Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, then attacked Congress in a coup attempt. Biden has done nothing of the sort. Trump’s openly threatening to repeat the attempt if he doesn’t win in 2024 (there’s also the non-trivial detail his preferred policies are awful). Nevertheless, some people have convinced themselves — or at least they’re trying to convince us — that Biden is the far greater threat.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, for instance, insists that in contrast to Biden’s awesome power as POTUS, Republicans have no authority over anything. Not schools (oh, no?). Not state governments apparently. They’re not censors, Democrats are censors (umm, wrong)! Besides, Democrats are in thrall to the transhumanist ideology, which is a cult and very bad. Curiously, he doesn’t offer any examples of Democrats adopting transhumanism into their policy preferences, probably because they’re as mythical as stories about schools catering to furries. Taibbi also delivers the usual rants about how newsrooms are enslaved to the left. Yes, we’ll just pretend NBC News didn’t want to hire Trumper Republican Ronna McDaniel as an on-air commentator.
Robert F. Kennedy, would-be president, admits Trump attempted a coup but still insists Biden’s a greater threat. One of his staffers, a Republican who dropped Trump for not-being anti-vax enough, says her dream is that RFK takes enough votes from Biden to throw the election to the House, which can deliver the Oval Office to Trump (to be fair Kennedy denounced her views). I find his view as crackpot as his other ideas.
Trump AG Bill Barr just barely came out against his boss’s coup attempt, acknowledges the coup but still says he’ll vote Trump to save us from Biden. Authoritarian Curtis Yarvin has not come out for Trump as far as I know but he does believe we need a dictator in the White House to save us from left-wing dictatorship.
A New York Times guest columnist argues Trump isn’t an authoritarian thug, he’s an outlaw hero challenging the status quo (slightly off-topic, I love this delicious take down of national columnists).
I think this river of bullshit has several tributaries. First, some people straight up lie. Second, political paranoia is a common feature in American culture, particularly on the right. Third there’s Wilhoit’s Law, which defines conservatism as the belief the law protects Us and does not restrain Us, while it restrains Them but does not protect Them. Kennedy, for example (I don’t have the link handy) has said he’ll put pressure on science journals that don’t publish anti-vax articles. That sounds like the kind of censorship he decries but I assume he’ll say forcing publication is fighting the real censorship. It isn’t. Kennedy chooses not to understand how science works. And as I said Monday, pushing back against facts drains energy from your opponents and sometimes shifts the Overton window.
Yarvin, for his part, is PO’d that people he considers his inferiors have the same say in government he does. All men are not created equal — the system needs to recognize that! It reminds me of the right’s resentment of elites, except Yarvin wants to replace the current elites with rulers more like himself.
Finally a lot of the ranting about left-wing dictatorship is a refusal to believe liberals are right. On a lot of points we are: women deserve equal rights with men, gays don’t deserve to be criminalized, blacks are equal to whites, America is not a Christian nation, vaccines work, evolution is true and global warming is real. By and large society has accepted a lot of these points, which translates into “left wingers control everything!” And conservatives who disagree get criticized, which is no different than turning them over to the Inquisition! Conservatives who are anti-anti-racist or anti-anti-misogynist are edgy rebels speaking the truth to power.
None of that right-wing nonsense changes the facts: Trump is a fascist thug and some of his supporters are equally bad. And perhaps the last reason: people who know they want to impose a dictatorship assume everyone else does.
