I Don't Respect Your Opinion
There are three types of people right now:
White supremacist insurrectionists trying to violently disrupt our democratic process.
People who are horrified by the white supremacist insurrectionists trying to violently disrupt our democratic process.
People who are upset about the “toxic nature of politics” and "the “end of civility.”
That third group of people is entirely complicit in the rise of fascism in the United States.
Shit’s been tense, no doubt. Everyone agrees that Trump is divisive. But not everyone agrees that he’s a fascist, and if you still don’t, I’m not likely to convince you, but all of Laurence W. Britt’s fourteen indicators of fascism have been met.
Trump is a fascist. If you voted for him, if you supported him, you are by default a fascist. It doesn’t matter if you “just like his stance on the economy.” You think rich people getting more tax cuts is more important than…democracy.
As A.R. Moxon said:
Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.
I am very, very sick of being gaslit by the “both sides” people and all of their whataboutism. There is a literal fuck-ton of photographic evidence highlighting the difference in the treatment of Black Lives Matter protestors and the Trump insurrectionists.
Even if the BLM protests had been nearly as violent (spoiler: they were not) as the mob at the Capitol, the BLM protestors were protesting Black peoples’ right to not be murdered by police. A few protestors threw water bottles at police, and they were tear gassed. The insurrectionists were very literally trying to stop elected officials from certifying a fair and free election. These people came into the nation’s Capitol with guns and Molotov cocktails and zip ties and the police response was so lacking that there’s now speculation as to whether Capitol police were actually in on the coup. (This is a terribly disturbing possibility, so I’m trying not to dwell on it until it can be better proven, but I certainly can’t discount it.)
“Let’s all agree to disagree” is good in theory. There are lots of things I’m willing to agree to disagree about. Serious issues of morals, ethics and beliefs, such as “eating meat is unethical,” “God doesn’t exist,” and “the Star Wars sequel trilogy ended up being a colossal disappointment.” If you eat meat, believe in God, or liked The Rise of Skywalker, I think you are wrong, but we can still be friends. We can agree to disagree, because your views are not inherently undemocratic.
But if your belief is “agents of the state (AKA cops) can act with impunity” or “sowing doubt about an election you lost is acceptable” or “corporations have more rights than individuals,” I am not going to agree to disagree. I am going to lose all respect for you, tell you so, and cut you out of my life as much as I feasibly can. If we tolerate fascists, we are going to get fascism.
The real question is not “should we tolerate fascists” but rather, “how do we deal with fascists in a democratic society?”
Nor do I think all views deserve a right of equal hearing in a democratic society. Philosophies that seek to destroy democracy and the rule of law don’t merit equal validation by a democracy. We grant them certain rights because doing so is consistent with a larger system of laws and rights that guarantees a civil society that is the antithesis of what they believe in.
While, according to Marshall (and also me), fascists deserve to get punched, it’s not always the correct course of action—both for practical and ethical reasons.
The people responsible for the coup attempt should be held accountable lest this kind of response to unfavorable political outcomes escalate. (Parables to the Beer Hall Putsch abound.) There are many, many complicit parties, but Trump is the undeniable instigator, the man all of these crazy motherfuckers are ready to sacrifice democracy for.
While Trump has often been accused of inciting violence (and he 100% has), his words haven’t met the legal definition of incitement—or at least they hadn’t, until he told his followers to protest in D.C. on January 6 and to “be wild,” and instructed them to “fight like hell” on that day. Unfortunately, it seems pretty unlikely that any case against Trump in the matter of the insurrection will ever even make it to the Supreme Court, and less likely a court packed with his picks would agree that his words didn’t fall under the Brandenburg test.
But while we have to (paradoxically) protect peoples’ legal right to hold fascist beliefs and say fascist things as part of democracy, we do not have to respect it—and certainly not at an interpersonal level.
The insurrection certainly broke the laws of our democracy, and some of the people involved (though likely not those most responsible) will suffer legal consequences (but probably not enough). Of course that’s important. And perhaps more importantly, they’ll also face non-legal consequences as well, including losing their jobs, because most companies are smart enough not to employ a guy who’s been photographed wearing a Camp Auschwitz hoodie.
Ultimately, those consequences will be just as deterring as legal consequences. We can’t always rely on the law to give these people what they really deserve; after all, asking the state to round up all the fascists and put them in jail would be…fascism.
That’s why we need to lean into the power of societal consequences—both to shut down the people actively trying to thwart democracy, and the people enabling it from the sidelines. Our society is governed by cultural norms just as much as it’s governed by actual government.
So let’s make being a fascist a societal taboo. Let’s make it a cultural norm to tell any espousing or enabling inherently anti-democratic ideals to shut the fuck up. We can refuse to agree to disagree with people who think protesting for racial equality is equivalent to halting the democratic process using armed force. We can make them uncomfortable by calling them out. We can refuse to socialize or do business with them.
My stance on this is the same as it was four years ago. People who recognize the threat of fascism need to stop humoring it on an interpersonal level. If you tolerate it, you enable it.
Remember, kids: It’s never a bad time to cut off the fascists and fascist enablers in your life. Fuck “both sides,” fuck civility politics, and fuck fascism.