By Josh Feit
1. Trickle-down Bullying
Trump’s progenitor, Ronald Reagan, gave us trickle-down economics. Donald Trump is going to give us trickle-down bullying.
Trump’s recurring temper tantrums—often misogynistic or racist, but at their core, always about intimidation rather than discourse—have empowered his MAGA faithful. Aggrieved bros are now free to scoff at longstanding civic standards that have traditionally helped many Americans (though, admittedly, by no means all) go about their daily lives with a sense of safety and belonging.
It’s already begun in the immediate wake of Trump’s election victory with an anonymous racist text message campaign aimed at African Americans. And soon enough, you’re going to see widespread, flippant and aggressive unchecked macho hysterics out in the open—at the grocery store; on the bus; at the bank; on airplanes; in the park; at restaurants; at the workplace; on college campuses; and in high-school hallways (teen boys this week are already taunting: “your body, my choice.”)
This represents one of the true nightmares about Trump’s looming return to power, and also one of the glaring ironies: Under Trump, “law and order” will actually mean lawlessness. Trumpism will officially remove the legal guardrails against abusive social behavior.
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a civil rights and civil liberties agenda bloomed in America. After Congress enshrined a series of universal protections into law, this humanist expansion of rights defined late 20th-century and early 21st-century jurisprudence. (You can read about my own father’s Supreme Court-level contribution here.) The resulting civil rights infrastructure, such as workplace safety and consumer protection, is about to be ignored, gutted, and reversed.
From police brutality to your kid getting bullied at school; from gender discrimination in the workplace to corruption in the marketplace; from hate crimes to casual mistreatment during everyday interactions, there will be no avenue for recourse or accountability.
Now that Trumpism has made it socially acceptable to bully, gaslight, and hate your neighbor, the courts will follow the zeitgeist. Longstanding legal protections will soon be cast aside by Trump-appointed judges. Right-wing legal firms are certainly already lining up cases aimed at officially striking down much of the mid-to-late 20th century’s civil rights legacy. We’ve already witnessed the end of national abortion rights, affirmative action, and much of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
In the meantime, now that voters have signed off on an anti-democratic backlash against egalitarianism, the world of bullying with impunity is upon us.
A small personal example that certainly pales in comparison to what’s about to crash down on immigrants and trans people, but in the Summer of 2022, XDX and I stopped at a diner on Interstate 84 on our way back from a wedding in Boise, Idaho. We were an interracial couple; she’s Chinese, I’m white and look (and am) Jewish. Bad vibe in there, and we hustled out pretty quickly after lunch under some unfriendly glares. Again, hardly comparable to what’s in store for other targeted groups, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable sitting down in that Idaho diner today.
2. Military Rule Coming to a City Near You
Take no comfort in the fact that you live in a blue state—or, more specifically, in a city. America’s metro islands of pluralism are about to become the beachheads of our tragic future.
Trump’s mass deportation agenda will begin in cities. Federal troops will sync with local police (and with Proud Boys vigilante “patriots” rushing in to help), immediately weakening local autonomy and setting the stage for standoffs between citizens and law enforcement. The ensuing civil unrest will give Trump the “Reichstag fire” excuse he needs to cue general clampdowns and martial law in the “crime-ridden” cities he already demonized on the campaign trail.
This is 1939 Nazi playbook stuff.
In 2025, Hitler’s Jews are Trump’s immigrants– “poisoning the blood of the nation.”
3. Acquiescence
I learned about the Holocaust in middle school in Ms. Clemmer’s class. Stunned to find out that Adolf Hitler came to power through legitimate means rather than through some violent takeover, we asked “How could this happen?” Ms. Clemmer told us about Germany’s staggering inflation and taught us about scapegoating (Jews and Berlin elites). Eighth-grade reading level and all, this was hardly difficult to comprehend.
The top reasons Trump won? Persistent inflation, scapegoating immigrants, and pointing at cultural elites. Yet, rather than continuing to ring alarm bells about the terrifying historic parallel at hand as they did during the election (calling out how Trump’s language directly sampled Hitler’s, for example), the news media are suddenly treating Tuesday’s results as a basic election postmortem story. They are pretending we still live in a normal electoral setting as they obliviously do traditional election analysis pieces.
