“Beware of hunting monsters, lest you become one,” Nietzsche warned. “And when you stare too long into the abyss, don’t be surprised if the abyss stares back at you.”
The insight is especially pertinent for the anti-Trump “Resistance,” which is evolving into something just a little bit less high-minded and idealistic than its leadership originally intended.
Although the Resistance was born in the spirit of principled opposition to what it contended was a man and a movement that were political monstrosities, it has become a kind of ogre in its own right. Over the almost two years of the Trump presidency, that Resistance—aided and abetted by its enablers in the media and in academia—has come to mirror many of the same vulgar, violent, and authoritarian impulses it condemned Trump for representing and—worse—for “normalizing.”
“The danger for the established press is the same danger facing other institutions in our republic: that while believing themselves to be nobly resisting Trump, they end up imitating him.
“This mirroring is a broad danger, applying to more institutions than the press. Trump comes to power as a destroyer of norms, a flouter of conventions, and everyone will be tempted to join the carnival—to escalate when he escalates, to radicalize whenever he turns authoritarian.”
Such a dynamic, Douthat insisted, “is more likely to polarize than to persuade, which means it does a demagogue’s work for him.”
Fearmongering
Flashback to June 2015: Almost as soon as Trump finished declaring his candidacy in the lobby of Trump Tower in the summer of 2015, the media branded him as a fearmongering demagogue, a stalking horse for white resentment and status anxiety who would bring on anti-democratic disaster.According to most mainstream media analysts and elite pundits, Trump’s supporters were downscale whites, at odds with the ascendance of a new coalition of non-white minorities and immigrants who represented the future to a Democratic Party that no longer needed, and had little to offer, a white working class suffering world-historic economic disruption. These people were racist, nativist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic “deplorables,” whose dedication to “Make America Great Again” was nostalgic desperation.
Still, in calling Trump a fearmonger, the Resistance countered with fearmongering of its own that was even more over the top. The economic disruption and social-class resentments were reminiscent of Weimar Germany. Trump was Hitler in the offing, it was argued, and not just in broad strokes, but in specific historical granularity. “It can happen here!” his attackers declared, echoing the Sinclair Lewis novel from the 1930s.
Another favorite literary reference was Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” the counterfactual novel that played on Charles Lindbergh’s “America First” movement, whose banner Trump had embraced as a campaign mantra. Prominent Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) advised that pundits—many of them Jewish—stop with the Hitler analogies. But those analogies continued thick and fast. Hitler. Hitler Hitler. And if not Hitler, then Mussolini, or some other fascist figure from the past.
In his eventual endorsement of Hillary Clinton, Remnick said that “the American demagogues from the past century who most closely resemble him—Father Coughlin and Senator Joseph McCarthy among them—were dangers to the republic, but they never captured the presidential nomination of a major political party.
“The prospect of such a president—erratic, empty, cruel, intolerant, and corrupt—represents a form of national emergency.”
Authoritarianism
The mirroring pattern holds in the accusations of “authoritarianism” against Trump and against his authoritarian-minded supporters. The Resistance points fingers at Trump, not always without evidence. But then, it turns around and acts in its own intolerant, tyrannical ways reflecting its own authoritarian psychology. “Liberal fascism,” it’s been called.“Their purpose ... [is] to make Trump’s legion of haters feel more high-minded about their rage, but mostly to misuse ’science‘ to categorize Trump as ’authoritarian.‘ The finding being ’scientific,’ it is therefore irrefutable and not subject to debate. ‘Authoritarianism’ being beyond the pale, thus so is Trump and all he represents.”
Citing one of the books under review, Anton said that an authoritarian “1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.”
Anton argued that the shoe is really on the other foot in all of these categories. True, Trump could have been seen as encouraging violence at his rallies by saying that he would pay the legal fees of a rally-goer who had punched an anti-Trump heckler in the face and was arrested. “Yet during his rallies,” Anton noted, “when things got out of hand, far more often than not it was anti-Trump ‘protesters’ who initiated or provoked violence.”
“And that’s to say nothing of the rallies that were not able to take place because protesters prevented them through violence or threats of violence. It’s also to say nothing of the many instances of anti-speech violence on campuses around the country, all of it initiated by the Left. Try as the Southern Poverty Law Center might to find brown shirts around every corner, there is no conservative equivalent of Antifa.
