Knocking down the guardrails

Election season has reached fever pitch, so it is not surprising to hear opponents of Donald Trump attempting to make instant connections between the president and the twin acts of domestic terrorism from the last couple of weeks: the (thankfully) inept mail bombs from Cesar Sayoc to prominent liberals; and the monumental tragedy of the synagogue assassinations in Pittsburgh by Robert Bowers. 

Frankly, I'd thought a lot of the connection-making rhetoric was altogether too facile.  I'm not aware that Trump had said or done anything particularly anti-Semitic during his presidency, nor to encourage attacks against prominent Democratic leaders.  Furthermore, his reactions to both sets of events have been, more or less, what one would expect of a conventional president.  So I'd been chalking up the connection-making to politics and the continuing efforts by the so-called Resistance to discredit Trump's presidency.

Then I read Bret Stephens' column in the New York Times this morning.


I suppose any NY Times columnist, simply by virtue of appearing in that paper, is an important voice in American public discourse, but Stephens already had a national reputation as a conservative columnist prior to joining the Times.  The paper doesn't employ enough conservative commentators to fill out a bridge table, but of that small group, Stephens' voice arguably is the most conservative.

That makes Stephens' calling Trump and his followers to account both important and credible.  Stephens first establishes the correct category for the aggressors:

There is no reason to think that Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bowers and alleged Florida mail bomber Cesar Sayoc are “deranged.” There is every reason to believe their acts are politically motivated. They are not “crazies” in the category of Gabrielle Giffords shooter Jared Lee Loughner. They are terrorists in the class of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, or Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter.

After noting that terrorists do not spring up fully formed in a vacuum, Stephens asks,

What are the villages from which Sayoc and Bowers hailed? For Sayoc it was the real-world villages of the Trump rally, with its mob-like intensity and unquestioning fidelity to one supreme leader. For Bowers, it was the virtual villages of Twitter and alt-right social networks, digitally connecting angry loners who follow nobody. 

Stephens then notes of these two "villages", the Trumpists and the alt-right:

Different methods and values — but not altogether different. Both draw on similarly cramped ideas about nationhood and sovereignty. Both see political opponents as enemies and immigrants as invaders. Both are susceptible to conspiracy theories. And both feed off the same incessant background noise of Trump-speak. “Lock her up.” “Enemy of the American people.” “Illegal alien mob.”  In other words: the criminalization of political opposition, the vilification of the media, and the demonization of foreigners. At some point, the distance between word and deed becomes short. And then they are joined, as they were last week.

Here is where Stephens wrenches the consciences of conservatives who have spent the last two years trying to persuade themselves that maybe they could live with, and perhaps even give a lukewarm bro-hug, to Donald Trump:

Conservatives used to understand the danger. Why care about social formalities, modes of dress, niceties of speech, qualities of restraint? Not simply because manners make the man, although they do, but because manners also shape political cultures. How does a conservative movement that is supposed to believe that every healthy society needs powerful moral guardrails give itself over to a president whose every other utterance cheerfully knocks those guardrails down?

Finally, Stephens turns to Abe Foxman, longtime professional susser-outer of anti-Semitism, who led the Anti-Defamation League for many years:

“Pittsburgh is not Trump,” Foxman says. “It’s also Trump.” Trump, he adds, is not an anti-Semite. But fanning one set of hatreds against immigrants has a way of fanning others, as it did for Bowers when he attacked the synagogue because he was enraged by its support for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Turning to last year’s neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Foxman says of Trump, “He didn’t create them. He didn’t write their script. He didn’t give them the brown shirts. But he emboldened them. He gave them the chutzpah, that it’s O.K. 

“And when he had an opportunity to put it down,” Foxman adds, “he didn’t.” The blood that flowed in Pittsburgh is on his hands, also.