When leaders run out of unifying myths, division is the last currency. Why
this Thanksgiving, America is a "death cult" versus "radical socialists"
Matt Taibbi
Nov 25
Self-described "elected DNC member" and Washington Monthly contributor David
Atkins tweeted this last week, garnering a huge response:
David Atkins @DavidOAtkins
No seriously...how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start?
Fox? Facebook? We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or
Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.
November 18th 2020
9,878 Retweets61,602 Likes
You have to read the full thread to grasp the argument, a greatest hits
collection of DNC talking points. Conservatives, Atkins writes, have no
beliefs, being a "belligerent death cult against reality and basic decency."
There's no reason to listen to them, since the "only actual policy debates"
are "happening within the dem coalition between left and center-left." He
had over 61,000 likes last I checked.
Meanwhile, as Donald Trump kept describing the election as a "hoax," newly
re-upped South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted this, perhaps
offering a preview into Republican messaging in the post-Trump era:
Lindsey Graham @LindseyGrahamSC
I can understand why the Squad doesn't want me in the Senate - because I'm
going to bury your agenda. You're a bunch of Socialists. You would transform
America and make it Venezuela. I'm gonna stand in your way. I'm not going
anywhere!
November 19th 2020
4,320 Retweets23,492 Likes
From the "vast right-wing conspiracy" through the "basket of deplorables" to
now, the Democratic message increasingly focuses on the illegitimacy of the
ordinary conservative voter's opinion: ignorant, conspiratorial, and racist,
so terrible that the only hope is mass-reprogramming by educated betters.
On the other hand, Republicans from Goldwater to Trump have warned that
coalitions of "marauders" from the inner cities and "bad hombres" from
across the border are plotting to use socialist politics to seize the
hard-earned treasure of the small-town voter, with the aid of elitist
traitors in the Democratic Party.
Spool these ideas endlessly and you get culture war. Any thought that it
might abate once Trump left the scene looks naive now. The pre-election
warnings from the right about roving bands of Pelosi-coddled Antifa troops
looking to "attack your homes" haven't subsided, while the line that Trump
voters are not a political group but a stupidity death-cult is no longer hot
take, but a mandatory element of mainstream press analyses.
This language has been picking up for years, from Vanity Fair's "Cult of
Trump" to endless Washington Post and New York Times ruminations on the
theme, all wondering how humans supporting Trump could also hold down jobs
or take out the trash by themselves. Every tale about science-denying
Trumpists gone off the deep end in the manner of religious loons is boosted.
When an E.R. nurse went on CNN to tell tales of Biden-haters going to their
Covid-choked deaths gasping, "It isn't real!", her story was circulated
everywhere, retweeted by multiple Senators and a Pulitzer winner.
A rare follow-up by Wired suggested these and other similar tales were
apocryphal, which ought to have been a relief. However, just as news that
Robert Mueller might not discover the president to be a secret agent was
deemed a "disappointment," press and politicians alike seem reluctant to let
go of legends of Middle America as one great sea of mass insanity. In the
same way, some in the GOP can't let go of the dream of an election stolen in
the dark night of our Venezuela-style city governments.
As a result, we've seen story after story of late about skyrocketing gun
sales, with frequent reminders that it's not just frustrated white dudes
tooling up now. Even "women, minorities, and politically liberal buyers" are
being forced to "contemplate something outside their universe," is how one
gun dealer recently put it to NBC.
Though the oft-predicted breakout of Yugoslavia-style sectarian violence
hasn't happened yet, it's not for want of trying on the part of both
politicians and the bigger media organizations, which couldn't get enough of
the stories of "on edge" and "nervous" citizens boarding up storefronts on
Election Night. They keep playing up these tensions as click-generating
theater, not caring about the consequences of wishing actual sectarian
battle into existence.
This is what happens when the very wealthy stop having a stake in the
outcome of a country's future. Having long ago stopped investing in
ameliorative programs to keep cities and small towns alive, they stop
bothering with unifying national legends, too, letting long-simmering
divisions rise.
Eight years ago, at the height of anger toward Wall Street, the American
Conservative wrote about the "revolt of the rich," saying, "Our plutocracy
now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it,
but not of it." They pointed out that in both world wars, the Harvard man
and the New York socialite alike "knew the weight of an army pack." By the
21st century, war became a job for lower-class suckers, with soldiers being
one of many groups targeted by predatory lending in the crash era. Conflicts
in places like Afghanistan drag on forever because the children of Important
People mostly don't serve. We have very wealthy people, but walled off in an
archipelago of tax and criminal justice loopholes that give them more common
statehood with other plutocrats in Europe and Asia than with other
Americans.
