Nose-Diving into Moral Relativism

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

When the Center for Strategic Politics asked 683 Democrats how they would feel if they “woke up tomorrow morning and saw the following headlines,” each of which revealed that Donald Trump was no longer president, the polling outfit uncovered a crisis of fatuity and injudiciousness among the president’s critics.

 

It seems a significant portion of this poll’s respondents couldn’t see beyond the instant gratification they would derive from Trump’s withdrawal from the political scene, even if the means of his removal were bound to make everything worse.

 

Sure, the republic would remain intact — perhaps even in a healthier state — if some sequence of events culminated in the president’s removal from office via impeachment or the 25th Amendment, presuming the circumstances warrant such an extraordinary intervention into political affairs. Democrats are unlikely to be thrilled with JD Vance’s accession to the Oval Office, but that’s an outcome they clearly hadn’t considered. Likewise, it’s safe to assume that the American left would not welcome a military coup, even an anti-Trump one. But no one who participated in this experiment could see beyond their immediate appetites.

 

Nor could this poll’s respondents apparently channel their humanity. If the president “died in his sleep,” such an event would deprive Democrats of what they should want more than anything: the president’s repudiation at the ballot box. Similarly, the only outcome in this poll that did not enjoy the support of a majority of self-described Democrats — the assassination of Trump on live television — would not benefit the Democratic Party. Trump would be rendered a martyr. The GOP would beatify him and commit itself to his legacy. The cause to which his killer was devoted would be anathematized in all but the most radical of the dimly lit salons where the left would comfort itself. And yet, just about one-third of Democrats polled here would rationalize that epochal murder. After all, he had it coming.

 

Maybe the numbers in this particular poll are off. Back in May, PolitiFact attempted to fact-check the notion that rank-and-file Democrats were growing more comfortable with acts of political violence directed against their opponents, which tells you something about the resonance of that particular allegation. While PolitiFact argued that the numbers don’t indicate that a crisis is upon us, “some polls show Democrats agreeing more” with the violent radicals in their midst.

 

The left does not have a monopoly on either political violence or provocations to commit violence in the name of this cause or that. Agitation in favor of violence is typically the exclusive province of attention-seeking maniacs, and that pathology has no ideological home. Republicans have their own dangerous elements in their ranks.

 

And yet, those on the left speak flippantly not just about violence but about the unalloyed goods that they imagine will accompany politically charged acts of human sacrifice. The comic Bill Burr provides us with only the latest example of this outlook:

 

 

There’s quite a lot of casual paranoia on display here, which is its own problem. It used to be socially undesirable to express so unhealthy a level of mistrust in your neighbors’ motives or suspicion that they’ve been co-opted by powerful interests presumably arrayed against yours (such as, in Burr’s telling, America’s own intelligence agencies); in fact, it would once have betrayed a potentially clinical pathology. Today, that sort of thing is currency on America’s most-listened-to podcasts, which tend to feature one ill-informed layman speaking in generally uncharitable terms about a subject he doesn’t understand to his equally unstudied interlocutor. That stuff just kills these days.

 

Of course, the most troubling element of this clip is Burr’s assumption that the deranged accused killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione, whose writings betray a clinical level of disordered thinking, had a point.

 

What an admission against interest. If Mangione was making a point, he didn’t elucidate it in his rambling missives, nor did he convey it to the sane and sober by assassinating a man merely because he didn’t like the industry in which Thompson worked. Only through divination could Burr even deduce that there was a point. So maybe it’s not Mangione’s point at all. Burr seemed eager to conclude that the victim of this heinous crime brought it on himself. Maybe he is the one connecting the dots here.

 

Burr is a latecomer to this party. In the aftermath of Thompson’s slaying, media outlets competed with one another in the effort to assign some politically relevant logic to the murder, as I wrote in Blood & Progress. Mangione channeled “pent-up anger at the nation’s complex health insurance industry,” highlighting “the anger and frustration” the killer merely acted on. Artists celebrated Mangione at rock concerts. The mere mention of his name elicited cheers from Saturday Night Live’s audience. And, of course, the progressive politicians who believe they profit from the public’s anger at private American enterprises fanned the flames.

 

Obviously, “people are furious,” said Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren agreed. “People can only be pushed so far,” she exclaimed. We all need to understand that “people interpret, and feel, and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez theorized. The killing represented an opportunity, in Senator Chris Murphy’s estimation, “to listen to what people are feeling.”

 

But “people” didn’t do this. One lunatic did. And if Mangione inspired other lunatics to do the same — as he almost certainly has, aided in no small part by the left’s adulation — it would not create a better world for the rest of us. Murder leaves terrible, unhealing scars on those who survive it, and it creates incentives for retribution and retaliation that can transcend the generations. It is the most grievous of sins.

 

To talk about murderous violence as though it was an instrument of political hygiene is not just perverse; it’s a rationalization. It’s designed to assign higher motives to what is, really, just an ill-advised articulation of a variety of hatreds. There’s nothing high-minded about it. At best, it’s a thuggish intimidation tactic. At worst, it’s sadism masquerading as a political philosophy. Either way, it says more about the speaker, and none of it is good.