Undoing Democracy

One Sloppy Condemnation at a Time

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

In the first part of President Joe Biden’s now-famous speech in Philadelphia in 2022, he declared:

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.
 
Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.  Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.

Why did Biden feel it necessary to make a distinction between the two groups? Perhaps he wanted to appear cautious, to not paint with too broad a brush. Or maybe it reflected more than a desire for favorable optics—maybe he actually believes the difference matters. I, for one, hope the latter is true.

After all, to put it bluntly, democracy depends on our collective ability to parse the two. In many ways, self-governance will fail if we cease to believe that people are thoughtful and reasonable more often than they are not. This means it cannot survive if one side dismisses the other as racist, crazy, or hateful.

If, in reading that, your instinct is to argue that the right/left has lost its mind and therefore deserves to be ignored/silenced/condemned, then you might as well own the fact that you’re essentially making the decision to leave democracy behind.

The response to Biden’s words was, perhaps unsurprisingly, mixed. Many on the left praised him for calling out MAGA Republicans, while carefully separating them from their non-MAGA counterparts. While many on the right weren’t nearly as convinced that such an important distinction had actually been made.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens was squarely in the latter group. Stephens pulled apart Biden’s speech in a way that suggested that any distinction Biden made was undone if one just continued to listen. Stephens wrote:

Start with the “MAGA Republicans,” who, Biden said, “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”

Who are they? The president allowed that they are “not even the majority of Republicans.” Then, in describing their goals, he cast a net so wide it included everyone from those who cheered the attack on the Capitol and the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, to those who oppose abortion rights and gay marriage.

As categories go, this one is capacious.

It includes violent Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — as well as every faithful Catholic or evangelical Christian whose deeply held moral convictions bring them to oppose legalized abortion.

It takes in the antisemites who marched at Charlottesville — as well as socially conservative Americans with traditional beliefs about marriage, which would have included Barack Obama during his 2008 run for president.

Stephens continued:

In other words, Biden claimed to distinguish MAGA Republicans from mainstream ones and then proceeded to conflate them.

I don’t know if this conflation is the result of a failure to recognize it or of simply thinking it doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s a solvable problem that we somehow, mystifying, keep choosing to ignore.

The most recent example is in the Huffington Post’s exposé of Richard Hanania. In the well-researched piece, we learn a lot of shocking information. Including how Hanania has written and defended some pretty hateful things—often pseudonymously, under the name Hoste. (Full disclosure: I found myself in the audience at a small event at the end of June, listening to Hanania. He was talking about his new book. I spent the entire time with my face in my palms, wondering how and if I could leave the room without making a scene. In other words, I’m not inclined to defend him.)

As with Biden’s speech, though, Hanania’s actual thought crimes are conflated with transgressions that are far less clear. Which is all the more bizarre here because, frankly, there’s plenty of sufficiently disturbing material to work with. For instance, this quote:

“We’ve known for a while through neuroscience and cross-adoption studies... that individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do, too, with whites and Asians on the top and blacks at the bottom,” Hoste wrote in the 2010 essay, titled “Why An Alternative Right Is Necessary.”

is damning all on its own. And the lack of self-awareness in this next one actually makes my eyes roll:

“As a teenager I tried working at a pizza place and MacDonalds [sic]. I was the worst employee there. I actually felt sympathy for low IQ kids, knowing that this is what they must’ve felt like in school. Blacks and Mexicans shook their heads at me. It was really traumatic...”

And yet, what is objectionable in this?

At the right-wing site Quillette, Hanania wrote about how Twitter supposedly discriminates against conservatives; at the National Review, the prestigious conservative magazine, Hanania wrote about how “culture, not economics, decides most voters’ choices.” 

Are these questions really not important to ask or explore? And what exactly is ruinous about the following?

On his podcast, Hanania recently had a friendly conversation with Amy Wax, the University of Pennsylvania professor facing disciplinary proceedings for, among other alleged offenses, inviting a white supremacist to speak to her class and making racist remarks such as that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer minorities.”

Is the crime talking to someone who has said odious things? I’ve talked with Amy Wax before. What does that make me?

And, for heaven’s sake, what is the evidence of hatefulness here?

Another $50,000 in donations came from the Mercatus Center, a think tank at George Mason University funded by the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers and run by the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, whom Hanania has interviewed on the CSPI podcast.

I’ve benefited from the generosity of the Mercatus Center multiple times. My own work aside, I’d happily go on record saying they support some extremely thoughtful and important projects.

My point isn’t to defend Mercatus or Amy Wax. My point is simply that these differences matter. Each sloppy condemnation erodes our democratic norms by further separating us from one another. And this, we ignore at our peril.