What They Voted For: Conservative Fulfillment

#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor

“I had an opportunity to speak with President Trump and he, I would say to all my colleagues, has indicated he’s prepared to sign the bill. He will also be issuing a national emergency declaration at the same time. And I’ve indicated to him I’m going to support the national emergency declaration.”

―Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)^α

The underlying theme of the #trumpswindle is that despite mutterings here and there among Beltway Republicans, the Trump Administration is hardly a departure from the GOP of recent decades; the sticky sensation of pining nostalgia for the ’80s is no mere coincidence. The Senate Majority Leader is hardly making a radical break with mainstream American conservatism in abdicating to a Republican president verging toward a national emergency against migrants.

Our American atrocity is afoot. Once upon a time, the joke was that we need another Vietnam^β. For Trump voters, apparently what we really need is another atrocity against nonwhites. For all the excuses Republican voters have offered over the years for bargaining with supremacism^γ, they just haven’t really gotten much in return. There is the economic wreck and fiscal nightmare inflicted against the country over the course of the last twelve years, and that atop the general failure of their trickle-down myth; the Bush Doctrine has laid their foreign policy ambition to the bone. All these voters ever got for their votes is the traditional supremacism, and having suffered a definitive loss in the Gay Fray^δ, have redoubled their efforts to assail the human rights of women. A national emergency in order to establish extraordinary authority to build border wall, at a time when a Republican administration runs internment camps for migrant children, is a happy day for American conservatives. This is #WhatTheyVotedFor.

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^α Transcript corrected from linked article, per video source.

^β e.g., Bart Simpson, ca. 1996 (#3F16)—

Bart: What the hell is this?
Lisa: It’s one of those campy seventies throw-backs that appeal to Generation X-ers.
Bart: We need another Vietnam, to thin out their ranks a little.

—exploiting a roadworn American trope about youth. It is, however, worth noting that when Congress refused to support President Obama’s request for new authorization against Daa’ish, Democrats saw too much risk and entanglement, while Republicans complained that the administration was not intending a large enough war.

^γ Because, after all, those voters are not racist; but it’s just unfair to alienate supremacism like that, and it’s not like anyone is ever really going to let them be in charge. Right?

^δ Which, in turn, was always about women, anyway.

Image note: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY; left), walks with President-elect Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol for a meeting, 10 November 2016, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Bolton, Alexander. “Trump to sign border deal, declare national emergency”. The Hill. 14 February 2019.

What They Voted For (No, Really)

#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor

A couple points come to mind:

An evangelist pastor criticized religious leaders who are “trading their moral core” by supporting the Trump administration solely due to their stance on abortion.

Doug Pagitt, a Minneapolis-based pastor and executive director of Vote Common Good, wrote in USA Today Sunday that white Evangelicals are blindly support Trump and the GOP-led Congress.

(Gstalter)

First, the question of evangelicals cleaning up their own houses, as such, is fraught and grim.

And for a bonus, there is the mystery of what happened in the last copy edits of the first two paragraphs of the the article.

Image notes: Top — Detail of Corpus Hypercubus, by Salvador Dali, 1954.  Right — United States President Donald Trump reacts to being laughed at during a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, 25 September 2018. (Image credit: FOX News)

Gstalter, Morgan. “Pastor tears into Evangelicals for supporting Trump due to abortion stance.” The Hill. 21 October 2018.

What Mitch Said (Professional Sideshow Meltdown Mix)

#rapeculture | #WhatTheyVotedFor

C-SPAN, via Twitter:

.@SenateMajLdr: “We have hired a female assistant to go on staff and to ask these questions in a respectful and professional way. We want this hearing to be handled very professionally not a political sideshow…” #Kavanaugh

The question arises whether we should thank Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for acknowledging Senate Republicans are incapable of handling the growing sexual harassment and assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh in a respectful and professional way that does not amount to a political sideshow.

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Image notes: Top — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) bows his head in prayer during an event on Capitol Hill, 24 February 2016 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)  Right — Tweet from C-SPAN, 25 September 2018.

One of Those Moments (… cum Farce)

#DimensionTrump | #WhatTheyVotedFor

To the one, something goes here about unnamed sources; it’s a long question, by now. To the other, though—

For all the morning’s madness, there may have been an underlying logic. Over the weekend, as Brett Kavanaugh’s prospects appeared increasingly imperiled, Trump faced two tactical options, both of them fraught. One was to cut Kavanaugh loose. But he was also looking for ways to dramatically shift the news cycle away from his embattled Supreme Court nominee. According to a source briefed on Trump’s thinking, Trump decided that firing Rosenstein would knock Kavanaugh out of the news, potentially saving his nomination and Republicans’ chances for keeping the Senate. “The strategy was to try and do something really big,” the source said. The leak about Rosenstein’s resignation could have been the result, and it certainly had the desired effect of driving Kavanaugh out of the news for a few hours.

