Listening to the right describe American reality today is a little like overhearing a mid-level military commander preparing a battalion for an upcoming fight to the death with a ruthless enemy: The stakes are enormous. The other side is incredibly powerful. They seek nothing less than to destroy us, and they’ll succeed if we don’t destroy them first. Our own self-preservation requires nothing short of total victory — by any means possible.

This venom spews forth from our car radios, primetime cable news broadcasts, partisan websites, and the mouths of elected officials, setting a tawdry, unedifying tone for our public life. We’ve grown so accustomed to the hyperbole that it barely makes an impression.

Yet, as Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell have frequently suggested on their consistently excellent podcast about the American right, “Know Your Enemy,” we need to pay attention to such talk and learn to interrogate it. More specifically, we need to confront it with a crucially important question:

What exactly is the American right giving itself permission to do?

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