Time For Civility Or Time For Resistance?

I called Trump a fascist two years ago. How close are we?

Is it time to be civil, or time to resist?

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) recently told a crowd: “If you see anybody from [Trump’s] cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service at a restaurant. And young Trump staffers can’t get dates because of the opprobrium that comes with their jobs.

Republicans are aghast at the lack of civility; Democrats scoff that Trump started it, and, besides, you don’t have to be civil to racists and fascists. A New York Times columnist explained that “treating members of Donald Trump’s administration as ordinary public officials rather than pariahs does more to normalize bigotry,” and that “there’s a moral and psychic cost to participating in the fiction that people who work for Trump are in any sense public servants.” Because of course one isn’t obligated to be nice to a “professional racist.”

Some go further. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently published Fascism: A Warning, and suggested Trump’s rise might be part of a global…