Megan McArdle muses on why things go farther than anyone expects
"Trump is no great moral theorist, but he does have a certain cunning about human behavior, enough, possibly to foresee that the Great Statucide would proceed by what conservative writer Rod Dreher has dubbed “the Law of Merited Impossibility”: Conservatives warning about the dire consequences of some social change are dismissed as hysterical cranks - and then, when exactly what they predicted eventually comes to pass, denounced as bigots for opposing the new order. Implicit in Dreher’s law is an intermediate phase in which a large number of people sit uncomfortably silent as the radicals take the moderate majority’s well-intentioned efforts further than they ever dreamed.
"If you had told me 10 years ago that same-sex marriage meant Christian bakers being legally required to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, I, or any supporter of marriage equality, would have dismissed this as conservative propaganda, too silly to even bother refuting. Probably someone did tell me that, at some point; probably I laughed and said, “Come on.”
"Then, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled, activists began declaring that of course those bakers had to bake those cakes. Privately, one heard from a lot of same-sex marriage advocates who thought this went too far. But publicly, they found other things to talk about. And so the default position on the left became exactly the sort of thing that everyone had declared would never happen.
"What Trump understood, and his critics perhaps didn’t, was that you cannot credibly declare that some revolution in social affairs has a natural stopping point unless you personally commit to stopping it when it goes too far. It’s not enough to say that very clear distinctions can be drawn between allowing gays to marry and forcing people to cater weddings that conflict with their religious beliefs; between the father of our country and the traitor who led a rebel army in defense of slavocracy. When the moment arrives, you have to actually draw them.
"If you don’t, you will cede issue after issue to the radicals. And if uou make those tacit concessions again and again and again, then however privately you may rue it, you will nonetheless end up with something very different from your idealistic vision. Something that looks like ... well, like the Republicans who quietly ceded their party and their conscience to Trump, one outrage at a time."
"If you had told me 10 years ago that same-sex marriage meant Christian bakers being legally required to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, I, or any supporter of marriage equality, would have dismissed this as conservative propaganda, too silly to even bother refuting. Probably someone did tell me that, at some point; probably I laughed and said, “Come on.”
"Then, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled, activists began declaring that of course those bakers had to bake those cakes. Privately, one heard from a lot of same-sex marriage advocates who thought this went too far. But publicly, they found other things to talk about. And so the default position on the left became exactly the sort of thing that everyone had declared would never happen.
"What Trump understood, and his critics perhaps didn’t, was that you cannot credibly declare that some revolution in social affairs has a natural stopping point unless you personally commit to stopping it when it goes too far. It’s not enough to say that very clear distinctions can be drawn between allowing gays to marry and forcing people to cater weddings that conflict with their religious beliefs; between the father of our country and the traitor who led a rebel army in defense of slavocracy. When the moment arrives, you have to actually draw them.
"If you don’t, you will cede issue after issue to the radicals. And if uou make those tacit concessions again and again and again, then however privately you may rue it, you will nonetheless end up with something very different from your idealistic vision. Something that looks like ... well, like the Republicans who quietly ceded their party and their conscience to Trump, one outrage at a time."