Yet this situation is not normal – or, if you prefer that in social media terms, #notnormal. When women are lining up for long-term contraception in a mournful, pragmatic farewell to their reproductive autonomy; when the chief strategist is accused of enabling racism and antisemitism; when the vice-president-elect signed legislation requiring women to hold and pay for funerals for miscarried foetuses; when the president-elect has vowed to deport three million immigrants; when he has at least 12 allegations of sexual misconduct outstanding against him; when he has announced a cabinet that includes his own three children:
this looks nothing like a democracy. It looks nothing like reconciliation. It looks despotic, inflammatory, extreme and violent: it looks, in short, exactly as Trump promised it would look, as he campaigned on a pledge to imprison his opponent. His adversaries respond that he probably doesn’t mean what he says, a position for which there is precisely no evidence. Their desire to normalise has put them in the fantastical state of seeing the forthcoming presidency as they wish it, and not as it plainly is.
[...]
Normalising is not anything the rightwing extremists do, and they do not try: they don’t look for acceptable labels for themselves. It is the mainstream that twists itself into conciliatory pretzel knots finding nicer words for “fascist”, such as “alt-right”.
Democrats try to find the fault within themselves: ask not whether a racist hates; ask what made the racist so angry in the first place. Once we have found the right member of the liberal elite to pin it on, the hate maybe won’t sound so frightening.
All this has a few sources: there is straightforward denial, the first stage of grief. Trump can’t be that bad, because that would simply be too bad. There is a sense that the far right doesn’t just ignore liberal sensibilities, it actively takes nourishment from our despair. The US journalist Wajahat Ali, writing the day after the result, described his conversation with his father: “Please be careful – if Trump wins, his supporters will feel very energised.” This was borne out by the spike in racist and sexist hate crimes in the US, and resonates here in Britain, too.
Racists are energised by the victory of racists, and calling them racist simply rams that victory home. A year ago, to be antisemitic would have meant exclusion from public life, and now it amounts to fitness for high office. Every time you reassert a fundamental value of humanity, you give a cheap, scornful thrill to the person who made it necessary for you to say it. You cannot shame a white supremacist; unaccountably, you feel the shame yourself when you try. The charge is so extreme, if they don’t accept, then you must be hysterical. There is an underlying truth, here, that the act of debating brings its own legitimacy. If we are really going to go back to square one and have to explain why grabbing a woman by the pussy is a violation of her human dignity, or why you can’t ban an entire religion from your shores, where does that end? What territory have you ceded just by allowing the question? It is genuinely hard to say.
The hard right does not accept argumentation as a path to a shared truth; it is simply not how they are wired. They take a view; you take a view; their view electorally prevails, you shut up. End of, as they always say on Facebook. “You just don’t get it, do you? You LOST.” That is the authoritarian way. It is hard to escape a pragmatic conclusion that verbal combat is pointless, but it is also wrong; the purpose now is not persuasion. I don’t think anybody is going to unearth any hidden sophistication or empathy in the person of vice-president-elect Mike Pence. The purpose of making these basic arguments is solidarity with one another, lest, in the silence, we lose our bearings.
As to the descent into leftwing in-fighting, so distracting from the task of trenchantly opposing a fascist, it has the same driver: if you are fighting to reach a consensus, however bitterly, you can only do so with people who will move. You cannot discuss climate change with a person who thinks all scientists are crooked; you cannot discuss abortion with people who conceive women as chattel to begin with; it’s meritless. And yet to fight with one another is not neutral, it does more than just pass the time. It creates false equivalence or, worse, a hierarchy that has its arse on backwards. If you are talking about Hillary Clinton’s corporate cosiness and not Trump’s endorsement by the KKK, you are unavoidably putting one above the other.
What does non-normalising look like? Bernie Sanders told the Today programme today that it would be millions of people coming together to defend institutions and the rule of law. This is specific to the US, obviously – there isn’t much point in millions of non-Americans coming together, for all that the new toxicity of the US’s political culture affects us all, practically and theoretically. And it’s reactive, since the Trump presidency will choose the sites of the conflict.
Yet there is meaning and hope in remembering, as the American Civil Liberties Union has, that the president is not pope; that there is a constitution and a set of laws; that supreme court judges can lean whichever way they will, but there are only so many ways of interpreting a constitution founded on the universal rights of man; and that millions of people can and will oppose their traducement with the backing of the ages.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...mp-normalisation-us-president-elect-barbarism
