When Hatred Becomes a Creed: The Radical Left’s Descent into Pathological Politics, By Charles Taylor (Florida)
A sculpture recently installed in Basel, Switzerland, depicts Donald Trump crucified — a life-sized figure in an orange prison jumpsuit nailed to a cross-shaped gurney. The work, titled The Saint or the Sinner by the British provocateur Mason Storm, was intended, according to the artist, as "a moment of reflection." Yet its reflection says far more about the state of the modern Left than about its subject.
Even those who detest Trump's politics, style, or policies should recognise that the imagery of execution and martyrdom — particularly in the context of contemporary liberal democracies — crosses a line. It is one thing to mock or critique a political figure; it is quite another to aestheticise their imagined death. That kind of visual rhetoric belongs not in satire but in pathology.
Recent polling underscores how far this moral corrosion has spread. A survey by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University found that more than half of self-described Left-of-centre respondents believed that assassinating Trump would be at least "somewhat justified." Over a quarter of Democrats reportedly said it would have been better had the assassination attempt at his golf course in Florida succeeded.
Pause and think about that. In a society that claims to champion tolerance, inclusion, and human rights, a large portion of citizens now see political murder as acceptable — provided the target is someone they despise. That's not progressivism; that's the logic of civil war.
This descent into moral inversion isn't confined to anonymous internet vitriol. It's encoded into cultural production: theatre pieces simulating Trump's assassination; comedians brandishing fake severed heads; and now, a sculpture sanctifying his imagined death. Each act is justified under the banner of "art" or "expression," yet what it really expresses is a desire to annihilate the political Other.
For the radical Left, hatred has become a form of virtue — an inverted sainthood defined by the purity of one's contempt. To oppose Trump is no longer a political stance; it's a moral identity. And within this moral framework, the usual rules of decency, democracy, and even humanity no longer apply. Violence becomes not merely permissible but righteous.
Liberal democracy, at its core, rests on the conviction that ideas are contested with words, not weapons. It assumes that disagreement can coexist with respect, and that persuasion, not coercion, is the path to change.
When any faction — Left or Right — begins to normalise violence, to fantasise about the destruction of opponents, or to treat mock execution as "performance art," the democratic framework itself begins to erode. You cannot preach inclusion while celebrating elimination. You cannot defend democracy while depicting your rivals as vermin to be purged.
This is why even those who oppose Trump on every conceivable issue should recoil at this culture of hatred. Because once you accept violence as a legitimate political tool, it never stays confined to your enemies. It becomes part of the civic bloodstream — a toxin that eventually poisons everyone.
What we are witnessing is not political radicalism in the noble sense of seeking justice or reform. It is psychological radicalisation — the displacement of politics by a form of moral mania. When your sense of righteousness depends on the existence of a permanent enemy, peace is intolerable; only perpetual outrage sustains the self.
That's why this kind of "art" doesn't heal or question; it feeds the addiction to loathing. The crucified Trump is less a critique of power than a mirror held up to those who can no longer define themselves without hatred.
History teaches that dehumanisation always begins with words and symbols. First come the caricatures, the jokes, the art pieces that make violence seem playful, clever, or deserved. Then come the real acts — the mob attacks, the shootings, the rationalisations.
What begins as irony ends as ideology. And that is where much of the modern activist Left now finds itself: convinced of its own moral superiority while increasingly indifferent to the basic human norms that sustain a free society.
The answer isn't censorship or censorship-by-outrage. It's moral clarity. Violence — whether physical, rhetorical, or artistic — must never be normalised as a political instrument. The right to criticise, parody, and protest is sacred; the impulse to destroy one's opponents is not.
To defend liberal democracy means defending the dignity even of those we oppose. It means remembering that opponents are not enemies and that power, once unrestrained by principle, consumes everyone in turn.
Even if one opposes everything Trump says or does, to indulge fantasies of his death is to surrender to the same darkness that democracy was designed to contain. Hatred may thrill the mob, but it cannot build a civilisation. And when a society begins to crucify its adversaries — literally or symbolically — it isn't art anymore. It's a warning of decay.
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