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.
Yes. At the least we can go back to Gingrich's Contract For America, if not Reagan's "government is the problem." (To say nothing of his deal with Iran re when the hostages were released.)
One needs to appreciate how pervasive right wing talk radio had become by 1990 or so.
Rush Limbaugh set the template and developed a massive audience on AM radio stations across the nation just as AM radio was looking for a way to survive (almost all music, e.g., had shifted to FM).
Limbaugh perfected name calling (feminizis), casting liberals as powerful but inherently anti-everything true straight Christian Americans like is his listeners cherished. The way Limbaugh took them down the liberals was through satire and ridicule, undercutting liberal legitimacy, and credibility. Once the lid was taken off the need to offer balanced programming (fairness doctrine), Limbaughcreated a coast to coast presence. Others followed but were never quite as influential but by 2000 AM had become a hornet's nest of MAGA style outlooks.
One thing worth mentioning is how Limbaugh and a number of ultra-right talk radio hosts owed to sports talk radio, a genre full of pure uniformed BS ranting that allowed all its listeners to air (literally) all their ignorance and actively encouraged callers to do so to stoke ratings.
[Glenn Beck had some of these ties and was also a shock jock which is essentially sport radio mannerisms translated to music based formats.]
PS
One turning point may be when Fox ended any pretense of balanced programming. E.g., Sean Hannity was originally paired with Alan Coombs. Fox found Glenn Beck too much in the early Obama years, I believe. Anyone more informed about when Fox quit pretending?
The important missing element here is that the craziness did not cost the mainstream GOP votes. So if you can motivate your base with crazy and it’s successful, you’ll keep going until something stops you. But the mainstream GOP was unable to stop them, and so now the crazy control the party. They’ll keep trying to take more ground until the rest of America stops them, I guess. It’s hard to see anything short of a war or a depression re-normalizing politics.
Yes. Limbaugh occurred to me as well, but my comment was already more than long enough : ) .
The bottom line is that the GOP's history of bad faith arguments goes back further than Brian's citation of Obama's administration. (That is not to nitpick Brian's post, just discuss his point about that part.)
Limbaugh himself had predecessors (Morton Downey, e.g.) but he perfected the model that dozens later emulated or pushed even further (e.g., Michael Savage or madman Mark Levin).
An even older source of right wing attacks on 20th century US liberal mainstream consensus (that after WWII included many Republicans) is all the craziness incubated in Orange County, California in the 1940s, 50s and 60s or the rantings of Carl McIntyre who was broadcast over many stations across the country.
Yes, again. Though I'll say that in this discussion the question, such as it is, is when the GOP party, itself, absorbed/accepted such craziness as their baseline M.O.
Rage-bait, also known as agit-prop (agitation propaganda) was Limbaugh's business model. The birth of Fox was in 1996, but they started out fairly mild. Until Obama was elected. Then they went all in on the rage-bait model.
When you need to keep your audience constantly enraged in order to retain and grow an audience, you have to keep raising the volume of alternative facts. Fox has become so outlandish (see the Dominion lawsuit emails) while at the same time Fox is at the top of the rightwing food chain, a conveyor belt to the righty's social media and podcast media.
It's quite an empire of malicious actors and grift. I keep wondering what might bring them down.
This goes back further than Brian is imagining. There's a reason one of the few times the victors didn't write the history of a conflict is the American Civil War. I posit that reason is baked into our founding, at least the bit described by the heart of The 1619 Project. White Americans simply had to reconcile, regardless of the cost to everyone else. So lies were written about the nature of the conflict and who the heroes were. Military installations were named after even the most incompetent enemies who arrayed troops against the United States.
Those are the same forces that are animated today. There's a reason Steve King from Iowa, a state who suffered losses to those wearing the gray, put a flag of the Army of Northern Virginia on his desk, and the reason wasn't something Barack Obama did. The reason was the same as why we're currently finding creative ways to restore the names of the incompetent enemy generals to US military bases.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (along with Nicole Hannah Jones) has the better of the Klein argument. Because of how deeply embedded these forces are into the American ethos, constant vigilance is required to overcome them and it is often a losing battle. Two steps forward, one step back. All that can be done is put one foot in front of the other and keep taking those forward steps.
I am reminded of how insurance companies managed to restrict jury awards in tort cases. They took a number of seemingly shocking cases like the MacDonalds coffee case, distorted the facts of the case or did not mention them and spending tons of money persuaded ordinary people, much like the ordinary people who returned the verdicts, that juries were out of control and their ability to award large damages should be limited.
The right wing propagandists have similarly pounced on actions that can be associated with the left that are bad or could be made to seem bad and, often distorting the facts, characterized everyone left of center as collaborators. Sometimes actors with left liberal views provided the propagandists with the material they needed as when speakers were shouted down on college campuses, though even these were sometimes set ups done by intentionally sending the most horrible speakers to speak in places where overly strong reactions were almost certain. Sometimes through consistent propagandizing the meaning of symbols was turned in its head as when “ Black Lives Matter” was turned into white lives and police lives do not matter. Self- appointed movement spokespeople did not help as when “Defund the Police” shouted in anger became the left’s demand following the George Floyd killing although what almost all liberals , black and white, were in fact asking for was police reform. Sometimes good things, like compassion for the homeless or for immigrants was made to seem bad as if this meant indifference to criminality. I could go on and on.
