Left Wing Extremism Isn't the Threat that Right Wing Extremism Is

For years, I’ve been struggling with why Americans are still scared of communism/Marxism. And why some people in my own country, whose culture is arguably downstream of American culture, are also still scared of communism/Marxism (now that they’ve forgotten about ISIS and Shariah law).

This is bothering me more and more each year in part because I personally see a very serious threat from illiberal and/or anti-democratic right wingers who seem want to remove civil rights for some and/or disenfranchise some. And some of these people are getting elected in western liberal democracies.

So I want to discuss extremism and why I personally think the threat from right wing extremism is far, far greater than the threat from left wing extremism. And hopefully at least one person who is currently scared about the existential threat “communism” poses to their country changes their mind. I can dream…

By extremism, I mean the belief that liberal democracy should be abolished or greatly reduced. Liberal democracy is the most common form of government in The West and the form of government we most associated with "development.” It is also the form of government that I believe is the least bad type we humans have devised. By left wing extremism, I mean the belief that liberal democracy (and capitalism) should be replaced by some other form of government that makes people more equal by force, usually by nataionalizing the economy. By right wing extremism, I mean the belief that liberal democracy should be replaced by some other form of government that reinforces traditional norms and values. Neither “left wing” nor “right wing” extremism is monolithic. There is always internal disagreement among extremists about ideology, that is one of the natures of extremism. And there are numerous instances of self-identified left wingers embracing ideas I would say are right-coded and self-identified right wingers embracing ideas I would say are left-coded.

With that out of the way…

Left Wing Extremism Used to be a Very Big Deal

For much of the history of ideologies - i.e. since there has been a “left wing” and a “right wing” to politics, so basically since the Enlightenment1 - left wing extremism was arguably the bigger threat to the social order. There are two main reasons for this:

The first, and most obvious, reason is that “right wing” meant, for a very long time, just a defense of the status quo, or occasionally a retrenchment. For most of the history of ideology - basically until the 1920s - “right wing” did not ever mean revolutionary. That’s not to say there wasn’t right-coded violence and extremism, but rather that, almost always, that extremism was in support of the existing nation state and was either tacitly or explicitly supported by the regime. In the vast majority of cases right wing extremism would have been meaningless as it was just state-sponsored.

The other reason people were rightly terrified of left wing extremism is the French Revolution. For much of the existence of ideology, the biggest thing in the history of extremism was a revolution in which The Left took over, killed and jailed thousands and started wars with everyone they could. Again, prior to the 1920s, it was a reasonable thing to be very afraid of another French Revolution and really not remotely concerned about radical right wingers. (Of course, if you were not someone who the state liked, you might feel very differently about this.)

That began to change in the 1920s, with the rise of the first right wing revolutionary movements, the various forms of fascism. However, that accompanied a new round of left wing revolutionary movements - the Bolsheviks most successfully, and later Maosim in China. With the end of World War II, it was the left wing extremists who were ascendant in much of the world, given that the three most prominent extremist right wing regimes, the Nazis, the Italian fascists and the Japanese empire, had lost the war and been forced to become liberal democracies. (Plenty of other fascist regimes either survived WWII or emerged afterwards but not many people noticed because of the size of what became the Warsaw Pact.)

But that was 70 years ago. Things have changed. Below I want to talk about how left wing extremism has waned in numerous ways since the end of the Cold War and why I think many of us haven’t realized that.

There are a number of ways we can think about how powerful right wing and left wing extremism are:

• The number of extremist regimes in the world

• The motivations of terrorists

• The ideological tenor of social censure

• The electoral success in liberal democracies of extremist-coded politicians.

Extremist Regimes

As I mentioned at the top, it’s important to think about extremism in relation to something because “extremism” is meaningless if it’s not in relation to “the centre” or whatever we want to define as the normal mode of life. So I’ve chosen to focus on liberal democracy as the norm - even though it wasn’t for most of history. Many regimes we would classify as extremist now would have been progressive in many senses prior to the 20th century or, in the case of women’s and LGTBQ rights, prior to the last few decades.

