I hadn’t heard of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, before this past weekend. But like many people, I’ve been struck by the pivot he’s signaled in how the Democrats, and the Left more generally, should talk about Donald Trump.
Asked by Jake Tapper why he insists on calling Trump “weird” rather than an “existential threat to democracy,” which is how most Democrats and progressives have been describing Trump since 2016, Walz said:
It gives him [Trump] way too much power. Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks, whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just give him way too much credit. When you just ratchet down some of the scariness and just name it what it is. . . . That is weird behavior. I don’t think you call it anything else.
“The fascists depend on fear . . . but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”
Damn right. I hope other Democrats — and with them, the army of commentators inside and outside of the media and academia — follow suit.
I’ve written quite a bit about why I think the model of fascism or authoritarianism is not the right way to think about the Republicans or the Right more generally today. I won’t rehearse those arguments I’ve made again here.
But I’ve also made a different argument, since the rise of Trump, about why I think the Left’s tone of moral and political alarm is so unhelpful to opposing Trump. Walz makes the case in 2024 pithily; I made it, back in December 2016, in Jacobin, at greater length.
Here’s what I said then.
In the last few days, I’ve gotten a lot of emails and comments asking me why I seem, in my Facebook posts and tweets, to downplay the threat of Trump. Why I resist the comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, why I emphasize the continuities between Trump and previous Republicans, why I insist on attending to the fractures and cleavages within his coalition.
Now, of…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Corey Robin