“Meanwhile, the Left openly argues against, and sometimes actively disrupts, their opponents’ right to assemble. Which side argues openly for curtailing the right to freedom of speech—but only for their opponents? Which side is allied with mega-monopolies that use or threaten to use their outsize media power to restrict their adversaries’ discourse?”
During the campaign, as during the Trump administration, Resistance figures have insisted that Trump’s authoritarian bearings represented a nightmare for the American tradition of free speech, First Amendment protections, and the independence of the Fourth Estate.
Eventually, Trump would start calling the media the “enemy of the people,” which was what Stalin called his political opponents—usually before arranging their imprisonments or executions. He made a passing threat to suspend NBC’s broadcast license, which in fact he wouldn’t as president have the power to do. He also hinted that he might block the proposed merger between CNN and AT&T.
In fact, though, the pressure on free speech has come from the other side.
Free Speech
During the 2016 campaign, mainstream media made a big deal out of some of the more radical elements in the alt-right who had taken to “doxing” its opponents and critics by posting their addresses, phone numbers, and other private information to the web. But some in the media started doxing in response.The Resistance has used its power over social-media giants to restrict the ability of conservatives—and not just alt-right—to communicate on various digital platforms. “No platform for fascists,” as they say. In some cases, these companies, which have grown so large that they are very accurately referred to as mega-monopolies, have de-platformed certain individuals and certain groups, permanently banning their accounts in order to sideline their views.
In other cases, the companies have operated passive-aggressively, manipulating algorithms to reduce or deny advertising revenue or to rig the results of search functions.
Social-media giants are taking cues from allegedly liberal-progressive organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ADL, which are operating in a McCarthyesque vein, pointing an accusatory finger against online “hate” in the same way that McCarthy denounced communist subversion.
Google has actually produced an internal report called “The Good Censor,” which calls on the big tech behemoth to bring online standards for “hate speech” more in line with European rules, which it openly acknowledges transgresses on American free-speech traditions and the original libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley.
“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.
“But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”
“After months of holding back, modern-day journalists are acting a lot like Murrow, pushing explicitly against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. ... But we nonetheless are witnessing a change from the existing practice of steadfast detachment, and the context in which journalists are reacting is not unlike that of Murrow: The candidate’s comments fall outside acceptable societal norms, and critical journalists are not alone in speaking up.”
“Let’s stop being complicit in promoting his hateful and harmful demagoguery. Just for one week,” she pleaded.
Although she was very careful to say, “This is not an invitation to censorship,” that was exactly what Ben-Ghiat was calling for to offset what she claimed was White House “fabrications and dissimulations.” She said that “dangerous subversives” such as Steve Bannon and manipulative liars such as Kellyanne Conway should be effectively banned from the air and from news analyses.
Media neutrality “creates more space for right-wing points of view,” Ben-Ghiat declared. “No one who has lived in an authoritarian state has looked back and wished its propagandists had gotten more media coverage during the crucial window of transition from liberal democracy to something else—which is potentially our situation right now.”
Liberal intolerance for free speech is most ironic on university campuses. In March 2017, an audience of thuggish Middlebury undergraduates at Middlebury College shouted down conservative scholar Charles Murray.
Nullify the Vote
The Resistance has signaled other authoritarian tendencies in its efforts to nullify the 2016 election result. The worst part of Trump, Remnick insisted, was that he did “not accept the authority of constitutional republicanism—its norms, its faiths and practices, its explicit rules and implicit understandings.” In fact, Trump did suggest that he might not accept the election result, saying quite directly that the vote was rigged against him.But Trump did finally declare that he would accept the election result. And after his victory, it was the Resistance that flouted democratic norms and understandings, by seeking to both morally delegitimize the votes of Trump supporters and to actually nullify the outcome through various constitutional measures that were themselves of dubious legitimacy.
“First on the bogus claim of fraudulent voting machines. Then they sought to subvert the Electoral College by bullying electors into renouncing their respective states’ votes.
“Massive protests and boycotts marked the inauguration. Then there were articles of impeachment introduced in the House. Some sued to remove Trump on a warped interpretation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Others brought in psychiatrists to testify that Trump was ill, disabled, or insane and should be removed, in accordance with the 25th Amendment. The former FBI director, CIA director, and director of the Office of National Intelligence have variously smeared the president as a coward, a traitor, and a Russian mole.”
