If you argue that Republican primary voters are making a terrible mistake in renominating Donald Trump for president, you are immediately met with two arguments. One is that any criticism of the choice of Trump is somehow condescending, patronizing, an insult to Trump’s supporters, or a sign that you “don’t get it.” A slightly more sophisticated version of this argument is that the primary voters are right by definition, because anybody who would lose the primary could not win a general election.

Both of these arguments are ridiculous. Neither of them stands up to scrutiny.

First, we live in a liberal democracy, not an absolute monarchy or a caudillo dictatorship. Nobody is above criticism — not the voters, and certainly not our political leaders. I confess that there are few things that infuriate me more than being told to shut up for some reason other than being wrong. Like Noah, I recognize this tactic for what it is: emotional blackmail aimed at shutting people up without actually persuading them that the opinion that was silenced was wrong, with a heaping side order of trying to shift responsibility for bad candidate choices from the people making the choices to the people who noticed that the choices were bad ones. Like Charlie, I recognize in this sort of thing the exact same instinct that we rightly deplore when it comes from the woke Left.

Second, it’s outrageously hypocritical for Trump supporters in particular to play this game. If you listen to Trump or other prominent MAGA spokespeople — politicians, pundits, etc. — you will hear from them a steady stream of invective against all manner of other Republican politicians. Ron DeSantis? Nikki Haley? Mitch McConnell? George W. Bush? Mitt Romney? John McCain? You will hear specific complaints that the party went in the wrong direction and personally betrayed them by nominating Romney, McCain, the Bushes, and Bob Dole. But guess what: All of those people won their primaries, too. You can’t have it both ways: If the people who nominated Trump are beyond criticism, then the nomination of all those other people is also beyond criticism.

Third, it’s false. With perhaps the exception of a few of the most genuinely awful public spokespeople, I have nothing against Trump supporters other than their tendency to support the wrong politicians. I’m fine with having them in our coalition. I can live with them having a seat at the table when that coalition’s decisions are made, although it would be better if more of them acknowledged that one faction shouldn’t have the only seat. Not every disagreement needs to be taken as a personal insult. We can agree to politically disagree with other Republican voters just as we can agree to politically disagree with Democratic voters.

Fourth, it’s terrible political analysis. By definition, half of all major-party political nominees lose their elections. Some of them are fine candidates who just draw a bad situation or a tough opponent, but that’s a lot of losers to exempt from all criticism. A party that rules out of bounds the very idea of learning from its mistakes will continue to repeat them. More specifically, we’ve all seen plenty of examples of losing primary candidates who come back to win the primary later, and many of those go on to win the general election. At the presidential level, Joe Biden, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all lost in the primaries before becoming president, and both Biden and Reagan lost to candidates who lost the general election. Barack Obama won a Senate race four years after having lost a safe-seat House primary. Even acknowledging that Reagan made some adjustments and ran in a more favorable environment, it’s pretty hard to look at his campaigns in 1980 and 1984 and deny that Republicans made a mistake in picking Gerald Ford over Reagan in 1976. We can respect the collective wisdom of voters as a general rule without pretending that they never make a bad choice.

The defining feature of pro-Trump commentary is that it never accepts that Trump can err or lose. If he or someone he hired, recruited, or endorsed is defeated in an election, it was stolen, or they were sabotaged. The belief that Trump is the right candidate and the right party leader can never be put to a test that it might fail. But just because people say it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to believe it.