“If Mr. Trump is elected legally and legitimately,” writes Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr., “the threat to democracy comes from his opponents.” This is a fascinating categorical statement. Over the past week, the New York Times and the Washington Post have published reports detailing Donald Trump’s plans to use the government as an authoritarian weapon. In conjunction with his advisers, Trump is planning to prosecute various political opponents and to use the military to suppress anticipated civil protests. Both papers included detailed reporting on Trump’s planning, but much of it is happening in plain view. (“This is third-world-country stuff — ‘Arrest your opponent,’” Trump said. “And that means I can do that, too.”)

The most revealing thing about these reports may be the response they generated in the conservative media — or, more accurately, the lack thereof. National Review ran one short wry piece by Charles C.W. Cooke that mourned the declining influence of the Federalist Society but focused entirely on Cooke’s wavering loyalty to the conservative movement rather than the Putin-esque threat to the republic. It’s certainly possible other organs in the conservative media covered this, but I couldn’t find anything. Even traditional conservatives are taking the line that the only threat to democracy during a second Trump term would come from Trump’s opponents.

Whether you support Trump’s ambitions to prosecute his enemies and sic the troops on peaceful demonstrators, it is undoubtedly an important policy decision. It is not a trivial story. These ambitions would play a central role in a second Trump term.

Now, conservative intellectuals certainly could explain why they disagree with the reporting about Trump’s plans.They could also defend Trump’s plans. Instead, they responded with a wall of silence. Even those corners of the conservative media still clinging to the hope that the party will nominate a candidate other than Trump didn’t use these stories against Trump.

The reason, of course, is that most Republicans approve of Trump’s iron-fist methods. Trump’s erstwhile opponents understand that highlighting his plans to turn the office of the presidency into a quasi dictatorship would only help him and that anybody complaining about it will only lose audience and influence within the movement.

I think this illustrates how the democratic death spiral in the Republican Party has reached its terminal stage. The first Trump administration did have a series of figures who were willing, and frequently able, to slow down or stop Trump’s most illiberal maneuvers. But Trump has identified this problem and is at work, alongside a cadre of competent aides, to correct it.

Republicans have likewise learned from this lesson that opposing Trump on any grounds is a career-ender. Once resisting even nakedly authoritarian moves is no longer viable for party players, then the restraints have disappeared completely.

Last week, Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan, sent out a video claiming “Joe Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people.” Somehow, this was only the second-most controversial part of her video. The part that drew the harshest response was Tlaib celebrating demonstrators chanting “From the river to the sea!,” a slogan that has come to define the fault line within the left on Israel and Palestine. Numerous Democrats, many of whom have defended her before, lit into Tlaib for using a slogan that delegitimizes Israel in any form and lends itself to genocidal interpretations.

For the uninitiated, defining the land that must be liberated as encompassing everything “from the river to the sea” — i.e., from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean — means the entire State of Israel, not merely its occupied territories, must be eradicated.

Some conservatives have argued that eradicating the State means eradicating its citizens, or at least its Jewish ones. “The only way you can eliminate Israel and turn that whole area into Palestine,” argues National Review’s Philip Klein, “is by killing millions of Jews.”

That isn’t true. One way would be to drive Israeli Jews into exile (this is what many left-wing critics seem to have in mind when they call Israel a “settler-colonist state” — its inhabitants would go “back home” like other European interlopers). Another way would be to turn Israel and the occupied territories into a single, binational secular state in which Jews and Arabs would live together.

Now, I don’t consider either of these outcomes realistic. In practice, a binational state would lead to a lot of violence and out-migration. But — news flash! — radical activists have plenty of unrealistic ideas about how the world could work. Lots of them genuinely think a secular, democratic state would allow Jews and Palestinians to live in peace and harmony or don’t realize Israeli Jews aren’t white people with a place to go back to in Europe. So it’s not fair to say everybody using this slogan wants to murder millions of Jews.

On the other hand, some of the people who use this slogan clearly do want to murder millions of Jews. Hamas, whose founding charter calls for violent struggle against the Jews, also employs the slogan “From the river to the sea.”

Progressives have tried to fudge this difference. “‘From the river to the sea’ is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” insists Tlaib. Yousef Munayyer, writing in the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents two years ago, argued, “It is precisely because Zionist settler colonialism has benefitted from and pursued Palestinian fragmentation that it seeks to mischaracterize and destroy inclusive and unifying rhetorical frameworks.”

“Inclusive and unifying” is the key phrase here. Palestinians are divided between advocates of peaceful coexistence with Jews and advocates of expulsion and violence. The phrase “From the river to the sea” is unifying and inclusive of those different ideas. It can mean either violent or nonviolent struggle against Zionism. The whole appeal of the phrase is that it allows the movement to avoid an internal schism.

People who use the phrase “From the river to the sea” are not always consciously endorsing terrorism or violence. But what they are doing is sending a message of inclusion to terrorists. It is a slogan for those who wish for their movement to link arms with Hamas. If you reject violence, you should reject that slogan and use rhetoric instead that excludes murderers.

In early 2015, I wrote a feature story identifying the rise of a new illiberal style of political discourse in progressive spaces. In the ensuing years, many progressives who expressed skepticism that the phenomenon I described was new or meaningful have since come around.

