The sub headline of Andrew Sullivan’s lengthy essay in New York magazine on the state of American democracy declares, “America is a breeding ground for tyranny.”
Who is responsible for this new tyranny? The rich, the elites, the powerful, the well-connected, and the Republicans. That, of course, is a heavy judgment — and one that Sullivan never quite gets around to proving. Sure, he makes the case that Donald Trump is on the verge of riding some ugly sentiments to the Republican nomination, but it almost seems as though Sullivan hasn’t noticed that a progressive trailblazer — Barack Obama — has been working from the Oval Office these last seven-and-a-half years. Tyranny is generally described as a repressive and arbitrarily cruel regime; and to be a tyrant, you need power. The subset of Republicans who are voting for Trump are driven by their sense of powerlessness — that’s not exactly your prototypical foundation for tyranny.
Trump’s fans are coming out because they feel like they have so little control over their own lives, and they fear this might be their last shot. Even Donald J. Trump — reality-TV star, erstwhile bankrupt, and sometime real-estate mogul that he is — isn’t all that powerful, at least not yet. Trump has wealth, and when he talks, the media broadcasts it, but he can’t make the laws. For all of his flaws — you may have noticed National Review pointing them out from time to time — he didn’t create this mess of a government, and he’s only one economic actor among millions in the modern economy.
Could Trump’s fan base constitute a potentially tyrannical menace? You don’t have to look hard to find corners of Trump World that exhibit a chilling enthusiasm for violence, such as the guy who sucker-punched the Black Lives Matter protester or the guy screaming “light the mother****** on fire” at another. But the Mexican-flag waving anti-Trump protesters who threw eggs and blocked roads in California last week are exhibiting an equal or greater enthusiasm for mob violence. Those upheavals were built upon the examples of the rioters of Ferguson and Baltimore and followed logically from the crowd that cheered the man defecating on a police car at Occupy Wall Street. The angry Left has been on the March in Obama’s second term; to paraphrase the old anti-drug public-service announcement, the angry Right learned it from watching you, angry Left.
The United States of America isn’t a tyranny. But if it’s drifting in that direction, perhaps we should look at the actions of those who are actually in power.
Sullivan acknowledges that the Founding Fathers wanted to “guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob” and so “constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.” But those barriers only work when there’s a broad political and cultural agreement about the supremacy of the Constitution and that the government can’t, say, ban the right to bear arms just because it wants to do so.
If America is turning repressive or tyrannical, it’s not because of the Right.
It’s not a Republican who’s trying to rewrite immigration law through executive order. It wasn’t a Republican president who got smacked down by a unanimous Supreme Court for abusing the power of recess appointments, nor a Republican president who had the IRS targeting groups based upon their political views. It’s not conservatives who are demanding ESPN fire Curt Schilling for a Facebook post, or fining a bakery $135,000 for refusing to make a wedding cake. It’s not the Right that insists that a secretary of state is immune from laws on handling classified information, while lower-ranking military officials face serious punishment for the same actions. If America is turning repressive or tyrannical, it’s not because of the Right. Conservatives couldn’t even stop Donald Trump from winning the most delegates in the Republican-nomination contest.
That being said, if you skip over Sullivan’s still-too-credulous faith in Obama (“a very elite figure, a former state and U.S. senator, a product of Harvard Law School . . . blessed with a preternaturally rational and calm disposition”); his hysterical denunciations of Sarah Palin (“a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism,” i.e., Trump); his typical hyperbolic raving (“it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned”); and some axe-grinding that Paul Bunyan would envy over past battles (such as the casual suggestion that Karl Rove won the 2004 election for George W. Bush by promoting state gay-marriage initiatives); Sullivan makes a few arguments the readers of New York magazine need to hear.
#share#In January 2015, the magazine’s Jonathan Chait tried to sound the alarm about how the forces of political correctness were starting to target liberals in good standing. Sullivan echoes this observation, writing that the campus Left and its ideologically aligned media allies have so thoroughly dismissed and castigated white working-class America that they’ve pushed it to radicalization.
The white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as ‘political correctness’ run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.
If you believe the leftist media and academia, one of the preeminent problems in modern America is “white privilege.” On this point, Sullivan is quite right: The opposite is true; white working-class Americans feel particularly powerless over their fate. They switch on their televisions and — instead of sympathy — find themselves besieged by the message that they’re the biggest problem in America. The media’s collective heart is big enough to offer a sympathetic look at a convicted felon looking for a second chance, but an Evangelical Christian, a gun owner, or a Civil War re-enactor will be forever suspect.
Sullivan goes further, arguing that liberals’ “no enemies to my left” philosophy has effectively become a “no friends to my right” dogma. In their minds, #NeverTrump Republicans either don’t exist or will fall in line eventually — because conservatives are all authoritarian drones at heart. Unfortunately, Sullivan is probably spitting into the wind when he calls on progressives to give credit where it’s due.
Those Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate support, not our disdain. This is not the moment to remind them that they partly brought this on themselves. This is a moment to offer solidarity, especially as the odds are increasingly stacked against them. Ted Cruz and John Kasich face their decisive battle in Indiana on May 3. But they need to fight on, with any tactic at hand, all the way to the bitter end. The Republican delegates who are trying to protect their party from the whims of an outsider demagogue are, at this moment, doing what they ought to be doing to prevent civil and racial unrest, an international conflict, and a constitutional crisis.
Sullivan may be wrong about the rise of tyranny in America but I do wish him luck in trying to talk a bit of sense to our progressive friends. Alas, few among the Left are interested in drawing distinctions among the denizens of the Right. For them, nuance is a dangerous, slippery slope: If some conservatives are right about Trump’s flaws, what else could we be right about?