You know it’s a weird election year when it seems normal that both liberals and conservatives might call one major party’s presumptive presidential nominee a “fool, oaf, and sociopathic liar.” In this case, a liberal, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, blasted (of course) Donald Trump.
In a Wednesday article, Gopnik contended that if Trump became president, his agenda could not be “bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits.” Therefore, he must lose in November, and toward that end, Gopnik urged “intelligent” conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton, opining that their oft-discussed alternatives to Trump -- voting for a third-party candidate or not voting in the presidential election -- are “meaningless.”
“Voting against Trump is an act of allegiance to America,” asserted Gopnik. “Hillary Clinton…was in the White House, once, and helped preside over a period of peace and mostly widespread prosperity. One can oppose her ideology (to the degree she has any), be unimpressed by her record (as contradictory as it may be), or mistrustful of her character. God knows, it is bitterly hard to defer to a long-standing political enemy, but it is insane to equate a moderate, tested professional politician with a crypto-fascist. Doing so is possible only through a habit of hatred so distended that it no longer has any reference to reality at all.”
From Gopnik’s piece (bolding added):
That Trump can dominate an increasingly right-wing nationalist party with a right-wing, white-nationalist creed is neither surprising nor all that complicated…
…In the French Presidential election of 2002…the left and right joined to form a Republican Front—ironic term—designed to keep [Jean-Marie] Le Pen from power. The lines of a similar Republican front seem dismayingly harder to see here. Almost every intelligent conservative knows perfectly well who Donald Trump is and what he stands for. But NeverTrump is a meaningless slogan unless one is prepared to say ThisOnceHillary.
…This kind of Republican front would not really require that anyone formally endorse Hillary’s politics, which they have every right to resist and criticize. But voting against Trump is an act of allegiance to America…What would Hillary Clinton be like in the White House? Well, she was in the White House, once, and helped preside over a period of peace and mostly widespread prosperity. One can oppose her ideology (to the degree she has any), be unimpressed by her record (as contradictory as it may be), or mistrustful of her character. God knows, it is bitterly hard to defer to a long-standing political enemy, but it is insane to equate a moderate, tested professional politician with a crypto-fascist. Doing so is possible only through a habit of hatred so distended that it no longer has any reference to reality at all.
Hitler’s enablers in 1933—yes, we should go there, instantly and often, not to blacken our political opponents but as a reminder that evil happens insidiously, and most often with people on the same side telling each other, Well, he’s not so bad, not as bad as they are. We can control him. (Or, on the opposite side, I’d rather have a radical who will make the establishment miserable than a moderate who will make people think it can all be worked out.) Trump is not Hitler. (Though replace “Muslim” with “Jew” in many of Trump’s diktats and you will feel a little less complacent.) But the worst sometimes happens. If people of good will fail to act, and soon, it can happen here.
