Donald Trump has consistently attracted the support of a handful of left-wing activists and writers. Some of them were die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters who believed, much like the Weimar communists, that Trump would hasten the social crisis that would open the door for their revolution. A somewhat different faction on the left today believes electing Trump is a necessary price for punishing Joe Biden for his Zionism.
Others have developed a stranger rationale. One of them is Matt Taibbi, once a prominent left-wing polemicist who is now a paradigmatic anti-anti-Trumper, nominally opposed to Trump while almost exclusively attacking his enemies. Taibbi has written a social-media post explaining, in his words, “Why I don’t spend a lot of time on the Republicans.” It is both bizarre and revealing.
Most of Taibbi’s reasons for ignoring the right are familiar ones employed frequently by lifelong Republicans. He argues that Democrats “are being organized around a more potent but also much dumber, more cultlike ideology,” an idiosyncratic reading of a political landscape in which Donald Trump is the subject of conservative propaganda depicting him as literally Christlike.
Taibbi likewise maintains that Trump is the victim of “lawfare” and whatever authoritarian impulses he may harbor pale beside those of the Democrats: “The Democrats’ ambitions are significantly more dangerous than those of the Republicans. From digital surveillance to censorship to making Intel and enforcement agencies central players in domestic governance — all plans being executed globally as well as in our one country — they are thinking on a much bigger and more dangerous scale than Republicans.”
This claim suffers numerous familiar flaws. His dismissal of Trump’s censorship ignores his first-term efforts to financially punish owners of independent media (imagine if Joe Biden was singling out the Murdoch family for retribution!) and ordering trumped-up investigations to harass his critics, all while openly describing the government as a weapon of vengeance. His belief that the Biden administration is persecuting Trump ignores both the fact that Biden’s Justice Department is investigating and charging numerous Democrats, including the president’s son, and the obvious reality that Trump’s legal problems are a consequence of being a lifelong crook.
And Taibbi insists he needn’t hold Republicans accountable because “There is a [sic] enormous army of MSM reporters already going after them from every angle,” when of course there is also a large army of conservative reporters — including the most-watched television news network by far — going after Democrats.
These are all familiar elements of conservative rationalization. But Taibbi is not a conservative, at least not in his issue preferences. That is why his main rationale for ignoring Republican cruelty is so striking:
“The Republicans have very little institutional power nationally. It’s not their point of view prevailing in schools, on campuses, in newsrooms (where over 90% of working reporters vote blue), and especially in the intelligence and military apparatus, which has openly aligned itself with Democrats. Even if Donald Trump were a ‘threat to Democracy’ he lacks the institutional pull to do much damage, which can’t be said of Democrats.”
I’ve frequently seen liberals argue that they don’t need to criticize the left because the left has no power. That belief is blind to the power the left wields within progressive-dominated spaces (schools, media, culture), which in turn filters into the Democratic Party. The same people who insisted the left was too powerless to be worth critiquing now insist Biden must heed its demands.
Taibbi’s argument that the Republicans lack institutional power is the mirror image of this, but it is even more detached from reality. You can plausibly deny left-wing cultural power when it operates through semi-visible channels in the intellectual and cultural elite. But how can you deny the Republican Party has institutional power when it controls formal levers of government power?
The Supreme Court throws its weight around American law with little restraint. Republicans have held a majority of its seats continuously since 1970, and appear likely to maintain their stranglehold for years if not decades. Republicans have a majority of one legislative chamber and stand a strong chance to win the other by next year. They control most of the state legislatures and governorships. Any definition of “institutional power” that omits organs of state power is useless.
That institutional power is not merely formal. Republican power has made itself felt across a wide array of social-policy indices. Compared with other developed democracies, the United States has a notably less redistributive tax-and-transfer system, millions of people lacking health insurance, massive and barely regulated private-weapons ownership, among other things. These all reflect conservative power. In a world in which the legislative and judicial branches of government had the same ideological composition as elite universities or the mainstream media, all these policy realms would look dramatically different.
What’s more, there are ongoing struggles in all of them. Republicans in states like Florida and Texas continue to fight to deny Medicaid to their poorest citizens, to constrict the right to abortion, and (should they win control of government) hand out more tax cuts to the wealthy. Democrats used their 2021-22 governing trifecta to modestly expand the welfare state, the limits of which were hit when the most anti-tax Democratic senator (Kyrsten Sinema) joined with all 50 Republican Senators to limit the tax hikes on the rich, and the most fiscally conservative Democratic senator (Joe Manchin) joined all 50 Republicans to constrain its social spending. The holdout Democrats got most of the attention, but it was the Republican Party that supplied the overwhelming mass of votes to empower them. That is an exercise of power.
For conservative Trump supporters or anti-anti-Trumpers, these are all reasons to support the party. They are willing to overlook the paranoid, criminal, and authoritarian tendencies overtaking their party because it remains a vehicle for advancing their longstanding policy goals.
Taibbi, though, does not share these goals. He is known for denouncing inequality, the predations of Wall Street, calling health care a human right, and hasn’t explicitly abandoned these commitments. He just ignores them, and serves as an ally to the party slashing spending on the poor, rewarding the rich, and marbling the government with titans of wealth. (Donald Trump’s qualification for Treasury secretary appears to be finding the wealthiest political loyalist willing to take the job.)
The anti-anti-Trumpers on the right minimize Trump’s offenses in order to achieve these ends. Taibbi, by contrast, seems to have convinced himself the ends aren’t happening, or no longer matter. His account of his own motivations is supposed to serve as an explanation, but it seems more of a self-diagnosis.
