Hold fast
We’ve reached “the end justifies the means” chapter of our American experiment. Peter Wehner runs down in The Atlantic a by-now familiar accounting of the fascistic things Donald Trump says and his MAGA audience applauds.
Trump’s rise to the presidency began with, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best.” (The Republican Party took that as candidate recruiting advice.) He’s gone from declaring Mexicans drug dealers, rapists and criminals in 2015 to telling crowds today that immigrants from south of the border are terrorists and escapees from mental institutions who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Wehner pointedly begins by sketching out the dehumanizing rhetoric that prededed the Rwandan genocide in 1994. I still remember just where I was when I heard that news on the radio.
But this sample from Wehner’s in-box and a personal interaction was particularly arresting:
As one Trump supporter put it in an email to me earlier this month, “Trump is decidedly not good and decent”—but, he added, “good and decent isn’t getting us very far politically.” And: “We’ve tried good and decent. But at the ballot box, that doesn’t work. We need to try another way.”
This sentiment is one I’ve heard many times before. In 2016, during the Republican primaries, a person I had known for many years through church wrote to me. “I think we have likely slipped past the point of no return as a country and I’m desperately hoping for a leader who can turn us around. I have no hope that one of the establishment guys would do that. That, I believe, is what opens people up to Trump. He’s all the bad things you say, but what has the Republican establishment given me in the past 16 years? First and foremost: BHO,” they said, using a derogatory acronym for Barack Obama that is meant to highlight his middle name, Hussein.
Some Americans’ embrace of American ideals and Constitutional principles has forever been a mile wide and an inch deep.
Trump is not speaking his plans in code. He and his acolytes speak bluntly of them. Republicans who gained control of state legislatures gerrymandered themselves into safe districts and boldly dismiss the will of voters are not just talking. They are showing us, plainly, and have in Wisconsin, in Ohio, in North Carolina. And on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The end justifies the means. Might makes right. If they cannot get their way democratically, they’ll burn the republic to the ground and replace it with something, very, very different.
Wehner continues:
If I had told this individual in 2016 what Trump would say and do over the next eight years, I’m confident he would have laughed it off, dismissing it as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—and that he would have assured me that if Trump did do all these things, then of course he would break with him. Yet here we are. Despite Trump’s well-documented depravity, he still has a vise grip on the GOP; he carried 94 percent of the Republican vote in 2020, an increase from 2016, and he is leading his closest primary challenger nationally by more than 45 points.
The first time I ran across the phrase “might makes right” was in a comic book I saw as a kid. It was the one atop this post, I think, and referenced the philosophy of Nazi Germany again and again: MIGHT MAKES RIGHT! MIGHT MAKES RIGHT!
The jingoistic lesson, of course, illustrated with images of air combat, was that the Allies eventually defeated fascism because, as Abraham Lincoln proclaimed at the end of his Cooper Union address, right makes might.
LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.