Ross Douthat advises us that the mainstream right will blow off any of the allegations against Trump because the left is as guilty of violating liberal democratic norms as he is. Is there any justice to this argument?
Let’s deconstruct it. The right’s complaints revolve around the following: censorship on the web; mob violence during BLM demonstrations; “defunding the police” and otherwise being soft on crime; and evolving standards regarding sexual identity and behavior. The first is attributable to a few (not liberal) billionaire businessmen and the Twitter left; the second involved the behavior of a few individuals during mostly peaceful demonstrations; the third is also a Twitter left phenomenon, except that Trump and the GOP joined in a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill a few years ago; and the last applies solely to a handful of woke activists. No part of the indictment, as it were, factually or logically pertains to Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the mainstream of the Democratic Party (which voted for Biden), or me.
The essence of the problem here is that the right attributes the behavior of a handful of left-wing nonpoliticians to everyone who didn’t vote for Trump, and then says that far more dangerous actions taken by a US president are the same thing. They aren’t. It’s a clear category error. Period.