When Leftists Killed Presidents
This was during pauses in their pious blather about “our democracy.”

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Two presidents were assassinated during the twentieth century. Both of the men who were murdered appear to have been victims of the far left.
Leon Czolgosz, the man who shot President William McKinley on Sept. 6, 1901 (McKinley died eight days later), was a man of the left, an anarchist and associate of the renowned activist Emma Goldman. After hearing Goldman (who actually advocated the assassination of rulers she thought unjust) speak about the injustices of American society, Czolgosz determined that “I would have to do something heroic for the cause I loved.” He traveled to Buffalo, where McKinley was appearing at the Pan-American Exposition, to kill the president.
Emma Goldman suggested that the assassination was justified: “Some people have hastily said that Czolgosz’s act was foolish and will check the growth of progress. Those worthy people are wrong in forming hasty conclusions. What results the act of September 6 will have no one can say; one thing, however, is certain: he has wounded government in its most vital spot.” This the-end-justifies-the-means rhetoric would become a staple of leftist discourse, particularly in the twenty-first century, when the left in America grew more violent than it ever had before.
Republican Party bosses, notably McKinley’s chief backer, Ohio Senator and Republican National Committee Chairman Mark Hanna, thought Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was a reckless radical. Hanna once exclaimed to a roomful of party leaders: “Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between this madman and the presidency?” When Leon Czolgosz showed by killing McKinley how important such concerns really were, one prominent Republican is said to have exclaimed, “Now look, that damned cowboy is president of the United States.”
The “damned cowboy” was a “progressive,” equating progress with the steady expansion of government control over ever more aspects of citizens’ lives. As charming and ebullient as he was, Theodore Roosevelt was also one of the founding figures of today’s gargantuan and out-of-control federal state. Democrat party leader and thrice-failed presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan charged Roosevelt and the “progressives” with stealing ideas from the Democrat program. Roosevelt responded cheerfully: “So I have. That is quite true. I have taken every one of them except those suited for the inmates of lunatic asylums.” And some of those as well.
On November 22, 1963, the Democrats were grim about their prospects for 1964. Although the fact has been forgotten now, John F. Kennedy’s presidency had been rocky. He had faced down the Soviets over their missiles in Cuba, but they wouldn’t have put them there in the first place if they hadn’t perceived JFK as a callow, weak party boy. His disastrous Bay of Pigs effort to overthrow the Communist regime of Fidel Castro only reinforced this view. Kennedy faced a tough challenge from Republican Barry Goldwater, whom many pundits thought could win.
The assassination of Kennedy changed all that. Lyndon B. Johnson rode the revulsion and horror that followed the assassination to a landslide victory, and enacted the far left’s dream agenda for domestic policy. (In matters of foreign policy, the hard left was not as enamored of LBJ.)
Johnson’s War on Poverty was a huge exercise in applying the wrong solution to problems and only making them worse rather than solving them. Yet the Democrat party to this day is full of leaders who refuse to admit that it has been a defeat and a disaster, and keep pushing to repeat its mistakes on an even larger scale. The War on Poverty has cost over $22 trillion since 1964, over three times the cost of all the actual wars that the U.S. has ever fought. All that has resulted from it, however, is urban blight, nagging minority unemployment, and above all, more poverty. Poverty levels were falling sharply before Johnson declared war on poverty; in 1950, 32 percent of Americans were considered to be living below the poverty line. By 1965, when the War on Poverty was just getting started, the poverty level had been cut nearly in half and was down to 17 percent. But by 2014, after trillions had been spent in the War on Poverty, it was at 14 percent, nearly the same as it had been when the War on Poverty began.
The War on Poverty failed because it ignored a basic law of economics: if you pay for something, you’ll get more of it, not less. As the government expanded welfare programs that subsidized food, housing, and health care for the poor, it got more poor people, not fewer: the Johnson administration had created an economic incentive to remain poor. Johnson’s “Great Society” took away incentives to work and created a permanent unemployed underclass in which an ever-larger group of people were essentially wards of the state.
We’re still paying the price, but the advocates of statism and socialism love it. If Donald Trump had been killed during the 2024 campaign, those forces would have virtually assured of getting even more of what they want. Instead, he is back.