Dahlia Lithwick is correct. Here is a taste of her Slate piece: “The Price of No Consequences for Trump”:
I don’t have any prescription for how to reason with a radicalized GOP, a post-truth electorate, or a conspiracy-addled former president, nor do I harbor any illusions that tackling the problems of minority rule, racial violence, and weaponized law enforcement head on will allay the problems of creeping illiberalism. But gritting your way through it by pretending it’s not happened or happening will continue to open a bigger and bigger chasm between what we know to be true and what we want to believe. With all due respect to those who would like to continue to lecture us about the mathematically correct ratio of concern to destabilizing danger, we’ve actually done a fairly decent job of understanding that ratio intuitively all along. This is a profoundly dangerous moment, and being told to get over it is just as jarring when it comes from inside the guardrails of democracy as it was when it came from the smirking authoritarians that have been replaced. That’s why it doesn’t feel any better. If anything, gaslighting about ongoing threats to democracy might be even scarier when it comes from the very people who were supposed to protect us.
Read the entire piece here.
