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Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
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Mar 14 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Just Trump being ridiculous, nothing to see here?

Actually, it’s the standard-bearer of the Right, the political leader of the Republican Party, the likely 2024 GOP presidential candidate, calling for a violent struggle to the death against the enemy within.

It’s alarming.
An enemy, by the way, that is supposedly everywhere, dominates all the powerful institutions of American life - very much including the Democratic Party, which is therefore not just a political opponent, but a fundamentally illegitimate, “Un-American” faction.
The leader of the Republican Party has abandoned - and is actively assaulting - the foundations of democratic political culture. Accepting the legitimacy of the political opponent and denouncing the use of political violence: Trump is delighting in crossing those lines.
It won’t matter. Republicans are not abandoning Trump. He is where the energy and the activism on the Right is - that has always been his greatest strength: A manifestation of what is animating the Right, a willingness to express it in the crudest, starkest terms.

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More from @tzimmer_history

Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
Mar 15
Why does the “cancel culture” idea play such an outsized role in liberal / mainstream media coverage?

We need to look at both ideological and structural factors: a confluence of reactionary centrism and a system that incentivizes #BothSides “balance” above all else.
Reactionary centrism is the ideology that animates many of the people who shape media coverage. A disproportionate percentage of those people are white men, and the fact that elite white men face a little more scrutiny today than in the past has caused quite a bit of anxiety.
#metoo is another excellent example of this dynamic: As soon as traditionally marginalized groups gain enough power and enough of a platform to make their demands for respect and accountability heard, certain white people (predominantly men) start bemoaning “persecution.”
Read 16 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
Mar 11
In last week’s column for @GuardianUS, I wrote about how the Right is infatuated with foreign autocrats like Putin who they perceive as defenders of “Christian values.”

I’d like to address a few reactions to the piece - and some misconceptions about white Christian nationalism:
There are four common reactions / misconceptions I’d like to address:

- “These are just fringe voices”

- “Putin is not a real Christian”

- “If they love Putin so much, why don’t they go live in Russia?”

- “How can they possibly go from hating Communism to loving Putin?”
1) ”Just the fringe”

Like I said in my column, to describe Donald Trump, the Right’s political leader, and Tucker Carlson, one of its key media activists, as “fringe” is either wishful thinking and / or deliberately disingenuous.
Read 26 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
Mar 10
I very much agree with @imillhiser. But you know what, I’d settle for “Republicans want to abolish democracy, Democrats want to preserve it - We don’t care who wins, but here’s what’s up.” The key problem is that too many journalists are actively obscuring what is going on.
It’s not even necessarily the “I don’t have a horse in this race” attitude that is so disastrous. It’s the complicity in the assault on democracy that results from the norm of valuing “neutrality” over objectivity, producing coverage that privileges the radicalizing Right.
If political journalists adhered to a strict pro-truth, pro-evidence, pro-objectivity bias, we wouldn’t necessarily need an active commitment to democracy over other forms of government. What we need is clear, factual coverage of the GOP’s anti-democratic radicalization.
Read 12 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
Mar 10
This is such a key point. There are always established norms for what is and what is not acceptable “speech,” and there are always sanctions for deviating from those norms. The real questions are: Where are the boundaries? Who gets to define them? What are the sanctions?
The Free Speech Crusaders don’t want to have a debate about these specifics, which would have to include an actual case-by-case analysis, instead clinging to vague insinuations of widespread “cancel culture.” Because once you get into specifics, their case quickly disintegrates.
Take the infamous NYT student op-ed. Once we move beyond generalized accusations of leftwing “cancel” threats, the Free Speech Brigade’s argument seems to be: “The student should not have had to deal with disapproving looks from peers.” Talk about the “marketplace of ideas”…
Read 5 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
Mar 9
I have one more thought on “cancel culture” and “self-censorship”: In most elite institutions, the only political opinions that are guaranteed *not* to get you some pushback are those adhering to the established centrist tropes of “polarization,” “division,” and “lack of unity.”
The problem with the way the term “self-censorship” is currently deployed to suggest a pervasive “cancel culture” is twofold. First of all, it disregards the fact that some measure of modulating when and how we voice our opinions is just normal – and certainly needed.
Political opinions, opinions about people in our lives, even opinions about movies, sports, whatever: We all understand that we can’t always offer our unadulterated takes on anything and everything, to whoever, regardless of circumstance. That’s not how the social contract works.
Read 14 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
Mar 8
One thought on the “Cancel culture at UVA!” op-ed that the NYT should never have published:

It’s a great example of how, once it’s out in the world, a diagnosis like “cancel culture” quickly starts shaping, rather than just reflecting, reality and individual experiences.
Forget about the question of whether or not cancel culture is actually a thing: “cancel culture” – a specific diagnosis, a claim about the world widely perpetuated not just on the Right, but pretty much across the political spectrum – most definitely is having a massive impact.
In so many ways, what is described in the piece is “normal,” for lack of a better word: common experiences of adjusting and adapting to a new social / cultural / professional environment, being confronted with differing perspectives, figuring out how to navigate a wider world.
Read 11 tweets

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