Guest post: The hardest lesson to swallow

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on If.

…all his opponents thought that he was engaging in hyperbole for dramatic effect

There is certainly no shortage of normalization or “sanewashing” – not to mention delusional levels of wishful thinking – going on. I also suspect that the moderate, centrist tendency to “err on the side of least drama” has become such a reflex to a lot of people that any suggestion that things might actually be that bad sounds like obvious “alarmism” and “hysteria” and hence self-refuting.

Still “all his opponents” seems like an exaggeration to me. There are plenty of people out there who never had any illusions about Trump himself. What a lot more people seem to have a hard time fathoming is that a large minority of the American electorate (almost certainly the single largest identifiable “constituency” at the present) really do support Trump’s authoritarian and illiberal agenda and will not start turning against him in droves if only nice liberals and lefties can make them understand how awful he truly is. Sam Harris* once made the point (rightly in my opinion) that because most secularists or moderate believers are unable to imagine what it’s like to really believe the things that religious extremists claim to believe, many can’t bring themselves to accept that anybody else believes it either, hence the obligatory attempts to find secular motives for everything from suicide bombings to the practice of letting your own children die rather than allowing necessary blood transfusions. Apparently any correlation between theses people’s actions and their expressed beliefs was a pure coincidence.

I think the same goes for nice, moderate, centrist liberals and the MAGA crowd. In the summer of 2016 a writer in Der Spiegel argued that Trump was actually a lot closer to the White House than most liberals and leftists were prepared to admit to themselves. In part his argument was based on the observation that, according to the most recent poll results, if you took the rural bias of the electoral system into account, the outcome was basically a coin toss. But the part that really stuck with me was that because liberals and lefties found everything about Trump so repulsive, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe that anybody else could find anything to like about him either, hence his “apparent” popular support could only be a great big misunderstanding.

Others, like Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, may not have started out with any particular illusions about the electorate, but underestimated the degree to which the Republican Party had become radicalized. Levitzky and Ziblatt are on record as saying that when they published How Democracies Die in 2018, they saw Trump as a dangerous demagogue with strong anti-democratic tendencies, but they did not see the GOP as an anti-democratic party. They have been forced to revise their opinion on this latter point, however.

Perhaps the hardest lesson to swallow is that he really can get away with anything and that neither the constitution nor the greatly over-hyped system of “checks and balances” is going to stop him. As someone once commented I think most people used to have a vague idea that “they would never let him get away with that”. It’s time to face the fact that there are no such people as “they”, and that no one is coming to the rescue.

*Yes, I know, but as I keep saying, people are not split into those who are right about everything and those who are wrong about everything.

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