There are regimes in the world where people do not have many or any civil liberties and the average person cannot participate in power. North Korea is the most infamous example and it is ostensibly left wing.

During the Cold War, the most extreme, least liberal democratic regimes were associated with left wing politics, due to the USSR, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR’s support of left wing regimes.

It’s easy to understand why people raised during the Cold War believed left wing extremist regimes were a major threat to international peace. After all, China is believed to have killed something like 75 million of its own citizens and the USSR something like 60 million. And there were a number of other left wing regimes that were extremely repressive and caused the deaths of millions of their own citizens.

Obviously there were right wing extremist regimes as well but the worst one was defeated during World War II and nobody seems to care about the ones that didn’t join the Axis and weren’t defeated by the Allies. (Spain, Argentina, Nationalist China/Taiwan, etc.)

It’s particularly easy to think that the left wing regimes were always the problem if you’re American because the United States treated many left wing regimes (outside of Europe), which were not obviously extremist, as extremist, and told its citizens so. And some of that was done at a time when Americans trusted their government more.

But things have changed. The USSR and the Warsaw Pact haven’t existed for over 30 years. China is still a dictatorship but whatever it is now it isn’t traditionally left wing. Yugoslavia broke apart into countries that are not extremist left-wing regimes. And the Warsaw Pact was transformed into a group of liberal democracies (a number of which appear to be sliding into fascism now.) Yes, Cuba is still a communist country in name - I haven’t there myself - but it has a population of 10 million people and does not pose a threat to any other country. (Also, the only country in the world that consistently worries about Cuba as some kind of communist threat is the United States.)

I personally have been to a country that self-described as socialist and the differences I noticed between Canada and it (other than obvious culture ones) were

• A relative lack of homeless people

• Lots of heavily armed military/police

• Zero discussion of politics.

But everywhere we went there were private businesses which we bought things at. Very little was obviously state-owned. It wasn’t a free country in many ways, surely, but it wasn’t obviously socialist in the traditional sense of the world, at least to Western tourists like us. I honestly don’t even know if we interacted with a single employee of the state. Maybe on the train, I guess. But that’s just a guess. I’m sure we interacted with many party members but none of them felt the need to tell us tourists they were party members. It obviously matters only to residents who is in the party and who isn’t, but wasn’t obvious to us.

The Domino Theory was nonsense. It was always nonsense but we should all know it was nonsense now. It was based on reading Lenin and not on Stalin or Mao. Communism/Marxism did not expand throughout the world. From China onward, the countries that adopted or tried to adopt communism (or some other form of left wing extremism) were doing so because it was the communists they saw as anti-imperialist. As the story goes, if the Vietnamese had been given the Federalist Papers instead, they might have been liberals not communists. But Lenin spoke to them in their fight against the French and, later, the Americans.

The danger from extremist regimes is almost always to their own people first. Yes, they do start wars more than liberal democracies do, for the most part, but the threat is internal first. Extremist regimes are dangerous first to their own people and then to their neighbours. The United States and Canada do not currently border any communist regimes outside of Cuba. And though the US remains absolutely obsessed with Cuba it has not, as yet, invaded the United States. North Korea could conceivably fire missiles at the United States. And there’s a growing fear that China will invaded Taiwan which will then precipitate a war with the US. (Again, contemporary China is not “communist” in the traditional sense so much as it is its own form of authoritarian regime that defies categorization by ideologies that grew out of Christianity.)

There are fewer extremist left wing regimes than there used to be. Only one, China, is an obvious threat to the liberal democratic order.

Terrorism

Terrorism was originally entirely left wing ideologically. It had to be. It was against the state and there were no left wing regimes, at least as we would understand them. (I am excepting Revolutionary France which was a left wing regime and which conducted state terrorism. When we talk about terrorism, we usually mean terrorism as a means of individuals or groups fighting against the state over the last 200 years.)

