In the field of political psychology — and the psychology of war in particular — there’s the concept of “the demonization of the enemy.” People have studied how — for example in World War I — propagandists made their enemies to be the incarnation of Evil. That’s what demonization is: making something that is merely imperfect into being something so terrible it must be destroyed. Or so dehumanized it can be destroyed without compunction.
Peace is served by helping opposing groups recognize each other’s humanity.
But sometimes, there needs to be a battle won before there can be peace. And in those situations, peace is not served when one side does the opposite of demonization. That means that something that is actually doing the work of “Evil” is not recognized as such.
That’s what the Democrats have been doing in their dealings with the Republican Party over the past generation. While the Republican Party darkened from what it had been as the Party of Poppy Bush, who wrote thank you notes and mostly played by the rules, to the Party that gave us Gingrich and then, after a veritable rogues gallery of sociopathic leaders, brought us now all the way to Trump, the Trump Party, and the Trump base.
This impeachment process creates a special opportunity to expose this Republican Party for what it is. Nothing “normal” about it, i.e. the way it acts like a demonic force that’s degrading pretty much everything in America it touches.
A special moment because: Given the clear picture of Trump’s serious offenses, any vote to acquit is a dark deed. It is a defense of the criminal and corrupt, of the indefensible, clearly for partisan purposes in the pursuit of power.
An accurate portrait of Trump as President is a picture with the demonic in it. But it’s bigger than Trump.
Over the past generation, a destructive force — that had always been part of the Republican Party, but had never before come to dominate completely— has taken over the Republican Party. That Party has waged ceaseless war against the Democrats, while the Democrats acted like the inter-party fight for power were still being fought according to traditional American rules.
The opposite of demonization: the Democrats continued to perceive as something not so terrible something that in fact was evil in a way that no major American Party had ever been. (A long list of the unprecedented things the Republicans have done— all of them making American democracy more broken.)
The Democrats never seem to recognize that they are up against a force on the right that is downright one of brokenness/destruction/evil. And now is the time to recognize it, and help the American people to see it. This is not a normal political battle: it is a last ditch effort to take power away from a force of brokenness that has gained an extraordinary amount of power in America in these times.
Now is the time to fight all-out. The impeachment is part of it. But it should be pared with an effort to expose what America’s “conservative” party has become.
