The Black Mold Of Republican Lies

Let’s assess how Republicans are running against Democrats, to the extent that they’re trying to influence voter decisions and win more votes.

I phrase it that way, because Donald Trump is devoting most of his efforts to election-rigging and election-theft schemes. On his orders, Republicans sprinted to gerrymander as many seats as possible mid-Census. He’s racing to install an intelligence chief who’ll be willing to manipulate or lie about intelligence, to create pretexts for seizing control of elections or worse. His loyalist federal prosecutors are sniffing around for excuses to seize or nullify ballots.

But Republicans are still campaigning.

Most proximately, in California, the Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton will hit the trail with Spencer Pratt, the failed Republican candidate spreading lies about his defeat in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. Hilton says he may even appoint Pratt to a role in his administration, in the unlikely event that he becomes governor.

More conventionally (“conventionally”) Texas Republicans are running an A.I. generated ad that depicts James Talarico wearing a dress, singing a song about how much he loves transing children. To the extent that this is an appeal to voters, it works on the lizard-brain level: They want men to feel emasculated for supporting Talarico, and maybe to fool some thin margin of Texans into believing the footage is real.

The immorality is part of the appeal in their minds: Who do you want to elect: those of us on the front foot? Or our back-footed opponents? We do and take what we want; they can’t stop us; they don’t even really try.

And they’re right about that last part. Your description may depend on how favorably disposed you are to Democratic strategic thinking, but in both cases, the Democratic response has mostly been to play it cool, avoid direct confrontation, change the topic.

I want them to break this habit.

Share

Let’s get back to what I mean by that specifically in a minute. First: some navel gazing.

I don’t write at much length, or in too much analytical detail, about the strategic or psychological underpinnings of right-wing malice. These are not complicated people, and they don’t need much explaining. Their arguments and appeals are not made in earnest and so earnestly refuting them is usually a sucker’s game. I’m quite confident that most readers would gloss over my commentary if I wrote ethnographies of their degenerate culture. (Though, correct me if I’m wrong—always happy to oblige!)

That kind of thing—inhabiting the right-wing mind, or addressing their claims and arguments on the merits—was once of some use, when there was still constructive dialogue across the ideological divide. Or when gullible or snowed-over members of the national press might benefit from interpretive analysis of right-wing misdirection. Why do movement conservatives do what they do, or say what they say? What’s really going on?

But that hasn’t been the case for at least a decade. There’s little reasoned thinking left on the professional right, no more shame, and certainly no more interest in right and wrong. The White House situation room is no longer a place where national leaders weigh life and death against the national interest, but a place where they draw up plans to conceal the president’s involvement in a child sex scandal. The degradation is so complete, it should be obvious even to people paid to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. If any members of the mainstream press are still under the impression that the parties are roughly mirror images of one another, they are beyond the reach of earnest argument.

The only targets of persuasion who people in my position might actually be able to persuade reside within the broad left. They include voters, who might make demands of their Democratic representatives, fellow liberal commentators, who may not always agree with me, and professional Democrats, who might occasionally find wisdom in good-faith critique. I believe we are all in pretty close agreement at this point as to what the American right has become. Our shared objective now must be to optimize methods of opposition, and contain the damage the right inflicts. That’s how I see my role.