America Needs a Boring and Sane Party
It's not the fault of voters that they're surrounded by crazy
From “This is the formula that defeated Orban. It would defeat Trump, too,” in the New York Times:
Previous opposition politicians had described Orban’s regime as “corrupt,” a relatively mild term suggesting some aberration from the government’s intended function. Magyar made no such accommodation. Borrowing a term coined by Balint Magyar, he has called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third lesson: Don’t mince words.
Right, that’s the problem with anti-Trump agitation in America: mincing words! Opponents haven’t yet reached that magical two billionth Hitler comparison or dared to use terms like “fascism” in headlines, or invoked the mafia, the Klan, or the Antichrist. If only Trump critics would speak with more clarity. He’d be finished!
The author of the Times piece is “M. Gessen,” a sort-of ex-co-worker whom I knew as Masha Gessen in Moscow. I can’t say we got along terrifically: she was always a serious gender activist and I published a nightlife guide that rated clubs numerically according to your likelihood of getting laid. Still, Masha was one of the few English-speaking writers who occasionally wrote perceptively about the West’s failures in the former Soviet Union and did show some bravery early in the Russiagate fiasco by casting a few public doubts about the story, warning of “conspiracy thinking.” But she’s left out a pretty big part of this Orban/Trump analysis, ignoring the oxygen both got from increasingly crazed opposition.
Although he’s reasserted dominance over his own party by wiping out figures like Thomas Massie, Donald Trump continues to go down in polls, but the damage is almost entirely self-inflicted. He’s underwater on the Iran war, the economy, free speech, and other areas. As has been the case throughout his political tenure, his best friends politically have been his opponents in the Democratic Party, who keep handing him avenues for return.
Take, for instance, the above Times-style propaganda about how no one yet has solved the riddle of Trump, as if his appeal were a confounding Scooby-Doo mystery. Vox a few weeks ago ran a similar piece bylined from Toronto called “Are far-right politics just the new normal?” that pretended to total ignorance about Trump’s staying power, saying the longstanding belief that he was just a “blip to be outlasted” or (as Pete Buttigieg put it) “some random anomaly” now must be set aside, so progressives can search for more serious diagnoses. Vox and some of its interview subjects speculated that perhaps trying something like governing better would work – in perfect deadpan they called this “deliverism,” i.e. the idea that the “far-right trend” could be blunted by “delivering” economic success.
Governing better, a radical idea! Improving the financial outlook for the middle class would also help, though figuring that out a decade or two earlier might have been still better. But even these are half-steps to the obvious. Everyone on earth knows why Donald Trump gets votes, and not just from “right-wingers”: because his opponents are every bit as batshit crazy as he is, if not worse.
Just look at the drama that engulfed my home state of Massachusetts in recent weeks:
