Go Ahead, Celebrate Trump's Conviction!

America's Moralizing Pundits Can Take Several Seats

Like probably many of you readers, I’ve been consuming a lot of coverage—both print and broadcast—of Donald Trump’s various trials over the last few months. I’ve refrained from saying much about it, but I’ve done plenty of thinking. Yesterday, after a fairly short deliberation, the jury in the New York state election interference trial (often referred to as the “hush money” trial) handed down a unanimous guilty verdict on all 34 felony counts. My first reaction was to celebrate—and indeed, a couple of good friends and I ordered takeout last night and enjoyed laughing at the former bully-in-chief’s misfortune while we dined. Before that, I also exchanged celebratory words with random strangers here in Portland while walking the dog.

According to the punditocracy, as far as I can gather, this makes me a bad person—and possibly a threat to Democrats’ 2024 election prospects and/or democracy. That take is, to put this as politely as possible, balderdash. The insistence of elite pundits and the Democratic establishment on endlessly “taking the high road” against America’s authoritarians—people whose engagement with their political enemies (and they do consider us enemies rather than opponents) is by definition bad-faith—has not served the country well.

Fascists should lose. When they win, whatever remains of democracy and fairness in American life dies. A little emotional urgency, and a willingness to show or at least countenance displays of emotion when someone who has benefited his entire life from America’s fundamental unfairness finally meets with a little legal accountability, is in fact good for American society.

I believe this moralizing liberal “high-mindedness” derives largely from three sources: 1) a genuine and admirable desire for fairness; 2) a naive institutionalism grounded in American exceptionalism; and 3) fear of furthering American “polarization” and the consequences of stoking the authoritarian Right’s endless outrage. But none of these reasons can serve as the basis of a convincing argument for always, in every situation, “being the bigger person” and refusing to play hardball or to show a little emotion.

Let’s take them in turn.

Fairness Must not Mean Bothsidesism and Political Fecklessness

According to the major twentieth-century liberal philosopher John Rawls, justice is, essentially, fairness. But what is fairness? For Rawls, it is associated with an egalitarian society of free and equal citizens. Such a society is anathema to authoritarians, and today’s Republican Party is thoroughly authoritarian. Republicans—and especially the Christian Right—have played the long game over decades in an effort to reinscribe and enforce a strict, and patently unfair, social hierarchy in the United States, with wealthy white Christian men at the top. (And by the way, if you think the Christian part is immaterial, which it most certainly is not, I would direct you to my many comments addressing Christian privilege.)

Our Christian nationalist and indeed fascist Republican Party wants to make America, a highly capitalist country with a very limited social safety net where unfairness already looms large, even less fair. The social vision they want to realize is one of a viciously unfair society, with them at the top, taking sadistic pleasure in meting out cruelty on the rest of us. As someone who grew up in the Christian Right being mobilized for political efforts, let me tell you that, by and large, the ends justify the means for these people. For the true believers on the Christian Right—of which, make no mistake, there are many—the realization of the social hierarchy they seek is literally holy. In the service of “God’s will,” it’s possible to justify essentially anything.

How do we deal fairly with people committed to unfairness?