Democracy requires debate, but debate assumes that both sides have a legitimate position even if they strenuously disagree. Fascists, however, are fundamentally illegitimate, not to be reasoned with, but defeated or destroyed, hence there is no more room for debate in many Democrat circles.
Both before and after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, many reasons have been posited for the depressing, combative state of our political discourse, everything from increasingly violent and hyperbolic rhetoric to hyper partisanship driven by tribalism with latent racism in between. At the same time, these and other factors have been present in the American experiment to varying degrees since the Founding, if not earlier. While we might like to believe previous generations calmly and rationally debated matters of war, peace, and domestic policy under some sort of dignified rules of behavior, they did not. Instead, they attacked their opponents vociferously, slung mud, outright lied, made up facts, engaged fake journalists, betrayed one another for convenience, and used bribes and other forms of corruption, all of it supported by slurs and rhetoric that seems downright unimaginable today. Teddy Roosevelt was the most popular political figure and President of the early 20th century, a man who thousands would gather to see around the world simply to catch a glimpse of him, and who won reelection in 1904 the biggest landslide in history at the time, trouncing his opponent Alton B. Parker, carrying 32 states compared to thirteen, earning 336 electoral votes and capturing 56.4% of the popular vote, but he was not without detractors, far from it. Three years earlier, Roosevelt was the first President in US history to formally invite a black man, Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, setting off a racist firestorm that makes any debates we have today seem elevated by comparison. The n-word wasn’t taboo at that point, though some had begun to argue against it after the Civil War, and I use it here without editing merely to make the coarseness, the crudeness, and the all round vitriol of the discourse plain. After a completely innocuous dinner, Senator Benjamin Tillman called for people to die from the floor of that hallowed chamber, “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” Georgia Governor Allen Candler opined, “No self-respecting man can ally himself with the President, after what has occurred,” adding that “No Southerner can respect any white man who would eat with a negro.” South Carolina Governor Miles McSweeney noted, “No white man who has eaten with a negro can be respected; it is simply a question of whether those who are invited to dine are fit to marry the sisters and daughters of their hosts.” The media also got in on the act, with the Memphis Scimitar proclaiming it “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.” The Missouri Sedalia Sentinel went so far as to publish a sick poem, “Niggers in the White House,” that needs to be read to believed and which extended the sphere of outrage to Roosevelt’s young daughter. Beyond being a betrayer of the white race and an advocate of miscegenation, Roosevelt was variously and falsely called a drunk, who “lies and curses in a most disgusting way; he gets drunk, too, and that not infrequently, and all his intimates know it” and a crazed war monger. A half-century before Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln was branded the “Illinois Ape” and Andrew Jackson a bigamist.
While this doesn’t make these and the various other verbal battles that have occurred throughout our history noble or correct, it does suggest that our discourse today isn’t measurably better or worse than it has been in the past. As they used to say, “politics ain’t beanbag” and as Roosevelt himself said of the “man in the arena,” “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” To me at least, this means that something fundamentally different has changed in recent years, a development in our politics that goes beyond rhetoric, tribalism, racism, or whatever of the various isms that have been present for centuries. Some will undoubtedly attribute it to the arrival of President Donald Trump himself on the political scene, a man who even his supporters agree is unconventional in almost every way imaginable and unlike any President in recent memory if ever. In this telling, it is President Trump who is responsible for dividing the country, sowing discord, and essentially bringing everyone down to what they perceive as his level. Before Charlie Kirk was pronounced dead last week, Governor JB Pritzker neatly encapsulated this point of view by blaming him for the assassination of even a political ally, saying “political violence unfortunately has been ratcheting up in this country, and we saw the shootings, the killings in Minnesota — we’ve seen other political violence occur in other states. And I would just say, it’s got to stop, and I think there are people who are fomenting it in this country. I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it. We’ve seen the January 6th rioters who clearly have tripped a new era of political violence and the president, what did he do? He pardoned them. I mean what kind of signal does that send to people who want to perpetrate political violence? Not a good one.” This view, however, seems to conveniently ignore the rancor that accompanied President George W. Bush’s second term, wherein progressives launched an all out assault, regularly referring to him as a liar who was responsible for thousands of deaths, a “loser,” a Nazi, and a war criminal despite that he was credited just a few years earlier with bringing the country together after 9-11 and hadn’t personally engaged in these sort of attacks on his political opponents. As recently as 2023, Current Affairs published an article co-written by progressive professor Noam Chomsky that referred to the Iraq War as “The Worst Crime of the 21st Century,” claiming “The United States’ destruction of Iraq remains the worst international crime of our time. Its perpetrators remain free and its horrors are buried.” There is, in fact, an open complaint against President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others before the International Criminal Court, but my goal is not to debate the merits of the claim, merely to point out that being relatively tame and mild-mannered in discourse proved no shield against provocative, incendiary accusations and calls to be put in prison.