But right wing terrorism evolved pretty quickly as a response to left wing terrorism. The people who committed acts in the name of conservative ideologies were often, though not always, state-sponsored, either officially or unofficially.

But still, for the vast majority of the history of terrorism, most terrorists were inspired by what we would consider left wing ideology.

That is just not true any more. Whether it’s jihadists or militias, the terrorists of the 21st century are more often right wing. Yes, there are left wing terrorists and there always will be, at least as long as “left wing” is a term that means anything. But, with the ascendancy of liberal democracy and the fall of the Soviet Bloc, state-sponsored left wing terrorism has basically vanished. This leaves non-state-sponsored left wing terrorism, and it just doesn’t exist like it used to. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the embrace of at least some elements of capitalism by nearly every remaining “communist” regime seems to have convinced many people that communism was actually a bad idea. Sure, there are tons of people on social media claiming they are radical leftists who might one day commit violence in the name of their ideology but, mostly, this is just talk.

Rather, the vast majority of terrorist acts in the west are right wing coded. A 2022 study found that “left wing radials” were less likely to use violence than “right wing radicalsts” or Islamists. And this is borne out by the news. When was the last time you heard about a terrorist attack committed in the name of greater equality or the nationalization of the economy?

Per Wikipedia, here are all the terrorist attacks in the US within the last 30 years which resulted in at least 10 deaths:

• September 11th - Islamists

• Oklahoma City bombing - right-wing extremists

• Pulse nightclub shooting - an Islamist

• El Paso Walmart shooting - an right-wing extremist

• New Orleans truck attack - an Islamist

• Fort Hood shooting - confused but Islamist or possibly left wing (broadly defined as anti army)

• San Bernardino shooting - Islamists

• Pittsburgh synagogue shooting - right-wing extremist

• Buffalo supermarket shooting - right-wing extremist

Americans are far more likely to be killed in a terrorist attack by a right-wing extremist than a left-wing extremist.

Social Censure

However, despite the decline in violence from left wingers, there is a really strong presumption that left wing extremists are way worse when it comes to social censure, at least since social media has taken over our lives.

Now, I would argue that social censure is much, much, much less bad than terrorism or a dictatorship, but then I have never been fired from my job for posting something stupid on the internet (yet).

I would also argue that social censure has always existed, it’s technology that has changed it. The biggest difference now is that, for most of human history, social censure has flowed in one direction, from the older and powerful towards the young and less powerful. Social censure included enforcing both reasonable, time tested-norms such as that a woman should not to have sex with a man until he had committed to taking care of her and really stupid stuff like how people should dress this decade. This social censure was necessarily right wing as it existed to preserve the existing order against the young, who always want to change things, and the less powerful, who often want to change things. It both served a good purpose - to preserve society - and served a bad purpose - to keep the powerful powerful regardless of how badly they behaved.

The printing press, the Reformation and the Enlightenment began to change this by allowing less powerful and/or younger people to advocate for ideas outside of the current social norm based on argument rather than custom.

Industrialization created new constituencies that might be more receptive to arguments that the old ways were not actually best. But it was improvements in telecommunications, and the internet more than anything else, that created the time we’re in now: when young/powerless people can instantly unite to demand change publicly and instantly. And this has meant an absolute ton of attempts to socially censure people for perceived wrongs from people who, for most of human history, were never in the position to do so.

Regardless of whether or not you think “cancel culture” is real or is a problem, it’s very true that a ton of the demands to “cancel” someone are left coded. One question is whether this is a sign that left wing extremism is on the rise again. That is, in some ways, what the annoying “woke” debate is all about: fears, legitimate or otherwise, that demands to police behaviour (sometimes even private behaviour) are the beginning of some kind of actual police state (even though most of the people who advocate for cancellation are not actually powerful and are just loud on social media).

