In less than three months since he’s taken office, Donald Trump has imposed huge taxes by decree, harassed lawyers and judges, brought federal agencies into chaos, had people abducted from the streets without charges or access to legal counsel, antagonized America’s allies, and hinted at several acts of military aggression and conquest. The economy is already suffering from his actions and is likely to get a lot worse. In spite of this, his approval rating stands at close to 50%. Nearly half of registered voters, according to polls, approve of what he’s doing. Why?

In the past, I’ve discussed a couple of reasons. News media have abandoned objectivity. It’s hard to get just the facts. A second reason is the miserable state of education in the US. Schools turn out students who seldom read and lack critical thinking skills.

Here I’d like to talk about a third factor: the attitudes of the left.

“The left” isn’t one thing. The terms “left” and “right” in politics indicate alliances or clusters of opinions, not coherent bodies of ideas. The term covers people ranging from welfare state advocates to totalitarian Communists. What I’m talking about here is a set of ideas where there’s a broadly held taboo against disagreement. If you challenge any part of them, you’re a “racist,” “Fascist,” or “Nazi,” or you suffer from a “phobia.” However, people who applaud the mass murder of Jews and draw swastikas don’t get called Nazis; they even get to accuse their critics of Nazism.

Expressing agreement with dogmas isn’t necessarily required, but anyone who disagrees with them had better keep quiet. For instance, someone who says that racial discrimination is bad regardless of which group is favored or has doubts about medical sex-change intervention for pre-teens risks being denounced in nasty terms.

A certain member of a certain SF convention concom once threatened that if I opposed her proposals for racial separatism, the rumor would somehow spread that I was “racist.” She admitted it would be false. I’m confident that no one else on the committee had any intention of spreading such rumors, and the discussion was private within the committee, so you can reach your own conclusions about how those rumors were going to spread. If her attempt ever got anywhere, I didn’t notice. I can’t say what people I ignore think of me.

As I noted in an earlier post, a certain Mastodon site prohibits even offering devil’s advocate arguments defending people accused of racism. It still does.

When you falsely call people Fascists, they won’t want to talk with you or work with you, even on matters where they agree with you. The real Fascists won’t talk with you either, but they don’t care if you call them that. People targeted with smears may respond in several ways. Some will just shut up and withdraw from the people who insult them. Others will respond with insults of their own. They’ll prefer to associate who treat them better, which can mean people who don’t feel insulted by those terms. Or they may stop saying anything, leaving the field to the worst people.

“Worst people” includes Trump and his gang. Insult him all you want, he’ll laugh and throw insults back at you. This makes him attractive to people who have been insulted, justly or not. Becoming a MAGA isn’t rational, but it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of people have chosen it. They feel more at home there.

The effects of isolation from saner voices are progressive. If Trump had told ICE to have masked agents abduct people in 2020, I doubt that his followers would have stood for it. It’s taken years of participation in an echo chamber to reach the point where his really horrendous acts and most blatant lies don’t cost him many followers.

There’s nothing wrong with telling people they’re wrong, even badly wrong. And there are some people who really deserve denunciation in the strongest terms. The problem comes when you spit on people for little cause. It might make you feel superior, but you don’t change people’s minds that way. You just antagonize them and make sure they won’t listen. Call people Fascists long enough, and eventually they may become Fascists.