Common themes running through all this effort has been tons of money from wealthy individuals who most often do not care about the issues they are using but use them because others can be made to care, and intentional distortions and lies from people who know the truth.
The one factor left out here which has been essential has been the unquestioned allegiance of many religious believers to the right even though so much of what the right advocates and does should be anathema to anyone who takes the Bible seriously. This is rooted in the fight over abortion rights which has spread to affect other gender related issues like gender identity. The left has made some serious mistakes in dealing with these issues. For one, anti-abortion beliefs deserve considerable respect even if they should not govern the lives of people who think differently. It is understandable how some people can view the fetus as human life in the same way as a baby is. If only all the people who opposed abortion were pro-life in other resorts, like pre and post natal health care, adequate nutrition, and the like. A smarter and better funded left would be doing much more than it has to expand the definition of what pro-life means and speak to people who identify as pro- life. There may be no better time than now when a Pope seems to share the broader perspective.
The left also tends to respond ideologically to issues which are not cut and dried, like the participation of trans females in girl’s sports. It is not clear that differences associated with birth at sex are irrelevant to what makes for a fair competition. The left’s instinct for the well- being of trans people and for treating them equally as members of their chosen/ felt gender reflect important values, but it is not obvious that the concerns that trans women have an unfair advantage are unreasonable. The question in part depends on science and the science is complex. It also depends on the sport and the level on which it is played. There are complex issues to be negotiated but the debate has played out as if there are only two options. This framing is of course the work of the right but many in the left accept this framing although they cone out in the opposite side. Moreover, what is not clear is that very often on this as in other issues the firm positions of the people who get the most publicity for their views do not fairly represent than many different views within the left coalition.
To combat these kinds of problems people from the center to the left must at the individual and small group level show the lies and weaknesses to Republican right positions. They should be on X and media further to the right pointing out lies and redounding to claims. They should be staring information through FB and other social
Media not just with like- minded people but with people of different minds. An important role of leaders can be to call attention to the need for particular responses and to prepare data and other information that will make bottom up communication more effective.
Tort reform was a big early cause of talk radio in the early 90s. They made it sound sensible to me at the time as an impressionable high schooler when their talkers were not daily openly partisan but more cultural critics.
Yes - because talk radio hosts were paid to make it a cause and were probably provided with stories designed to fool people about what was really happening even if there were a few outliers. The deception in how examples were characterized was well known to researchers on jury trials. Interestingly my understanding is that these stories were more frequent as interest rates dropped. This is because insurance companies made much of their money on interest earned on premiums received. When interest rates on these reserves dropped their concern to minimize tort payouts became a higher priority.
As you intone, I’ve always wanted to be cautious about this, because there’s a risk of blinding ourselves to insights about our opposition.
But you’re absolutely right. The “three canonical grievances”, under any objective microscope, are simply bullshit. I’m usually reluctant to overrely on the race-reversal method, but it’s just plainly obvious that if a white President had said them — even discounting Trump’s many horrific statements and only considering the public mores at the time Obama spoke — there wouldn’t have been any issue.
IMO the decision to break with the cultural mainstream was what started the inexorable path towards the conservative movement becoming fascist. Sure, it happened decades ago, but once a political movement decides to wall itself off from the mainstream, they basically leave themselves with no option BUT to slowly gather steam until they’ve amassed an insurgent minority that gums up democracy.
An enduring mystery to me is why the powers that be on the left side did not seriously counter the acquisition/creation of the right wing media empire. I understand that there are differences in how the right and the left consume media that made a Fox News of the left less probable but what about local news, local tv stations, and (dare I mention) podcasting? I am essentially clueless about politics and media--which is why I read smart people like Brian--but even I watched with dismay when this consolidation was happening back in 2004, when I first became somewhat aware reading blog posts on Daily Kos. I don't get it.
"The question of our time is whether they repulse enough of us that we can eventually relegate them to the fringes once again."
That's what I believe will happen.... IF, this level of authoritarianism does not ratchet up with more people prosecuted, cancelled or more importantly, "compeititve authoritarianism" means that the ability to remove them from power via a democratic election is essentially ended, then it is game over and on to the next phase, which historically speaking, does not end well.
"The question of our time is whether they repulse enough of us that we can eventually relegate them to the fringes once again."
I believe that if this country is to get beyond the current crisis, and to survive in the longer run (come the next crisis), we need to push them *beyond* the fringes. We need to cause them to leave this land, rather than allow them to return to the shadows from which you can guarantee they will re-emerge. Remember, "The South will rise again."
What I want to share is the fairly straight line that brought the right to where we are today. I am old enough to have seen every stage develop. I turned 18 one year before the birth of the modern movement began to take organized, lasting shape.
The modern Republican party is a story of single cause growing to the strength of untamed zealotry. Then that zealotry welcomed zealots of every stripe into the fold AND agreed to fund a broad-based marketing campaign for each faction.
