Right makes might

Created
Thu, 23/11/2023 - 02:30
Updated
Thu, 23/11/2023 - 02:30
Hold fast We’ve reached “the end justifies the means” chapter of our American experiment. Peter Wehner runs down in The Atlantic a by-now familiar accounting of the fascistic things Donald Trump says and his MAGA audience applauds. Trump’s rise to the presidency began with, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best.” (The Republican Party took that as candidate recruiting advice.) He’s gone from declaring Mexicans drug dealers, rapists and criminals in 2015 to telling crowds today that immigrants from south of the border are terrorists and escapees from mental institutions who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Wehner pointedly begins by sketching out the dehumanizing rhetoric that prededed the Rwandan genocide in 1994. I still remember just where I was when I heard that news on the radio. But this sample from Wehner’s in-box and a personal interaction was particularly arresting: As one Trump supporter put it in an email to me earlier this month, “Trump is decidedly not good and decent”—but, he added, “good and decent isn’t getting us very far politically.” And: “We’ve tried good and decent. But at the ballot box, that doesn’t work. We need to try another way.” This sentiment is one I’ve heard many times before. In 2016, during the Republican primaries, a person I had known for many years through church wrote to me. “I think we have likely slipped past the point of no return as a country and I’m desperately hoping for a leader who can turn…