Sanctimony and Street Protest
The recent firestorm in Minneapolis over ICE arrests of illegal immigrants has highlighted a striking feature of the progressive left since the re-election of Donald Trump: rage. Marching to a rhetorical drumbeat of “fascists” and “Gestapo,” activists have faced off against federal ICE agents while screaming obscenities, smashing barricades with baseball bats, throwing bottles and rocks, and using their cars to block the progress of official vehicles. Astonishingly, like extremists in the Middle East or Latin America, they have set up illegal checkpoints on city streets, stopping cars to inspect them for ICE agents within.
Social media has helped raise progressive anger to new levels of vitriol. Lexie Lawler, a medical professional in Florida, issued a vile Tik Tok screed aimed at Trump’s pregnant press secretary after she defended the administration’s ICE deployment: “As a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great joy to wish Karoline Leavitt a fourth-degree tear. I hope you f*cking rip from bow to stern and never sh*t normally again, you c*nt.” Malinda Cook, a Virginia Commonwealth University nurse, also used Tik Tok to urge medical personnel who might be treating ICE personnel to “grab some syringes” and inject them with “succinylcholine,” a drug causing muscle paralysis.
Alex Pretti, an armed individual who was shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis after a physical altercation, vented his extreme anger ten days before his tragic death. Video footage shows him confronting Federal officers, repeatedly yelling “f*ck you” and “f*cking trash,” screaming “assault me, motherf*cker” in their faces, spitting at them, and finally kicking out the rear taillight of their car. In Minneapolis’ sister city, St. Paul, progressive agitators stormed Cities Church and shut down the Sunday service by crowding the aisles and shouting “ICE Out” and other radical political slogans.
This tidal wave of political rage stems, in part, from an unstinting hatred of the president — the much-discussed TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. For progressive activists, everything, or anything, the president endorses is not judged on its merits but automatically denounced as an authoritarian maneuver. However, much left-wing fury emerges from deeper sources entwined in the very nature of “The Resistance.”
First, it reflects the “omnicause” ideological structure of modern progressivism. This term, coined by the British feminist, Mary Harrington, writing in UnHerd, describes the crazy-quilt of activists and agitators — anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian advocates, social justice warriors and post-colonial crusaders, gender deconstructionists and Black Lives Matter radicals, climate alarmists, and socialist zealots — who knit together their often unrelated projects by insisting that a massive system of power oppresses them all.
Such thinking reflects the modern doctrine of “Intersectionality,” articulated by critical race theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and disseminated through the academy since the 1990s. It claims that oppressed identities overlap in modern America and the more minority statuses you inhabit the more oppressed you are. Homeless female black lesbian immigrants, for example, would constitute an exploitation gold standard. The intersectional gospel preaches that every form of oppression stands connected to every other form.
Simmering rage is one product of this omnicause progressivism because oppression, injustice, and marginalization appear everywhere its advocates turn. From race to gender to economics to global politics to climate to immigration, an omnipresent order supposedly crushes marginalized victims and fosters injustice. For omnicause radicals, a political dispute is never about one thing. It is always about everything, and the only responsible response is furious resistance “by any means necessary.”
Second, as they battle a leviathan of oppression, progressive leftists have developed a conviction of their own moral purity and superiority. Their Manichean vision holds that American society stands hostage to a racist, patriarchal, imperial, capitalist, cisgender, elitist power structure. Thus policy making is not a matter of reconciling competing visions of the public good, or balancing economic or social interests, but a death struggle between unalloyed good and evil. With no room for debate or compromise or reconciliation, politics appears a moral imperative where self-righteous anger is the weapon of choice. Political adversaries are not opponents to be debated but enemies to be obliterated. As Ta-Nehisi Coates, the radical racialist, said in a podcast debate with moderate Democrat Ezra Klein in 2025, “I am at war with certain ideologies and ideas, and I want them expunged.”
Like the old Puritan “elect” in colonial New England — those chosen by God for salvation and thus anointed to assume a dominant role in both religious and civic affairs — omnicause leftists comport themselves as a force of modern righteousness. They believe their standards comprise the only true moral yardstick for measuring the virtue of public life and policy. With trademark sanctimony, they heatedly hector their fellow citizens to “check your privilege” or adopt the preferred pronouns of “gender nonconformists” or use ideologically vetted language to describe “undocumented immigrants” or “the unhoused.”
With indignant smugness, they endlessly virtue signal to underscore both their own moral superiority and the inferiority of others. Singer Billie Eilish, for instance, accepted her Grammy award with a political homily about Minneapolis, claiming that “there are no illegals on stolen land” and “F*uck Ice,” remarks rapturously applauded by Hollywood lefties. Minneapolis radicals picket Target, threatening that if their stores allowed entry to ICE agents the company would suffer the economic wrath of leftist consumers. Confident he occupies the moral high ground, mayor Jacob Frey furiously demands that ICE to “get the f*ck out of our city” while Governor Tim Walz, declaring “I’m angry,” mobilized the state’s National Guard to “protect Minnesotans’ First Amendment rights” against ICE officers. Neither federal law nor political opposition, it seems, can be allowed to sully the moral purity of the progressive vision.
The last time the left embraced a politics of rage … things backfired badly.
