As the Hunter Biden gun trial nears its conclusion and we await sentencing for Donald Trump’s hush money trial, it’s worth pondering a counterfactual scenario: What if Democrats treated Hunter’s trial the same way Republicans treated Trump’s?
This is to say, what if Democrats insisted Hunter’s trial was rigged? What if they swore that this was a witch hunt designed to reach the president through his only living son?
Never mind that such an assertion would make zero sense. After all, Joe Biden is the President of the United States. In this capacity, it’s impossible to believe that his son is being persecuted by his own administration.
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This theory falls apart, however, when you consider that as president, Donald Trump claimed the “deep state” was persecuting him. Indeed, we are supposed to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump while he was president.
Rational or not, imagine if Biden and nearly every prominent Democrat and progressive pundit passionately embraced the notion that this is all part of a plot to steal the 2024 election from Joe Biden.
Would it work?
One could argue that Democrats are disadvantaged by fighting an asymmetric war, wherein they are bound to conventional weapons yet their Republican opponents can create alternate realities.
Democrats would presumably benefit from inventing their own exciting counter-narrative where they, for once, get to play the victims.
Alternatively, you could argue that Republicans had a first-mover advantage when it comes to attracting conspiracy theorists. By trying to fight fire with fire, Democrats would alienate the normies while simultaneously failing to attract the radicals.
Likewise, because the mainstream media (unlike Fox News and other right-wing outlets) still at least strive for some semblance of objectivity, Democrats would not enjoy the benefits of having a sort of unfettered Pravda-like echo chamber that Republicans now enjoy.
While we can debate the political efficacy of such a strategy, the bigger question is what would happen to America?
In my opinion, the reality-based world we inhabit cannot survive if the majority of Americans believe that everything that doesn’t go their way is rigged.
And while this thought experiment is not likely to play out with the Hunter Biden trial this year, something akin to this scenario is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
If Trump defeats Biden in November, it would not be illogical for Dems to conclude that the rules have changed, and that Joe Biden’s “nice guy” approach was always doomed.
If this happens, it’s easy to imagine a world where some young progressive running for president in 2028, co-opts Trump’s propaganda techniques.
In a sense, this would see Democrats reacting to Trump’s second victory the way Republicans reacted to Obama’s presidency (see the fetishization of Saul Alinsky tactics, the #war, and “At least he fights!” mentality we saw circa 2015 and 2016).
This is how escalation works. If you can’t beat ’em join ’em, right?
But where would this get us?
It is not unprecedented for a segment of one side of the political spectrum to eschew reality and embrace radicalism. In the 1960s and ’70s, for example, some on the political left embraced fringe political positions, conspiracy theories, and (in some cases) even resorted to violent acts.
This is sustainable so long as the radicals constitute a small minority of the population. This is sustainable only so long as the exciting revolutionaries are counterbalanced by boring “adults” who do the grunt work of keeping society afloat.
But what happens when we reach a tipping point where a majority of people on both sides of the political spectrum conclude that being a responsible “adult” is a sucker’s bet?
Imagine the fallout if both major parties started routinely making blatantly false assertions.
It has become a cliche for liberals to say that we need a healthy Republican Party because a functioning democracy requires two healthy parties.
While this may or may not be true, I’m reasonably sure it requires one.
Keep that thought in mind, as you watch Joe Biden say he would not pardon his own son, and then ponder what will happen if convicted felon Donald Trump still wins the election in November.
