I hadn’t heard of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, before this past weekend. But like many people, I’ve been struck by the pivot he’s signaled in how the Democrats, and the Left more generally, should talk about Donald Trump.

Asked by Jake Tapper why he insists on calling Trump “weird” rather than an “existential threat to democracy,” which is how most Democrats and progressives have been describing Trump since 2016, Walz said:

It gives him [Trump] way too much power. Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks, whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just give him way too much credit. When you just ratchet down some of the scariness and just name it what it is. . . . That is weird behavior. I don’t think you call it anything else.

At a rally in St Paul, Walz was even more pointed:

“The fascists depend on fear . . . but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”

Damn right. I hope other Democrats — and with them, the army of commentators inside and outside of the media and academia — follow suit.

I’ve written quite a bit about why I think the model of fascism or authoritarianism is not the right way to think about the Republicans or the Right more generally today. I won’t rehearse those arguments I’ve made again here.

But I’ve also made a different argument, since the rise of Trump, about why I think the Left’s tone of moral and political alarm is so unhelpful to opposing Trump. Walz makes the case in 2024 pithily; I made it, back in December 2016, in Jacobin, at greater length.

Here’s what I said then.

In the last few days, I’ve gotten a lot of emails and comments asking me why I seem, in my Facebook posts and tweets, to downplay the threat of Trump. Why I resist the comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, why I emphasize the continuities between Trump and previous Republicans, why I insist on attending to the fractures and cleavages within his coalition.

Now, of course, nothing I say is meant to downplay the threat at all; it’s all designed to get us to see it more clearly (clearly, of course, by my lights), and while I don’t see my posts or tweets primarily or even secondarily as organizing tools, I’d like to think they give us some potential sense of leverage over the situation. But let me not get too fancy or fussy in my response; let me simply take this criticism head on.

There are a lot of academic, intellectual, and scholarly reasons I could cite for why I say what I say about Trump, and you probably know them all, and they’re all relevant and important. But there is, I recognize, something deeper going on for me. And that is that I am fundamentally allergic to the politics of fear. That term is complicated (I explore it a lot in my first book), so forgive the very truncated, simple version I’m about to give here.

The politics of fear doesn’t mean a politics that points to or invokes or even relies on threats, real or false. It doesn’t mean a politics that is emotive (what politics isn’t?) or paranoid. It means something quite different: a politics that is grounded on fear, that takes inspiration and meaning from fear, that sees in fear a wealth of experience and a layer of profundity that cannot be found in other experiences (experiences that are more humdrum, that are more indebted to Enlightenment principles of reason and progress, that put more emphasis on the amenability of politics and culture to intervention and change), a politics that sees in Trump the revelation of some deep truth about who we are, as political agents, as people, as a people.

I cannot tell you how much I loathe this kind of politics. At a very deep and personal level. I loathe its operatic-ness, the way it performs concern and care when all it really is about is narcissism and a desperate desire for a fix. I loathe its false sense of depth and profundity. I loathe its belligerent confidence that it, and only it, understands the true awfulness of the world. I loathe the sense of exhilaration and enthusiasm it derives from being in touch with this awfulness, the more onerous citizenship, to borrow a phrase from Susan Sontag, it constructs on the basis of this experience.

And so if I have a weakness or a blind spot — and I genuinely see how it can be a blind spot — it’s to political discussions and mobilizations that repeat this kind of politics, even when they come from the Left. I say it’s a weakness or a blind spot because in the course of trying to avoid this kind of politics, I may wind up, inadvertently, giving the impression that something is not as dangerous as it is. I may wind up overstating its familiarity and intelligibility. While I still refuse to believe that pointing out the precedents for a current danger somehow diminishes that danger, I know my [Edmund] Burke well enough to know that when we pare back the exoticism, novelty, and strangeness of a thing, when we try to make it more proportionate to our understanding, it can have the accompanying effect (and affect) of making that thing seem less dangerous.

In any event, among the many reasons the election of Trump has so depressed me, and why I’ve not commented much since the election and have mostly stayed off social media, is that it has given license to the politics of fear on the Left. Particularly on social media. Once again, we have that sense that we are face-to-face with some deep, dark truth of the republic. Once again, we have that sense that those of us who insist the horribles of the world should not and cannot have the last word, are somehow naifs, with our silly faith in the Enlightenment, in politics, in the possibility that we can change these things, that politics can be about something else, something better. I find that sensibility deeply conservative (not in my sense of the word but in the more conventional sense), and I resist it with every fiber of my being.

I still stand by this argument. And I’m happy to see smart pols, like Walz and others, seeing and saying the same thing now.