Peter Beinart is part of a cast of liberals lamenting the fact that conservatives who were skeptical of Donald Trump during the campaign have inexplicably declined to join him in the Democratic party now that Trump is president. And he is now among a more select group on the left to name names in an effort to shame such people over their seeming hypocrisy. Except he doesn’t call it hypocrisy. Rather, Beinart’s argument is that these conservatives don’t share his prohibitive focus on Trump to the exclusion of virtually every other matter of public policy relevance or political salience. And so Beinart inadvertently validates the arguments of those he sought to condemn.
Writing in The Atlantic, Beinart takes aim at a certain type of conservative by tackling the work of a variety of columnists at National Review—though he could have easily broadened his scope to include much of the conservative opinion writing landscape. He notes that the conservative magazine’s editorial board had spent most of the campaign inveighing against Trump and it published a variety of center-right opinion-makers criticizing the Republican candidate. Yet National Review and NRO also publish pro-Trump opinion writers and, since Trump’s inauguration, even Trump skeptics who have the temerity to criticize the left on occasion. This, Beinart appears to think, exposes the publication’s duplicity. Yet even while making that case, he is careful to observe that these (in his view, insufficiently) Trump skeptical conservatives are also, cleverly, acknowledging “Trump’s flaws.” Beinart’s problem isn’t their arguments, but their emphasis.
They should not be attacking Trump’s critics, he says, for reasons that “should be clear.” In his estimation, the left lacks the power conservatives wield in Washington. It is, therefore, their solemn duty to focus not on the “secondary” concern of Trump’s occasionally overwrought detractors. To spare even a moment to criticize the left for, say, legitimizing false reports, doing their best George Wallace impression, or resorting to violence and property damage to register their dissatisfaction with the president is to lose sight of what truly matters.
This is why, by granting that the National Review contributors he cites are making “secondary” arguments, Beinart concedes their validity. By making it, in fact, Beinart demonstrates why such criticism is so necessary. Poking holes in the left’s more excitable lines of argumentation over the latest assault on republican virtue by the Trump White House should be viewed as a way of helping Democrats to refine their case against Trump and render it down to its most objective merits. A serious opposition would view this as a service.
There are no incentives in place for sober-minded and circumspect criticisms of Trump on the left. Liberals don’t want to hear from their compatriots why they should be keeping their powder dry. They want to hear that Mike Flynn’s resignation “is at least as big as Watergate,” that Trump’s conduct in office may “rise to the level of impeachable acts,” or that his executive overreach “continues unchecked to destroy the glue that binds us without precedent.” The left does not want rational and restrained analysis; they want their id indulged and desire to engage in histrionics validated. This is a marketplace, and there are too many are willing to participate in it.
If Democrats like Beinart and those who whom he caters genuinely believe that it is “deranged to think that leftist hyperbole constitutes the greater threat” than Trump to the stability of liberal democracy, they should welcome an audit of their tactics. They will need allies on the right to help stay Trump’s hand. If that is their true objective and not the emotional satisfaction that comes from venting steam, then Democrats will have to make meritorious arguments that convince and compel Republicans. Beinart’s is not an argument; it is a self-gratifying posture.
