From Andrew Sullivan:
The way to fight [Trump’s use of white panic] is to highlight his extremism, to show America that mass immigration can be controlled humanely, and aim for the center. But Trump’s rhetoric makes this emotionally impossible for many Democrats who are triggered and appalled by this man’s depravity. This polarizing dynamic all but guarantees a Democratic nominee further to the left on cultural and racial issues than any in recent times, if only to balance the emotional intensity of the Trump base. Our politics has thereby become a kind of tribal Twitter war, a non-discourse in which arguments almost instantly reduce themselves to bigotry, insults, ad hominem attacks, slurs, and deepening intransigence. It is becoming a crude racial battle for power, each side doubling down further and further, rallying their bases with racial rhetoric, reaching a climax in base mobilization in 2020. Democrats may be right that in the long run, in a fast-diversifying America, this kind of white nationalism has an expiration date. And given Trump’s anemic ratings, maybe a landslide in 2020 against him with the right candidate is still possible.
One of the most difficult challenges facing any Trump opponent is to separate the man from his proposals, even those that are throwaways. Why? Because, ideally, proposals exist on their own terms, and should be evaluated as such. When two groups become vociferously opposed to each other, otherwise notable proposals become little more than targets of opportunity. An example, perhaps the only such, of a possibly fine proposal from President Trump was his suggestion, in his United Nations speech that evoked so much laughter, that investigating and helping those nations from which immigration to the United States is originating might be an effective approach to drastically lessening that immigration, and not, by implication, this “the fox is in the henhouse” tactics of walls and mass deportations. As long-time readers of this blog know, I have little use for Trump or the GOP that elected him, but on the issue of immigration, I agree with him on this strategy: what is going on in Honduras and Guatemala and other origin countries is of critical importance to resolving the problem[1].
More generally, this entire pro-Trump cult vs anti-Trump cult has a negative impact on our entire political culture in the sense that proposals are no longer receiving evaluation without their political context stripped; that is, the first thing the cultists are doing is asking, Who proposed this?, and then reacting accordingly.
It’s dumb. The GOP has been doing it since at least the beginning of the Obama Administration, in the person of the incompetent Senator Mitch “Obama will be a one-term President!” McConnell (R-KY); I suspect political historians will point at Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA) as the true originator of blind political cultism. Now I worry, especially when reading The Daily Kos, that this canker sore has spread to the Democrats.
But the real problem is the “us vs. them” attitude engendered by Trump, his base, and the GOP. Fighting against it is a difficult requirement of being a political adult, especially given the lack of respect Trump has for the critical political procedures, institutions, and traditions of this country.
1 Not that I took Trump to be serious since, and I have heard nothing more from the conservatives since that speech.
