What comes next
Maxine Waters’ call for mob harassment of Trump administration officials is yet another sign that we are experiencing a contagion of political incivility flowing from political extremism.
That Waters is a particularly unsavory and not particularly bright specimen of the “resistance,” and thus hopefully not entirely representative, doesn’t diminish her contribution to our already troubling level of political polarization and the potential for the incitement of violence.
Indeed, what she and others advocating the mobilization of the mob forget is that polarization by definition involves two sides and that the other side can (and probably will) resort to the same tactics.
If liberal business owners begin to refuse service to those they disagree with, so too can conservative business owners refuse service to those they disagree with, including Waters and her friends (and the hunch is that there are a lot more conservative small-business owners out there than liberal ones), to the point where still more aspects of our daily lives become infected and thus ruined by political animus.
In Rod Dreher’s typically perceptive words, “for the woke left, even trying to eat out with your spouse and your friends at a restaurant is now political, and must be punished.”
Much of the incivility stems, of course, from the conclusion in certain quarters that Donald Trump represents a harbinger of American fascism. The claim that America is becoming Nazi Germany under his influence has now become distressingly pervasive, however reflective of historical ignorance and insulting to Hitler’s millions of victims.
Such rhetorical extremism leads to a political dead end, because once employed it leaves nothing else in the arsenal to pull out in response to the next Trump outrage. Once you’ve called Trump and his supporters Nazis, there isn’t much else you can call them. The shock effect begins to wear off and, like the little boy who cried wolf, people stop taking you seriously.
But this is also where polarization reaches the dangerous point—when all the rhetorical stops have been pulled out and the big guns (Hitler and Nazis) fired off without knocking down the target, the temptation to resort to more radical, even violent tactics grows.
When you decide that God is on your side (as Waters claims when it comes to resisting Trump) and that your political opponents are equivalent to those who carried out the Holocaust, any means of resistance becomes acceptable, nay, morally obligatory.
We thus arrive, via an escalatory spiral, at the kind of fanaticism that convinces people it is their moral duty to hijack airliners and fly them into skyscrapers housing infidels.
In a broader sense, the excessive politicization of life we are experiencing inevitably leads to a dangerous level of political polarization because, when everything is about politics, people are forced to argue about everything. As with the bloody religious wars of the 17th century, we get sorted into warring tribes with no room for heresy within or agnosticism between. Those in the other tribe are no longer simply wrong or misguided on desultory political matters, but the personification of evil.
Polarization thus begets moral self-righteousness, demonization, and fanaticism. If Trump truly is another Hitler, then it becomes all too easy to view all those who voted for him as Nazis too, and to declare the moral equivalent of war on nearly half the electorate.
From a purely pragmatic political perspective, this is a recipe for sure defeat. One could argue that every time a Trump official is kicked out of a restaurant or an unsavory character like Waters calls for mob action, Trump’s prospects for re-election increase.
As Dreher puts it with respect to the likely impact of the ongoing unpleasantries, “Conservative people see this, and they imagine themselves being thrown out of a restaurant, either by the owner or by left-wing protesters, because they are conservative. They see themselves being driven out of the public square by the left— which all the while congratulates itself on its superior morality—and it makes them furious.”
The great American political project was designed to neuter excessive political passion by relegating politics (and thus political discord) to a relatively small corner of life. The greatest threat to that project is therefore the kind of zealot, now increasingly common, who sees everything as political and finds personal identity and meaning only in politics. For such misguided, dangerous people, politics becomes a substitute for the kind of religion that can tolerate no disagreement.
Trump’s victory in 2016 was attributable to a sufficient number of voters holding their noses and choosing what they thought was the lesser evil (a determination that likely also guided the even larger number of voters on the other side).
If he wins again in 2020, it will be because a similar calculus held—that as bad as Trump has been, it would be better to re-elect him than to hand power over to Waters and the resistance mob.
All of which raises a disturbing question: If this is how the resistance is behaving 18 months into an unfortunate but entirely legitimate presidency, what tactics do they resort to if the voters extend that presidency past January 2020?