When Bad Isn’t Good Enough

Thoughts on the allure of affixing scarlet letters

Stock photo by David Wall (GettyImages)

This will be my last post until next week—hopefully on Monday, though I can’t be entirely sure at this point. Over the intervening days, I will be working on the revamp of this Substack I’ve been alluding to over the past month. What this means is that the next time you hear from me, I’ll be announcing and explaining the changes to all of you in my first post under the new dispensation. I’m very much looking forward to it. In the meantime, please read today’s post, which I consider a fitting way to close out the inaugural configuration of “Eyes on the Right.”

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I’ve blocked an awful lot of left-leaning people on Twitter over the past nine days—not for expressing disagreement or making arguments against me, but for denouncing me, insulting me, calling me nasty names, and so forth. Blocking is the appropriate response to this form of engagement. When there’s no argument, there’s nothing productive to say in reply. And I’m also not a sadist. The natural response to an attack is anger, an emotion likelier to muddle or distort our judgment than to strengthen it.

There’s a lesson in these observations. This post is an attempt to unpack and apply them more broadly than my Twitter feed.

Bad Ron DeSantis

One person I haven’t blocked is Skylar Baker-Jordan, a journalist who has come at me repeatedly on Twitter over the past week and a half. I’m not going to link to any of our exchanges because there have been several of them, and I don’t think they’ve gone very far in moving either of us toward the other’s position, or in shedding light about the issues we’re arguing about. (You can find these exchanges in either of our feeds if you wish.)

Every time we spar, the altercation begins with Baker-Jordan telling me I’m normalizing the fascism of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis by saying he isn’t as bad as former president Donald Trump, or by denying DeSantis is a fascist at all, or by trying to understand and explain why so many right-leaning voters support DeSantis’ efforts to curtail rights and defy the progressive influence within elite public (and some private) institutions.

But Baker-Jordan doesn’t just insist I’m normalizing DeSantis’ self-evident fascism. She also thinks I’m pretty much okay with DeSantis’ self-evident fascism. Either I secretly support it, or I just don’t care very much about it. She says this despite the fact that I have said over and over again in my recent writing, in The New York Times and in this newsletter, that I think DeSantis winning the presidency would be bad—bad for the members of certain minority groups and bad for the country as a whole. Bad, bad, bad.

But calling DeSantis “bad” apparently isn’t good enough for Baker-Jordan—just as it isn’t good enough for most of my ruder left-leaning critics. Their view appears to be that it is crucially important for good, decent people to do more than call DeSantis bad. They must at the very least call him an authoritarian. But much better is calling him a fascist—a word and a concept that goes far beyond a political regime-type to serve as a badge of absolute moral condemnation. To call someone a fascist is to cast them into outer darkness. It is to declare them evil.

The Source and Reality of Evil

Where does this conviction come from—this need to make absolute moral pronouncements, and to believe that doing so is a vitally important political act? The fact is that large numbers of people appear to think it’s woefully inadequate to say, “X is bad, I won’t vote for X, and I think voting for X is a bad mistake.” One must say, instead, or also, that “X is a fascist,” by which they mean, “X is an expression of the purest political evil.”

The link between fascism and evil incarnate is inextricably tied, of course, to Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist tyranny that ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War, and perpetrated the Holocaust, the deadliest and most bureaucratically cold-blooded genocide in human history. There have been other fascist regimes—definitely the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party in Italy, and arguably the regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal—but Nazism was so execrable that it has come to be understood in the popular imagination both as the purified essence of fascism and as a quasi-theological eruption of evil itself into the world and history.

Plato spoke of morality being eternally oriented toward the idea of the Good. Theologians and philosophers who followed in the Platonic tradition have typically insisted that evil has no positive power of its own and is merely the absence of goodness in a person, thing, or act. Many Christians have affirmed a version of this view, speaking instead of God’s infinite and intrinsic goodness anchoring the moral order underlying the world. But others have insisted that evil is its own independent force, tempting human beings to acts of sinful defiance, doing battle with God, challenging him, and even seeking his ruin and defeat.

In the Christian tradition, this force has many names: Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub, and others.

