Decline is relative

"Anti-Trump movement in decline" is how one local paper headlines David Brooks's latest column. That looks counterfactual given recent Democratic successes at the polls and the media frenzy over the Fire and Fury book, but Brooks is actually writing about what he perceives as the opposition's intellectual decline. "It seems to be settling into a smug, fairy-tale version of reality that filters out discordant information," he writes, "The movement also suffers from lowbrowism  [which] ignores normal journalistic or intellectual standards [that] makes you think and notice less." Brooks sees this as a regrettable but inevitable development, since "In ever war, nations come to resemble their enemies." That's a new one that our nonagenarian "Greatest Generation" survivors might be interested to hear, but the observation probably is more true for civil wars and milder levels of factional strife. My problem with Brooks's assertion of decline is that it makes him look very slow on the uptake. The anti-Trump movement on the street and social-media levels has been like this all along. It has done little other than demonize and caricature Trump and his movement in "fairy-tale" fashion. What Brooks seems to be missing now, to provoke his decline claim, is the moderating  presence of anti-Trump Republicans like himself, now that the GOP has gotten what they wanted from Trump: tax cuts and regulatory rollback. There's still a lot of anti-Trump opinion among conservative columnists, but with most of the leading anti-Trump elected officials preparing to leave office, a "deplorable" lowbrow left has come to define the opposition in Brooks's eyes. This is too "insular" an opposition for him, unfamiliar or simply unwilling to communicate reasonably with anyone who supports Trump. Brooks still holds out hope that a revival of civility resulting from some escape from insualrity on all sides can reverse the overall decline in political discourse, but I don't yet see what can bring that about, so long as all sides demand respect as the precondition of civility while each equates respect with surrender. Trumpism and its opposite continue to be driven by the perception that one group refuses to respect the other. Mutual respect will require some compromise, as civility always does, but few see so far what might make that worth their while. We probably have more decline to endure before that changes.