Other than latent racism, the original sin is the Reagan tax cuts of the mid 80’s. It started a bull run in stocks that created a never ending source of wealth that continues to this day.
The country club republicans opened pandora’s box when they agreed to adopt the agenda of the anti-taxers. The widespread anti-tax movement has underwritten every form of zealotry we see today.
Once you’ve rationalized zealotry it’s easy to keep taking it to the next (lower) level. Leadership on the right has continued to devolve to stronger zealots, as long as you agree to feed the other factions the baton is passed to you.
There have always been ideological funders but there weren’t enough of them to take your “lost cause” agenda national. Their motivation was hate, which wasn’t nearly as attractive as greed.
The modern Republican party is composed of many forms of zealotry, each finding common cause with the other. The anti-tax screed is the ultimate organizing principle because it’s underwritten by self-interest; it’s a gift that never stops giving.
Trump brought the “lost cause” zealots to the front of the line in the party, realizing it was a force that could overwhelm all other organized forces. The anti-taxers agreed to fund the marketing programs of allied groups to average Americans because it gave them electoral strength. They welcomed the “lost causers”, religious right and anti-science right among others because they provided votes and were also allied against the government. Average Americans in the Republican party aren’t motivated by tax cuts, but they will support them as long as their cause is funded.
Trump is the culmination of zealotry run amok. He’s both sewn and is reaping the seeds of the right’s destruction. The BBB is the final act of a long chain of rationalizing the irrational. All the zealotry factions have now been fed until they are gorged with success. The dog caught the car and then doesn’t know what comes next. They assumed they’d live happily ever after, but are finding they’re in bed with poisonous snakes. No happy ending for them.
In the right’s final act, they obtained their ultimate achievement. There is nothing more they want for. All their craven insatiable needs have been met. Their final form is a two-headed beast that was awarded with a tax cut that will lead to the bankruptcy of a government that was their greatest threat and the formation of a national police force to conquer (kill) their perceived enemy, modern Americans. (The religious right was awarded with the over-turning of Rowe earlier. The anti-science coalition is being awarded with the mainstreaming of its anti-vax propaganda and the destruction of every effort to confront climate change.)
These two ultimate achievements are the end of the America we knew. There is no fix for what we’ve become, it ‘s come too far. The ongoing destruction of our democratic project can’t be stopped before it’s finished. Democrats could have temporarily side-lined the right’s project but not derailed it. Racism and greed are far stronger than healthcare when it comes to motivations. All the arguing about Biden is just a shallow distraction from realizing how strong the right has become. We allowed the right to become too powerful.
ICE will bring this country to its knees. What comes next is unwritten. We have the strength to contain this cancer but currently no organizing principle. That’s why reinvention can’t come quickly.
The right is well organized and well funded. We aren’t. They ran their movement as a business that produced tax cuts, we ran ours as a volunteer non-profit. The police are no match for drug dealers with deep pockets. We are currently no match for the right with unlimited sources of dark money.
The longer we wait to confront them, the harder it will be.
If we use violence our movement becomes illegitimate, a nationwide, non-violent social movement is our only option. Together, we are 1,000 percent stronger than the right, but that means nothing unless we become organized. The right is like the Wizard of Oz, just a little pig-man behind a curtain of dark money. Don’t be intimidated. When they see a coordinated mass opposition their unity will dissolve as fast as it has recently flourished. ICE will go too far and 80% of Americans will recognize the right’s illegitimacy. That’s a critical inflection point. What will we do then?
Those canonical grievances sound like the story I heard about a diversity trainer, a Black woman, who said a white woman in a session would become almost panicky at even the mention of racism. The participant would frantically deny being a racist, even though no one was accusing her. Such reactions sound like PTSD. What sort of upbringing would cause a white person to react that way? It’s like parents explicitly told them from infancy that Black people are scaaaaaaaaary.
Brian, I share the view that the Republicans had become a bad-faith in the service of power Party since at least the time of the the Newt Gingrich 1994 wave and the preceding talk radio years.
However, whatever illogic there is in their accounts, I feel like if the *only* political conclusion you are drawing from Shapiro and Kelly’s list of grievances is that they were pre-radicalized and anyone sharing their thoughts were pre-radicalized GOP partisans, you are missing a potential insight that Shapiro’s comment offers.
I mean, you ever wonder how to square the very existence of Obama to Trump voters? You ever wonder how Obama (especially in 2008) got such great electoral college results, being the first and last Democrat to carry *Indiana* since LBJ, and the first and last to carry North Carolina since Carter 1976?
And since him, Iowa and Ohio have been out of Dem reach?
How can that electoral over performance be squared with the interpretation that Republicans victories *after* him were racial backlash? Did masses of whites not voting in 2008 and 2012 surge off the couch later to vote?
Or did Obama “borrow” votes from 100s of thousands or millions of white people who had a thought fairly parallel to Shapiro, they imagined, in their own heads, a national bargain, like this: “majority (white) America elects (allows election of) a black President, a position of honor and prestige, and in return majority (white & other nonblack) America gets a relaxing *racial silence* and a quieting of the the constant racial justice nag within public discourse.” But of course racial realities and discussions did not change, and certainly did not stop, so a segment of Obama ‘08 voters felt betrayed by him or the Party, and started voting for the other side.