In the largely post-Christian public world of the United States, this force has come to be called fascism, Nazism, or Hitler. (At least among liberals and progressives. Among conservatives and others on the right, Communism plays an analogous role.)

Fascism, Nazism, Hitler—these may be our (only?) fixed moral absolutes, with our publicly affirmed positive standards of justice and progress often defined largely by negation of the totalitarian cruelty, prejudice, anti-Semitism, racism, and generalized bigotry that characterized the regime of Nazi Germany.

Understanding over Denunciation

If you read my writing regularly, you’ll notice that I make lots of judgments about the world, many of them moral. Yet something you will see very rarely from me is a statement that this or that person, party, policy, or ideology is evil. It so happens that I also try to refrain from likening people, parties, policies, and ideologies to fascism, Nazism, and Hitler, unless I’m making a very specific and concrete point about a present-day parallel.

There are several reasons for these (related) conscious decisions.

For one thing, while I usually feel comfortable labeling political and moral phenomena good or bad, noble or base, just or unjust, and honorable or dishonorable, I’m not so sure about what might be called the metaphysical status of evil attributes. This comes mainly from my incorrigible Platonism and the Socratic skepticism with which it is intertwined. To claim there is evil in the world seems like asserting an independent malevolent force can lend an added demonic wrongness to certain people and deeds and collective entities (like political parties and governments) beyond average everyday badness. I don’t believe (or consistently believe) such a force exists, so I’d rather not speak and write as if I do.

But there’s another reason why I avoid labeling as evil bad political acts and ideas, just as I try and resist the urge to liken them to fascism or Hitler. I talked about this reason in my very first post for this Substack, making the point a pretty important one for me. Here is what I said there:

Yes, some of what’s being done and said by right-wing people and parties is genuinely disturbing and dangerous, but not all of it is. Some of it is merely foolish—and yes, sometimes someone on the right even makes a valid point. Yet the prevailing mode of engaging with right-wing ideas is five-alarm panic combined with quite a lot of name-calling, as if it’s reasonable to think the right can be defeated politically and intellectually merely by drawing moral red lines, issuing fulsome denunciations, and affixing scarlet letters.

We need to do better—first, by following the example of sociologist Daniel Bell, who famously defined an intellectual as someone who excels at making relevant distinctions. I attempted to do that in my writing during the Trump administration by regularly distinguishing between acts that were normal for a Republican president from those that were abnormal or truly alarming. I expect some of that kind of work to continue here, as elections come and go in the U.S. and abroad, and as various factions on the right dream about what they would do with political power, and attempt to implement some of those ideas when they get the chance.

I think a good part of what DeSantis is doing in Florida is abnormal by liberal-democratic standards, and some of it is truly alarming. I’ll undoubtedly have many occasions over the next year or so (and perhaps even beyond that) to make these judgments and distinctions, and explain why I have. But I do not anticipate calling any of it evil or fascist or Hitlerian—because I’m unlikely to think these hyperbolic claims are accurate, and because I do not believe “the right can be defeated politically and intellectually merely by drawing moral red lines, issuing fulsome denunciations, and affixing scarlet letters.”

I also prefer an effort at understanding to the kind of consolation that comes from making psychologically satisfying but politically impotent moral pronouncements. And yes, those two activities—understanding and denunciation—are very often at odds with one another. Moral condemnation shuts down conversation and argument. The right these days does a lot of that to the left. The left should resist the urge to return the favor. The country’s well-being depends on it. Republicans win a lot of votes in this country—around half of them much of the time. If your message is that half of our fellow citizens have been seduced, not just into moral error or supporting terrible policies but into acting as emissaries and agents of evil, you’ve thereby contributed (perhaps literally) to a level of demonization that may one day soon render stable, functional self-government in the United States impossible.

Many on the left, including Skyler Baker-Jordan, disagree with me on this. They think denunciation of the right in the strongest possible terms is the one thing most needful. I obviously disagree. Thankfully for them, there are many more places online where harsh and angry admonitions are directed toward the right than there are places that seek to explain and constructively engage it. I, for one, am proud to be doing the latter kind of work.