In the wake of Donald Trump’s devastating win last week, Democrats have fallen back on an old habit and are now trying to coax better behavior out of Republicans. In his Rose Garden speech acknowledging the loss, President Joe Biden begged, “Something I hope we can do no matter who you voted for is see each other not as adversaries but as fellow Americans, bring down the temperature.” Striking a similar note in their statement, Barack and Michelle Obama asked people to “listen to each other,” adding that “progress requires us to extend good faith and grace—even to people with whom we deeply disagree.” There are no limits to the faith that modeling good behavior will cause Republicans to shape up, apparently.
You cannot turn down the temperature when one side keeps setting the furniture on fire.
Even prominent Trump supporters were making these “unity” and “peace” noises in the aftermath. Podcast host Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump, appeared not to understand the character of the man he sat with for a three-hour interview. “He’s got to unite people. He’s got to not attack the left, not attack everybody,” Rogan said of Trump, reminding listeners that he is uniquely incapable of learning from experience.
I don’t blame Democrats for Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss, but this rhetoric is frustrating. The underlying sentiment that people should debate in good faith sounds nice but is ultimately empty. Only liberals are interested in listening to this “tone it down” advice, but when your opposition is coming at you with the fury of a deranged chimpanzee, turning the other cheek only gets you killed. You cannot turn down the temperature when one side keeps setting the furniture on fire.
Part of the problem, of course, is that Trump is in charge, and he cannot help but be the worst. He’s always been hateful and erratic, and it’s clearly getting worse as he approaches 80 years old. But even if his newly chosen chief of staff Susie Wiles is able to convince Trump to spend the next four years golfing and leave the governing to her and JD Vance, we can expect the next four years to be the same stream of unhinged vitriol and lies aimed at immigrants, journalists, independent women, LGBTQ people, racial minorities or anyone else belonging to Trump’s “enemies within” category. That’s because MAGA is a fascist movement, and fascism needs to offer up a constant stream of imaginary “enemies” to their supporters, to keep them paranoid and enthralled.
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At the Republican National Convention in July, right after a gunman had failed to kill Trump, the candidate and his campaign were pretending he was a changed man who was now all about peace and, yep, “unity.” But it quickly became clear, listening to the speeches and talking to delegates, that their definition of “unity” mostly meant crushing everyone else under the boot. Crowds would burst into bloodthirsty “fight fight fight” chants at a moment’s notice. Delegates might start with high-minded rhetoric about coming together and getting along, but they would swiftly pivot to attacking people for perceived differences, usually with weird conspiracy theories. Hulk Hogan was probably the best-received speaker of the convention, and his speech was focused on how you’re not a real American unless you’re a Trump voter.
In interviews with dozens of delegates and other attendees, one of the most telling examples was our conversation with a Republican from New Jersey. He spoke a big game about wanting Americans to take “down the heat a little bit” and focus on our commonalities instead of differences. I then asked him why he was wearing a “Women for Trump” T-shirt. “I’m a cis-attracted trans lesbian,” he replied. “That’s how I identify.” He laughed, but my colleague and I sensed that he did have a moment of pause, realizing that he just proved to us how little he believed his own “unity” talk.
My favorite text regarding fascism is Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay. He really captures how its appeal lies in the permission it gives followers to shut off their brains and instead wallow in their worst impulses. There are a few features of fascism that intersect in what we witnessed at the RNC. First, there’s the fear of difference and the paranoid belief that those who are deemed “different” are plotting against the in-group. “The followers must feel besieged,” he wrote. The fascist leader must construct scary enemies for the followers to fear because the only way he achieves power is to promise he alone can eradicate the threat.
Conversations with Republican voters and speeches at the RNC made it clear that their idea of “unity” is conformity. That the obstacle to “unity” was all these liberated women and queer people and minorities and academics and artists who keep insisting on being different than what MAGA wants everyone to be. Implicit in many discussions about “unity” was a hope that all those liberals would shut up, bend the knee, go back into the closet, or whatever else it takes to hide or eradicate difference.
This attitude isn’t just immoral, but it shows they fail to understand how their leaders, especially Trump, manipulate them. Trump needs “enemies” that he is forever threatening to conquer. But he can’t actually conquer them, because if he ever achieved the alleged paradise of conformity he promises, his followers wouldn’t need him anymore. So there will always be a new made-up baddie that is supposedly threatening the good white straight Christians. As Eco noted, it’s a central paradox of fascism: “No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.”
That’s why Democrats lamely asking people to turn down the temperature won’t work, though it can, unfortunately, give cover to fascist leaders by falsely seeding hope they could be coaxed to see reason. Trump and other MAGA leaders want power, full stop. The way they get power is to keep millions of people spun up on outrageous lies about Haitians, trans people, Taylor Swift or whoever gets assigned the Bogeyman of the Day.
Worse, it is a subtle form of victim-blaming, as it implies that the targets of defamation can make it stop by responding with gentleness instead of anger. This fallacy was amply disproved by the “cat-eating Haitians” lie. The people who were harmed by this lie — the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — were too small and scared a group of people to respond. They largely kept their mouths shut or spoke only anonymously to reporters. Many of them literally hid in their houses for weeks, hoping it would all blow over. This quiet response did nothing to slow down the lies. That’s because it was never about them. They were just a useful punching bag for fascist leaders, who needed a hate object to dangle in front of their deluded supporters.
The only thing that will stop this is if enough people get sick of all the hate-mongering and stop rewarding those who do it with power. Harris was right to focus on the word “exhausting” when she described Trump’s firehose of vitriol. The hope was to get people to seriously ask if they are ready for another four years of endless paranoid bigotry. For whatever reason, the majority of voters decided they were okay with it. Or maybe, like Rogan, they are just deluded enough to think that Trump will shut up now that he got what he wanted. But it never ever works that way.
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