There is a particular hunger on the contemporary Left that reveals itself most clearly when someone they dislike dies. The body is still warm, the family still reeling, and already the digital crowd gathers to dance. Charlie Kirk's death produced a chorus of "Bye, Nazi b**ch." Lindsey Graham's end was met with open celebration. When Ann Widdecombe was beaten to death with a hammer, the response from some quarters was not horror at the violence but satisfaction that a "racist old b**ch" had been removed. And now Rod Liddle, dead at 66, is receiving the same treatment: laughing emojis, champagne-cork images, and long threads cataloguing his alleged sins as if the act of listing them somehow justifies the pleasure taken in his absence.
This is not ordinary political hostility. Ordinary hostility argues, mocks, and votes. What we are seeing is something more elemental: a politics that experiences the death of an opponent as moral progress. The dead man can no longer speak, can no longer offend, can no longer force the sensitive to confront ideas they have decided are intolerable. His silence is treated as a victory. The grave becomes the ultimate cancellation.
The pattern is not accidental. Cancel culture trained a generation to believe that the proper response to wrong think is removal from the public square. Careers were ended, reputations destroyed, platforms revoked, all in the name of protecting the vulnerable from harmful speech. Once that logic is accepted, death is simply the most thorough form of removal available. The same moral machinery that once demanded a writer lose his column now finds satisfaction when the writer loses his life. The difference is only one of degree. The underlying conviction remains constant: some people should not be allowed to speak, and if nature or violence removes them, so much the better.
What makes the phenomenon especially revealing is its humourlessness. Liddle's critics quote him selectively, strip jokes of their context, and then present the resulting caricature as evidence of monstrosity. A pointed critique of Islam is flattened into "Islamophobia." The possibility that a man might be simultaneously wrong, funny, and human is not entertained. For a politics organised around the protection of feelings, complexity is itself a threat. Better to reduce the dead to a list of charges and then congratulate oneself for having survived him.
This is the intrinsic destructiveness of the woke Left in concentrated form. It does not merely disagree with its opponents. It experiences their continued existence as an injury. Their words are treated as violence; their success is treated as oppression; their death is treated as justice. The movement that claims to champion empathy shows little of it toward those outside its moral circle. The movement that claims to expand the circle of human concern contracts it ruthlessly around the correctly opinioned. Everyone else is disposable.
The result is a public culture that grows steadily more vicious. When death becomes an acceptable occasion for political celebration, the barrier between rhetorical elimination and actual elimination grows thinner. Trans activists have long wished death on "TERFs." Sections of the pro-Palestinian Left have treated the murder of Jews with chilling equanimity. The same temperament now turns on domestic political enemies the moment they stop breathing. Each episode normalises the next. Each celebration of a corpse trains the participants to see human beings as obstacles rather than as fellow creatures.
Civilisation depends on a basic restraint: the recognition that even those we despise remain human, and that their deaths are not occasions for public joy. The woke Left has abandoned that restraint. It has replaced it with a moral vanity so complete that the suffering of an opponent's family registers as less important than the opportunity to signal virtue over a grave. That is not progress. It is a regression into something older and uglier, a politics that feeds on corpses and calls the feast justice.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/08/06/why-the-woke-left-loves-dancing-on-peoples-graves/