I was thinking about doing a commentary on Viceroy Trump’s second Supreme Court pick, but while I have some notes … the piece isn’t coming to me.
But this week I responded to a post that one of my Facebook friends made, since it really touched on something I’d been wondering about for some time. He said:
“Sometimes I wish I still had some Trump followers on my (Facebook page), because I have SO MANY questions I’d like to ask. There are so many things that simply don’t make any goddamned sense to me. I wish I had a thoughtful, articulate Trump supporter who could explain his allure to me. I would love nothing more than to have a fact-based discussion about this administration and its policies. ”
My main response was “‘I wish I had a thoughtful, articulate Trump supporter’ – there’s your problem right there.”
But one of the other people who responded to him was a black Canadian who mentioned that at least one of his relatives was still living in the US and was a big Trump fan. I thought he was on to something.
For instance: In my largely black call center, at least two of my co-workers are black and pro-Trump. When I talk to them, they’re just as much invested in all the “culture war” stuff as any other Trumpnik. And their general approach to “the Left” is negative. This indicates that despite “intersectionality”, not everybody from a certain group has to identify with a certain political party. It doesn’t surprise me, actually. If you’re black, or for that matter, if you’re a Hispanic person whose family has been in this country legally for generations, you’re not automatically disposed to think that immigration to this country is a good thing when it’s all you can do to get the jobs that are out there. That doesn’t mean that (in this example) the arguments against immigration are all correct, but it doesn’t mean that you’re immune to them just cause you’re not white. And if you’re in a community that traditionally hates abortion and homosexuality, your loyalties to the Democratic Party may be conflicted. In fact since The Election, I have often thought that liberals severely underestimate the level of hate and contempt they engender from people who aren’t them, and the more I actually probe this, the more of it I discover, often from people whose “rational best interests” are supposedly with Democrats, because they cannot identify with the current “progressive” culture. This also helps explain how somebody who would not be ethnically pure enough for Nazi Germany (like Stephen Miller) could end up supporting Trump, because he still identifies more with that mindset than the liberal one.
Speaking for myself, I read various culture articles from East Coast outlets about how woke or unwoke somebody is, and why I should care, and my reaction is usually “I knew nothing about this subject before you published this article, and now that I’ve read it, I care that much less about it than I did.” The subject could be whether the cutting edge of comedy is “a performance where a comedian rejects comedy“, whether Scarlett Johansson is cool now that she’s had two projects in a row where her casting insulted minorities, whether roleplaying gamers should support White Wolf now that they’re run by “edgelords“, and it all seems like the pastimes that I had used to get away from politicians and the “reality” they foist on us have become just another set of barricades and house-to-house combats in a culture war that seems to have turned into a never-ending Battle of Stalingrad.
And I’m like… I give up. As the Brits would say, I can’t be arsed. I would like to be an “ally,” at least insofar as I do not think people should be criminalized just for being who they are, but how am I supposed to march in your band when you keep changing the sheet music?
And if that’s what I think of the Left, imagine the opinion of someone who never gave a fuck.
The problem is that while I understand the Right’s cultural antipathy, that’s all they have fueling them. I used to read conservative media because they had the Buckley tradition of intellect. Not anymore. Most of it is the approved buzzwords and even the articulate guys are just rationalizing the culture war. In fact, I’d often mentioned that I read Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, and sometimes in TAC columns there will be bits at the end linking “More From This Author.” Reading Dreher this week, one of these rolling links went to the title “Rush Limbaugh Explains the GOP Defeat.” This linked to a Dreher column from 2013, in regard to Republican budget negotiations under President Obama. After quoting Limbaugh’s take on the GOP’s status in the “wilderness,”, Dreher asks, “How did this defeat come about? A sellout by elites, plus some kind of weird conspiracy involving the Negro president, says Rush. There’s your conservative populism. Not a sober-sided analysis of this defeat, no self-examination necessary, only blaming shadowy forces surrounding Barack Obama Republican traitors who hate decent, patriotic Americans like you and me, friend.”
That was 2013. Where is Dreher this week? Making a favorable reference to The Camp of the Saints and before that saying in reference to the Supreme Court pick: “Though I too was hoping for an Amy Coney Barrett selection, Trump’s SCOTUS picks — as well as the ascent of the Social Justice Warriors on the left — have made it more likely that I will vote Trump in 2020.” And he still IS the sensitive and self-examining one.
And if I still find myself hanging out with liberal “loonies” more than right-wingers I ought to agree with more, it’s because- at least now that they’re out of power- the Left has more capacity for introspection and self-auditing. Whereas self-examination is something that Republicans actually seem to fear. And while leftists might seem hysterical in their view of Republicans, their emotions are consistent with their stated beliefs.
By contrast, the more hysterical and desperate Republicans get, the greater the contrast between their stated religious-political beliefs and the actions of their current role model. As we saw in their interrogation of/soapbox preaching against FBI agent Peter Strzok Thursday, where they presented the case that because Strzok had had an affair that he tried to keep secret, he was an untrustworthy public official who was vulnerable to blackmail and needed to be investigated, and that this was why they were attacking his position against Donald Trump. As the phrase goes: Let that sink in.
Because as I’ve said, the definition of “conservative” is no longer how pro-life, pro-Israel or anti-tax you are. All that matters is if you can predict what color Donald Trump says the sky will be today. To Republicans, the only definition of conservatism is slavish loyalty to whatever Donald Trump says, even if it contradicts what he said two hours ago. This means that the whole movement defines itself in terms of the transitory whims of the most erratic president in history, rather than religious or secular values that have stood the test of time. In other words, the antithesis of the common definition of conservatism. So contra Dreher, I don’t see how one is supposed to build a foundation on sand, especially when that sand is from the runoff of a toxic waste dump.
Put another way, when a liberal opposes Trump, it is an affirmation of principles. When a conservative defends Trump, it is a destruction of their principles.
In response to the Facebook question, the issue is that there isn’t a fact-based discussion to be had about Trump, because, speaking again as someone who might have sympathized with Republicans in the past, there is no fact-based motivation for Trump support. As I’ve said, even articulate and successful people like Ann Coulter and the various zillionaire donors to the Republican Party are acting on behalf of their own prejudices instead of their ability to assess facts, and the result is that they not only betray their own claims of morality, they also are betrayed by Trump on the practical level (with tariff policy among many other things).
Trump fatigue isn’t just on the Left, and I don’t know how much longer the Right can endure their own cognitive dissonance. Because contrary to liberal sentiments, there is a difference between Republicans and Nazis, at least in that the Republicans didn’t start out as a white supremacist party, but rather as the opposite.