ReasonAs America settles in for some prevent defense against ever-advancing authoritarianism at home, it is potentially useful to examine the categories of apologetics for the advanced authoritarian who just expired 90 miles away. Since bad political argumentation is fungible across ideological and partisan lines, chances are versions of these tacks will be deployed in service of hand-wavery about our current and future caudillos, as they certainly have been in the past.

Category 1: Trudeautastic euphemism. Amply covered in this space by Anthony Fisher and Nick Gillespie, this is the practice of cramming into a brief anodyne phrase one’s entire acknowledgment that just maybe there might be legitimate objections to a murderous dictator who impoverished his country and banned the Beatles while advocating first-strike nuclear attacks on the United States and throwing gays into camps. See, for example, the phrase “A controversial figure for sure,” in this glowing tribute from Peter Schwab, author of Cuba: Confronting the U.S. Embargo.

Category 2: The last gasp of Whataboutism. Or, “the enemy of the target of my domestic criticism is my ‘controversial figure.'”