They
“They would let the whole country collapse for the pleasure of spite.” — Charles Blow, sounding like some sort of Classical Roman commentator in an article on Trump and his supporters in yesterday’s NYT.
He also says:
Only two things seem capable of offering relief: The elections this year and in 2020, or something damning from the Russian meddling investigation.
He’s right about the elections, but the Russian thing has always seemed delusional to me — even if any sort of damming evidence survives the media and investigatory delegitimizing Trump and his fellow travelers are working on overtime, his supporters just aren’t going to care that much. There’ll be a few shrugs, and (maybe) some rueful rationalization, and life will go on as before.
It’s a lesson the Left in this country seems incredibly slow to learn — your outrage is what cements and legitimizes Trump’s position in the eyes of many of the people outside your bubble. As I’ve been saying since well before he was elected, all those things you think disqualify him are those things his supporters think make him perfectly suited to the job — and there’s enough of them in this screwed-up electoral system that that’s all that matters.
Later, in the NYRB (“It Can Happen Here”), Cass Sunstein says
[Mayer] learned that Nazism took over Germany not ‘by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.’ Many Germans ‘wanted it; they got it; and they liked it’”
And then, in Tuesday’s NYT, Mark Randazza’s defense of Alex Jones is noted in Lawyers for Neo-Nazi to Defend Alex Jones in Sandy Hook Case. I hope that if Randazza wins for Jones, he remembers that in the resulting triumph of abstract principle, real concrete flesh-and-blood people have suffered immensely, and that no amount of going on about free speech rights will make up for that or compensate them for those damages.
Randazza is quoted as asserting that “Mr. Jones has ‘a great deal of compassion for these parents.’”. If he actually said that — and meant it — it almost defines delusional. Otherwise, it comes across as just cynical and self-serving.
