THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Former President Donald Trump recently called for the "termination" of the Constitution:

Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.

This is just the latest in a long line of reprehensible norm-breaking statements and actions by Trump. Just within the last few weeks, he also had a congenial meeting with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and anti-Semite Kanye West, and called for instituting the death penalty for drug dealers. Even if you support the War on Drugs (which I do not), this would be barbarically excessive punishment.

The usual excuse for such behavior by Trump is to claim it's all just words and/or that he doesn't really mean it. If nothing else, Trump's effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the resulting attack on the Capitol should give the lie to the notion that he doesn't really mean what he says, and that his abhorrent statements won't lead to action. He and his most committed supporters are more than happy to undermine the Constitution if it gets in their way.

But even when Trump's awful ideas cannot or do not lead to immediate action, they can still cause longterm harm by normalizing the previously unthinkable. In 1993, Senator and former Harvard Prof. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a famous article entitled "Defining Deviancy Down," in which he argued that (mostly) left-wing tolerance for various forms of criminal behavior and social pathology can increase crime and disorder over time, by making such actions more socially acceptable. For years, conservatives loved to cite this article as a warning against excessively permissive liberal attitudes towards criminality. While I don't agree with everything in Moynihan's analysis, the dynamic he identified is a genuine problem. At least on some issues, conservatives who cited it had a valid point.

Much the same point applies to Trump's deviations from constitutional and political norms.

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