Therefore, there must be another explanation than merely President Trump himself. In this regard, some may point to the fact that his Presidency has never been seen as legitimate by his opposition. After his stunning victory over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, Democrats and their progressive allies immediately undertook various attempts to prevent him from taking office, urging his own electors to defect and back another candidate while simultaneously planning an impeachment and sowing the false seeds that he only prevailed because help from Russia, help he actively participated in, colluding to steal the election from its rightful victor. On November 16, 2016, Bill Lichtenstein, writing for The Huffington Post offered “The Way Out of Trumpland: Hail Mary Pass to Save the Nation.” The plan was to pressure those sworn to support President Trump in the electoral college to cast their votes – illegally in most cases – for another candidate, turning the election over the House of Representatives and overturning the will of the electorate. As he put it, “Thirty-seven is the magic number here, because if 37 of the 306 electors, who represent the states that Donald Trump won, fail to cast a vote for Trump, he would fall under the needed 270 Electoral College majority, and would not become president. In that case, the U.S. House of Representatives would vote — with each state’s Congressional delegation getting one vote — which they could cast for one of the top three Electoral College vote getters.” He also reported on a potential “a grand compromise, if you will, that would help unify the country” by denying President Trump’s lawful victory. The goal, in that case, would be to “persuade a total of 270 Democratic and Republican electors to change their votes — that is not to vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump — but for a to-be agreed-upon compromise moderate Republican candidate. By doing so, that person would become the 45th President of the United States.” Though this would clearly be the equivalent of conducting a political coup in plain sight, a bizarre position for supposed champions of democracy, Mr. Lichtenstein casually dismissed those claims by insisting this was “precisely — in the process as it was designed by the Founding Parents of the Constitution over two centuries ago.” On January 20, 2017, the day he was inaugurated the first time, The Washington Post reported that “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun,” noting “At the moment the new commander in chief was sworn in, a campaign to build public support for his impeachment went live” and in barely six months, Democrat House members were introducing formal articles in the House of Representatives without bothering to identify a single crime.
Clearly this was unusual, but comparisons to President Bush are once again instructive. He too was declared “selected not elected” because of the legal challenges during the 2000 election and many progressives never acknowledged him as a legitimate President; at the time, there was something of a cottage industry of shirts and other gear with his likeness emblazoned “Not My President.” In 2004, some even claimed he tried to steal the election by rigging voting machines in Ohio. While the tactics used against President Trump have clearly been bolder and more aggressive, the detractors far more vocal and even hysteric at times, his Republican predecessor wasn’t treated much better, a difference of degree not kind, suggesting once again that the root cause of our discontent remains something different. Humbly, I would offer that the difference lies in the treatment of President Trump’s supporters, who were roundly declared as illegitimate as their President for perhaps the first time in American history. In retrospect, we can trace the beginning of this trend to his opponent, Secretary Clinton, and a statement she made at a fundraiser in September 2016, where she intentionally and publicly targeted voters rather than the politician they supported. “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” she said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” While Secretary Clinton was referring to only a subset of these potential voters as irredeemable, the distinction appears to have vanished during the intervening years. President Biden repeatedly turned to this idea throughout his Presidency, where the issue was no longer Trump himself, it was his entire movement. “I believe America is at an inflection point,” he declared in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia in September 2022 in a bizarre, dark speech, “one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after. And now America must choose to move forward or to move backwards. MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.” In 2023, he framed it this way, “This MAGA threat is a threat to the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions. It’s also a threat to the character of our nation that gives our Constitution life, that binds us together as Americans, a common cause. None of this is surprising, though. They’ve tried to govern that way before. Thank God they failed. But they haven’t given up.” In 2024, it was “politics, fear, money all have intervened, and all of these MAGA voiced who know the truth about Trump on January 6, have abandoned the truth and abandoned democracy. They made their choice – now the rest of us, Democrats, Independents, mainstream Republicans, we have to make our choice. I know mine, and I believe I know America’s.”
