This is all terrible stuff. We’ve heard so much about this that we sometimes get numbed to its importance. So let me remind us all: Trump was the first president in American history to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power. He incited a crowd to intimidate his own vice president and Republican legislators. And he managed to get a majority of Republican members of the House to vote against certifying the election results of 2020 despite the fact that they had been duly authorized by 50 states and D.C. and affirmed in dozens of court rulings. This is a big deal.
But here is the problem: Ever since then, about one-third of Americans have believed that the 2020 election was not free and fair. That’s more than 85 million adult Americans. How do we approach them? How do we approach the people who have led them to these beliefs? Do we cancel them all? Should no one who has these views be allowed to speak on NBC News? I think the executives at NBC were trying to find a reasonable way to have the views of 85 million Americans represented on their airwaves.
I understand the dilemma. McDaniel acted in ways that were not conservative or Republican but antidemocratic. She assaulted the constitutional foundations of the country. But the nature of liberal democracy is that we allow all kinds of people to express their views. Avowed communists have run for the presidency of the United States.
And, let’s be honest, many Republican leaders are playing a cowardly game here. It’s not likely that they agree with Trump’s lies. They just know the base of their party does and that to disagree with it is political suicide. Most elected Republicans who in some way opposed Trump are now former elected Republicans.
But some do try to move away from the worst excesses of Trumpism. McDaniel in a recent NBC interview affirmed that Biden was the legitimate president of the United States. Should we encourage this kind of return to normalcy or forever punish those who once espoused conspiracy theories?
Liberal democracies should avoid the temptation of using illiberal means even when they confront views and positions that are forthrightly hostile toward liberal democracy itself. I worry about some of the court cases against Trump. While they might be technically legitimate, some involve offenses that happened years ago and for which he was not charged at the time. Would he have been charged for these were he not the controversial political figure he is today?
So far, these efforts to rule him beyond the pale are not working. Despite 88 felony counts and all the censure of the media elite, he’s leading in the polls. After all, his supporters are fueled by the belief that a group of overeducated liberals with no regard for them runs this country. So how do you think they will react when a group of lawyers in big cities come up with clever ways to make Trump ineligible to run for the presidency?
As I write in my new book, “Age of Revolutions,” the new populist right’s disdain for liberal democracy is frightening, constituting the gravest threat we face to our political future. But the left also has its excesses in this direction. Many want to dispense with some of liberalism’s rules and procedures. … They want to ban those who have “wrong” ideas from speaking. They want to achieve racial equality by quota or decree. They want to use education or art to achieve political goals rather than educational or artistic ones. Convinced of the virtue of their ideas in theory — say, the rights of asylum seekers — they are comfortable pushing them onto a reluctant society. But top-down revolutionary actions, from the uncompromising left or the reactionary right, often cause more turmoil than progress.
Donald Trump’s brand of right-wing populism is illiberal, xenophobic, and takes America into dark dead-ends. But the way to defeat it in a liberal democracy is not by using legal mechanisms that take him off the political playing field and canceling those who support him. Rather it is to debate his allies, to put forward powerful and persuasive positions that show Americans that you can address their concerns, and to confront Trump on the political battlefield — and beat him.
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