By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
For the last few days the burning question among pundits
has been: “How much blame does Donald Trump deserve for the violence at his
rallies?” It’s a fair question, and the obvious answer is: a lot.
On Sunday, the demagogue paid his usual lip service to
social norms, rejecting “violence in any shape.” He then proceeded to say —
again — that he’s willing to pay the legal fees of those who commit violence on
his behalf. He routinely waxes nostalgic for the good old days when
troublemakers were “carried out on stretchers.”
That said, there was a good deal of Kabuki to the recent
chaos in Chicago.
The Trump campaign said it had to cancel its event there
because the police were concerned about public safety. That’s a lie. The
Chicago Police Department insists the decision was Trump’s — as was the choice
to stage a rally in an area of Chicago where the campaign knew protesters would
swarm.
Of course, protesters were only too happy to play the
role Team Trump expected them to play. It matters little whether they were
Bernie Sanders campaign pawns, as the chants of “Bern-ie! Bern-ie!” would
suggest, or puppets of MoveOn.org, or self-starting rebels. What they wanted,
as the hashtag campaign #ShutItDown suggests, was to suppress free speech.
That makes them doubly blameworthy: Their goal was
dishonorable, and their tactics only helped burnish Trump’s bogus self-image as
the brave-yet-victimized anti-PC warrior.
Such high-ratings spectacles only magnify the sense that
politics is a contest of will, not arguments. As the commentator Jonathan Chait
writes: The whole premise of democracy is that rules need to be applied in
every case without regard to the merit of the underlying cause to which it is
attached.” If you think it’s acceptable to shut down Trump’s rallies, you have
no grounds to complain when Trump’s supporters shut down Sanders’s rallies.
The real problem with the question “How much blame does
Trump deserve?” — or, for that matter, “How much blame does Sanders deserve?” —
is that such questions assume blame is a limited commodity. If we say Trump
deserves a lot of blame, the implication is that there’s only a little left for
everyone else. The reality is that there’s plenty to go around. We are all
adrift in an ocean of blameworthiness.
Chicago was a fleeting scene in a very long-running play.
The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset defined barbarism as the lack of
universal ideals to which all can subscribe. The war on free speech is really
just a battle in the larger war on universal standards.
When leaders claim the system is irredeemably corrupt and
the rules rigged against them, politics becomes a kind of barbarism. What is
good for my team is right, and whatever is good for your team is wrong.
Trump is merely the latest actor to deliver such
assurances to his coddled constituencies. Barack Obama — who recently absolved
himself of all blame for the state of politics in the nation he’s led for seven
years — has played this game with more finesse than most. But that’s the thing
about the great ones: They make it look so easy. Obviously, he hasn’t
encouraged violence — that is Trump’s special contribution to the degradation
of our politics. But from his contemptuous rhetoric for his political opponents
to his unilateral disregard for constitutional restraints, Obama has helped
fuel distrust and discord in ways his fans can’t or won’t see.
Sanders lighted his populist fire by insisting the
country is held hostage by malefactors of great wealth who are exempt from the
rules that bind the rest of us. Hillary Clinton, who got rich(er) giving hidden
speeches to those very same malefactors, is not trusted by the voters because
she seems to think the rules are for other people, at least when it comes to
handling classified materials.
The truth is that politics is downstream of culture. And
all of these politicians, Trump included, reflect deeper tendencies. Identity
politics on the left and the right — from the war on so-called white supremacy
to the bitterness of the white backlash — amount to what the French philosopher
Julien Benda described as the “intellectual organization of political hatreds.”
What’s remarkable about the violence Trump encourages isn’t its sudden
appearance. It’s that it took this long.
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