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Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
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If I had to collapse the American political gestalt into a single moment, it would be a confrontation that took place this week at the University of Alabama. On one side of a plaza, anti-Israel protesters gathered. Counterprotesters gathered on the opposing side. The counterprotesters began chanting, “Fuck Joe Biden!,” perhaps thinking this would trigger their adversaries. They thought wrong. The anti-Israel protesters joined in the chant.
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Here they were, two angry groups of young people shouting “Fuck Joe Biden!” at each other.
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Four months ago, I wrote an essay about the disintegration of the anti-Trump coalition. The tension over the war between Israel and Hamas was part of the story. Left-wingers were attacking Biden for supporting Israel, and moderates were defecting from Biden because the left-wingers were attacking him. Somehow the political calculus of Biden’s stance has become negative-sum.
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The Alabama rallies are a visual manifestation of this. Another is a short observation from Nick Catoggio in the Dispatch. “One colleague told me this morning that an apolitical friend who cast write-in ballots for president in 2016 and 2020 is thinking of supporting the ‘clown’ Donald Trump this time because of the impunity with which the campus intifada crowd has been treated,” Catoggio writes. “A second colleague chimed in that he’s heard the same thing recently from multiple acquaintances.”
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The people who think Biden’s Middle East policy is too right wing, and the people who hate those people, have joined together in common cause, even if they can’t recognize it.
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Perhaps the most confused faction of the anti-Biden coalition is traditional conservatives. Formerly anti-Trump, and now anti-anti-Trump, the right has eased back into the party fold under MAGA leadership in large part by talking itself into the idea that Joe Biden is controlled by the radical left. This is what makes Trump the lesser evil in traditional conservatives’ eyes: He may say some unpleasant things, but he can’t threaten the system the way the leftists can.
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The obvious flaw in this calculation is that Biden is not controlled by the far left. Some left-wing elements are sullenly resigned to supporting Biden as the lesser of two evils, and others are actively working to harm his campaign.
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The latter creates a spectacle that the anti-anti-Trumpers seem unable to mentally process.
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When Joe Scarborough complained that radical demonstrators are “not helping those of us who want to fight fascism in America,” National Review’s Dan McLaughlin shot back, “Yes, having fascists on your side will do that to the image of your movement.”
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By “fascists,” McLaughlin doesn’t mean right-wing authoritarians (who are an enthusiastic wing of the MAGA movement). He means the left-wing authoritarians who are calling President Biden “Genocide Joe” and disrupting his speeches and fundraisers. I don’t think that’s the behavior of activists who are on Biden’s side.
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National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry has a column headlined “Does Columbia Want to Elect Donald Trump?” By “Columbia, he doesn’t mean the school’s administration or even the majority of its students but rather the protesters. And the answer is “yes”! The protesters do not like Trump, of course. But they believe defeating Biden will force Democrats to change their policy on Israel.
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Lowry is treating this as some kind of accidental by-product of the anti-Biden protest strategy when in reality it is a conscious element of it. There’s some strange need on the anti-anti-Trump right to pretend they are not in partnership with the radical left when in fact they are working toward the same election outcome.
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Here’s another manifestation of the anti-Biden alliance between the right wing and the far left. A claque of leftists has spent the Trump era dismissing the notion that Donald Trump poses any serious threat to democracy. “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is.” was the headline of a 2017 New York Times op-ed co-written by Samuel Moyn and David Priestland, which claimed, “There is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to think he could succeed.” Rather than retract this analysis, or at least quietly slink away from it, Moyn built this observation into a very bad book blaming liberals for clinging to anti-authoritarianism.
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The fixed point of the Moyn universe is the belief that the threat to democracy always comes from the liberals. They are hysterically overreacting to the threat from the right, and even if there is a threat from the right, it is the liberals’ fault anyway.
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Having denied that that poses any authoritarian danger, Moyn has taken to suggesting that the real fascism comes from university presidents arresting the demonstrators who illegally occupy campus spaces.
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Photo: samuelmoyn/X
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These schools, like almost any town in America, have always had rules governing the use of their public space. But apparently those rules turn out to be fascist! Any group of people must be allowed to seize public space for its own use, and only a would-be Mussolini would prevent it from doing so. If other students want to use what used to be this shared space, they should form their own group and take it by force, perhaps.
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Anyway, we have a clear picture of Moyn’s vision of democracy. Disregarding an election result and fomenting a mob to seize an unelected term: not fascist. Enforcing long-standing time/place/manner restrictions on public space: very fascist.
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Speaking of the horseshoe coalition, Matthew Schmitz, founding editor of the red-brown journal Compact, has written one of the most deranged sentences I have ever encountered. It is the final line of his op-ed in the Times: “Indeed, given the nature of the outlaw hero’s appeal, we shouldn’t be surprised if efforts to counter him end up limiting things that are normally cherished as democratic values — not least, the freedom to challenge authority.”
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The “him” is Donald Trump. Schmitz is arguing in this column that efforts to counter Trump will limit “the freedom to challenge authority.”
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Schmitz’s argument, which I’ve read several times in an attempt to understand it, is about Trump’s “outlaw hero’s appeal.” Now, most of the column approaches the subject in a descriptive sense rather than a normative one. It maintains that Trump’s legal problems make him attractive in the cultural vein of Jesse James, Robin Hood, and so on. As an attempt to describe Trump’s appeal, that may be true. James was a Confederate terrorist turned criminal, which goes to show that murderous, racist criminals can somehow find a place of honor in American culture.
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But at the end, Schmitz switches from describing Trump’s appeal to defending it. And here is where he offers his astonishing claim that “efforts to counter” Trump will limit “the freedom to challenge authority.”
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What efforts does he have in mind? Schmitz does not say if he is describing efforts to prosecute Trump for crimes or to elect his opponent. But neither effort can reasonably be called a threat to the right to challenge authority.
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Without relitigating the entire suite of criminal offenses confronting Trump, which ranges from tenuous to rock solid, we can simply dispense with the idea that Trump is a rebel figure who stands in opposition to authority.
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Obviously, Trump believes that he should be allowed to commit crimes — and likewise that his allies should have the same right. But that is not because he believes in challenging authority. It’s because Trump believes he is the ultimate authority. His activities by definition are not crimes, and opposition to him by definition is criminal, which is why he has repeatedly accused Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Biden, Robert Mueller, Jack Smith, and others of being criminals.
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The authoritarian spirit has animated Trump long before he developed an interest in holding office. He shelled out for newspaper ads hysterically demanding the execution of innocent young men wrongly charged with crimes in Central Park. He praised China for its bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
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The fact that he personally feels entitled to commit crimes does not in any way indicate a skepticism of authority. Hitler and Stalin were both lawbreakers before they seized power and then, once in power, were totally unbound by law.
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Schmitz does not say which freedoms would be curtailed by unspecified “efforts to counter” Trump. The freedom to steal classified documents, refuse to surrender them, and construct a cover-up? The freedom to attempt an autogolpe?
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Meanwhile, Trump has made it perfectly clear that if the efforts to counter him fail, he will use his power to take revenge upon all his enemies. His notion of defending “the freedom to challenge authority” is to hand power to a man who recognizes no limits to authority.
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I am not committed to using my newsletters to pursue a unified theme. (Just the opposite, in fact, hence the name.) Still, in this case I can’t help but tie it together by noting one prominent left-wing academic who seemed to appreciate Schmitz’s column:
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Photo: samuelmoyn/X
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