Why Trump is so popular
Progressives have long argued that academics and those in the news media ought to call evil ideas evil, rather than strive for a neutrality that conceals that fundamental truth from the reader. And over the past five years, conservatives, libertarians and a few figures in the center-left have sounded apocalyptic alarms as the left began pressing to put those ideas into practice.
Most on the left rolled their eyes at the dramatic language in which these fears were couched — cries of “cultural Marxism” and “purges.” But over the past few weeks, I suspect some have became more sympathetic to that sort of talk, as others have gone on the attack against moderate liberals within institutions that the left already largely controls.
Those moderates had been trying to hold on to a studied neutrality. In a complicated world, final judgment should be left as an exercise for the reader. Besides, as you can see by comparing the readership of The New York Times with that of The Nation, the audience for overt, left-wing activism is much smaller than the audience for mainstream fare with a distinct blue tinge.
But as writer Jon Schwarz once noted in his “iron law of institutions,” people often care more about maximizing their power within their institutions than about maximizing the power of the institution. So it seems unsurprising that progressives were not persuaded to let the center-left continue offering equal time to evildoers.
A corollary of the iron law is that institutions will tend to be controlled by the folks most focused on maximizing internal rather than external power — and already this month, progressives have scored several major victories.
James Bennet resigned as a top editor at The New York Times over an oped he oversaw from Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., expressing an opinion that at least one poll suggested was shared by many and possibly most voters. A University of California at Los Angeles sociology professor was investigated for reading Martin Luther King Jr. aloud without bowdlerizing the Nword, and a political consultant no longer has a job after tweet-linking a paper suggesting that violent protest may be politically counterproductive.
A few weeks ago, these were not firing offenses. Overnight, firing became necessary for the same reason that academia, the media and Hollywood have been offering more and more overtly political content recently: as a counterweight to the outrages of a Trumpish right.
Progressives, especially young ones, fear Donald Trump will roll back hard-won progress toward equality for marginalized groups. They want to fight that with every weapon at their disposal, and particularly their life’s work.
Why, though, does fighting Mr. Trump necessitate destroying the moderate wing of your own side? We might ask the conservatives, who have been purifying their own ranks for years, and with roughly the same justification: Our cause is under existential threat, and we cannot compromise with evil, so if you are not with us, you are against us.
Conservatives saw tech employees being fired for opposing gay marriage, bakeries shut down by civil rights commissions, and their own employers “inviting” them to publicly declare themselves allies of various social justice causes, removing even the option of keeping tactfully quiet on the job.
Thus, instead of a moderate conservative who would defer to liberal sensibilities on touchy issues such as immigration, they chose a champion whose superpowers were reflexive belligerence and utter indifference to social mores. When the GOP establishment warned that nominating Mr. Trump would end with Democrats running things, the base responded, “So would nominating one of you.”
The civil war that ensued saw Mr. Schwarz’s iron law working in both directions: Both the #NeverTrumpers and the Trumpists were willing to lose the election before they’d allow the other side to run the party. Come November, both sides may get their wish.
And while #NeverTrumpers may fantasize that, afterward, chastened Trumpists will let the moderates reclaim the GOP, recent history suggests the opposite.
It seems likely that the iron law will remain in force, because the purer your own side gets, the more terrifyingly alien are the people who remain outside your carefully constructed defensive perimeter. This only makes it more imperative to make sure that none of them get inside, or even close enough to weaken your fortifications. And so Mr. Schwarz’s law grinds on, ever finer.