John Ganz mentioned in passing the other week—over on his Substack—a school of thought that he termed the "anti-alarmist left." He doesn't explain in detail who he has in mind, but I can gather from the context the sort of person he is envisioning: the type of smug leftist who refuses to call Trump a fascist; or who insists—at the very least—he is no more fascist than the entire U.S. imperial project has always been. The sort of leftist who—when presented with evidence of Trump's atrocities and extrajudicial killings—feels the need to interject with non sequiturs like: "well what about Obama's drone strikes?"
(For the millionth time, let's say outright: Obama's drone strikes were also very bad. But he hasn't been president for ten years at this point, so can we focus for one second please on the person who is actually president right now, and will be for at least the next three years, and who is right now blowing up civilian vessels in the Caribbean, with no legal justification or due process whatsoever, and who appears set to continue killing more innocent people by these means at a rate of at least one per week?)
Why do so many leftists—who should be the most outraged and opposed to Trump's brand of fascism of anyone—feel the need to downplay his crimes or to point out, whenever they are addressed, "well your precious Democrats aren't so perfect either"? Why are there so many people who spent years railing against Hillary Clinton's speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, for instance—and yet who appear to have nothing to say about Trump's blatant schemes to corruptly enrich himself, using the perks of his office, to the tune of billions of dollars?
Part of the reason for this "anti-alarmism" in some quarters of the left is surely just the standard snobbish quest for la distinction. Too many of the "libs" and suburban Resistance warriors are already saying the stuff they would ordinarily say about Trump. So, they have to find a way to position themselves further to the Left. They have to say: "it's not Trump that's fascist, it's the whole system." They have to say: "it's not Trump who started spying on people and killing people—the national security state was doing it all along. The real evil is capitalism. The real evil is imperialism." Etc.
In his memoir of his political evolution, Arthur Koestler writes about how the German Communist party—up until the very moment Hitler seized power—was still saying that the Social Democrats were the real enemy. They were really "social fascists"—even worse than the overt fascists of Hitler's party—because they tried to disguise their hand and were "dividing the working class." (Later, the C.P. would shift course, during the Popular Front era—which Koestler wrote allowed him a short-lived second honeymoon with the party—but this came too late to save German democracy.)
Koestler's contribution to the edited collection The God That Failed was probably the single most important piece of literature I ever read in my entire political development. Reading it in late adolescence, it cured me forever of the temptation to side with totalitarian and illiberal streaks of the left.
It also taught me a lesson that has never deserted me since, about the importance of keeping the following moral hierarchy always clear in one's brain: however much you may disagree with the center-left or center-right "bourgeois" or liberal democratic political parties on specific policies—the anti-democratic, illiberal far-right is always infinitely worse.
Since Trump first appeared on the political scene ten years ago, those passages of Koestler's have been ringing in my brain. I've thought: that's exactly what the Greenwaldians are doing; exactly the mistake those "anti-alarmist leftists" keep making. They are so lost in their comparatively minor points of political difference from the liberals, moderates, and old-fashioned conservatives—so consumed with the "narcissism of minor differences"—that they can't recognize the real evil staring them in the face. They refuse to forge the "Popular Front" of all the democratic parties that could save us while there's still time.
Part of the reason for their reluctance to do so is the fact that they have built their whole lives and identities around the idea of being anti-Establishment and anti-institutionalist. They therefore cannot easily pivot overnight to become defenders of flawed existing institutions in the name of staving off an even worse menace—even when there are many circumstances in history when this is precisely what is required (the Weimar Republic being the canonical example).
Koestler, in a later piece of writing—the "Seven Deadly Fallacies"—calls this the "fallacy of the perfect cause." He observes: "History knows no perfect causes, no situation of white against black. [...] Western democracy is not white but grey." World War II, he said, was a war in which "we are fighting a total lie in the name of a half-truth"—with Hitler's murderous dictatorship being the total lie; and liberal democracy being the half-truth. But it's hard for some people to fight earnestly for a half-truth; for something grey—even when that is precisely what is needed to preserve human civilization.
That seems very clearly to be what's happening today, with the "anti-alarmist left." They say: "well, but the FBI was already violating people's rights, even before Trump took over the Justice Department." Great—true—good point. But no sane person can deny that Trump has made it even worse—far worse than it was before. They say: "well, Obama was the deporter-in-chief." True, yes, he deported a lot of people; it was very bad. But Trump is sending ICE on sweeping raids, violating the Fourth Amendment, eviscerating due process; and systematically ignoring court orders demanding people's release.
If, someday, a Democrat becomes president again and proceeds to betray their principles and promises, I will vehemently criticize them for it. I spent the entire Biden administration doing little else. But so long as Trump is president, such retrospective or prospective broadsides against the center-left party do nothing but muddy the issue and provide the MAGA apologists with a handy set of excuses: "well," they can always say, "Obama did it first..."
"[T]o defend our system against a deadly threat does not imply acceptance of everything in this system, does not imply giving up the long-term fight to improve it," Koestler wrote. Indeed. When Trump is someday no longer in office, I will gladly devote my attention to long-term efforts to win a path to citizenship, to end all forms of immigration detention, to expand access to asylum, etc.—just as I did during the Biden administration. I will likewise relish the chance to reform the Justice Department, even if it is restored to a somewhat more politically independent post-Trump state.
I do not accept everything in the system we had before Trump. Far from it. There was a great deal to criticize. Hillary Clinton was bad. The Obama administration in certain respects was bad and disappointing—even criminal, in its drone killings, e.g. The Justice Department was flawed even before Trump eviscerated its ethical guidelines and transformed it into a creature of his quest for vengeance. But, Koestler went on: "our criticism of the shortcomings of this system does not free us from the duty to defend it, despite its ambiguous grayness, against the total corruption of the human ideal."
American democracy never was anything close to perfect; neither was the United Nations, or the "rules-based global order," to the extent it ever actually existed. All of these things are not black and white, but "grey," to Koestler's point. But they are still worth defending against alternatives that are infinitely worse: Trump and Putin's revival of great power imperialism, say; Trump's brand of fascism; Trump's new "Board of Peace," which appears to be evolving into an all-purpose vehicle for trying to advance a megalomaniacal vision of a new, Trump-centric world order.
Trump—with his blatant financial self-dealing at the American people's expense, his naked aggression and imperialism, his transparent bids for authoritarian power and flexes of arbitrary, lawless might—represents the "total corruption of the human ideal," as Koestler would put it. And yes, so help me, the world we knew before he took office, for all its flaws and foibles—for all its "ambiguous grayness"—was worth defending against him.
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