Thinkers in the political extremism literature, most notably Steve Clarke (2019), David Coady (2024), and Morgan Luck (2025), have recently argued there is nothing wrong with extremism qua extremism. I advance two connected lines of argument against this view. First, that these arguments rely on a fundamentally flawed conceptualisation of extremism that conflates it with the concept of extremeness. The concepts of extremism and extremeness can be separated at the semantic, personal, and ideological level, and insisting on their connection generates deeply counterintuitive extremism-categorisations. Second, I put forth a necessary feature of extremism that can ground the wrongness of extremism qua extremism. I call this feature (Morally) Unjustified Political Violence (UPV): extremist ideologies and their believers- extremists- consider successful purported moral justifications for political violence which actually fail. After clarifying political violence and the nature of the justification-failure, I argue that UPV is extensionally adequate and identifies wrongs with extremism qua extremism.
