In Britain and other supposedly calm democracies, the ascent of leftwing politicians can arouse unusual fears of violence. Many conservatives and centrists associate the left with mobs, intimidation and revolutionary struggle. For some on the right, leftwing politics of any sort is a kind of violence, with the upsetting of the traditional order that it promises.
Such fears are not always groundless. But more often they are exaggerated, sometimes deliberately, in order to smear the left as fanatical and dangerous. In reality, the left always contains plenty of pacifists and other principled opponents of the use of force – life’s “herbivores”, as the writer Michael Frayn called them in a perceptive 1963 essay.
