The antifascist partisan Democrat's trilemma
If the Republican Party's fascist, supporting the Democratic Party means supporting enablers of fascism
In my inaugural post, I poked a hole in the hard-consequentialist argument for voting for Joe Biden in 2020. To summarize, the argument was that life under a Joe Biden presidency would be better than life under a second Trump term, so consequentialists had to vote for Biden. Then I laid out a flaw in the argument. The flaw is that consequentialists must consider all predictable consequences of electing someone president, not just the consequences during their presidential term. So if you thought that Biden would be more likely than Trump to trigger the election of someone far worse than Trump in 2024 (or 2028 or 2032 or…), that could’ve been a legitimate reason to deny Biden your vote; it could’ve been that Biden would’ve led to worse long-term consequences than Trump, even if life would’ve been nicer for 4 years under Biden. That sank the idea that consequentialists had to vote for Biden.
This time I confront a deontological argument used to urge people to vote for Biden. The deontological argument was supposedly an antifascist, small-“d” democratic argument:
Trump, if not the Republican Party writ large, was fascist, or at least a serious threat to democracy, whereas Biden wasn’t;
people must oppose fascism and defend democracy (that’s the deontological part);
therefore people were obliged to vote for Biden to oppose fascism and defend democracy.
Like the hard-consequentialist argument, this deontological argument is short and elegant. Unlike the hard-consequentialist argument, I won’t dispute the deontological argument. Instead I’ll point out that if you accept it, you likely face a difficult trilemma.
The trilemma is that it’s inconsistent to believe that
Trump (or the Republican Party) is fascist,
fascism is so unconscionable that enablers of fascism are themselves fascists who must be opposed, and
you, or anyone else, should support the Democratic Party.
The trilemma springs from the fact that the Democratic Party supported and enabled the Republican Party and even Donald Trump:
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign infamously plotted to “elevate” Trump as a “Pied Piper candidate”;
Nancy Pelosi, Democrat and speaker of the US House of Representatives, declared in October 2016 that the US needed a “strong Republican Party”;
in September 2020, after over 3 years of President Trump, Pelosi repeated her claim that the US needed “a strong Republican Party that’s done so much for our country”, said she respected “people who vote for Trump because they’re pro-life” (Trump having overseen hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths), and was convinced that Republicans would respect the presidential election’s result;
in February 2021, after Senate Republicans blocked a second Congressional attempt to convict Trump, Pelosi again maintained that the US “needs a strong Republican Party, it’s very important”;
last month, Pelosi asked her “Republican friends” to “take back” the Republican Party, since (according to her) the US continued to need “a big, strong Republcan Party”;
while the leading candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, Joe Biden declared that “we need a Republican Party”;
in 2019 and 2020, Biden told many people (voters concerned about his age, activists, and voters who believed that he’d sexually assaulted Tara Reade) to vote for someone else, including (twice) telling an immigration activist that they “should vote for Trump”;
from the Trump administration into this year, Biden’s remained committed to the idea of bipartisanship;
Democrats have failed to use the presidency and Congressional majorities to pass a voting-rights bill, while Republicans bombard state legislatures with bills to restrict voting and Congressional Republicans reject Biden’s election victory; and
Democrats have also failed to pass a bill to reform police forces, leaving police about as free as before to engage in militarized, authoritarian abuses of power; and
under Biden, the Department of Justice continues the Trump-era policy of labeling civil-rights protesters terrorists.
Democratic politicians enthusiastically breach any antifascist, pro-democracy cordon sanitaire you might want to impose against Trump and Republicans. So you have to choose between backing Democratic politicians and insisting on a pro-democracy cordon sanitaire.
In short, you can’t be a hard-line antifascist and a partisan Democrat.
If you support Democrats because you scorn Trump and Republican politicians as fascist, that might seem paradoxical. But the trilemma is no less elegant than the original deontological argument, and both the argument and the trilemma get their bite from the rigidity of deontology.
If, like many people, you believe that a table where 10 people sit and talk with a fascist is a table with 11 fascists, no exceptions, and you believe that Donald Trump is a fascist, then you have to conclude that Trump’s party is fascist, and in turn that the Democratic Party — which talks up, talks to, sits with, works with Trump’s party — is fascist. Otherwise you’re using a double standard to let Democratic fascist-enablers off the hook, which is bad, and is even worse if your partisanship has you denouncing potential voters to your left as fascist-enablers because they won’t vote for your blue-branded fascist-enablers.
I see all of this less as paradoxical (the meme that “liberals hate socialists more than fascists” didn’t come from nowhere) than as hypocritical and ironic. Various Democratic partisans styled themselves as democracy’s defenders by accusing disaffected leftists and Bernie Sanders’s supporters of practicing Trump-enabling, fascism-enabling “purity” politics. But in the process the Vote Blue No Matter Who sloganeers indicted themselves.
Update, December 17: