This type of rhetoric precisely captures what’s animating a large segment of the Republican Party and the conservative movement: Either “We” win or “They” will destroy America (as a country defined by white Christian rule). Who cares about “democracy”? #GOPextremism
As evidence for how little any of this has to do with Trump, here’s Rod Dreher, a “serious intellectual” who says he abhors the president, professing that opposing the “left” still trumps (ahem...) everything
This Dreher piece is truly something. To him, Trumpism and the “far left” (by which he means the Democratic Party, even Joe Biden) are equally radical - no “moderates” left to choose from. To make clear what a difficult choice he and his fellow conservatives face, he says this:
“As a priest, you might have had big problems with Gen. Franco, but if you didn’t side with him, you stood to be shot by the left-wing Republicans, and have your church burned down. Mind you, nobody’s going to get shot or have their churches burned down here...” I mean, what?
I mean, leave aside this, uhm, questionable portrayal of the Spanish Civil War. But what type of argument is this? “I have to go with the rightwing authoritarian because otherwise I’ll get killed - only of course I won’t... but still!” Huh?
What I find most striking about the position of “socially conservative Christians” like Dreher is how brazenly anti-democratic it is. For him, it all comes down to the judges Trump puts on the bench - who, Dreher hopes, will act as “the only line of defense” against... democracy!
As Dreher puts it, as “the country is going to start voting a lot more liberal as the Boomers die,” he needs those Trump judges to fight against the liberalization of the country. Democracy though? Not something worth protecting, it seems.
Dreher says he has a bad conscience for voting for the moral abomination that is Trump. I just wish he would also reflect more critically on a position that amounts to “If democracy goes against me, I’m gonna go against democracy and with Trump.” He doesn’t. That’s telling.
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What stands out about this interview with New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn is this pervasive sense among centrist elites that by the summer of 2020, “woke” radicalism had been allowed to advance too far - and people like Kahn see it as their mission to stem the tide. 1/
Kahn describes the Summer of 2020 as “a crazy period” that “frayed nerves everywhere” - he denounces the “excesses of the period,” meaning the spread of “woke” ideas and too much anti-Trumpism inside and outside the NYT. “A period of peak cultural angst,” he calls it. 2/
This is precisely the spirit that is fueling the elite centrist support for the crackdown on college protesters - an acute anxiety that things have gone too far, that these “woke” radicals who were given too much rope during the Trump era urgently need to be reined in. 3/
Mainstream elites are adopting a reactionary tale about the “leftist” indoctrination of America’s youth that verges on the conspiratorial and is destined to give the Right a major boost.
Key points from my new piece (link in bio):
🧵1/
I wrote about what George Packer gets so wrong about the university, critical theory, and the legacy of the 1960s student protests – and what to make of the fact that he is propagating the conspiratorial idea that leftwing radicals have indoctrinated generations of kids. 2/
George Packer’s grand accusation of a direct line of leftwing indoctrination from 1968 to today doesn’t hold up to the least bit of scrutiny - but it provides a window into the elite anxieties that are driving so much of mainstream politics in America. 3/
This is the type of comment I’ve been getting a lot for this piece: Always from self-regarding liberals who never want to grapple with the fact that the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 60s – the legacy of which they surely want to claim – clearly violated those principles.
The polite mainstream widely rejected them with precisely those arguments: too radical, too loud, too disruptive, too divisive. Protests demanding justice, student protests, protests carried by a multiracial coalition are almost always unpopular as they are happening.
And they just keep coming:
“If you engage in civil disobedience you will get arrested.”
Easy! And this from someone who had “Democrat” in their bio and started their previous comment by claiming they - of course! - would have supported the 1960s civil rights movement. Perfect.
What an absolute disaster that Republicans are still successfully playing their cynical game of exploiting fears over antisemitism in order to advance their reactionary crusade – and mainstream institutions keep willfully playing along.
I wrote about this here (link in bio): 1/
We have reached a truly bizarre place in our political discourse when supposedly serious people want us to believe that the party of Trump, QAnon, and “Great Replacement” is the bulwark against antisemitism in America. 2/
After pretending to be really upset about campus antisemitism during the congressional hearings in December, Stefanik ran off to meet “her friend,” the leader of a fascistic movement, the guy who is raging against immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” 3/
I dove into how leading conservative commentators in National Review are imagining a second Trump presidency. What they offer isn’t analysis. It is sophistry in defense of the premise that the actual threat isn’t Trump, it’s hysterical Libs and the radical Left. 2/
The goal is evidently not to provide National Review readers with an understanding of what’s been happening on the Right, but to portray Trump and his political project as so mundane and unremarkable that the liberal reaction to Trump must seem unhinged and dangerous. 3/
Anti-Anti-Trump Conservatism Is a Disingenuous and Dangerous Game
A case study of how National Review normalizes Trump, rages against a bizarre caricature of “the Left,” and thereby accommodates rightwing extremism.
A thread, based on my new piece (link in bio):
🧵1/
I dissect two recent pieces written by National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry and senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty - who represent that “respectable” spectrum of the American Right the mainstream political discourse consistently asks us to take seriously. 2/
Whether or not rightwing extremists manage to take power depends largely on how much support they get from mainstream conservative circles – it depends on the extent to which the rightwing establishment is willing to make common cause with extremism. 3/