Clear, many progressives and much of the mainstream media agreed. To them, President Trump’s supporters don’t have legitimate political perspectives who have simply chosen the wrong leader. Instead, they are cultists and fascists. Boston University, for example, hosted an interview in 2022 with Jonathan Zatlin, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of history, who taught “Comparative European Fascism, about Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and similar regimes that trafficked in violence, racism, and repression,” asking “Are Trump Republicans Fascists?” While he refused to go that far, he came close enough to make no difference, stating that Republicans have “put public officials into office who don’t have democracy as a value, who believe violence is a legitimate part of public discourse, which it obviously isn’t. It’s a form of politics that is deeply disturbing, because it means the Republican Party has allied itself with antidemocratic values, violence, and racism.” “You don’t make compromises with them. You have to call these things out. It’s important to call conspiracy theories out and debunk them. It’s a difficult thing to do, but all these things need to be called out. You cannot make alliances with people like this, because these ideas are so corrosive. [They] will swallow you whole. You cannot make idiotic statements like violence is part of democratic discourse. Conservatives believed they could contain fascists in the interwar period, and seem to think the same thing today. They bear responsibility not only for generating some of the ideas, but for collaborating with, and tolerating, a lot of the violence and racism. I see conservatives walking down a really precarious path, one that will endanger us all.” In the spring of 2022, Chapman University published “Fascism, the Republican Party of Death, Structural Racism, QAnon, the War in Ukraine and the Coming Metaverse: Are We All Doomed?” and reached much the same conclusion, attacking Trump and his base in equal parts, who the author, Peter McClaren, called politically mobilized fascists. “Some may object to the label fascism being applied to Trump because he did not create a one-party system or because he could always have institutionalized more horrific policies (perhaps torturing migrant children in addition to separating them from their parents and putting them in cages?). Encouragement of civic violence and urging his base to overthrow an election by attacking the Capitol building is, admittedly, not enough for Trump to pass the historically high watermark of being officially recognised as a fascist – at least, not if we are comparing Trumpism to Franquismo, Mussolini or Hitler. But whether or not Trump is a true fascist, or he just borrowed some motifs and ideas from fascist leaders that he admires is not as urgent an issue as the fact that he has, without question, politically mobilised fascists and emboldened neo-Nazis, white nationalists, internet trolls, groypers, neo-confederates, bikers for Trump, armed militias and sovereign citizens; he has amplified the anti-Semitic chorus against George Soros, incited violence at political rallies among his supporters such as the Proud Boys, and basked in the sanctified aura of being regarded by evangelical religious leaders as ‘chosen by God’ to lead the country back to its former glory.”
Under these circumstances, it is any wonder that a frightening percentage of Democrats now question whether political violence is acceptable and are seemingly alright with some in their party openly celebrating a political assassination? Democracy requires debate, but debate assumes that both sides have a legitimate position even if they strenuously disagree. Fascists, however, are fundamentally illegitimate, not to be reasoned with, but defeated or destroyed, hence there is no more room for debate in many Democrat circles.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 