Even If the US Survives Trumpism, So-Called Centrist Democrats Might Quickly Revert to Their Usual Nonsense

How could any honest person fall for false equivalence at this point?  A true but incomplete answer to that question is simple: No honest person would.  Most of the time, people who say that the left is just as guilty as the right when it comes to anything and everything are Republican hacks.  And even if those people truly believe that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans, that is not based on an honest assessment of reality but on a firm belief that the other side must be as corrupt and evil as their side is.  The old "if you believe it, it's not a lie" defense is not in fact a defense but rather a relocation of where the dishonesty lies.

My writing here on Dorf on Law and Verdict has focused so frequently on the problem of false equivalence that I dare not even begin to offer a "see, for example, these columns" list of citations.  As it happens, however, yesterday's column by Professor Dorf ended with a link to two columns in which I discussed the post-election pardon of Hunter Biden by his father.  Although my ultimate point in the second of those columns was that the pardon was completely legitimate on the merits and not the "cronies and insiders" sin that so many people (including many Democrats, to their enduring shame) decried, a big part of my analysis there amounted to venting at length about the insanely dishonest false equivalence at play there.

[As a side note, I (like everyone else) have over the years used the neologism bothsidesism as well as the term false equivalence in these contexts, because it is in fact difficult-to-impossible to find a difference between the two.  Rather than switching back and forth, in this column I am using only the term with two real English words.  Even so, I offer no guarantees that I will stick to that decision in the future, for what it might be worth.]

Why bring up false equivalence now?  More to the point, why bring it up today but not every time that I write anything, given how ubiquitous it is?  Most of the time, the trigger is a truly egregious example of false equivalence showing up in a major news source.  I do have one of those today, which I will take some time to discuss presently.  The good news here, however, is that I can also report on a truly excellent analysis by a scholar/commentator who absolutely nails not only the existence of false equivalence but also explains why it is more dangerous than ever for non-Trumpists to default into the false comfort of believing that everyone is equally at fault (especially themselves).

Regarding the latest all-too-common example of ridiculous false equivalence, the op-ed page at The New York Times ran some pompous drivel last week penned by Mike Lawler.  Lawler is one of the Republicans who won seats in the US House in the 2022 midterms after New York State's redistricting process devolved into both farce and tragedy.  Had that not happened, the House would have almost certainly remained under Democratic control, and we would not have had a Speaker Kevin McCarthy or a Speaker Mike Johnson.  But I digress.  My point is that Lawler is one of those people who merely fluked his way into power but now acts like he is a political genius.

In his op-ed, Lawler focused on immigration, using the recent murders of innocent citizens in Minneapolis to say that, well sure, those were wrong, but the real problem is that both Democrats and Republicans are wrong about immigration.  His second paragraph begins with this: "The loudest voices on each extreme have retreated to their usual corners. They have an interest in keeping our immigration problems unsolved and politically divisive."  He then claims that President Biden's policies were bad -- so bad that "Americans demanded action, electing Donald Trump in 2024."

But wait, I thought that Trump won because of groceries!  That is nonsense as well, as I have demonstrated at length, but we are apparently now supposed to simply nod along while Lawler attributes Trump's underwhelming non-majority election win to whatever happens to fit his argument.  This, however, is merely old-fashioned hackery that claims a "mandate from the voters" for anything that happens to support the hack's narrative.

It is the claim that Democrats and Republicans are equally to blame, however, that is truly outrageous.  To repeat, Lawler wrote that "[t]he loudest voices on each extreme ... have an interest in keeping our immigration problems unsolved and politically divisive."  Who, pray tell, are the equivalents on the "left extreme" who do not want to solve the US's immigration problems?  We know who has that attitude on the right, because they work in the White House and are using immigration as an excuse to attack American cities.  Who among Democrats -- or even "the extreme left," whoever that might be -- has shown any indication that they are eager to keep immigration problems unsolved in order to gain political advantage?  The very idea is insane.

