We who support liberal democracy in the U.S. know very well your discomfort as you sit at a table with a raving, ill-informed fool who thinks he knows more than you do.
Our Thanksgiving dinners have gone like this for years. So have our work meetings, our evenings out with friends, our family gatherings.
We made the mistake you make as you remain seated at the table, stunned by Trump’s arrogant stupidity, attempting to engage with him in adult civil conversation as though he were an adult.
For years, liberals in the U.S. tried to be the grown-ups. We “went high” when right-wing mouth-foamers like Michael Flynn, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, assorted young Republicans who read a synopsis of Ayn Rand, hateful preachers, racist cousins—and so on—“went low.”
Please don’t.
Please don’t sit there and attempt to have an adult discussion with a rabid ideologue. You can’t enlighten him. He doesn’t want to hear your counter-facts. By engaging with him politely, you can only give him the false sense that he is somehow your peer. He is not. More importantly, all you’re doing is validating his propaganda and normalizing his dangerous authoritarianism.
Donald Trump is a fascist—just like our friends and family and coworkers who have been “educated” by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. It’s an ugly word, but we need to say it. Its historical weight makes it a weapon, but as a descriptor of the right’s animosity to democratic institutions and anyone not their equivalent of “Aryan” (white, straight, right-wing, hostile to immigration, favoring force over diplomacy, claiming to the “real” Americans, “real” Brits, “real” Germans, “real” French, etc.), it’s sickeningly accurate.
We made a mistake—as did our media—in respectfully listening to dangerous ideas, either ignoring them for the sake of peace or gently and futilely disagreeing. Respectful engagement does not change those ideas. It normalizes them. You can’t change an ideologue’s ideas. But you can get up and walk away from the table. When those ideas are dangerous, you must.
The next time Trump is Trump, please, get up and walk away. Humiliate him. Don’t treat him with respect. Don’t normalize his bullshit. Don’t make our mistake. Our civility, our desire to find common ground with radical right-wingers in our lives, has only enabled the rise of fascism in the U.S. and in Europe.
Fascism can’t be “adulted” into moderation. It can only be opposed.
Oppose it.
Leave the table.
Please.
