The age of extremes
The extreme polarization that afflicted American politics during Donald Trump’s presidency obscured the symbiotic relationship that developed between him and the radical left.
Trump needed the threat of the radical left to cement his support among conservatives while the radical left needed the threat of Trump to acquire support among liberals. Trump’s takeover of the GOP was thus aided and abetted by the radical left takeover of the Democratic Party and vice versa.
For each side, the primary justification for which side they were on was the horribleness of the other. For the Trump camp, any tactics were acceptable because the radical left was intent upon transforming America into a socialist dystopia. For the radical left, any tactics were acceptable because Trump was intent upon creating a fascist America built upon racism and bigotry.
Joining one tribe or the other in lockstep was presented as necessary on the basis of gradations of evil that were supposedly both detectable and determinative. Any waffling or squeamishness in signing up for the cause was viewed as a form of moral abdication.
The overall effect was to both stretch out the ideological continuum and add lots of weight to the ends at the expense of the middle.
The resulting tribalism, in which both extremes presented themselves as crucial bulwarks against the other, made things difficult for those of us who wanted to belong to neither. If you criticized Trump (as I often did), you were accused of giving aid and comfort to the woke left; if you criticized the woke left (as I also often did) you were accused of giving aid and comfort to Trump’s personality cult.
Classical liberalism provided the ideological underpinnings to the American founding and a set of political principles that were more or less shared by just about every major American political figure for the first two centuries of the republic. Foremost among those principles were belief in limited, representative government; the rule of law (constitutionalism); individual liberty; equality; and Thomas Jefferson’s unalienable rights (including to property, as necessary to sustain a market economy).
If you believe in such values, as I still do, it is important to recognize that the two sides in the Trump wars for the most part didn’t. Trump wasn’t a genuine conservative (the term mistakenly used to describe classical liberals by contemporary liberals who don’t know much political theory), at least by the standards of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan or in the sense of having any familiarity with or loyalty to conservative values. The woke leftists who presented themselves as an extension of liberalism or progressivism were so profoundly illiberal, even totalitarian in their thinking and behavior, as to have little in common with the welfare state liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt or Jack Kennedy.
The classical liberal tradition of the American founders that has done so much to inspire the pursuit of liberty around the world has no place in it for the overt racism of critical race theory or for cancel culture or identity politics. Or for crazy QAnon conspiracy-mongering, white racial resentment and populist nationalism either.
Indeed, it is quite possible that Herbert Hoover and FDR or Reagan and Jimmy Carter had more in common with each other ideologically than either would have with the main ideological currents of their respective political parties today.
America is often depicted as a nation wherein political battles are beneficially fought between the 40-yard lines. As befits a country with the world’s oldest and most influential constitution, and because of the healthy system of checks and balances that that constitution established to deter such battles, it has proved remarkably immune to the array of ideological pathologies that have disrupted the development of other, less happy nations.
Our political parties, and accompanying political discourse, are, however, increasingly dominated by extremists who have no awareness that their extremism is only inspiring a competing extremism on the other side and is therefore self-defeating. Their mutually reinforcing zeal to vanquish their opponents is incompatible with a system in which permanent victories are neither obtainable nor desirable, but drives them toward scorched earth nonetheless.
Democracy requires both the acceptance of the results of the ballot box and an awareness that those results ensure that competing parties will tend to take turns holding power.
And if the country is divided into halves that see each other as a dire threat to democracy, and deny their right to govern legitimately, democracy can’t help but eventually fail.
The greatest threat to democracy—besides encouraging the kind of ends-justify-the-means thinking that leads to the embrace of anti-democratic methods and tactics—is the belief that democracy must somehow be “saved” from the depredations of your opponents.
One is reminded of the sad experience of the French Third Republic in which the estrangement between the right and left became so great that many preferred Stalin or Hitler to their countrymen across the aisle. And how, so badly divided, a France that had fought in the trenches for more than four years to prevail in the First World War collapsed in just six weeks in the Second.
When we mistake our political opponents for enemies, we fail to recognize the real ones.