Back in 2016, when, to my horror, Donald Trump was winning the Republican nomination, I was often told that to criticize the choices that his voters had made was to “attack” those voters or “hate” those voters or “look down on” those voters. But this was absurd. First, this rule never seemed to apply the other way around; by definition, my choices for the nomination were being rejected, but nobody ever seemed to care about that. Second, if that rule were taken to its logical conclusion, nobody would ever be able to disagree with anyone else about electoral politics ever again. There is a line in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that neatly sums up the trap: “Is every defense an attack upon the court?” If one is unable to argue for a candidate who is not Donald Trump without being accused of attacking Donald Trump’s current set of voters, then one is unable to engage in political persuasion at all. In other contexts, this is bloody obvious: Nobody told Ronald Reagan in 1980 that he was “insulting” those who had voted for Jimmy Carter by attacking Carter as a failure. The idea is silly in the extreme.
Lest one think that Mr. Cooke is sparring with a straw man, here is a passage from a column that appears in the current issue of Chronicles, a self-consciously highbrow MAGA journal:
Trump as a politician is many things, but the most important thing he is to the men and women who elected him is an avatar for themselves. In its contempt for Trump, the Republican establishment has exhibited its contempt for the voters and, indeed, for republican government. No matter how often that establishment insists that their only object is the protection of “Our Democracy™,” it is now abundantly clear that their first object is the protection of their own hides. And from what, exactly, are they protecting them? The will of the people, of course. [emphasis added]
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