Worse, the analysis itself is playing into Trump’s hands by parroting the MAGA POV: Liberal media elites are now blaming the liberal elites for not listening to “real” Americans, and … Hey, stop condescending to MAGA voters, maybe their complaints about immigrants have merit. I mean, you know, immigrants may not actually have been eating dogs, but Trump was just joking, and there’s a larger point here …
Never mind that MAGA voters have consistently condescended to “libtards” too, liberals are now solicitously adopting a politicized version of the facile Hallmark Channel narrative of America, where the hard-charging city girl returns to her small hometown and realizes she’s lost touch with what’s important in the world as she falls in love with a “regular” guy. In short: People who choose to live in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle (as well as in Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta) are the bad guys. We aren’t real Americans, we’re Trump’s “enemy within.”
I’m not saying there isn’t (a lot of) truth in the notion that the establishment has hurt the working class. That’s 100 percent correct, though it’s GOP policies like tax cuts for the wealthy, anti-union laws, and eviscerating corporate regulations that have helped capitalism run amok.
And there’s a big difference between condescension and calling out racism and bigotry; denouncing misogyny and transphobia; exposing corporate fraud; fact-checking and correcting conspiracy theories; and defending science and the rule of law.
I’d add that plenty of “regular” folks, not just liberal snobs, have called BS when their neighbors lean into bigotry—fighting against transphobia for one inspiring example, here.
People who voted for Trump are grownups. Treating people as grownups means not giving them a pass on supporting a shoddy demagogue who has been found guilty of fraud and sexual abuse, who issues racist statement after racist statement, who shamelessly lies. Sorry New York Times, I’m not interested in putting the MAGA voter under a microscope as if they’re some magical species that I fail to understand.
I understood them in 2016, and, having listened to Trump’s grievances about pet-eating immigrants, I understand them in 2024.
Ceding the post-election narrative to the Trumpist talking point that liberals have somehow deeply offended “authentic” Americans is the first step of acquiescence that allows the winners (MAGA, in this case) to write the history.
When you write the history, you control the future. The notion of a MAGA future is a grim one.
Flash back to November 8, 2016: Late in the night after Trump won the election, angry and emotional crowds gathered for impromptu and noisy protests in Seattle’s urban epicenter, Capitol Hill.
Fast forward to this past Tuesday night in the same neighborhood. Acceptance and fatigue have apparently set in. After it was clear Trump was going to win the election, Capitol Hill was relatively empty and totally subdued. I left an election night event at 8:45 and sat at a bar drinking a whiskey in morose silence while a smattering of folks, including a couple who seemed to be on a successful first date, chatted amiably.
josh@publicola.com
I agree with most of your points. Re bullying: I follow a website for erotic fiction, and I’ve followed it long enough to notice that it changes more or less in synch with the American president. Men get away with more in more stories when Republicans are president, and this was far more severe during Trump’s first term.
Re parallels with Hitler: As you state them, they’re hard to ignore.
But re condescension? I’m a white man without a college degree, and have had my share of blows from “the establishment”, including being homeless for the entirety of Barack Obama’s second presidential term and of Donald Trump’s first. I’m also, however, a few classes away from a degree at the University of Chicago. So let me try to translate for you, Mr. Feit.
I just spent some time re-reading the Sunday opinion sections of _The Seattle Times_ and _The New York Times_. Nicholas Kristof, after some accurate observations of non-establishment lives, devolved into blaming elite condescension. I was surprised. Maureen Dowd, though arguing more sensibly than I remember her doing when last I could afford _The New York Times_, say 2010, seemed to me to be making a similar argument.
Most of the pieces didn’t have much to say about this at all. Baird, Gangloff, Lopez and Winfrey in _Seattle_, Beinart, Douthat, Cass, Filipovic, Linker, Lozada, McMillan Cottom and Rhodes in _New York_.
But the one _The Seattle Times_ reprinted on Sunday, David Brooks’s piece, is not about condescension, and does not treat the result as normal politics. “We have entered a new political era. For the past 40 years or so, we’ve lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.”
I grew up believing that the draft was slavery. In 1982, a law was passed denying federal financial aid for education to people who didn’t register for the draft. In 1983, I turned 16 during orientation week at the University of Chicago. In 1985, thanks to the 1982 law, I left that institution. I tried and failed to complete a degree in mathematics, using only family funds, in 1990.
I got, and did well at, jobs at banks as a trust operations clerk. Later I was the fair-haired child of a local Accountemps office.
“Society worked as a vast segregation system, elevating the academically gifted above everybody else.” (Followed by a sweeping series of assertions about what happens to the non-gifted. Brooks isn’t careful about facts, but I have little doubt most of these assertions are true.)
In 2002, Arthur Andersen collapsed, creating a glut of accountants on the job market. Personnel offices responded by making jobs that I’d been doing, the previous few years, require at least an associate’s degree. Which I couldn’t get. I became homeless on the street for the first time one year later, for a few months. When I came to Seattle in 2006, pursuing a certificate in the Oracle database, I was able to patch together enough work doing data entry and, eventually, tax returns, to stay housed. For just under six years.
