The Wolf vs The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Which one should we fear the most at this political moment?
One common refrain we’ve heard many times over the last several years of the Trump/MAGA era goes something like this: “This politician is worse than Trump, because he’s much smarter and sneakier. He’ll overthrow our country quietly without us even knowing”.
I mindlessly agreed with this for years, as the logic really made a lot of sense. It does seem like we should fear the quiet devil, the one who isn’t so obvious about their intentions, as they will slip past us while we are sleeping and take down our institutions one by one via technical legal arguments that tend to not generate sensational headlines which therefore gives an air of respectability to the process. Before we realize it, a silent coup will have been staged and we’ll wake up and realize that democracy as we have known and loved it is gone.
I do think there’s some truth to this. It is unsettling that there are concepts that defy our nation’s traditional sense of self being given legitimacy on technical grounds. The fact that people are even trying to do this is frightening, even as their efforts often get dismissed.
But I don’t believe anymore that I should be more scared of this than the full-throated demagogue. Hasn't there been enough evidence over the last 5-7 years that a loud, obnoxious, self-aggrandizing wannabe authoritarian is actually more than capable of tearing down the institutions that are supposed to restrain him? Have we ever seen anything more effective in shaping and warping American political discourse than this?
We know that a whole political party is willing and able to be overcome with a loud, forceful movement brought to the surface essentially one man. I do understand that Trump is not necessarily the “problem”, just a symptom of it. But it does seem apparent that he brought the “problem” front and center, normalized it, and took advantage of it for all it’s worth. Only a barbaric narcissist would be willing to act the way he has acted, and assume that he would just be able to brush it off and move on to the next norm to demolish. For him, he doesn't even seem to know he’s demolishing norms, it’s just his standard operating procedure.
The polite extremist is polite for a reason. Being polite means there is some acknowledgement of societal norms. This does not excuse the politics or ideologies of the polite person, but the polite person is probably going to remain polite. They will be less likely to incite violence or make large swaths of the population question everything they know or assume about the social fabric of American society.
Who, other than a proud and public shameless demagogue, would do the following:
Find, at all costs, loyal henchmen to do whatever it took to make legal arguments that were unsound and unprecedented in order to forgo the rules and accepted traditional methods of widely known administrative procedures, such as elections?
Publicly call out and insult those who do not follow his lead to his followers with vitriolic language obviously engineered to incite contempt and even violence?
When faced with indictments or public evidence of illegal or immoral behavior, publicly explain away his questionable behavior and blame all the forces against him for the decay of society?
These are things that we haven’t seen in modern times by an American political leader, so it’s hard to know how to digest them and analyze them. But they create enough of a void due to confusion and hesitancy to be effective. The loud, boisterous one will break any and all rules publicly and privately to get what they want, and the more forceful they are the more likely they will create an environment of inertia and subsequent complicity.
The polite one will tend to accept the rules as they are and comply with decisions or recommendations made by judges or advisors if the issues at hand are important enough. How would a polite person bulldoze their way through an overthrowing of an election, for example? Just asking this question and imagining any other politician than Trump as the subject gives you the answer. They very likely wouldn’t, and even if they did, their personality alone would not generate near the fanfare required to shove society into another unheard-of dimension of thought and mind.
The polite one may argue their cases in court with vigorous rhetoric, but at the end of the day, if they lose the case, or the appeals process thereafter, they will tend to accept the outcome. And if they don’t, their ability to rile up enough of the population to support ignoring the judicial outcomes that makes enforcement of the law impossible is extremely limited.
In this way, regarding the basic foundations of our country and society, I fear the overt demagogue much more than the polite or polished extremist. I’ll take Mike Johnson over Jim Jordan or Ron DeSantis over Donald Trump. The benefit is that we know where Johnson and DeSantis stand, as they are public figures, and their history and public record will still be on the table for analysis and effective oppositional strategies.
With Trump or Jordan, we have people that also have those things, but don’t care or fear the consequences of bulldozing through anything and everything in their path, demolishing norms along the way. They are true trailblazers, but not in a positive way. Their nefarious innovations in modern politics will do more to shove us into a new undesirable reality for how American governance will work.
If their style wins, you can be assured that more like them will be on the way. And at some point, even if they technically remain in the minority, there may be too many of them to effectively contain.
But power can corrupt and nice people can have violent accomplices.