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I'm confused by the timing. 2015-2020 saw the Pittsburgh synagogue, Charleston church and El Paso walmart shootings despite conservatives being in power and the anti-Trump/nazi rhetoric being significantly more unhinged than it is today. 2020-2024, all I remember is the Tennessee trans school shooter despite the rhetoric against Fauci and plenty of other government officials being absolutely bonkers in right wing spaces (traitors, nooses, trials, you know the drill). 2025 has seen what, a half-dozen left wing events all at once? It doesn't seem to track with who's in power or how violent the rhetoric is.
I'd guess that during Trump I radicals of both stripes thought the majority of the country was on their side, whereas this time around, it certainly feels like the left is losing the normies. Shooting Kirk or ICE agents is retarded on both fronts, you're going to further alienate the normies and obviously not going to stop deportations.
I think it's just copycats, to be honest. It's a vicious cycle, the more high-profile assassinations (or attempted assassinations) there are, the more crazies will decide to try and get their own moment in the limelight.
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2015-20 was the high-water mark of a particular kind of hard-right white-nationalist politics that gave us those three shootings (and Charlottesville, to some extent). Think of it as a continuation from the kind of subculture that created Breivik. In part because of the internet hard-right meming Trump, and in part from all the anti-nazi rhetoric, they thought that Trump was really their chance, and some of them decided to go killing for it. That movement fell apart for multiple reasons - they realized Trump wasn't in fact Hitler II, many of their groups flamed out, less radical types ended up synthesizing themselves into more normie conservatism, and finally covid distracted a lot of the more radical personality types (I also wonder if 09A and other less political, more nihilistic Nazi-affiliated sects started siphoning off people who would otherwise be Dylan Rooffs to become school shooters). It was a relatively very small memeplex but one disproportionately good at creating spree killers. Libs/leftists didn't feel much of a need to go postal because they could identify with Resistance within the government.
2020-24 I suspect was quite peaceful because normiecons get hopping mad at stuff and post about gitmo trials but don't actually go shoot people (partly out of personal inclination, partly because they're more familiar with actual violence than an internet shut-in, and partly because their demographics don't tend towards violent self-annihilation, you don't see pot-bellied fiftysomethings with Oakleys shooting up synagogues). And, also, who could really bring themselves to destroy their lives and kill their fellow humans over... Joe Biden? To be fair this first changed with Israel/Palestine, where we did have some killings.
In the current moment libs/leftists feel themselves losing harder than they ever have in living memory, even if the rhetoric was sometimes crazier in 2017. The dynamic of violence is different imo from 2015-20, in that hardline white nationalism was a very small movement that was oriented towards and somewhat effective at creating violent lone wolves, whereas the current attackers seem to have beliefs that are not particularly out of the overton window in the movement left, but have individually snapped and decided that those beliefs in the current situation now demand violence. It would also go some distance to explaining why these are coming in a spasm - the heightened emotional tension created by one attack causes others to snap, and in some cases like today's shooter even copycat the method.
*liberalism.
Richard Spencer sided with the Democrats.
Some of the actual wignats like Spencer, Hanania, etc. did do the 180 zeal-of-the-convert flip to Racist Liberalism, but I mean that the guys who were talking about migrant crisis, great replacement, crime stats, etc., but weren't full 1488, largely merged into right-wing populist discourse rather than staying on the fringes and radicalizing themselves further.
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This is it. In 2016, leftist freaking out was mostly a performative way of calling for the managers to take care of a problem, according to Victimhood culture rules. Progressives (and indeed, most everyone) saw Trump v1.0 as a passing blip who won due to Hillary Clinton being a uniquely unelectable candidate, and whose administration would be smothered by "institutional checks and balances".
Cultural leftists did not really feel like they might actually be losing grip on the country until recently. Probably the last twelve months.
Nitpick: no, progressives generally weren't that introspective (the Berniebros were, but not the mainstream). They saw Hillary as the rightful winner, and her having being robbed of her victory by Russian interference and the Electoral College system. Hence the hashtag #NotMyPresident, which literally denies that Donald Trump won.
This actually strengthens your argument, but I felt it's important to keep the record straight.
How are you defining "progressive" that people who supported Hillary over Bernie fit into that category?
The SJ set of views on societal norms and the culture war, as opposed to the liberal set (which generally isn't trying to enforce a paradigm) or the conservative set (which is trying to enforce a very different paradigm), and separate from any set of views on economics (you can be a progressive free-market capitalist, and Hillary very much was).
I'm pretty sure Hillary Clinton was a progressive crony capitalist.
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That doesn't quite fit for me, because if you tasked me with ensuring the arrival of the Thousand Year JD Vance Reich, I don't know if I could do a better job than what the Dems are doing.
All they need to do is regroup and wait for the next recession, though I suppose "letting something slip out because you didn't want to lose grip" is a pretty old story.
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Evaporative cooling of group beliefs? When the moderates and normies start voting red instead of blue, that increases the average extremism of the modal blue, accelerating the purity spiral?
Mean, or median, not mode; the mode should stay the same unless the modal value itself flipped (in which case there'd be a new, more extreme mode).
I will note that more progressive Internet communities have locked themselves into such a spiral for a long time, due to censorship on SJ boiling off anything that might cause the board to shift right.
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