I think you have captured their ethos perfectly. It’s not possible for them to live alongside people who are culturally different. They insist on complete dominion or else obliteration. (You WILL mourn our heroes sufficiently and respect our “beliefs” or we will cancel you and harass you and get you fired.)
Leaving aside the hypocrisy of ignoring the mote in the Left’s eye on academic freedom (there is also no left-wing alternative to the scientific method either, yet weak studies are held up as proving notions like “1.7% of people are intersex”, and even well-founded knowledge about greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide must defer to decades-long scaremongering about nuclear power, causing Germany to shut down reliable, emissions-free energy sources) and its persistent demand to only print what it wants to be printed (your defense of “neutral journalism” is belied by the demand for “moral clarity”), you and those who believe in your strategy would do better if you admitted some inconvenient truths about two of the examples you published that the Right likes to bring up: George Zimmerman was being sat on and pummeled, as both the eyewitness testimony of Andrew Good (“he was beating him up MMA style” and the forensics established); Michael Brown was going for Officer Darren Wilson’s gun when he was shot.
(There are many, many more on TalkLeft, which cannot in any sense be accused of being right-wing. Also plenty of dissent on bringing Zimmerman to trial on various prawfblogs, by people who understood the dangers of the abuse of prosecutors obsequiously deferring to politics *before* Trump took office)
“ A Justice Department report looked at the Ferguson Police Department and found a wide range of abusive practices, as well as “intentional discrimination on the basis of race.” But another Justice Department inquiry debunked the widely reported story that Brown was coöperating, with his hands up—saying, “Don’t shoot!”—when he was killed. And forensic details corroborate the claim that Brown was initially shot while trying to grab the officer’s gun.”
Do you really think we’re going to get *anywhere* politically without admitting where we fucked up? The answer to disputing the Right’s attempts to discredit our truthfulness wasn’t to prove them right, and now just to keep doubling down because “well, they’re much worse!” Of course they are, that’s their brand! Our brand *was* “we believe in truth, even when inconvenient”, which has been twisted beyond recognition going on fifteen years now.
I know this is now your brand, so I don’t really expect you to change, but the truth — the *whole* truth, still matters. Things are really bad right now, but if we insist on retaining the new shibboleths we’re not gonna get the votes, and perpetuating these foundational lies isn’t going to get it done!
Every single point in this post is an example of right wing propaganda, from the nuclear grievances to the anti-academia grievances to the Zimmerman defense (the man disobeyed police orders and hunted down an innocent kid.) Bravo and thank you for the illustration!
Right, sourcing exclusively from left wing sources makes this right wing. Well done, yourself!
And “you don’t have to do that, sir.” From a 911 dispatcher isn’t exactly “disobeying police orders”. Do you even know if Broward County 911 dispatch is staffed with police officers? Seems unlikely, but it doesn’t seem like you care about the truth, just making yourself feel good. Again, well done!
I remember a time when liberal blogs weren't flooded with weird right-wing trolls. You might have a few people with different opinions, but they wouldn't be a packaged right-wing messaging machine firing on every single right-wing cylinder all at the same time. I'm curious, is this just what happens on Substack?
"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."
Well, I'd say the right-wing alternative to the scientific method is evangelical religion and the dinosaurs-lived-beside-humans theme park mentality. That's had only *some* effectiveness since there are those who're fine with right wing goals and many contradictions, but can't quite sign on to the religious contradictions.
As to there not being partisan interpretive processes, that's why they created extreme right wing think tanks that, after a few years of being cited as if they're legitimate, earned (sic) the aura of intellectually defensible counter lines of political thought.
Which is not to say I disagree with the basic premise here, because I do. I just think the rot started much earlier than 2008.
In your description, Brian, even the most fearless adherence to scientific method and the right to voice an opinion would have been inundated by this wave, yes? So blaming land acknowledgments and diversity statements for the peril we now face is unnecessary
This is a brillant analysis of how the right's shift from competition to eradication mode happened. The Breitbart Doctrine being a kind of codephrase for a new battle plan is spot on. What gets me is how Shapiro and others keep trotting out those three Obama moments as if they justify everythng that came after. The beer summit grievance is particularly absurd when you lay it out like this. The fact that they're still mad about Obama acknowledging that black youth face racist suspicion tells you everything about what they were realy upset about. Your point about them achieving cultural parity through influencers but still choosing destruction over competion is key. They had the chance to just build their own thing and compete fairly, but that was never actualy the goal.
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.
It goes back to their proto-Republican fore-fathers, the slave-owning delegates to the Constitutional Convention, at least.
Yes. At the least we can go back to Gingrich's Contract For America, if not Reagan's "government is the problem." (To say nothing of his deal with Iran re when the hostages were released.)
One needs to appreciate how pervasive right wing talk radio had become by 1990 or so.
Rush Limbaugh set the template and developed a massive audience on AM radio stations across the nation just as AM radio was looking for a way to survive (almost all music, e.g., had shifted to FM).
