The pundit class that cried wolf

Writing a “Trump will end democracy” column has become almost obligatory for liberal and NeverTrump pundits. This piece in the Washington Post by Karen Tumulty is yet another contribution to the genre.

Tumulty’s take is that if Americans elect, or come close to electing, the “authoritarian,” if not dictatorial, Donald Trump, it will show “who we are” — a sick nation that’s comfortable with white supremacy and insurrection. My take is that if Americans put themselves in the position of having to choose between Trump and Joe Biden, his norm-busting counterpart on the left, that will be evidence enough of national dysfunction.

From my perspective, the only interesting passage in Tumulty’s piece is this one:

In 1964, when the radical right John Birch Society was near the peak of its influence, renowned journalist Martha Gellhorn, who had launched her career covering the Spanish Civil War three decades earlier, wrote a friend: “Unless there’s a Johnson landslide, the country and world will know how many incipient and energetic home-grown Fascists we have. I never for a moment feared Communism in the US but have always feared Fascism; it’s a real American trait.”

Gelllhorn, Ernest Hemmingway’s wife during the early 1940s, was indeed a renowned and fearless foreign correspondent. But, on the evidence of this quotation, she lacked an adequate understanding of her own country.

The Barry Goldwater movement was not driven by “home-grown Fascists.” It was essentially a libertarian movement and thus on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from fascism.

Nor do we need to rely on a prior reasoning to show how wrong Gellhorn was. Ronald Reagan, who came to political prominence as an advocate for Goldwater and who became heir to the conservative movement’s leadership, was not a fascist. And the Reagan presidency was not remotely authoritarian.

Tumulty’s reference to Gellhorn’s alarmism is a needed, though inadvertent, reminder that left-liberals have been warning about the supposed fascist leanings of conservative presidential candidates for more than half a century. They viewed Reagan in much the same way they viewed Goldwater.

These days, most liberal haters of Trump, and all conservative ones, contrast him to Reagan. And rightly so. But until Trump, no president in modern times had ever been as reviled by the pundit class as Reagan.

The fact that so many liberals viewed both Goldwater and Reagan (the candidate and the president) as dangerous extremists counsels that we treat similar warnings about Trump with skepticism. So does the fact that Trump did not govern as an authoritarian during his first term.

In the tale about the boy who cried wolf, a real wolf eventually appears. It’s possible that Trump in a second term would be a real wolf, not just a very angry dog with more bark than bite. It’s probable that a second Trump term would be worse than his first. I can easily see it being considerably worse.

However, in my view it’s quite unlikely that a second Trump term would be truly authoritarian or would cause “our democracy” to die. Thus, the sad question that voters very likely will have to consider in November isn’t whether Trump’s second term would be worse than Trump’s first term. The question will be whether Trump’s second term would be worse than Joe Biden’s.