Andrew Sullivan: “I despise what too much of the left has become. I worry about the far left’s contempt for liberal democracy and their view of the American experiment as a form of racist oppression which can only be righted by reverse racist oppression. And I’m dismayed by the liberal denial and appeasement of these deeply illiberal trends.”

“But it’s also vital to understand that the most powerful enabler of this left extremism has been Trump himself. He has delegitimized capitalism by his cronyism, corruption, and indifference to dangerously high levels of inequality. He has tainted conservatism indelibly as riddled with racism, xenophobia, paranoia, misogyny, and derangement. Every hoary stereotype leveled against the right for decades has been given credence by the GOP’s support for this monster of a human being. If moderates have any chance of defanging the snake of wokeness, and its attempt to deconstruct our Enlightenment inheritance, we must begin with removing the cancer of Trump from the body politic. It is not an ordinary cancer. It is metastasizing across the republic and spreading to the lifeblood of our democracy itself. Removing it will not be enough. But not removing it is democratic death. Let us count the ways of his destructiveness. He has turned the Department of Justice into a politicized machine dedicated to attacking his political opponents, delegitimizing the most essential rampart of any democratic system: the rule of law. He has perverted US foreign policy for his own domestic political objectives, and been impeached for it. He has tried and largely succeeded in rendering his own administration immune to Congressional oversight and legal scrutiny, by reckless brinksmanship in the courts, and contempt for separation of powers. He has grotesquely done all he can to enrich himself, his kleptocratic family and his talent-free cronies at the public’s expense.”