(Sherman)

—this is the Trump administration: What insanity will we be expected to believe, tomorrow? The question is how well a bit like this ages; certes, it makes a powerful headline, but the instinct to disbelieve seems largely reasonable.

And, again, to the other, this is the Trump administration. The idea of a T&A comedy presidency ought to be a really stupid joke. Something, something, Trump administration, right. This really is what they voted for, and no, it’s been more of a tragedy cum farce than any sort of comedy. It really isn’t funny.

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Image notes: Top — Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testifies to the House Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., 13 December 2017. (Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)  Right — President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, in Washington, D.C., 24 May 2018. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

Sherman, Gabe. “‘The Strategy Was to Try and Do Something Really Big’: Trump Wanted to Nuke Rosenstein to Save Kavanaugh’s Bacon”. Vanity Fair. 24 September 2018.

What They Voted For: Grotesque Dishonesty

#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor

Fact checkers at the Washington Post note:

On Sept. 7, President Trump woke up in Billings, Mont., flew to Fargo, N.D., visited Sioux Falls, S.D., and eventually returned to Washington. He spoke to reporters on Air Force One, held a pair of fundraisers and was interviewed by three local reporters.

In that single day, he publicly made 125 false or misleading statements — in a period of time that totaled only about 120 minutes. It was a new single-day high.

That such grotesque dishonesty is precisely what Trump voters wanted makes its own point. Steve Benen noted, yesterday, in consideration of yet another Trump administration travel scandal, “If you voted for the Republican ticket in 2016 because you hoped to avoid four years of ethics controversies, I have some very bad news for you.” The upside for those voters is that nobody really voted for Donald Trump in hope of avoiding a scandal-ridden presidency. To the other, or, rather, toward the more useful, we might wonder when it will be acceptable to stop pretending this was ever about anything other than graft and supremacism.

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Image note: President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., 27 August 2018 (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Benen, Steve. “FEMA director faces investigation at an inconvenient time”. msnbc. 13 September 2018.

Kessler, Glenn, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly. “President Trump has made more than 5,000 false or misleading claims”. The Washington Post. 13 September 2018.

A Moment Significant of Either Something Important or Nothing In Particular

#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor

There is this, from Jacob Hamburger for L.A. Review of Books—

What exactly are the ideas that have made people like Weinstein, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Christina Hoff Sommers into what a recent New York Times profile described as intellectual “renegades”? According to the Times writer Bari Weiss, most emphasize the biological differences between men and women, a feeling that free speech is “under siege,” and a fear that “identity politics” is a threat to the United States’s social fabric.

A listener of Harris’s podcast might add to the list a vociferous defense of the validity of genetic explanations for IQ differences between racial groups, a follower of Peterson’s videos might insist on the nefarious influence of “postmodern neo-Marxism” on college campuses, and a fan of Ben Shapiro might contribute a skepticism toward the reality of “transgenderism.”

The movement sees itself as an alliance that defies established political categories in order to defend these ideas against the creeping influence of thought control. This leads us to another important meaning of the term intellectual dark web, the suggestion that its ideas are not only controversial, but particularly innovative in our political moment. If the dark web arouses the anger of certain commentators in the media or the academy, it is for the same reasons that new technologies in the internet age are “disruptive.”

It would take a short memory, however, not to notice that these sorts of polemics over political correctness are anything but novel: they have been around for at least 30 years, ever since a strikingly similar set of media debates centered around college campuses took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Toward the end of the Reagan years, political correctness became a favorite bugbear of conservative intellectuals, who believed that college professors had latched onto illiberal or totalitarian notions of equality, and were indoctrinating their students with a subversive view of American society. Today’s “dark web” provocateurs rarely mention these predecessors, who not too long ago occupied a similar place in national media debates. But the comparison suggests that the “iconoclastic” ideas of these figures are actually a well-established institution in American discourse: an institution whose home is on the political right.

—and what stands out is that we really ought not be surprised. To the one, the general point is nothing new; to the other, what is the significance of this particular discussion getting this press at this time?

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Image note: Top — Detail of Lucifer, by Franz von Stuck, 1890.  Bottom — Detail of cartoon by Jen Sorensen, via The Nib, 17 July 2018.

Hamburger, Jacob. “The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Is Nothing New”. Los Angeles Review of Books. 18 July 2018.