This is, in fact, even more insane than the false equivalence that we are now hearing about gerrymandering.  Why is it worse?  At least in the context of redistricting, the Democrats are now -- thank goodness -- fighting fire with fire, which means that there is some factual basis for saying that "Democrats do it, too."  It is still a completely dishonest claim, of course, because it is Democrats who have been pushing all along for nonpartisan redistricting, often successfully.  That is why California Democrats had to put to a vote by the citizens of the Golden State the question of whether to temporarily negate their own independent line-drawing law.

But Lawler is blithely asserting as a matter of unobjectionable fact that there are people on the left who are standing in the way of progress on immigration reform for partisan advantage.  That is not happening at all.  And this non-equivalence goes way back.  In the lead-up to the 2024 election, it was Trump who told Republicans in Congress to kill a hard-line immigration bill that Democrats had reluctantly supported (and others opposed because of its harshness).  Why?  Because he wanted to prevent it from seeming that any progress had been made on immigration.

And it goes back even before Trump came along.  In 2013, for example, then-Senator Marco Rubio went through the motions of negotiating a compromise immigration bill but then told House Republicans to vote against his own handiwork!  As NBC reported at the time: "Not only is the senator from Florida now telling House Republicans not to pass the Senate legislation he co-sponsored and championed for months -- he's urging them not to negotiate with the Senate at all."  Today's State Department is in good hands!

All of which means that we have yet another Republican officeholder at the national level who is willing to tell bald-faced lies in order to make it seem as if he is not on the side that is responsible for the mess.  That is stomach-churning malevolence.  As I noted above, however, I did see an excellent essay that highlighted the false equivalence problem and made the further point that people who want to preserve and rebuild American democracy must not lapse into the self-blaming rituals that are all too common among Democrats who wish to be seen as "reasonable centrists."

In The Guardian yesterday, Princeton scholar Jan-Werner Müller published "Beware of ‘anti-woke’ liberals: they attacked the left and helped Trump win."  He packs some real punch in barely more than one thousand words, including these:

Consultant and political communications specialist Aaron Huertas coined the expression “reactionary centrism” in 2018. The basic idea is that self-declared moderates claim equally to oppose extremes on the right and on the left – but hard-hitting criticism is reserved almost exclusively for the left (partly, perhaps, because the presumed audience is expected to already know how bad things are on the right).

This perceptive observation was inadvertently vindicated in thousands of columns that contributed to a moral panic about “wokeness” and “identity politics”. It convinced readers that, sure, Trump was horrible, but what was happening “on campus” (translation: anecdotes from one or two elite places, endlessly recycled) was also putting US democracy in peril.

After noting what should be an obvious point -- but is not, because the Democrats who believe in false equivalence have bought into the "cancel culture" nonsense and everything that goes with it -- that Kamala Harris ran her campaign on non-identity issues, Müller then lays out another "iron law of reactionary centrism" that builds on false equivalence: "[O]nly the left and liberals really have agency. The right just reacts – everything is always backlash, never a self-generated political project."  He brings it home with this:

Of course, self-criticism and checking one’s priors is a good thing. But behind the ostentatious displays of “we failed to listen” was also a profound narcissism: if only we acted (or at least talked) differently, all would be well. Only liberals, or so the assumption goes again, have agency; performing contrition reinforced that flattering image.

The payoff of the piece for the future comes when Müller warns that centrism's "defenders should ask themselves hard questions about what [centrism] can possibly mean in 2026. [To equate Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] with Trump (or say they are worse, as Wall Street leaders have done) means contributing to the destruction of democracy."  He ends with a warning: "The Joe Biden years were accompanied by a chorus of 'don’t overdo it.' A post-Trump US may well see a revival of the greatest hits of the reactionary background singers. Think before listening."

At this point, it is an open question whether the US will ever have a post-Trump future, because even when he is gone, his movement might well have turned the country into a one-party autocracy.  But Müller's point is important to bear in mind, because the same "radical centrists" who gave us President Joe Biden and his regrettable (to put it mildly) Attorney General Merrick Garland are still in charge of the Democratic Party.  They still thrive on hippie-punching and imagining that Americans will reward them for failing to stand up for anything.

And they will do everything they can to tell people not to go "too far" in a post-Trump world.  That is what brought the US to the brink.  It is not what would bring us back.

- Neil H. Buchanan