Limbaugh perfected name calling (feminizis), casting liberals as powerful but inherently anti-everything true straight Christian Americans like is his listeners cherished. The way Limbaugh took them down the liberals was through satire and ridicule, undercutting liberal legitimacy, and credibility. Once the lid was taken off the need to offer balanced programming (fairness doctrine), Limbaughcreated a coast to coast presence. Others followed but were never quite as influential but by 2000 AM had become a hornet's nest of MAGA style outlooks.
One thing worth mentioning is how Limbaugh and a number of ultra-right talk radio hosts owed to sports talk radio, a genre full of pure uniformed BS ranting that allowed all its listeners to air (literally) all their ignorance and actively encouraged callers to do so to stoke ratings.
[Glenn Beck had some of these ties and was also a shock jock which is essentially sport radio mannerisms translated to music based formats.]
PS
One turning point may be when Fox ended any pretense of balanced programming. E.g., Sean Hannity was originally paired with Alan Coombs. Fox found Glenn Beck too much in the early Obama years, I believe. Anyone more informed about when Fox quit pretending?
The important missing element here is that the craziness did not cost the mainstream GOP votes. So if you can motivate your base with crazy and it’s successful, you’ll keep going until something stops you. But the mainstream GOP was unable to stop them, and so now the crazy control the party. They’ll keep trying to take more ground until the rest of America stops them, I guess. It’s hard to see anything short of a war or a depression re-normalizing politics.
Yes. Limbaugh occurred to me as well, but my comment was already more than long enough : ) .
The bottom line is that the GOP's history of bad faith arguments goes back further than Brian's citation of Obama's administration. (That is not to nitpick Brian's post, just discuss his point about that part.)
Limbaugh himself had predecessors (Morton Downey, e.g.) but he perfected the model that dozens later emulated or pushed even further (e.g., Michael Savage or madman Mark Levin).
An even older source of right wing attacks on 20th century US liberal mainstream consensus (that after WWII included many Republicans) is all the craziness incubated in Orange County, California in the 1940s, 50s and 60s or the rantings of Carl McIntyre who was broadcast over many stations across the country.
Regards.
Yes, again. Though I'll say that in this discussion the question, such as it is, is when the GOP party, itself, absorbed/accepted such craziness as their baseline M.O.
It goes back to Reagan at the very latest. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who voted GOP even once since then is complicit
Rage-bait, also known as agit-prop (agitation propaganda) was Limbaugh's business model. The birth of Fox was in 1996, but they started out fairly mild. Until Obama was elected. Then they went all in on the rage-bait model.
When you need to keep your audience constantly enraged in order to retain and grow an audience, you have to keep raising the volume of alternative facts. Fox has become so outlandish (see the Dominion lawsuit emails) while at the same time Fox is at the top of the rightwing food chain, a conveyor belt to the righty's social media and podcast media.
It's quite an empire of malicious actors and grift. I keep wondering what might bring them down.
This goes back further than Brian is imagining. There's a reason one of the few times the victors didn't write the history of a conflict is the American Civil War. I posit that reason is baked into our founding, at least the bit described by the heart of The 1619 Project. White Americans simply had to reconcile, regardless of the cost to everyone else. So lies were written about the nature of the conflict and who the heroes were. Military installations were named after even the most incompetent enemies who arrayed troops against the United States.
Those are the same forces that are animated today. There's a reason Steve King from Iowa, a state who suffered losses to those wearing the gray, put a flag of the Army of Northern Virginia on his desk, and the reason wasn't something Barack Obama did. The reason was the same as why we're currently finding creative ways to restore the names of the incompetent enemy generals to US military bases.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (along with Nicole Hannah Jones) has the better of the Klein argument. Because of how deeply embedded these forces are into the American ethos, constant vigilance is required to overcome them and it is often a losing battle. Two steps forward, one step back. All that can be done is put one foot in front of the other and keep taking those forward steps.
As Lincoln said of the same people in 1860, for them it’s “rule or ruin.”
The "three canonical grievances" distillation is PERFECTION.
It's the racism, stupid. (And Megyn Kelly is an f-ing piece of work.)
I am reminded of how insurance companies managed to restrict jury awards in tort cases. They took a number of seemingly shocking cases like the MacDonalds coffee case, distorted the facts of the case or did not mention them and spending tons of money persuaded ordinary people, much like the ordinary people who returned the verdicts, that juries were out of control and their ability to award large damages should be limited.
The right wing propagandists have similarly pounced on actions that can be associated with the left that are bad or could be made to seem bad and, often distorting the facts, characterized everyone left of center as collaborators. Sometimes actors with left liberal views provided the propagandists with the material they needed as when speakers were shouted down on college campuses, though even these were sometimes set ups done by intentionally sending the most horrible speakers to speak in places where overly strong reactions were almost certain. Sometimes through consistent propagandizing the meaning of symbols was turned in its head as when “ Black Lives Matter” was turned into white lives and police lives do not matter. Self- appointed movement spokespeople did not help as when “Defund the Police” shouted in anger became the left’s demand following the George Floyd killing although what almost all liberals , black and white, were in fact asking for was police reform. Sometimes good things, like compassion for the homeless or for immigrants was made to seem bad as if this meant indifference to criminality. I could go on and on.
