Watching Donald Trump piss on the Constitution is sadistic fun for all of MAGA, but there’s a palpable difference between Trump loyalists who make no bones about it and those who evince some awareness that they’ve chosen an evil course.
The former, represented by neo-Nazi internet trolls and the vice president of the United States (who follows many of them online) will happily come out and say: this is happening because we hate you. They lie about events, then cite those lies to justify abuses.
The latter—the ones with at least some reach outside far-right precincts—tend to have a record that can be plumbed, or principles they once claimed to hold. They’re aware and self-conscious of their hypocrisies, and cover their shame by pleading insanity. We couldn’t help it. We were radicalized. Look what you made us do.
They specifically pass the buck to Barack Obama, who (they complain) promised them a post-racial America, but then ̶c̶o̶n̶t̶i̶n̶u̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ didn’t blind himself to all race-based disparities or race-related controversies.
Ben Shapiro recently cited three canonical grievances:
In 2009, Obama mused that the white Massachusetts police officer who wrongfully arrested the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. may have “acted stupidly.” Shapiro and the rest of the right wing convulsed, and Obama tried to placate them by inviting Gates and the cop to the White House for a “beer summit.”
In 2012, a Florida vigilante killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin. Obama infuriated the right by letting on that this kind of violence, driven by racist suspicion of black youth, haunts him. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Rightists (who already hated Obama) have never forgiven him.
In 2014, Obama partially attributed violence in Ferguson, MO, to “a deep distrust…between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of [which] is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.”
For these sins, more than a decade old, the left must pay. “Obama was a major factor in creating a much more racist and much more dangerous America,” Newt Gingrich said just this week.
“We haven’t felt like ourselves since Barack Obama,” Megyn Kelly admitted in September. “He was such a slick snake. This affable guy wearing good suits and looked the part and sounded the part and dressed the part. But so divisive in his messaging.”
It has always been fashionable on the left, and understandably so, to mock this reasoning. But if you lived through the era, you also know it doesn’t match the timeline. It’s not as though things were hunky-dory before the beer summit.
If you want a truer Rosetta Stone, to really understand how and why the right’s radicalization accelerated in the era, you’ll do better mining the archives of Breitbart News and remembering the mantra of its founding editor, Andrew Breitbart: “Politics is downstream from culture.” This was, in hindsight, an admission that if rightists ever gained control of the U.S. government, they would use it to crush dissent.
Outside the far right, the Breitbart Doctrine was understood and blithely dismissed as a corrective to “it’s the economy, stupid”-style conventional wisdom that politics is downstream from material concerns1. Inside the GOP, though, it became a kind of codephrase for a new battle plan. Right-wing elites and influencers repeated it among themselves ad nauseam, until it totalized them.
WHOSE GORE GETS FOX’D
The effect has been transformative. It was in this period that Republican contempt for mainstream American culture stopped being competitive, and became purgatory.
Movement conservatism has always behaved, and even conceived of itself, as an invasive force. Like any movement, its goal is to increase its own political clout; unlike most movements, the right operates in machine-like fashion to dismantle all competitors to authority and obstacles to power.
In its earlier days, before it commandeered the GOP, movement conservatism’s engagement with the liberal establishment was more indirect.
Right-wing money people poured billions of dollars into establishing a counterculture, in the hope of eventually achieving dominance. They created propaganda organs, while waging a parallel campaign to discredit mainstream media. They created right-wing think tanks, while preaching the evils of higher education. And if history had ended in 2008, it would still look a lot like institutional rivalry. Liberals can have their mainstream news, we have Fox. Activist judges have the law wrong, because, according to the Federalist Society, the Constitution makes our agenda obligatory. Our judges vs. your judges. Academics say greenhouse gas emissions will warm the planet, our experts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute say otherwise.
Climate change wasn’t the only inconvenient truth the movement sought to deny—it existed to deny all of them.
I was not a fan of the pre-Trump/pre-Breitbart right’s bent on cultural and political competition, particularly as it sought to “out-compete” authoritative sources of information. There is no right-wing alternative to the scientific method. There are no partisan interpretive processes that by coincidence are equally suited to discovering ground truths.
But in the movement’s zero-sum thinking, alternative facts could never suffice. If politics is downstream from culture, controlling the culture is paramount. It isn’t good enough to have ersatz expertise as a counterweight to science. The scientists must be destroyed. Fox News and talk radio can’t be mere alternatives to mainstream news, the very idea of journalism as a neutral vocation had to be extinguished. Reporters and outlets entrapped and smeared. Breitbart, James O’Keefe, and sundry others rose to the challenge; Shapiro, Kelly, and Gingrich applauded.
The start-up phase was over, and it was on to eradication.
CULTURE, CANCELED
The irony is that through technological innovation, the right has achieved something close to cultural parity without having to rig the playing field or destroy everything in its path. For every old-school celebrity icon whose progressivism derives from artistic collaboration and labor, there now 10 or 20 or 100 influencers whose glorification serves the purpose of their personal enrichment. This generation’s celebrities are, thus, much further to the right than the last one’s. They operate alongside sports-entertainment leagues and franchises that serve as megachurches for secular, reactionary men, and a right-wing media empire that has grown behemoth through the acquisition of legacy outlets and platforms.
It was enough to finally give the movement total control over the state.
And because politics is downstream from culture, what choice do today’s fully coopted Republicans have but to destroy mass culture rather than simply compete with it?
The NFL invited a Puerto Rican rapper to headline the Super Bowl halftime show, so today’s Republicans will send masked secret police to harass his fans and crew.
Universities continue to be engines of inconvenient knowledge production, so today’s Republicans demand that they pledge loyalty as a condition of continued federal investment.
And, of course, late night comedians criticize the president, so they must be removed from the air.
This is where the movement apparatchiks who produced Trump were always headed. Obama’s handling of race controversies didn’t provoke them, but it did provide something of instrumental value to that generation of culture warriors.
Their true appetites are now on naked display. The question of our time is whether they repulse enough of us that we can eventually relegate them to the fringes once again.
At a global level, Breitbart’s mantra really is little more than pseudo-intellectual pablum. (In a totalitarian society, politics and culture are coterminous; as China’s economic might has increased, our culture has become partially downstream of Chinese politics). But in the context of American elections, there’s clearly a lot of truth to it.
I can't help but think that the subservience and bad faith of Republicans goes much farther back than Barack Obama. Republicans have been tools of Big Corporations and rich people for generations. OTOH, you are right that they got much crazier after losing to Obama the second time.
The "three canonical grievances" distillation is PERFECTION.
It's the racism, stupid. (And Megyn Kelly is an f-ing piece of work.)