The Perils of Pursuing Justice (and Why We Have to Do It Anyway)

Don’t be afraid of making the Trumpies mad.

One of the chief tactics of terrorist groups is to create conditions after the fact to justify their atrocities.

Terrorists routinely insist that their foes are brutal oppressors who are deserving of the violence visited upon them, and can be defeated by no other means. They then provoke those foes — typically sovereign states — with horrific acts like bombings and assassinations and hijackings, hoping, in part, for a draconian overreaction in response — mass arrests, torture, abrogation of civil liberties, etc — which the terrorists then point to as proof of their original allegation.

This kind of carefully engineered self-fulfilling prophecy is very much what the Republican Party is doing when it comes to the effort to hold Donald Trump and his enablers (which is to say, the GOP itself) accountable for its myriad sins.

For decades, long pre-dating the rise of the Orange One, conservative politicians have spoken to their constituents in apocalyptic terms, fearmongering that liberals — “socialists!” — intend to destroy everything real ‘Mericans hold dear. In the Trump era, Fox, Newsmax, OANN, and their fellow travelers kept up this steady drumbeat of paranoia, arguing to their audiences that the “Deep State” was…