Common themes running through all this effort has been tons of money from wealthy individuals who most often do not care about the issues they are using but use them because others can be made to care, and intentional distortions and lies from people who know the truth.
The one factor left out here which has been essential has been the unquestioned allegiance of many religious believers to the right even though so much of what the right advocates and does should be anathema to anyone who takes the Bible seriously. This is rooted in the fight over abortion rights which has spread to affect other gender related issues like gender identity. The left has made some serious mistakes in dealing with these issues. For one, anti-abortion beliefs deserve considerable respect even if they should not govern the lives of people who think differently. It is understandable how some people can view the fetus as human life in the same way as a baby is. If only all the people who opposed abortion were pro-life in other resorts, like pre and post natal health care, adequate nutrition, and the like. A smarter and better funded left would be doing much more than it has to expand the definition of what pro-life means and speak to people who identify as pro- life. There may be no better time than now when a Pope seems to share the broader perspective.
The left also tends to respond ideologically to issues which are not cut and dried, like the participation of trans females in girl’s sports. It is not clear that differences associated with birth at sex are irrelevant to what makes for a fair competition. The left’s instinct for the well- being of trans people and for treating them equally as members of their chosen/ felt gender reflect important values, but it is not obvious that the concerns that trans women have an unfair advantage are unreasonable. The question in part depends on science and the science is complex. It also depends on the sport and the level on which it is played. There are complex issues to be negotiated but the debate has played out as if there are only two options. This framing is of course the work of the right but many in the left accept this framing although they cone out in the opposite side. Moreover, what is not clear is that very often on this as in other issues the firm positions of the people who get the most publicity for their views do not fairly represent than many different views within the left coalition.
To combat these kinds of problems people from the center to the left must at the individual and small group level show the lies and weaknesses to Republican right positions. They should be on X and media further to the right pointing out lies and redounding to claims. They should be staring information through FB and other social
Media not just with like- minded people but with people of different minds. An important role of leaders can be to call attention to the need for particular responses and to prepare data and other information that will make bottom up communication more effective.
Tort reform was a big early cause of talk radio in the early 90s. They made it sound sensible to me at the time as an impressionable high schooler when their talkers were not daily openly partisan but more cultural critics.
Yes - because talk radio hosts were paid to make it a cause and were probably provided with stories designed to fool people about what was really happening even if there were a few outliers. The deception in how examples were characterized was well known to researchers on jury trials. Interestingly my understanding is that these stories were more frequent as interest rates dropped. This is because insurance companies made much of their money on interest earned on premiums received. When interest rates on these reserves dropped their concern to minimize tort payouts became a higher priority.
As you intone, I’ve always wanted to be cautious about this, because there’s a risk of blinding ourselves to insights about our opposition.
But you’re absolutely right. The “three canonical grievances”, under any objective microscope, are simply bullshit. I’m usually reluctant to overrely on the race-reversal method, but it’s just plainly obvious that if a white President had said them — even discounting Trump’s many horrific statements and only considering the public mores at the time Obama spoke — there wouldn’t have been any issue.
IMO the decision to break with the cultural mainstream was what started the inexorable path towards the conservative movement becoming fascist. Sure, it happened decades ago, but once a political movement decides to wall itself off from the mainstream, they basically leave themselves with no option BUT to slowly gather steam until they’ve amassed an insurgent minority that gums up democracy.
An enduring mystery to me is why the powers that be on the left side did not seriously counter the acquisition/creation of the right wing media empire. I understand that there are differences in how the right and the left consume media that made a Fox News of the left less probable but what about local news, local tv stations, and (dare I mention) podcasting? I am essentially clueless about politics and media--which is why I read smart people like Brian--but even I watched with dismay when this consolidation was happening back in 2004, when I first became somewhat aware reading blog posts on Daily Kos. I don't get it.
"The question of our time is whether they repulse enough of us that we can eventually relegate them to the fringes once again."
That's what I believe will happen.... IF, this level of authoritarianism does not ratchet up with more people prosecuted, cancelled or more importantly, "compeititve authoritarianism" means that the ability to remove them from power via a democratic election is essentially ended, then it is game over and on to the next phase, which historically speaking, does not end well.
"The question of our time is whether they repulse enough of us that we can eventually relegate them to the fringes once again."
I believe that if this country is to get beyond the current crisis, and to survive in the longer run (come the next crisis), we need to push them *beyond* the fringes. We need to cause them to leave this land, rather than allow them to return to the shadows from which you can guarantee they will re-emerge. Remember, "The South will rise again."
What I want to share is the fairly straight line that brought the right to where we are today. I am old enough to have seen every stage develop. I turned 18 one year before the birth of the modern movement began to take organized, lasting shape.
The modern Republican party is a story of single cause growing to the strength of untamed zealotry. Then that zealotry welcomed zealots of every stripe into the fold AND agreed to fund a broad-based marketing campaign for each faction.
Other than latent racism, the original sin is the Reagan tax cuts of the mid 80’s. It started a bull run in stocks that created a never ending source of wealth that continues to this day.
