I do think the only basis for Trump resistance has to be a realistic assessment of who he is and what he's doing at any given time. The anti-Trump media and social media has been, overall, really detached from reality. One thing is that we've reached the point where people really believe the point of communication is not to say the truth, but to manipulate people's minds. But even on that theory the thing has been ridiculous.
Really, on Twitter, and live, people routinely do things like 'sociopathic white suprematist.' People sincerely purport to be diagnosing him as insane. There is no reason to think that at all. And then the way people react makes a stray anti-Streep Tweet seem equivalent to building a wall or something. Really, just tweeting loosely is enough to convince David Brooks or Frank Bruni or Radley Balko or Stephen Pinker that you are literally insane. Nor is there any plausible reason for 'white supremacism,' alright? It's obvious to a whole demographic that he's a white supremacist, but then they go to something published in Breitbart 5 years ago, or constructing elisions around the term 'nationalism.' The idea is not to make the most hyperbolic charge on the theory that it will hype up the resistance. The point has to be to say something true, or else no one should listen to you at all.
Just one example: this shipload of hysterical abuse by nicholas bourbaki, tweeted by pinker and others. I'm all like: christ, ever heard of ad hominem? to which the reply all around was: no this is a sober assessment of the man's personality: "a corrupt, emotionally unstable demagogue and white nationalist fellow-traveler." (wait, fellow-traveller?: maybe they don't know that's a mcarthyite strategy for guilt by association).
I've been in a number of Twitter exchanges in which people are ragging on Trump's IQ and his taste, and then claiming to be engaged in a sober statement of the facts. Very amazingly self-deluded. Now, the audience for all the extreme abuse is people who already agree; obviously, it's not intended to reach out to or convince anyone who is not already convinced. It is not going to help. And people who were representing their politics as reality-based and reason-oriented last week really sound like completely irrational fanatics, all the time, and it comes in unanimous repetitive phrases: one repeats them as emblems of membership. It is as or more partisan, and just as rigidly and irrationally partisan, as the tea party, or Republicans in Congress with regard to Obama, etc.
Each in its own way, the Trump and anti-Trump rhetoric is focused extremely on exclusion, on separating the right sort of people from the wrong sort. Definitely is an elitism/anti-elitism flavor. But vilifying the 'white working class' or condemning all concerns as boiling down to racism: those things will just make this whole 'two nations' thing worse and worse.
