Politics

Stop Protecting Fascist Republicans

Stop drawing false equivalence between fascists and their critics

I recently read a scathing opinion piece scolding writers for pointing out the endemic corruption and swirling malevolence within the Republican Party, and taking severe umbrage at those of us who are reckoning with the grim pathologies currently consuming the political right-wing in the United States.

Such writers are merely adding to the “toxic” atmosphere in American politics, and should silence themselves, according to this person.

Instead, these writers should write only about what they believe in, resisting the impulse to catalogue the house of horrors that is the modern Republican Party. We should ignore the seething racism, conspiracy-mongering, blatant voter suppression, and lethal political violence, in the theory that a generally more pleasant political climate will somehow prompt the fascists in our midst to spontaneously reform themselves into small-d democrats.

This is naive to the point of absurdity.

I’ve heard this strained line of thinking before, usually from closeted Republicans out to justify their political brethren without admitting their own humiliating authoritarian predilections. It’s all a bit trite.

This prescription is a dangerous recipe for criminal impunity. It’s an overly simplistic formula for disaster in a country where Republicans routinely and eagerly exploit useful idiots willing to provide political cover for wrongdoing by rendering a false equivalence between the GOP’s bad faith authoritarian criminality and those Americans who feel obliged to shine a light on such things.

I’d argue that you enable autocrats like Donald Trump and his Proud Boy enforcers through obedient silence, and that it is those bad actors themselves who have created America’s fraught climate of dangerous division and simmering distrust.

Indeed, our only national salvation lies in exposing and confronting these cancers in our discourse and our democracy. You can’t excise a cancer you refuse to acknowledge exists. Ignorance is not a cure.

Certainly, shrinking away from the long list of crimes and wrongdoing in our public life simply emboldens the very worst bad actors to grow more dangerous still.

Appeasement has never worked against sociopathic personalities. Rather, it stirs them to more hot excitement to discover your weakness, and it provides them still more reason to continue testing the boundaries of what they might get away with.

If the current Republican Party was a person, I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet it would be a person with a sociopathic personality, one who simply cannot resist all manner of lying, cheating, stealing, and violence, and all without a shred of remorse or apology. This is borne out by the GOP’s leaders, who routinely do all of the things I’ve listed, and have now begun to encourage terrible political violence among their rabid supporters.

These are antisocial behaviors, and it’s unclear why America should tolerate such conduct from our public officials when we would never accept it from our children or friends in our own communities. This was a recurring analysis of Donald Trump throughout his presidency, and it went to the heart of the political nightmare we’re still living through.

Politics is inherently about people. Leaders define the political parties they lead through their actions and language, and their conduct should be scrutinized and wrongdoing held to public account, at least in a functioning democracy.

Donald Trump’s January 6 coup was possible only because of silent acquiescence from Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP’s Senate conference as the former president fashioned his Big Lie in the days and weeks after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Out of that Senate caucus, only Mitt Romney had the courage to say: this is wrong.

January 6 is what happens when you allow a criminal to do as he pleases, and forego the consequences. Inevitably, he or she will commit more crime.

In the political world, the fate of a nation hangs in the balance. Self-censorship is an accelerator of political wrongdoing, and Republicans and Democrats alike should be held to account when they betray the public trust, and the people whom they serve.

It just so happens that the Republican Party has been dominated and consumed by a mad tyrant, bent on subverting American democracy to achieve power. Donald Trump has proven that he will stop at nothing.

As far as a toxic political atmosphere, I’d argue that our ailing democracy is far more precious and important to protect than any one person’s tender feelings regarding politics. If you want to see a truly toxic atmosphere, take a look at any of the right-wing autocracies currently operating around the world, as they slaughter journalists and poison political opponents and dissidents in cold blood. They plunder public wealth to enrich their henchmen.

Right-wing dictatorship’s are toxic, and refraining from pointing out and criticizing the Republican Party’s recent turn toward authoritarianism and political violence is both absurd and utterly counterproductive.

Silence is the currency of despots and tyrants, whereas democracy demands the pursuit of truth, accountability, and justice. Pick a side.

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