One of them, Matt Yglesias, has nonetheless maintained that while the specific pattern of behavior I describe is real, it does not reflect any kind of coherent ideological phenomenon. I find his argument about this uncharacteristically flabby and illogical, and I think the point is worth delving into.

The illiberal left tends to define political issues as struggles of obvious right and wrong, pitting oppressors against the oppressed and denying that advocates of oppression have any political rights. Liberalism would emphasize the need for due process, free speech, and other kinds of procedural neutrality, but left-wing critics of liberalism see these abstract rights as merely cover for protecting existing privilege.

Matt doesn’t deny the existence of self-conscious criticisms of liberalism from the left. Instead, he makes two responses. First, he argues that leftists have bad ideas that aren’t traceable to these critiques of liberalism. “There are any number of ways unchecked left-wing thought can drive policy off the rules,” he writes, “including ones that have nothing to do with grand theories about hierarchies of oppression.”

Well, sure, I never claimed to have identified the single source of every bad left-wing idea in the world. Some poor thinking on the left — he cites opposition to nuclear power — is largely unconnected to left-wing illiberalism. I fail to see how this negates my argument in any way, though. I was identifying one source of problems on the left, not all of them.

Matt’s second critique is more serious. He argues that, contrary to the premise that Identitarian extremism always takes the side of oppressed groups over more privileged ones, it sometimes actually does the reverse. He cites school closings:

It is true that left-wing activists often take positions that are contrary to either the interests or the preferences of the minority groups they claim to represent. My point is not that these groups correctly and faithfully advocate for minority groups but that they use the rhetoric of social justice to discredit any challenges to their ideas.

School closings were, indeed, a perfect example of this. Having adopted a pro-closing stance, the left justified the closings as a way to protect Black and brown families, who were most vulnerable to the COVID pandemic. From this premise, the left attacked anybody who wanted to open schools as a “white supremacist.”

If I thought these essentialist arguments about identity always did a good job of advocating for the interests and preferences of minorities, I’d be much less critical of them! The fact that they often fail to do so is an important aspect of my critique.

The underlying premise of liberalism is that we need to have some modesty about our understanding of what works and what doesn’t and require permissive norms of discourse in order to critique errors and arrive at the truth. But not every progressive agrees with those liberal norms. That’s the debate. And while the liberal-versus-illiberal ideological schism obviously doesn’t explain every disagreement within the left, it very much exists.

One of the more disturbing aspects of contemporary conservative thinking is a refusal to acknowledge that Muslim and Arab Americans experience discrimination. Leading Republicans engage in overt, gross acts of dehumanization and bias. And yet conservatives routinely argue — I collected numerous examples here — that even admitting this bias exists is a ploy to minimize antisemitism.

National Review’s Dan McLaughlin has a column that attempts to defend this position. McLaughlin insists that denouncing bias against Muslims and Arabs at a time when Jews are experiencing antisemitism is a form of antisemitism. “Why choose this particular moment to unveil a ‘National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia’?” he asks. “Why do this in the immediate aftermath of the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust?”

Well, the answer is that there is also a huge surge in bias against Muslims and Arabs! McLaughlin runs through a list of terrible attacks against Jews, seemingly oblivious to the fact that similar crimes have also been committed against Muslims and Arab Americans. The most notorious incident was a landlord stabbing a Palestinian American mother and killing her 6-year-old child, but other threats and violence abound, according to Vox, including:

Organizations tracking these incidents report a spike in attacks and threats.

McLaughlin proceeds to contrast Democrats’ position of denouncing bias against both groups with the left’s response to the George Floyd murder:

One important difference between the George Floyd episode and now is that there was no pattern of white people suffering from hatred. Yes, I am aware of affirmative action, and I am also aware of ridiculous left-wing rhetoric (see the preceding item). I don’t believe these intellectual pathologies amount to anti-white racism. Most of the people who perpetrate them are white progressives.

Also, McLaughlin might be mistaking me for somebody who considers DiAngelo a wise moral leader, but I assure you this is not the case.

The most glaring blind spot in McLaughlin’s argument is the fact that blatant racist rhetoric against Muslims is being perpetrated by leading Republicans, including Trump. Trump’s go-to response to criticism from any Muslim American is to say that person has no standing to criticize Real Americans and should go back to “their” country. He recently promised to turn away immigrants who don’t subscribe to “our religion.” He is legitimizing forms of bigotry against Muslim and Arab Americans that would have been considered racist a century ago.

McLaughlin can’t understand why Democrats would denounce anti-Muslim bias now? Imagine it’s 1939 and Charles Lindbergh is the favorite in the next presidential election and you’re complaining about taking the time to denounce antisemitism.

It’s not surprising that McLaughlin would have a mental block preventing him from accessing Trump’s gross bigotry. As an anti-anti-Trump conservative, his entire worldview is based on attacking Trump’s enemies while pretending as hard as he can that Trump doesn’t exist.

The conservative demand that Democrats refuse to denounce bigotry against Muslims and Arabs is not about protecting Jews from antisemitism. It’s a way to justify and enable racism against other minorities.

Programming note: A couple friends have asked me which day this comes out or expressed concern that they missed an edition. The answer is there is no day it comes out. I write &c. a few times a month. The schedule is completely irregular. The downside is that you never know when it will come. The upside is that I write it only when I feel like I have something valuable to say.

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