Motus Mentis

Here’s Michael Anton (with whom, in 2018, we had a brief exchange in the linked series of posts starting here), writing recently at Claremont Review of Books:

The vast majority of those who went to the Capitol did so without a plan, but they did have a goal: to be heard. Which was also the reason they voted for Donald Trump in the first place: they had not been heard in at least 30 years. But the actions of a few not only ensured that they would not be heard, but that instead they would get an earful of the same stuff most of them have been hearing their entire lives, only this time much louder: that everyone in the heartland, at least half the South, and anyone who voted for Trump is deplorable and irredeemable; that America itself is systemically racist; that most or all police are stormtroopers; that equal treatment under law is unjust; and that there are, fundamentally, two classes of people in the United States: the genetically deserving and the genetically guilty.

And now, in addition to all that, calls from the wise and good to investigate and “hold accountable” and cleanse from industry and employment people who did not storm the Capitol but who simply supported a politician and his agenda, as if this were somehow criminal. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson has proposed an effort to “deprogram” Trump voters. Prominent members of the Democratic Party such as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich have called for a “truth and reconciliation commission” like the kind that has followed the fall of shameful autocratic regimes. (And that, not coincidentally, uncovered little truth and produced even less reconciliation.) The Berggruen Institute’s Nils Gilman—a man who, perhaps not incidentally, recently called for my death—is having none of that. “These people need to be extirpated from politics,” he recently tweeted.

In Gilman and company’s eyes, Trump’s voters have no moral, political, or intellectual standing and no legitimate interests—only obligations arising from their inborn moral culpability. There is no reason at all to address their concerns or listen to them. Indeed, it’s dangerous even to let them speak lest they lead others into error. Worst of all is to allow them to organize around what they perceive as their interests, which inevitably leads them to express and perpetuate racism and other sins.

So that’s what Trump supporters hear; what do they see? Double standards and hypocrisy everywhere. Mike Flynn’s life ruined over a non-crime while the man who ruined it, James Comey, laughs about his handiwork on an Upper East Side stage. Four years of constant lies about Russian collusion and no reckoning, either for those who broke the law to get it going, or those who used their megaphone to keep it going. Changes to the voting system designed to help one party and marginalize theirs. A country flooded with immigration for more than half a century, padding the votes of the other party, driving down wages, and enriching oligarchs. A trade regime seemingly designed to ship their jobs overseas, close their factories, and empty out their towns. A media and intellectual class that no longer makes any pretense of fairness or objectivity but openly operates as the propaganda arm of the regime—to the extent it is not itself the regime. And now, an increasing tendency to demonize all dissent as terrorism and lock out of the political system—permanently—at least 47% of the population.

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable JK has brought to our attention a podcast in which Andrew Sullivan “debates” Mr. Anton on Trumpism, the election, and the events of January 6th. (I dithered briefly about whether to use the scare-quotes around “debates”; you should listen to it here, and then tell me whether you think I was right to do so.)