Melinda Henneberger

I keep reading about how important it is to buck the "normalization" of not only drama king Donald Trump but also of theatergoer Mike Pence. Except that Pence is normal — a normal, very conservative Republican politician.

Good liberals have a bunch of well-known policy disagreements with the president-elect, who has promised to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, gut environmental regulations and “empower law-abiding gun owners to defend themselves.”

They have a few additional disagreements with Pence, who doesn’t share Trump’s view that same-sex marriage is settled law and has a far longer, much clearer record of opposing abortion rights. On just about every issue, in fact, Pence is a lot more reliably righty than his boss-to-be. Yet he worries me a lot less.

It's not that I’m more apt to agree with him — actually, with Trump so hard to pin down, the reverse is true. No, it's because I don’t wonder whether the governor of Indiana intends to ignore the Constitution, or undermine our democratic institutions under cover of chaos, or set us against one another in the streets.

Trump supporters who think all opposition to their man is partisan are mistaken. And so are those Trump critics who make no distinction between the usual policy differences that are bound to chafe after you lose an election, and the potential threats to our democracy that are not usual at all.

If Trump and his party privatized Medicare, for instance, that would be a mistake in my view, but one that could be remedied as soon as voters insisted on it. But if he got us to shrug as he suppressed free speech, or to look away as devout American Muslim women grew fearful about freely practicing their religion by wearing the hijab, or to answer the specter of Muslim internment camps with indifference, then we would have lost something even more precious and harder to win back than an entitlement that has been protecting older Americans for half a century. Instead of reasserting ourselves, we would have forgotten the very values that do make America great.

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Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator whose words of wisdom Trump retweeted during his campaign, was utterly unlike our president-elect in any number of ways. The son of a blacksmith and ardent socialist, Mussolini was both an intellectual who translated Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and a brawler who was twice suspended from the equivalent of our elementary school for stabbing his classmates. He was an ideologue and a journalist, a man who strongly opposed World War I before just as strongly arguing for Italy’s involvement in it, and finally fighting in it himself. A poet as well as a bully, he believed in the power of both words and fists.

But Il Duce and The Donald also have enough in common that we can’t afford to ignore the not-so-distant history of a democratically elected leader who became a totalitarian, who swung from left to right, who preached that the greatness of ancient Rome needed to be restored and celebrated, and who believed, as Giuseppe Prezzolini wrote in his book Old and New Nationalism, that there are two classes of people in the world — the dominated and the dominators. He was obsessed with the size of Italy’s territory and dreamed of a new Roman Empire.

His fascist squads of Black Shirts supposedly only imposed law and order but did far more violence than those they suppressed. The fact that he was not himself anti-Semitic, or that one of his favorite mistresses was Jewish, cannot have been any consolation to the Jews who, as Mussolini came under Hitler’s influence, were stripped of their Italian citizenship in 1938.

According to Jasper Ridley’s excellent biography Mussolini, what we would today call his flip-flops are best explained by the fact that he wanted more than anything to win, and to be on the side that succeeded, even if in 1940 he guessed incorrectly that virile Germany would surely prevail over sterile and spent France and Britain.

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So when Trump says he wants to weaken the freedom of the press, or make Muslims register, or jail or deny citizenship to dissenters — whose right to burn flags is clearly protected speech under the First Amendment — I don’t see those as distractions but as alarm bells, as is the enthusiasm he excites among the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other haters.

A worried Jewish friend of mine, whose family escaped the Holocaust, says he finds some comfort in the fact that he has Israeli as well as U.S. citizenship, and can move there if the threatened Muslim registry, for instance, ever becomes a reality. But what I find most reassuring is the very thing that many liberals find most disconcerting: Though I may not agree much with the very conservative constitutionalists Trump has promised to nominate to the Supreme Court, I do dare to believe that not one of them would uphold any law denying us the freedoms that I hope I’m dead wrong to fear losing.

Melinda Henneberger, a political writer and a visiting fellow at Catholic University of America's Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow her on Twitter @MelindaDC.

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