I have a colleague at work whom about whom I’ve written before; four years ago:
… when it comes to current events, politics, history and other important subjects, as I tell him all the time, he basically doesn’t know shit about shit, which he occasionally acknowledges, along with the fact that he gets all of his information from Fox News. … At one point he said, “I just like Trump’s foreign policy,” which when I asked him what that “policy” is, he answered, “F*** everybody.” Which, of course, is not a policy. So he’s basically cool with the idea that support for Trump derives from ignorance.
Somewhat more surprisingly, he followed this up with a declaration that, as a general matter, “I don’t give a sh** about anybody else.” Which I also found unsurprising; what surprised me a bit was that he doubled down on this, saying “Yes, I’m very selfish.” So he was also cool with the idea that support for Trump derives from selfishness.
At which point I reiterated my longstanding theory that support for the GOP in general, and Trump in particular, is largely built around selfishness and cruelty. My colleague again agreed that he was selfish, but denied being cruel.
It goes on like that. I wrote about this person again a few days later:
[T]his time the topic was, from my point of view, the GOP letting Trump skate on serious offenses and from his point of view, the Democrats trying to impeach him just because he’s a Republican. … Then the topic turned to how, in his view, “Democrats have been saying ‘impeach the m**f**er!’ since day one,” which (a.) is not true, and (b.) pales in comparison to all that “Lock Her Up” nonsense from 2016, as well as the “Impeach Obama” websites that started to appear around May 2008.
I bring this up because I had another one of those unfortunate and distressing conversations with him about the current state of our politics and our world in general, and while we agree that it’s distressing and precarious we obviously don’t agree on why, or on who’s responsible for it. “It’s both sides,” he insists. We’re all screwed, no one and nothing can be trusted anymore, the People In Power™ are going to do whatever they want anyway, so it doesn’t matter who you vote for, or who wins the next election.
As I’ve written many times before, there are two things I always notice about anyone who insists to me that “it’s both sides”; that the distressing nature of our politics and the precarious position we are all in is the fault of, or is because of, Both Sides®:
My colleague continues to vehemently deny that he is a racist, a white supremacist, an antisemite, or a Nazi, even as I remind him that he supports, has stood up to be counted and has aligned himself with racists, white supremacists, antisemites, and Nazis, has voted for and intends to vote again for a man who is openly racist, a committed white supremacist, a vicious antisemite, and a Nazi, not to mention a vulgar, narcissistic, humorless, demented gangster, and actually said out loud in the office during the week that Tucker Carlson was going on about Great Replacement Theory and America First that “I think Tucker Carlson has been right on lately.” I have to constantly remind this person that he has the luxury of believing that elections don’t matter — and the luxury of supporting and voting for Nazis while denying that he supports or agrees with any of what the people he votes for actually, explicitly stand for — because as a straight cis White Christian man he checks all the right boxes, whereas I, my family, my friends and loved ones, don’t. The name of Martin Niemöller comes up a lot in these conversations.
Anyway, to make a long diary short, two things from this conversation stood out to me. First, he tried to “gotcha” me by asking if I thought that Republican efforts to prosecute Hunter Biden are “politically motivated,” then whether the prosecutions of his beloved Führer are “politically motivated,” to try to get me to say yes to the former and no to the latter so that he could then say, in essence, that “you can’t say” that the latter isn’t if the former is. This was obviously yet another both-sides-use-shovels false equivalence, and I had to remind my colleague that even if the prosecution of his beloved Führer is “politically motivated” that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, or unfair, or improper, or most importantly, that he’s not guilty, or that he shouldn’t be held accountable for his malfeasance. Indeed, it’s “politically motivated” in the sense that his own political cohort would let him get away with it, leaving his political opposition to consider whether to enforce the law.
The other one was something I’ve also heard before in this and other contexts; the “oh, come on, you know” method of false equivalence.
I mentioned the fact that his beloved Führer is constantly whining and complaining to anyone who will listen, on his Truth Social site and in front of courthouses and courtrooms and in any other forum available to him, about how unfair everything is and about how badly he’s being treated and how everyone is persecuting him for no reason when he’s done nothing wrong because they’re just very bad, very biased, very sick people who hate Trump. My colleague said, “Well, Biden’s doing the same thing.” Which, of course, he isn’t. Not once, not in a speech or a tweet or an interview or a press release or a public appearance; not one single time since he’s been President, not during the last campaign; not about himself, not about Hunter; never. When I said that, and asked him to cite an example, his response was, “Oh, come on, you know he must be...”
I don’t think there is any escape from this, or any cure for this.
Even smart, generally well-meaning people who invest themselves that deeply into supporting and being part of a cult that is as self-evidently awful, authoritarian, ignorant, and dangerous as MAGA and the Orangeführer, to the point where they have to just make stuff up in their heads and imagine that the things they imagine are real in order to convince themselves that Both Sides® Are Just As Bad™ so it doesn’t matter who wins, so they can go on supporting and being part of the Nazi cult without letting conscience get in the way, probably can’t be cured. At least, not until the last line of Niemöller’s poem.