The Lies We Tell (Ourselves)
Revising my post from Monday at the end of another dismal week for American democracy
Reader response to my last post was more polarized than usual. Some loved its message and shared it widely online. My conversation with Yascha Mounk, in which I made a version of the same argument, has also been widely liked and discussed.
But others found it irritatingly wrongheaded. These critics thought I was advising liberal and left-leaning opponents of the administration to shut up and stop describing it as what it is: a fascist or fascist-adjacent movement in the process of a historic seizure of power. I was saying we should stop resisting what’s happening in our country in the hope that this display of restraint would somehow be rewarded by the president and his supporters on the right. We’d generate good will, in other words, and this would help to lower the civic temperature in our bruised and battered polity. A good friend even joked via text on Monday afternoon, after I shared a news story about the administration’s coming crackdown on liberal groups, “But we mustn’t tweet about it, eh?”
That isn’t what I intended to say or imply, and it isn’t what I believe.
Even if we make the foolish assumption that the administration and its cheerleaders and apologists on the right are scrupulously committed to a good-faith exchange with their critics, we would be facing a reality in which someone somewhere on the left—not to mention bots controlled by foreign intelligence services and other bad actors eager to stir the pot of civic pestilence—will say something irresponsible and inflammatory that the right will point to as evidence of a threat to which it must respond with maximal severity. It only takes a tiny handful of examples to confirm the right’s worst fears and turn it into an opportunity to seize more power.
There is no way to win this game. I know this. If it sounded like I was saying, if we change, they will, too, well, then that means I wasn’t writing as clearly as I should have been. There is no basis for assuming this.
All About Reality
Here is where I am: I feel gutted by what I see unfolding in our country. Where it’s leading becomes clearer and more undeniable every day. It’s become considerably clearer between the time I wrote my last post on Sunday and today (Thursday, four days later), with the FCC strongarming ABC into firing late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel for making an inaccurate and pretty thoroughly unfunny joke about the right’s response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Coming just a day after the President of the United States filed a $15 billion civil suit against the New York Times for the sole purpose of browbeating the country’s premier news organization into submission, it’s undeniable that our government is led (and supported) by people who have little attachment to constitutional limits on their power, including key parts of the First Amendment.
I strongly recommend John Ganz’s post from Thursday morning and Jonathan Last’s from Wednesday night on where we are today. There’s some tough language in those posts, and I endorse pretty much every word. Sometimes it takes lacerating words to describe a wounding reality. Showing fidelity to the way things are demands nothing less, no matter what the aspiring authoritarians in the White House and their media apologists say or do in response.
If the MAGA forces hurl this accusation at me: You called us authoritarians just now! You’re inciting left-wing assassins to kill us, just like you did with Charlie Kirk!
I can only respond like this: No, I’m not. I don’t want anyone to murder you. I am merely being as accurate as I can in describing who and what you are.
And therein we finally get to the deeper motive at work in what I wrote in Monday’s post.
This is about reality—at least as I and my political allies perceive it. It’s fine to acknowledge that we live at a time when political polarization has become so ferocious that it often feels like we and our political opponents reside in distinct, mutually exclusive epistemic universes. That’s certainly true! But at the end of the day, we can only take our stand where we are, with what reality appears to us to be after a good-faith effort to nail it down.