Right around the same time that "Revolt of the Rich" article was being
published, political movements on both the left and the right were beginning
to wake up to the idea that they'd been focusing their anger in the wrong
places. Each articulated a theory of abandonment by the political class. The
Occupy movement described their battle as being between the 99% and the 1%,
while the Tea Partiers, for all their eccentricities - I was pretty harsh
about them once upon a time - were at least coming to the realization that
the Republican Party leaders had long been lying to them about things like
spending. These movements respectively set the stage for Bernie Sanders and
Trump, who both described politics as a fight between a broad mean of
betrayed constituents and that archipelago of rich villains.
Those movements failed, for different reasons, and we're now back to
corporate-sponsored tales of half against half. What's always forgotten is
who's paying for these messages. We have two donor-fattened parties that
across decades of incompetence have each run out of convincing pitches for
how to improve the lives of ordinary people. So they've settled into a new
propaganda line that blames voters for their problems, with each party
directing its base to demonize the other's followers. Essentially, in the
wake of Trump, the political class is accepting the inevitability of culture
war, and urging it on, as something preferable to populist revolt.
As any restaurant owner will tell you, the customer is not always right. The
customer is often a braying, obese asshole, prone to ogling waitresses,
yelling gross jokes at stadium-rock volume, and skipping out without
tipping. It's the same with the "ordinary" voter, who for generations was
exempted from criticism by unwritten consensus of stumping candidates.
Because it was once understood that politicians in both parties wanted to at
least try for their votes, presidential campaigns devolved into flattery
contests about the boundless rectitude of the farmer, the autoworker, the
teacher, the firefighter, the nurse, the beer-drinking good ole boy, anyone
who didn't sound too upscale and was physically capable of pulling a lever
in a voting booth.
If you want an idea of how deeply Washington strategists once pretended to
revere the "regular" person, watch the scene in Primary Colors where John
Travolta-as-Bill-Clinton escapes the tumult of a hotel fight with Hillary to
share a Krispy Kreme apple fritter with a Boobus New Hampshirus (it would be
a Dunkin' Donuts in actual New England). Travolta-as-Clinton is nearly
brought to tears at the thought that he might let down someone like Danny
the Krispy Kreme clerk, gutting out a late shift on a bum leg for $5.25 an
hour. "We won't let him down," whispers Henry, supposedly the stand-in for
George Stephanopoulos, patting saddened Travolta-Clinton on the back.
"Middle class" (read: white) voters back then were depicted as sinless
creatures whose uncomplaining devotion to work had talismanic healing
properties for the deformed soul of the compromised Washington politician.
"Folks" were fetishized as virtue-icons in elite media and never criticized
in speeches. Targets instead for stump wrath were "Washington insiders,"
"millionaires," "waste," Russians, and whichever treacherous, cheating,
probably Asian economic rival was kicking America's ass at the time - for
Dick Gephardt it was the Koreans, for Pat Buchanan Japan, then China, etc.
The lone exception to the don't-rip-the-common-man rule was the inner city
minority voter, for ages caricatured by Republicans as a gobbler of taxes
and a work-avoiding criminal. Ronald Reagan's tales of Linda Taylor, the
famed "queen" of welfare who drove a Cadillac and bought T-bone steaks with
the working person's taxes, grew out of a calculation that there was more
percentage in riling up "silent majority" white voters than in trying, even
insincerely, for Black votes.
Republicans had the monopoly on this behavior until Bill Clinton's run in
1992, which unveiled a new politics designed to steal Republicans' donors by
appropriating Reagan's deregulatory policies, and their voters through
dog-whistle campaigns to "save the middle class." Clinton decided that
selective ur-father moralizing about the likes of Sister Souljah would be
enough to pry loose white voters anxious about the popularity of Jesse
Jackson, the precursor to Sanders-style populism.
By the mid-nineties, Clinton was openly speaking the language of Reagan with
respect to welfare and trade, and was demonizing the same inner-city voters
as Reagan, only with a little more subtlety. Years after he left office,
Clinton would write an op-ed in the New York Times hailing welfare reform as
the great example of unity and "bipartisanship," a politics of togetherness:
The 1996 Welfare Act shows us how much we can achieve when both parties
bring their best ideas to the negotiating table and focus on doing what is
best for the country.