The country club republicans opened pandora’s box when they agreed to adopt the agenda of the anti-taxers. The widespread anti-tax movement has underwritten every form of zealotry we see today.
Once you’ve rationalized zealotry it’s easy to keep taking it to the next (lower) level. Leadership on the right has continued to devolve to stronger zealots, as long as you agree to feed the other factions the baton is passed to you.
There have always been ideological funders but there weren’t enough of them to take your “lost cause” agenda national. Their motivation was hate, which wasn’t nearly as attractive as greed.
The modern Republican party is composed of many forms of zealotry, each finding common cause with the other. The anti-tax screed is the ultimate organizing principle because it’s underwritten by self-interest; it’s a gift that never stops giving.
Trump brought the “lost cause” zealots to the front of the line in the party, realizing it was a force that could overwhelm all other organized forces. The anti-taxers agreed to fund the marketing programs of allied groups to average Americans because it gave them electoral strength. They welcomed the “lost causers”, religious right and anti-science right among others because they provided votes and were also allied against the government. Average Americans in the Republican party aren’t motivated by tax cuts, but they will support them as long as their cause is funded.
Trump is the culmination of zealotry run amok. He’s both sewn and is reaping the seeds of the right’s destruction. The BBB is the final act of a long chain of rationalizing the irrational. All the zealotry factions have now been fed until they are gorged with success. The dog caught the car and then doesn’t know what comes next. They assumed they’d live happily ever after, but are finding they’re in bed with poisonous snakes. No happy ending for them.
In the right’s final act, they obtained their ultimate achievement. There is nothing more they want for. All their craven insatiable needs have been met. Their final form is a two-headed beast that was awarded with a tax cut that will lead to the bankruptcy of a government that was their greatest threat and the formation of a national police force to conquer (kill) their perceived enemy, modern Americans. (The religious right was awarded with the over-turning of Rowe earlier. The anti-science coalition is being awarded with the mainstreaming of its anti-vax propaganda and the destruction of every effort to confront climate change.)
These two ultimate achievements are the end of the America we knew. There is no fix for what we’ve become, it ‘s come too far. The ongoing destruction of our democratic project can’t be stopped before it’s finished. Democrats could have temporarily side-lined the right’s project but not derailed it. Racism and greed are far stronger than healthcare when it comes to motivations. All the arguing about Biden is just a shallow distraction from realizing how strong the right has become. We allowed the right to become too powerful.
ICE will bring this country to its knees. What comes next is unwritten. We have the strength to contain this cancer but currently no organizing principle. That’s why reinvention can’t come quickly.
The right is well organized and well funded. We aren’t. They ran their movement as a business that produced tax cuts, we ran ours as a volunteer non-profit. The police are no match for drug dealers with deep pockets. We are currently no match for the right with unlimited sources of dark money.
The longer we wait to confront them, the harder it will be.
If we use violence our movement becomes illegitimate, a nationwide, non-violent social movement is our only option. Together, we are 1,000 percent stronger than the right, but that means nothing unless we become organized. The right is like the Wizard of Oz, just a little pig-man behind a curtain of dark money. Don’t be intimidated. When they see a coordinated mass opposition their unity will dissolve as fast as it has recently flourished. ICE will go too far and 80% of Americans will recognize the right’s illegitimacy. That’s a critical inflection point. What will we do then?
Those canonical grievances sound like the story I heard about a diversity trainer, a Black woman, who said a white woman in a session would become almost panicky at even the mention of racism. The participant would frantically deny being a racist, even though no one was accusing her. Such reactions sound like PTSD. What sort of upbringing would cause a white person to react that way? It’s like parents explicitly told them from infancy that Black people are scaaaaaaaaary.
Brian, I share the view that the Republicans had become a bad-faith in the service of power Party since at least the time of the the Newt Gingrich 1994 wave and the preceding talk radio years.
However, whatever illogic there is in their accounts, I feel like if the *only* political conclusion you are drawing from Shapiro and Kelly’s list of grievances is that they were pre-radicalized and anyone sharing their thoughts were pre-radicalized GOP partisans, you are missing a potential insight that Shapiro’s comment offers.
I mean, you ever wonder how to square the very existence of Obama to Trump voters? You ever wonder how Obama (especially in 2008) got such great electoral college results, being the first and last Democrat to carry *Indiana* since LBJ, and the first and last to carry North Carolina since Carter 1976?
And since him, Iowa and Ohio have been out of Dem reach?
How can that electoral over performance be squared with the interpretation that Republicans victories *after* him were racial backlash? Did masses of whites not voting in 2008 and 2012 surge off the couch later to vote?
Or did Obama “borrow” votes from 100s of thousands or millions of white people who had a thought fairly parallel to Shapiro, they imagined, in their own heads, a national bargain, like this: “majority (white) America elects (allows election of) a black President, a position of honor and prestige, and in return majority (white & other nonblack) America gets a relaxing *racial silence* and a quieting of the the constant racial justice nag within public discourse.” But of course racial realities and discussions did not change, and certainly did not stop, so a segment of Obama ‘08 voters felt betrayed by him or the Party, and started voting for the other side.
