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You can just buy outcomes with money rather than mucking about with violence. Take Soros. He finances candidates for office, high and low. He funds NGOs that train up ideological cadres and create a bunch of agitators and activists. I don't know, maybe Soros dips his toe into violence from time to time. But the vast majority of his effort is peaceful, putting end results to one side.
There's no opposition like there would be for violence. Post 1945 Liberal democracies have zero defence mechanism against this kind of nudge-nudge bribe-bribe mobilize-cadres sort of thing. If you do this in China, the state will harass you and make your life miserable. See the Beijing LGBT center, the police kept messing with them until they gave up and closed down.
Of course, it's a very different story for the right. They're not civil society groups or reformers, they spread dangerous misinformation or are far-right extremist radicals. AFD experiences similar kinds of suppression. Trump is being suppressed. There are voices ready to tell them 'no!' whereas the left gets to act more freely.
The left doesn't need violence to get what they want (though they can use it to a certain extent), the right can't afford to use it for much the same reasons that political violence doesn't happen in China. It makes more sense to spend time and effort building up cadres, though this is somewhat harder for them.
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