Up until January 6, 2021, I used to think that some Trump supporters were still decent and that you could have an honest disagreement with them, and even still be friends. As the MAGA mob went into the Capitol to try to prevent the certification of Joe Biden‘s election, that idea no longer seemed tenable.
In many ways, democracy is like a game: there are rules that we all agree to and abide by, so we can all peacefully partake in society. When someone flouts the rules, though, they’re not really playing the game, right? You wouldn’t come back to the table and keep playing after the guy next to you flipped the Monopoly board in a fit of rage; you wouldn’t consider it a legitimate game if Travis Kelce suddenly started going the other way and tried the non-existent concept of an own goal; and you wouldn’t pay up if you lost a bet because Lionel Messi decided to grab the ball with his hands and carry it through to the opponents’ goalposts.
In such cases, the other teams would either stop playing or go to the referees. But, as has been made abundantly clear, in the American democracy case there are no refs any longer! To name a few: after their short-lived initial repudiation of Trump in 2016, the GOP quickly bent the knee, Barr kneecapped the Mueller report, Senate Republicans fumbled the impeachment, Merrick Garland dragged his feet for two years, the Supreme Court gave criminal immunity to the President and they also dragged their feet with Trump’s cases. At every step of the way, when we thought, “Surely, the buck stops here“, it just didn’t!
It’s been four years since Trump incited the insurrection, and now he has been rewarded for it. Would you keep playing Monopoly with people who flipped the board, or those who think it’s just fine to allow the angry player to keep all the money he grabbed during his tantrum? Would you pay the bet if the referee showed a red card to the players complaining about Messi grabbing the ball with his hands? What are we even doing?
I don’t know how you come back from this. I don’t think it is pretending things are just fine, or that you can just simply go grab a beer with the guys rooting to turn America into a Christian theocracy, and longing to make their beliefs into the law of the land. The whole point of democracy and the democratic norms is that your enemies won’t come after you, that you have a guarantee that you and your friends and relatives will be afforded the same treatment as your foes and their friends and relatives. No better, no worse. It will never not be dumbfounding to me that people just pretend that the constant anti-democratic discourse is the new GOP normal, and that there is nothing especially worrisome about that.
People voted for (and failed to vote against) the guy who promoted the insurrection, and, true to form, kept attacking the democratic norms for the whole of his campaign. Unlike 2016, there is no plausible claim to ignorance this time around. No one can claim they didn’t know. They knew (or should have known). The mask has slipped, and they don’t care.
No matter how you want to slice it, there are only two types of Trump voters: those who want to hurt someone (be that the woke, coastal elites, women, black people, gay people, etc) and those who voted on vibes (low info voters). And people will, indeed, get hurt.
Now, I can be friends with people that I disagree with politically: I wouldn’t end a friendship over capital gains tax amounts, or over whether we should have more or fewer bike lanes, or snow-plowing schedules. I don’t think relationships are worth ending over these.
People getting hurt as a deliberate result of wantonly inhumane policy is not a disagreement on politics, it’s a disagreement about the dignity of fellow human beings. Some people have been floating around the tired civility politics line, and every single one of them fails to explain why anyone should keep in their lives someone who either sees them as second-class citizens (or worse) or doesn’t care enough to vote against the people who do. Liberals and Democrats are not without their flaws, of course, but whatever issue you may have with them, you can find the Trump side being a worse offender on any principle.
Why would ‘libtards’ want to keep on being friends with someone who will scorch the Earth just to ‘own the libs’? More to the point: where is the line? As a political phenomenon, Trump has been steadily eroding the democratic norms, to the point where he was able to get elected a few weeks after falsely claiming that Haitians in Ohio were eating pets, and having a campaign-approved comedian telling racist jokes at Madison Square Garden. If you’re not re-considering your friendships over this, what will it take for you to do so? In 2015 some people would have considered ending a friendship over a politician mocking a disabled journalist. I don’t understand how an insurrection just doesn’t do it for so many people — how is that not crossing a line? (The most powerful explanation I can find is the boiled frogs hypothesis.) Your democracy is being destroyed by the puppet of an enemy nation and all you can think of is being nice and not hurting the feelings of people who sided with white supremacists because eggs were too expensive?
After the assassination attempt on Trump, his supporters kept on calling the Dems and Never Trumpers to lower the temperature of the discourse, but they themselves didn’t bother to do that. Do as I say, not as I do. Why would their interest in being friends with you be any more sincere?
You afford them the luxury of the democratic norms they deny you at your peril: it’s like playing soccer with a cheating Messi who has the referee on his side.
(pic: https://macexpertguide.com/)