Essentially, the two parties were both using race as a way to deflect
attention from their own job-exporting, donor-fellating policies. When
corporate America started shuttering its steel factories and auto plants,
Reagan went after union workers with appeals to patriotism and racial
animus.
At the same time, decades of promises of more investment in inner cities
went up in smoke as New Democrats embraced "opportunity" and "community
policing" instead of urban renewal. An enduring example is beloved Democrat
Mario Cuomo using New York's Urban Development Corporation - a public agency
created a week after Martin Luther King's death with the aim of developing
jobs for inner-city voters - to fund the construction of a series of new
upstate prisons in the early eighties.
The blaming behavior would wane during fat years, and accelerate in
downturns. Both parties, for instance, lied about the causes of the 2008
crash, when once again racial politics were used to deflect attention from
donor greed. The actual culprits in 2008 were bankers pumping up a
speculative bubble selling mortgage securities to institutional investors
like pension funds, but in short order, the legend spread that the crash was
caused by "irresponsible" homeowners who took out mortgages they couldn't
afford.
Obama's chief economist at Treasury, Alan Krueger, explained years later why
they rescued banks and not people. "It would have been extremely unfair, and
created problems down the road," he said, "to bail out homeowners who were
irresponsible and took on homes they couldn't afford."
This line of rhetoric was celebrated on Wall Street as a way to make Black
and Hispanic homeowners the face of the crash, instead of the executives
from Countrywide-type firms who'd targeted them with crooked no-money-down
mortgage schemes that were basically a modern take on Jim Crow land deals.
Meanwhile, a crucial development between the Clinton years and the 2016
election was that white, formerly middle-class, rural and suburban voters
stopped believing in any of the appeals coming from either party. Unlike the
country's very poor, who could still hold out a hope that their lives might
get better with, say, more access to higher education, less-educated white
voters by 2016 were abjectly pessimistic. "Most don't believe they would be
better off if they had earned a four-year college degree," is how Evergreen
professor Stephanie Coontz put it after Trump's win.
And why not? The indicators across the board - job security, quality of
public schools, real income growth - were bad for everyone except the very
wealthy, who were essentially living in a separate country. Huge chunks of
America looked like the third world by 2016, with rampant drug addiction,
dead factory towns, closed hospitals, terrible nutrition, and phenomena like
"maternity care deserts," i.e. swaths of the country with no access to
birthing centers. Before 2016 we saw the first headlines about declining
life expectancy among white Americans, and studies showed a clear split:
where life expectancy was down or stagnant, Trump did well, while Hillary
Clinton won the approval of voters with rising life spans.
That wasn't the whole explanation, but it was part of it: the more people's
lives sucked, the higher the likelihood they would vote for someone like
Trump, whose campaign was opportunistically devised as a way to stick it to
the "global financial elite" that had "watched on the sidelines" as the
country crumbled. A huge part of Trump's appeal was that those people, the
ones who consider themselves the arbiters of "decency," found him appalling.
The general public's expectations for their votes were so low by 2016 that
for many, a Schadenfreude factor was enough incentive to fling feces in the
form of a Trump vote. It wasn't rocket science and still isn't.
The United States is not a healthy country. Our biggest cities remain
basically segregated, along racial lines but also into functional and
dysfunctional parts. The "defund the police" movement is borne out of
frustration in a lot of poor neighborhoods that cops are often the only
well-funded policy response to joblessness, lack of health care, etc. Now
that the Sanders campaign has been successfully beaten back, we're already
hearing the predictable calls from within the Pelosi wing of the Democratic
party to tone down the demands for more and better social programming, which
they're of course citing as the reason for recent down-ballot losses.
Rural America has its own failures, and has now been betrayed by so many
times by so many different parties that insults like Joe Biden's exhortation
to miners to learn to code barely even register. Yet in punditry and on
social media alike, it's become nearly impossible to say something as simple
as Dave Chappelle's speech after Election Night:
Yup @Much_Truth
@DaveChappelle talking about being a humble winner and having empathy. #SNL
#chappelle
November 8th 2020
69 Retweets283 Likes
We don't talk about why people are losing their minds, for the increasingly
obvious reason that culture war is the only thing standing between America's
plutocrat class and a lot of pitchforks. So what we'll get more and more of,
as the country grows less stable, are inciting narratives: the sticks are
filled with gun-toting loons, Antifa wants your house. This is what happens
when a society runs out of myths to sell to the public. After a generation
of lies and failures, our fear of each other is all our leaders have left.
