The Disease of Delegitimization⁠↗

I started to outline the idea that Trump is both a symptom and an accelerant of a trend that started as the Cold War ended. To put a tidy date on it, I chose August 17, 1992, the day Patrick Buchanan delivered his famous “Culture War” speech at the Republican National Convention. Nut graf from said speech: My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. Clinton was, of course, elected, and soon became the embodiment of the internal enemy that Buchanan was describing.

By all accounts, Trump has no intention of ever publicly conceding. And he seems hell-bent on going down screaming the most unhinged conspiracy theory yet—that an election he handsomely lost in several states was somehow stolen from him. This is all plenty bad. But focusing solely on Trump is a mistake. Rather, it’s Republicans’ decision to play along, even if cautiously and cynically, that is really the worst news of all.

I worry that this foulness will be met with no small degree of mirroring on the other side. Outraged Dems and NeverTrumpers, especially in the media, will persist in their loose talk of fascism and fret about coups being readied. Part of that will be muscle memory honed throughout the fat Trump years, which were, after all, terrific for business. Part of it will be a genuinely-felt pragmatic justification: the threat from Trump is vast, they’ll say, and motivating a response is our duty. And part of it will be laziness and vanity: instead of wondering why it is that their policy platform not only failed to flip the Senate but also completely shredded their majority in the House, these people will fixate on how evil the other side is—especially with Trump out of power but not out of sight. That last one is key. As Samuel Moyn recently noted, Trump has completely colonized his opponents’ imaginations. The sole source of his strength is that he compels his enemies to mirror him, dragging them down into the kind of ugly fights at which he is peerless.

First, it doesn’t matter who is worse or who started it. We live in a democracy, and if roughly half the country really is “to blame” for something, we are all going to have to live with the consequences. If we want to remain a democracy, that is; you simply can’t wish these people away. And second, your righteousness is not just useless, it’s as much an accelerant as Trump’s toxicity. Not only will you never out-Trump Trump, you feel so justified that you don’t see how your attitude only deepens the divide and wrecks things more. Indeed, glib and moralizing invocations of fascism underscore just how badly people understand their history. All Germans undermined democracy in Weimar. There were no heroes. It’s only after democracy was good and destroyed that Hitler was able to waltz in.