Here’s the thing: if being convicted of 34 felonies, accused of rape, and trying to overthrow the government isn’t going to sway undecideds, something has gone wrong with voter communication in a way that can’t be overcome by carefully tacking center.
We’re living through a full-bore five-alarm catastrophic meltdown of the system of norms and values that seemed to guide US politics, and in the middle of it is this class of elite political pros who are convinced they tinker with policy positioning and fix things.
It’s like being in a car that’s careening off a cliff, the entire engine block roaring in flames, total loss of steering control, and lecturing the driver: “Hey man you gotta feather the brake a little.” HELLO, THAT’S PRETTY CLEARLY NOT THE PROBLEM.
Now I think if you step back and look at that collapsed systems of norms and values, it’s actually not that hard to see what’s going on.
All the institutions that ordinarily enforce the norms have endlessly passed the buck to each other, waiting for some magic cosmic force to come boot Trump out of contention as he passed one red line after another. They figured it would just happen automatically; it doesn’t.
At some point institutions needed to start declaring Trump, his ideas, and his actions disqualifying. No one quite did, really: not the press, which reduced itself to bloodless neutrality, not the law, which caved endlessly, not his opponents, who didn’t want to lead that charge.
Even now you see Trump pushing ideas like his insane proposal to slice American population by nearly 8% and crash our economy - a genocidal ethnic cleansing proposal - and everyone just kind of talking around it, hoping it’ll take care of itself.
Everyone is still nervously looking around to each other, hoping that someone will prevent them from having to step up and simply stand up for the ideas and norms this country is supposedly built on.
Our public forums are flooded with vile and bloodthirsty lunatics following in Trump’s wake, the kind of people who, even two or three years ago, would be movie villains. Everyone is afraid to comment, much less do what needs to be done and expunge them.
We need a restored commitment to the idea that lunacy, villainy, bigotry, and corruption are unacceptable in government and politics. That creeps and racists have no place in the US public sphere. That lifelong liars and frauds are unacceptable regardless of party.
And frankly, the hardcore MAGA contingent - the feral fascist sociopaths, totally devoid any kind of recognizable American values - need to be treated as fully unwelcome in US society. Their ideas are going to destroy this country if we don’t throw them out.
The unfortunate thing is that it’s not just American fascism that’s on the rise. Here in good 'ol Europe we have multiple countries being led by more or less fascist governments - eg. in Italy’s case a literal neofascist party that is a descendant of Mussolini’s original fascist party – and the far right got an unprecedented amount of votes in the EU Parliament elections earlier this year. Then there’s India’s Modi, or Israel’s Netanyahu – both unabashedly fascist.
It seems that after Trump, conservatives everywhere realized that they can actually do anything they want and not only will nobody stop them, but something close to a majority of people will actually outright support them the more fascist they get. Even most “fiscally conservative” parties seem to have dropped their masks and started leaning heavily on far right rhetoric, eg. like what’s been going on here in Finland now that we have a fully right wing government – the “fiscal conservatives” are now completely indistinguishable from the extremist right wing party, right down to being anti-LGBT+ and racist. They started off with limiting peoples’ right to strike, and now they’re working on limiting the right of assembly using the Extinction Rebellion (who they claim are as bad as neo-Nazis) as an excuse. Personally I had a “moderate” conservative acquantance tell me that the world would be a better place if gender minorities like me wouldn’t exist, apparently dreaming of some sort of Endlösung.
I don’t think it’s just the hardcore right that is a threat to stable and civilized societies; every single conservative seems to just be waiting for the moment they can stop the pretense and actually say and do what they really want to do, which seems to be full-on fascism.