A Note on Civility and Equivocation

#wellduh | #WhatTheyVotedFor

In such time as we have to reflect on notions of civility and politic, and observing its coincidence in which we grasp both desperately and often belligerently after comparisons in history, it does occur that sometimes these lines of thought and inquiry merge or intersect or whatever else they might do, and from this nexus arises a question worth considering:

• While rhetoric of conservative backlash often drew puzzlement and even mockery, and centrists, liberals, progressives, and leftists alike have scrambled to remind women, queers, and blacks what happens when we make too much uncivil noise, like winning court cases or wondering who would actually claim a religious right to actively sabotage health care, there is also an iteration of Green Lantern Theory whereby President Obama could reconcile the political factions by simply charming and schmoozing Republicans enough, including that he should never speak common platitudes of empathy because, being a black president, doing so apparently means one is trying to start a race war; and, yes, it seems worth wondering just how much worse the conservative and crossover payback would have been had the nation’s first black president gone on to prosecute war criminals, including the white woman recently minted Director of CIA.

When questions of civility arise, perhaps we ought to consider just how we might answer such demand for civility that torture and white supremacism are not somehow uncivil.

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Image note: Radical Centrism 101 — Detail of cartoon by Matt Lubchansky, via The Nib, 31 May 2017.

A Minor Detail (Tennessee Six)

Perhaps it seems nitpickety, but if we attend the setup from Steve Benen—

In the aftermath of the deadly school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, opponents of gun reforms came up with quite a few culprits to blame for the bloodshed. None of them, of course, included easy access to firearms.

The public should blame the number of doors at the school, for example. And abortion. And video games. And Ritalin, secularism, Common Core, and trench coats.

And while some of this was expected—the right consistently tries to steer public discussions away from guns after mass shootings—Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) broke new ground when she tried to connect school shootings and porn.

—and the detail via Jennifer Bendery—

During a meeting last week with local pastors, Black raised the issue of gun violence in schools and why it keeps happening.

“Pornography,” she said.

“It’s available on the shelf when you walk in the grocery store. Yeah, you have to reach up to get it, but there’s pornography there,” she continued. “All of this is available without parental guidance. I think that is a big part of the root cause.”

—it seems well enough to note Mr. Benen’s punch line—

Her argument raised a variety of questions, though I’m inclined to start with this one: where exactly is Diane Black buying her groceries?

—might be leading with the wrong question. To the other, who really wants to make the point when the result means listening to a bunch of Republicans talking about internet pornography.

A Follow-Up Note (Sexual Redistribution)

#TheWomeAreSpeaking | #PayAttention

Meanwhile, there is this:

It’s really something the way Douthat can barely hold his nose to mention the monstrous “left leaning and feminist” among us, but it’s outstanding that he can then go on to leap from “the overweight and disabled” to internet trolls.

You want to have a conversation about sexual agency for marginalized groups, I am there for it. Surrogacy, self-pleasure, community: awesome. We are all entitled to healthy, safe, consensual sexual expression. But (grudgingly hoists megaphone): YEAH, THESE GUYS DON’T WANT THAT.

This isn’t rocket science. Men who idolize mass murderers do so because they hate women. They feel they have a right to their bodies. It enrages them when women do not behave in a sexually conciliatory way toward them. It enrages them that other men can obtain what they cannot, because they don’t see sex as a mutually pleasurable experience but as a reward they have been deprived of. They see themselves apart from the “Chads and Stacies” and “normies”—their version of the popular kids—and take comfort in posting memes about evil females and their precious man spaces. Oh, no, you’ve got us all wrong, they argue, I just want a nice girlfriend, and why can’t these ungrateful bitches understand that?

Douthat’s willful ignorance is telling. He hilariously believes that “The sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.” Because nobody wanted to screw good-looking people before disco and the Pill were invented. He sees the sexual economy in blanket terms, ignoring that the perpetrators of mass violence are generally not, say, women in wheelchairs. He visualizes “commerce and technology . . . harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incels.” My dude, these guys don’t want to BUY sex. They want to be GIVEN sex. A big part of the incel mindset is a revulsion of women who are sexually independent. As Jennifer Wright noted recently in Harper’s Bazaar, “There’s a lot of slut-shaming.” No hypothetical robot is going to cure that.

(Marcotte)

A Note from History (Sexual Distribution)

#TheWomeAreSpeaking | #PayAttention

This is a flashback, circa 2014, and for precisely not quite no reason under the sun:

This sort of rhetoric is fairly common on some of the more embittered PUA forums, and the “men’s rights” forums that have quite a bit of overlap with them. (Jaclyn Friedman wrote about the “men’s rights” (MRA) movement for the Prospect . . . .) The argument that it’s not women who are oppressed, but men who are kept down by women’s “unfair” systems of distributing sexual favors (for PUAs and MRAs, sex is a commodity, not really an activity) is the central organizing principle of both pick-up artistry and “men’s rights” organizing, so much so that the main text of “men’s rights”—Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power—features a woman’s naked butt on the cover, to drive home how men are supposedly helpless pawns of women’s game of sexual distribution.

(Marcotte)

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Marcotte, Amanda. “How ‘Pick-Up Artist’ Philosophy and Its More Misogynist Backlash Shaped Mind of Alleged Killer Elliot Rodger”. The American Prospect. 25 May 2014.