Matthew Karp in Sidecar:
The US political world can today be divided not only between left and right, but along another axis: Trump maximalists and Trump minimalists. Maximalists are inclined to view Trump as an agent or conduit of a sudden historical rupture, whether the transformation of the party system, the destruction of American democracy or the implosion of the liberal world order. Minimalists see Trump not as a fundamental break but rather as a lurid symbol of longer-running developments, or a symptom of crises that lie elsewhere – a black hole detracting attention from real political problems.
This is not a cleanly partisan or ideological distinction, which is one of the things that makes it interesting. There are many familiar liberal maximalists, of course – some of them have recently decamped to Canada in fear of or in protest at the tyrannical regime; and there are conservative maximalists too, mostly right-leaning newspaper columnists who have mobilized few votes but left an outsize impact on the texture and tenor of anti-Trump politics. Despite some disagreement, liberal and conservative maximalists unite in seeing the President himself as the chief and often the only issue in national politics; both have also leapt to enlist in the ‘fascism wars’, often brandishing the F-word as a cudgel to discipline the left at elections, and elsewhere.
Yet there is also a countervailing minimalism of the centre.
More here.
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