Resist the #Resistance
The New Center: A Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari
There is so much that can and must be said about the election. But the headline here gets at one of the most important tasks facing anyone—left or right—who wants to move past the political dysfunction of the past decade or so. We have to resist the #Resistance. We have to say No to the complex of comfortably sinecured journalists, academics, politicos, and government officials who have treated the rise of a mass, multiracial populist movement as an opportunity to cosplay as antifascists circa 1941.
Behold David Frum, the neocon-turned-resistance-lib, who responded to Team Trump’s crushing victory by indicating that he would go down to the bar, “strike up the band and sing the Marseillaise.”
First of all, I have to ask: How does Frum find these awesome 1940s-themed bars in Washington, where the members of the band, presumably dressed in crisp white dinner jackets with black pants, are ready at a moment’s notice to play the Marseillaise at the request of The Atlantic writer? Do these bars also keep handy Swastika flags, in case patrons feel a sudden urge to rip them apart in view of visiting Trumpian stormtroopers?
Sorry, this stuff is brain-deadening. Serious, good-faith people of the left and center left must recognize it as such (and many do—shout-out for that to Compact contributors and friends like Matt Stoller, Zaid Jilani, Christian Parenti, Ashley Frawley, Ross Barkan, and Bhaskar Sunkara, among many others). The answer to right-wing populism isn’t fantastical, overwrought (a)historical analogies. These serve only to sharpen polarization; to hinder bipartisan reforms; and to make it more, not less, difficult to confront the genuinely troubling elements of the online right that traffic in noxious racism and IQ worship.
That last group—the online racists—has been repudiated along with the #Resistance libs by the millions of working-class people of color who pulled for Trump at the ballot box. Yes, we should be on guard against their ideological encroachments. But it’s equally if not more important to banish the much more powerful #Resistance liberals to the margins, where they objectively belong (given the shape of the electorate). Let the aging David Frum play antifascist in his mind, and get remunerated handsomely for it. The rest of us have work to do.
Your core point is dead-on. We shouldn't give people like Frum the cover of legitimacy. I listened to endless hand-wringing in 2016 and unintentionally ironic comparisons to Weimar Germany. We should react to this kind of facile ire and cosplaying (great choice of term) with open disdain and an admonition to "grow up" and not take such an egocentric view.
I must challenge the invocation of "noxious racism and IQ worship". I see this as almost a tic in conservative writing currently. Is it an attempt to distance the author from The Unsavories? Or a false sense of balance? In the latter case it does harm... AFAICT the large preponderance of hate, Shadow-projection, and violence comes from The Left. Which I think comes from rigidity and an inability to meaningfully see other viewpoints.
As a Canadian, let me apologize for having inflicted David Frum on the USA. The election results will hopefully bring an end to anyone taking him seriously in either Canada or the USA.