“Go ahead and call me an elitist; Donald Trump has changed the way I view American government,” said Beinart, admitting that the framers who’d engineered the Electoral College were prescient and that he was naïve. “Eighteen months ago, I could never have imagined President Donald Trump. Now I’m grateful that, 227 years ago, they did.”
The irony of calling for Trump’s impeachment, which might become reality should he lose, was rich, especially the part of the case against him that was purely political, like the one that billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer was making and underwriting.
Vulgarity
Still another manifestation of hypocritical turnabout on the part of the Resistance was the way it insisted that Trump was a bullying vulgar celebrity who would coarsen the fabric of civic life but then turned around and used their own pop cult celebrity to protest against him in an even more crude and vulgar idiom.“Not the Super Bowl, not the Emmys, not the Grammys, not the Oscars. Almost every aspect of American culture has been weaponized to delegitimize Trump. ... The NFL, the NBA, late-night comedy shows, cable news, sitcoms, Hollywood movies, books, and music have all found ways to turn their genres into anti-Trump theater.”
Trump did have a propensity to use demeaning stereotypes and say offensive things, such as the remark comparing Megyn Kelly’s anger to menstrual blood. But the celebrity class has more than matched him in vulgarity and crudeness.
Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a vulgar expletive and was cheered on by The New Yorker for doing so; Politico magazine’s Julia Ioffe, now at The Atlantic, tweeted something suggesting that the president and his daughter had engaged in incest.
At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, comedienne Michelle Wolf cracked jokes about fetuses and body-shamed Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Racism
During the campaign and during the entirety of his presidency, the Resistance has insisted that the Trump phenomenon was based on little else but white ethnic nationalism, white racial privilege, and white demographic anxiety over the browning of America. There were countless denunciations of him for “otherizing” minority groups.But the only idea the Resistance seems to counter that with is an obsessive anti-white racism that “otherizes” the white majority, especially the white working class, as an almost inherently and irredeemably pathological force in American politics.
We’re awash in media that is obsessed with bashing white people, or more accurately in bashing “whiteness.” This is especially so in opinion journalism, and news analysis masquerading as such, where the racial postmodernism of academia has translated into demonstrating a preoccupation with white privilege, white fragility, and white supremacy, as well as a disturbing double standard in indulgence of anti-white racism.
“Only Mass Deportations Can Save America” wrote N.Y. Times’ Bret Stephens in a column that wasn’t entirely satirical.
“So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be—when ‘we’ had just come off the boat.”
Echoing Stephens, David Brooks said in all seriousness that the anti-immigrant white working class were the “East Germans of the 21st century,” left behind by a dysfunctional “monocultural” system. Their nativism was a “defensive animosity to the immigrants who out-hustle and out-build them,” Brooks maintained. “You’d react negatively, too, if confronted with people who are better versions of what you wish you were yourself.”Trump’s white racial nationalism was anathema, but anti-white multicultural nationalism seemed to be fine. Some of the rhetoric you’d hear on public radio or read on the opinion pages had the ring of the kind of post-colonialist discourse you’d hear in the Global South. Some of it even had the ring of race war, or of racialized political struggles in the post-Independence world, like the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya or the conflict between white farmers and blacks in what used to be Rhodesia.
Public Shaming
The place where the Resistance’s moral compass has spun most wildly—and recklessly—is in its embrace of public shaming, confrontation, and aggressive incivility toward its political opponents in Washington, which has led to mob violence and arrests.Media figures quailed at the occasional Trump rally-goer who got in their faces, and very rightly held Trump to account for offering support for the rally-goers who attacked hecklers. But the resistance has made face-to-face vitriol a standard instrument of its anti-Trump activism, and a lot of media figures have either shrugged or cheered.
It began during the crisis over family separation policies at the southern border, when Trump’s press secretary Sanders was asked to leave the Ren Hen Restaurant in rural Virginia. The restaurant’s progressive staff found her presence, and that of the guests at her table, objectionable.
Resistance protesters also challenged Homeland Security’s Kirstjen Nielsen, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and White House immigration policy director Stephen Miller.
“Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens.”
According to Noonan, “the howling and screeching that interrupted the hearings and the voting, the people who clawed on the door of the court, the ones who chased senators through the halls and screamed at them in elevators, who surrounded and harassed one at dinner with his wife, who disrupted and brought an air of chaos, who attempted to thwart democratic processes so that the people could not listen and make their judgments” were demonic—“like the shrieking in the background of an old audiotape of an exorcism.”
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