But something that gets overlooked a lot of the time is that people on the right demand “cancellation” all the time too, they just usually use words like “boycott” instead. There is probably some way we can quantify this in some way but I am not aware if anyone has figured out which demands for cancellation are explicitly left-coded and which are explicitly right-coded, and then quantified the volume of those campaigns and trends.

Personally, I am not convinced that left wing social censure online is proof of rising left wing extremism. If these people were advocating and then committing acts of terrorism I might feel differently but they’re not.2 I don’t believe right-wing boycotts of “woke” corporations is proof of a rise in right-wing extremism either.

What I do see online is a lot of people expressing previously verboten views about denying the rights of minority groups, including sometimes the right to live. To me, it feels like this is becoming much more common or, if not much more common, much more mainstream due to the presence of these types of posts on the English-language’s biggest social media networks. (And there is a connected failure to moderate these types of of posts.)

Electoral Results

But even if left wing social censure was as big a threat as the anti-cancel culture and anti-woke people say it is, you’d still expect to see it in electoral results. Putting aside right wing dog-whistle terms, and also putting aside the apparent inability for most people on the American right to be able to define what they mean by, say, Marxism, how many actual socialists are elected in liberal democracies each year? Certainly there are some in Europe but what about in North America?

Bernie Sanders tells you he’s a socialist but is he really? In other countries he’d just be a social democrat. (Look up his policy positions. They are liberal!) Social democrats are liberals who favour an increased welfare state. They are not socialists. In some countries Sanders might be right of some social democrats just because the centre in the US is so far right other the political centres in many other liberal democracies.

In Canada we have a social democrat party, the New Democrats, who have never won federally and who only occasionally win provincially, usually when one of the two bigger parties really messes up. They are also not socialists. I know that not just because of their actual policies but because, in Canada, we have actual socialist parties: the Marxist-Lenninists and the Communists, who once won two Federal seats (in 1943). These two parties run against each other and so split the left wing extremist vote, which is very funny. They do horribly in our federal elections and do horribly in the municipal elections where I live. (I assume that’s true throughout Canada but I don’t know.)

Certainly somewhere in a liberal democracy there is an actual socialist party (as opposed to social democrat or “progressive”) that has some electoral success. But it hasn’t led to anything, has it?

So, given that there is no actual threat from left wing extremists that I’m aware of, that brings me to why everyone seems to be so concerned about threats from left wing extremist while being so blase about the (to me very obvious) thread of right wing extremism.

Why Does Half Your Country Think Left Wing Extremism Is the Problem?

First of all, it’s important to note that English-language culture is often downstream of US culture, even to some extent in the UK. But this is particularly true in Canada, where we are just dominated by US media.

On the whole, the United States is right3 of nearly every other western liberal democracy, politically and culturally. As the joke goes, Democrats, the “left wing” party in the US, regularly support and implement policies that are right of the more centrist right wing parties in the rest of the west. (There are, of course, exceptions depend upon which policy and which country we are talking about.)

There are different theories as to why this is. But, since the country’s inception, the mainstream of US politics has mostly viewed socialism as “European” or “foreign.” The left, in the US, is historically associated with foreigners and troublemakers. There is a long cultural history of being skeptical of socialism. Socialist parties have never won federally in the US. “Socialism/socialist” has been an insult in the US for a very long time. It is only since the rise of the internet that more than a few academics and labour organizers have worn the term “socialist” as a badge of honour, and probably mostly would actually liberals if they’re pressed.

And if socialists weren’t immigrants or labour agitators they were enemies. In American action movies set between the end of WWII and September 11, the enemy is communist more often than not. Sure, there are instances pre-9/11 where the enemies are Islamists, such as True Lies, but often the enemy is explicitly communist.

The US is also rather notoriously insular, or at least non-elite Americans are. They don’t travel outside of their own country and if they do it’s to Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean (resorts rather than towns). (In 2019, ten times as many Americans visited Mexico as did the UK.) So numerous Americans who are skeptical of anything labelled “socialist” have no personal experience of what they are describing as “socialism.” And that’s even though that policy or positions is most likely actually liberal but just left of the American political centre.