“The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it.”
See the URL I’m linking this time. For a little while in late 2020, some activists saw me.
That year, also, that 1982 law was repealed, as part of one of the COVID stimulus omnibuses. And I’m now working on the associate’s degree in accounting for lack of which I’ve spent nearly nine years of my life homeless.
“But I have to confess that Harris [ran to the center] pretty effectively, and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption – something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”
“Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose.”
I’ll call your Kristallnacht and raise you Cultural Revolution. If there is one, I’m diligently working on disqualifying myself for any role but victim, but I’m increasingly convinced it could happen here.
8 years ago I thought some of the people around me were over-reacting, that surely checks and balances would hold, that the establishment GOP would see this tiny-handed parvenu for what (well-meaning liberals thought) he was. But his people saw him for what he really was.
He was the tool they needed to undo whatever they could, to pollute the judicial system with inexperienced hacks, to undermine any piece of public policy back to FDR. Now, with both houses on congress and four years of carefully-stoked outrage, there are no guardrails. There is no establishment GOP to push back. Or perhaps the establishment GOP has just been waiting for him, like a savior, to lead them to the promised land of the 1850s.
The Stranger’s Urban Archipelago cover from 2004 (referenced above) is still on point. As long as sparsely populated land (read: the slave power) can outvote the people in cities who actually drive the economy (read Jane Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities if you haven’t), there will be scant progress. The TVA, rural electrification, the USDA county extension service, all the things that the federal government provides to the red zones, funded by the people in the blue islands, means nothing to them.
Maybe this sounds harsh and nihilistic but again…the The Stranger in 2004…what has changed since? Reagan started this and his people are still in control of his party. The Lincoln Project is staffed with them…they only got involved because they might lose control of power, not out of any sense of patriotism. Too little, too late. All the misinformation they have been sowing for 40 years is now ripe for harvest and what a bumper crop.
When any individual’s civil rights are violated, we have the recourse of the judicial branch. I’m not going to invest in getting pre-outraged or cherry-picking a few disgusting events to suggest that 80 million Americans are unreachable.
At the presidential level, the Trump coalition has become more diverse over time while the Dem coalition has turned more white and more college educated. The fact that progressives cannot talk about cultural issues without instinctually attaching the other to bigotry is a mirror about how progressives enforce conformity along these lines:
– Policing is racist
– Unequal outcomes are racist
– Enforcing drug laws and prostitution laws are racist
– Protecting the competitiveness of women’s sports is transphobic
– Skepticism of the evidence supporting youth gender transition and use of puberty blockers is transphobic
And people on our side are afraid to speak like a normal person and says: disagreeing with these views does not come from a place of hatred. I’m fine with someone else having different views, but I’m not OK with top-down imposition of values that makes it difficult to talk with working class people in our own city much less go on a podcast hosted by someone who doesn’t share these shibboleths.
The International District swung 30 points toward Trump in early returns. That’s not bigotry, it’s a response to failed governance. Seattle and Washington elected officials should look past resistance 2.0 posturing and ask, what are we doing to make housing less expensive? Our cities feel safer for families? What are we doing to cut red tape so we can build more housing, transit, and energy projects?
Well said, Josh.
Humans can get used to anything, even fascism; it’s emotionally exhausting to maintain outrage. Instead, of outrage we need vigorous debate examining our assumptions, resisting our own cancel culture, and identifying practical long-term strategies.
Fuck that shit. Nazis are fucking outrageous, and I reserve to right to be and remain outraged by it (and anyone who is apologizing for them).
Piss off.
What an unhinged response that is emblematic of “our own cancel culture”
Whatevs, bro. When you have an incumbent who calls marching Nazis “Very Fine People” and later characterizes immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our people” (an actual Nazi term) it’s perfectly fair to call a Nazi a fucking Nazi.
And now that you’re rationalizing it, I’m quite comfortable calling you a fucking Nazi, too.
If the jackboot fits, wear it. I hope your foot freezes off like it did for so many Wehrmacht soldiers who served on the Eastern Front.
Bubbleator, shut the fuck up.
No. Make me, jackboot.
I (unfortunately) completely agree with you Josh. Thank you for putting this in black and white. I agree with Dick Lilly’s suggestion.
Right on.
Amen.
Marvelous, Josh. You should try getting the Seattle Times to run it as an op-ed.
Regards,
Dick Lilly
and invite the rage of the MAGA chuds who shit in the establishment newspaper’s comments every day? No thanks.