Third, progressive rage stems from a fervent, longstanding distrust of American values of liberty and opportunity, individualism, and success-seeking. In many cases, this hostility extends to Western civilization more broadly. In the 1980s, left-wing activists on campus chanted “hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has to go” as they agitated to erase the influence of “dead white men” on the curriculum and replace it with multicultural studies.
Largely successful, this educational venture has produced several generations of students indoctrinated in the view that the United States, and the broader Western tradition laying behind, is systemically racist, misogynist, imperialist, patriarchal, and economically oppressive. Their ideological spawn now line the streets of Minneapolis, screaming profanities, blowing whistles, and hurling debris at the purported symbols of a fascist America and demanding a country defined by open borders, unassimilated ethnic groups, and post-colonial dismantling of imperial and capitalist power. For the progressive left, Americans must be world citizens first. Or else.
This revolutionary fever has produced a striking vitriol among Minneapolis’s progressive agitators. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, for instance, radical member of “The Squad” whose district lay in the city, furiously reviles ICE as a “paramilitary force” and declares that “unchecked federal forces murder our neighbors.” Informing such allegations is her sordid history of anti-American outbursts. These range from downplaying the deadly 9/11 attacks as simply “some people did something” to tweeting that the United States and Israel should be grouped with Hamas and the Taliban as perpetrators of “unthinkable atrocities.”
In public statements Omar refers to the “U.S. Goddamn States,” laments that America has become “one of the worst countries” in the world, and blames American “xenophobia” and “hatred and bigotry” for border restrictions. A committed omnicause radical, she heatedly declared in 2020, “We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.” Activist groups in Minneapolis, such as the “Freedom Road Socialist Organization,” provide similar examples of revolutionary rage. The FRSO, as an investigative journalist recently revealed, has become a central player in the city’s anti-ICE coalition and works to push it in the direction of militancy and confrontation. In a podcast interview, one of its leaders, Mira Altobell-Resendez, admitted “just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean we won’t do it” and defended violent street protests as “people who are rightfully expressing their anger at the system.” In FRSO’s website document, “Our Strategy for Revolution,” the group vows to, “Harm the enemy and win all that can be won for the people” and “Win the advanced fighters to Marxism-Leninism and build organization for revolution.”
Fourth and finally, progressive rage stems from a powerful, deeply personal emotional energy pulsating within many of its adherents. For many leftists, political activism is not just about promoting policy positions; it is a process to find meaning, an exercise in self-affirmation. For decades, with the decay of family and spiritual attachments and the withering of individual character and the work ethic in modern America, many “forward-looking” individuals on the left have sought personal authenticity, connection, and solace in progressive activism. In the 1960s, feminists declared “the personal is the political” while SDS’ Port Huron statement asserted that radical politics offered a pathway to “self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity … finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, the historian and trenchant social critic, Christopher Lasch, revealed how America’s modern therapeutic culture was reshaping many endeavors into exercises in self-actualization, including the progressive politics of “liberation.” In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton championed a “The Politics of Meaning” that claimed a polity based on caring, community, and government intervention would cure selfish Americans’ “sickness of the soul.” Saving the planet or ensuring social justice is a personal journey and any opposition is a personal affront.
Since then, with “identity politics” sweeping the field on the left, this impulse has metastasized. Increasingly among progressives, political action is less about improving the position of working people and more about — in equal measure — affirming the identities of racial and gender groups and salving the souls of the social elites manning the barricades in their behalf. As several commentators have suggested, this deeply personal politics of progressivism functions as a substitute religion. In Andrew Sullivan’s words, intersectionality increasingly seems a religious
orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., ‘check your privilege,’ and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay.
After analyzing data from a poll by The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute, Emma Green concludes that political engagement seems to provide left-wing activists “a new form of identity…. a form of meaning-making, especially if they are disconnected from other forms of ethnic or religious identity.” Both Sullivan and Green make a crucial connection to rage. The former points to progressive mobs at universities shouting down speakers expressing unacceptable political views, while the latter notes, “Many liberals are feeling anger, and finding ways to express that” by ranting on Facebook, indulging in political harangues at dinner parties, or pressuring people to sign petitions. Or, one might add, assaulting and screaming at evil ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis. Envisioning the promise of secular salvation in their political activism, omnicause progressives must sternly bring evildoers to account.
To be sure, reasonable people on all sides are debating the merits of ICE tactics or the focus of its strategy in pursuing illegal immigrants. But for leftists seething with anger, this option offers no attraction. Their moral certitude demands fulfillment and their fury an outlet.
But omnicause radicals should take heed. The last time the left embraced a politics of rage, in the late 1960s and early 1970s when groups like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen endorsed violent confrontation as the way to overhaul a system they loathed, things backfired badly. Their tactics triggered a tremendous backlash among ordinary citizens, sweeping into office Richard Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, and producing a conservative domination of American public life for forty years from 1968-2008. If omnicause radicals are not careful, the same could happen again.
READ MORE from Steven Watts:
Charlie Kirk and the Shame of the ‘However’ Progressives
Happy Warriors: Teddy Roosevelt, Donald J. Trump, and Reflections on a Political Style
Steven Watts is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri, and the author of eight books, including Citizen Cowboy: Will Rogers and the American People (2024)