And there’s long been a lack of precision around the terms “socialist",” “communist,” “Marxist” and the like, especially when used by people on the right. I’m rarely sure what people on the right mean when they use these terms and I’m often not sure they themselves know either. (It often seems like they mean “progressive,” “liberal,” “left of me” or even just “foreign.”)

American culture is right of the rest of the west and English-language cultures downstream of it are exposed to a constant stream of entertainment and discussion that treats anything left of America as dangerous.

Combined with this long cultural history of skepticism and outright fear of left wing ideas - whether extreme or not - is the genuine fear of nuclear war. Anyone who was raised during the era of duck and cover was probably traumatized for life. And the fear likely isn’t just of nuclear war but of nuclear war initiated by communists. By the time I went to school, there was no mention of nuclear war as a potential threat - even though it absolutely still existed - but I can only imagine what it was like to grow up during the Cuban Missile Crisis or even up through the 1983 false alarm. (I had just turned two and obviously wasn’t in school for a little while longer.)

There is this large portion of the electorate in the United States that has some memory of growing up with the threat of nuclear war and with this threat being a left wing one. Most people don’t adjust their priors on most things and if you grew up in world in which you were taught that the biggest threat to world peace was a communist evil empire, you might still believe the communists are a big problem even if the USSR hasn’t existed for 30 years. (Also, there wasn’t world peace.)

Also, in addition to the all these cultural factors that are constantly influencing Americans and other English speakers to be concerned about threats from the left, there is the extremely successful propaganda campaign from various institutions of the American right to perpetuate the idea of “leftism” as a threat even as that threat has mostly receded. This campaign has been going on for at least 100 years, since the first red scare. But it entered overdrive when conservatives, including early neo conservatives, consciously adopted the tactics as a radical left as a means to fight the radical left in the 1960s. Prior to this a lot of the intellectual right had rejected propaganda as as a way to influence the electorate, or at least ignored it. (Though right wing populists obviously saw its appeal and used it.) But propaganda became a core component of right wing strategy in the US with talk radio, religious right organizations and their TV shows, and eventually entire TV networks dedicated to the cause at the expense of the truth. (Right wingers in the US will tell you a very different story about this that could only make sense to right wing Americans and that is that the US mainstream media is left wing. Only in America.)

The result of all of this is an electorate in the US - and, parts of electorates in Canada, Australia, the UK and New Zealand who believe strongly that “The Left” is an existential threat to liberal democracy. But some elites on the right, and some of their supporters, are now vocally critical of their own liberal democratic institutions. And there are numerous instances in the US, as well as in some European and Asian countries, of right wing political elites actively eroding liberal democratic norms while insisting the threat comes from “The left.” To someone like me, that reeks of fascism.

But to people who’ve spent their lives worried about horrible communist regimes and Maoist terrorists and now have to hear about how left wing young adults want to “cancel” people, it must seem reasonable. Because people keep voting for right wing politicians and parties who love to flirt with right wing extremism and embrace authoritarian rhetoric. And the US just decided to re-elect a man who tried, pathetically, to launch a coup in order to stay in power.

1

Yes, “right” and “left” come from the French Revolution but radical vs. conservative visions of politics predate the French Revolution.

2

I began writing this before a certain prominent murder in New York City. That one single act has not changed my mind about anything here, nor has the reaction of some people - on both sides of the political spectrum I might point out - celebrating that murder. A single murder of a private individual is not an act of terrorism. If you choose to see that differently that is more emblamatic of a flawed view of the world than it is an argument that left wing terrorism is increasing.

3

Here I mean “right” in the sense of the recent fusion of traditional values and economic liberalism that has emerged, principally from America post-New Deal, rather than to Toryism or other more traditional forms of conservativsm.