I think you have captured their ethos perfectly. It’s not possible for them to live alongside people who are culturally different. They insist on complete dominion or else obliteration. (You WILL mourn our heroes sufficiently and respect our “beliefs” or we will cancel you and harass you and get you fired.)
Leaving aside the hypocrisy of ignoring the mote in the Left’s eye on academic freedom (there is also no left-wing alternative to the scientific method either, yet weak studies are held up as proving notions like “1.7% of people are intersex”, and even well-founded knowledge about greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide must defer to decades-long scaremongering about nuclear power, causing Germany to shut down reliable, emissions-free energy sources) and its persistent demand to only print what it wants to be printed (your defense of “neutral journalism” is belied by the demand for “moral clarity”), you and those who believe in your strategy would do better if you admitted some inconvenient truths about two of the examples you published that the Right likes to bring up: George Zimmerman was being sat on and pummeled, as both the eyewitness testimony of Andrew Good (“he was beating him up MMA style” and the forensics established); Michael Brown was going for Officer Darren Wilson’s gun when he was shot.
Sources:
Zimmerman/Martin:
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2013/7/20/202943/953/crimenews/ACLU-Reverses-Course-on-DOJ-Investigation-of-Zimmerman
(There are many, many more on TalkLeft, which cannot in any sense be accused of being right-wing. Also plenty of dissent on bringing Zimmerman to trial on various prawfblogs, by people who understood the dangers of the abuse of prosecutors obsequiously deferring to politics *before* Trump took office)
Wilson/Brown:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/14/body-count-a-critic-at-large-kelefa-sanneh
“ A Justice Department report looked at the Ferguson Police Department and found a wide range of abusive practices, as well as “intentional discrimination on the basis of race.” But another Justice Department inquiry debunked the widely reported story that Brown was coöperating, with his hands up—saying, “Don’t shoot!”—when he was killed. And forensic details corroborate the claim that Brown was initially shot while trying to grab the officer’s gun.”
Do you really think we’re going to get *anywhere* politically without admitting where we fucked up? The answer to disputing the Right’s attempts to discredit our truthfulness wasn’t to prove them right, and now just to keep doubling down because “well, they’re much worse!” Of course they are, that’s their brand! Our brand *was* “we believe in truth, even when inconvenient”, which has been twisted beyond recognition going on fifteen years now.
I know this is now your brand, so I don’t really expect you to change, but the truth — the *whole* truth, still matters. Things are really bad right now, but if we insist on retaining the new shibboleths we’re not gonna get the votes, and perpetuating these foundational lies isn’t going to get it done!
Every single point in this post is an example of right wing propaganda, from the nuclear grievances to the anti-academia grievances to the Zimmerman defense (the man disobeyed police orders and hunted down an innocent kid.) Bravo and thank you for the illustration!
Right, sourcing exclusively from left wing sources makes this right wing. Well done, yourself!
And “you don’t have to do that, sir.” From a 911 dispatcher isn’t exactly “disobeying police orders”. Do you even know if Broward County 911 dispatch is staffed with police officers? Seems unlikely, but it doesn’t seem like you care about the truth, just making yourself feel good. Again, well done!
I remember a time when liberal blogs weren't flooded with weird right-wing trolls. You might have a few people with different opinions, but they wouldn't be a packaged right-wing messaging machine firing on every single right-wing cylinder all at the same time. I'm curious, is this just what happens on Substack?
“Eh…he don’t know me very well, do he?”
Speaking of liberal blogs (such as TalkLeft, which I linked to above):
https://www.emptywheel.net/2012/04/14/zimmerman-anatomy-of-an-deficient-probable-cause-affidavit/
But keep thinking it’s all right-wing blather, this talk of due process and “innocent until proven guilty”
"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."
Well, I'd say the right-wing alternative to the scientific method is evangelical religion and the dinosaurs-lived-beside-humans theme park mentality. That's had only *some* effectiveness since there are those who're fine with right wing goals and many contradictions, but can't quite sign on to the religious contradictions.
As to there not being partisan interpretive processes, that's why they created extreme right wing think tanks that, after a few years of being cited as if they're legitimate, earned (sic) the aura of intellectually defensible counter lines of political thought.
Which is not to say I disagree with the basic premise here, because I do. I just think the rot started much earlier than 2008.
In your description, Brian, even the most fearless adherence to scientific method and the right to voice an opinion would have been inundated by this wave, yes? So blaming land acknowledgments and diversity statements for the peril we now face is unnecessary
This is a brillant analysis of how the right's shift from competition to eradication mode happened. The Breitbart Doctrine being a kind of codephrase for a new battle plan is spot on. What gets me is how Shapiro and others keep trotting out those three Obama moments as if they justify everythng that came after. The beer summit grievance is particularly absurd when you lay it out like this. The fact that they're still mad about Obama acknowledging that black youth face racist suspicion tells you everything about what they were realy upset about. Your point about them achieving cultural parity through influencers but still choosing destruction over competion is key. They had the chance to just build their own thing and compete fairly, but that was never actualy the goal.