Once upon a time in America, “rednecks” beat up “hippies” for having long hair. That was the 1960s and early 1970s. Then country music stars began sporting mullets. Rednecks followed suit.
Much of movement conservatism grew out of backlash to the various liberations of the 1960s: the Civil Rights movement, women’s liberation, the sexual revolution. Conservative leaders derided the left as radical, anti-American, and having no core values. “Anything goes.” “Do your own thing.” “Moral relativism,” they warned. Then, like rednecks before them, the right followed its cultural icons down darker paths than they accused adversaries of pursuing.
People who raised us at the height of the Cold War warned us that communists would use propaganda and disinformation to destroy America from within. Now, many of those same Real Americans™, self-described patriots, consider trafficking in propaganda and disinformation good, clean fun for the whole family. They are people of the lie. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.
Monday’s court hearing in Detroit with Team Kraken lawyers proves the case. The Big Lie legal team keeps insisting it be allowed an evidentiary hearing where they can enter into the public record 960 affidavits from people who saw something they thought meant something about which they knew nothing. The documents generated by a Trump voter fraud hotline and website are worthless as evidence, U.S. District Judge Linda V. Parker told them, citing a few. But the truth is not the point. Having courts provide the veneer of credibility to wild accusations is. Lawyers — officers of the court — trying to spin lies into truth is why their careers are on the line.
Dahlia Lithwick considers the legacy of Trumpism and concludes that the lies were always the point:
Back when Donald Trump was the main one telling lies and his boosters were scrambling all around him to make it so, there was a certain comic quality to it all: What was the point in distorting weather maps or crowd sizes just to flatter a weirdo narcissist? Experts in authoritarianism were warning that this type of manipulation was how strongmen cling to power, sure, but it seemed easy enough to push it away and assume that once he was no longer president, the persistent flattery and adjusting of reality for his benefit would stop. But it’s now clear that the falsehood itself is the endgame …
The temptation has always been to try to sort the Trump lies into the hilarious ones and the pernicious ones, but that, too, misses the point. If the lying itself is the objective, the difference between the clueless whopper and the sly distortion is immaterial; in fact, the clueless whopper can be more potent because it offers up greater spectacle and affords more opportunity for performing loyalty. As recently as the second impeachment, the clueless whopper—about peaceful protesters and false flag antifa activists at the capitol—lived largely in the fever swamps. A few months later, it is being parroted by Trump and members of the Senate. The Big Lie, however absurd it might be, can overtake reality so fast the only trick anyone need master is the patience to ride it out. That means the only strategy needed for liars is to repeat the lie. Trump, who had little mastery of most skills, was always a wizard at this move.
For years, Trump used the phrase “many people are saying” to essentially mean “someday people will be saying.” He did so understanding that if you say such things enough times, someone somewhere will parrot it as a fundamental truth, and then your initial statement will be true(ish—many people will be saying the untrue thing). “Many people are saying [this lie]” was always code for “if we get people to say [this lie], it will seem true.” Trump’s admission of that principle at CPAC on Sunday gave away the game. He confessed, about polling numbers, that “if it’s bad, I say it’s fake. If it’s good, I say, that’s the most accurate poll perhaps ever.” The lie thus goes from a fiction in the lizard brain of a dangerously delusional man to headline news to gospel for people who have been trained to invert whatever they see from the news. In which case why wouldn’t Rudy Giuliani advise Trump on election night 2020 that he should simply lie and claim victory? That had been the game all along.
Being able to rewrite history and define reality (or redefine it at will) is perhaps the ultimate power, Orwell thought. Authoritarians such as Trump crave the power Stalin once had. Adhering to norms and societal standards is for the weak. And if there is one thing that makes conservatives cringe it is weakness.
Dave Weigel considers how “based” and “cringe” have become codewords on the right. He explains:
“Based,” an old term usually traced to 1980s cocaine slang, was resurrected by rapper Lil B to mean “not being scared of what people think about you” and “not being afraid to do what you want to do.”
The term gained traction among Trumpists during the 2016 campaign and has survived Trump’s 2020 loss the way Trumpism has survived it.
It’s not complicated, so long as you ignore the usual liberal and conservative labels and view political debate through two frames — “based” or “cringe.” Based means behaving how you want to behave, confident in the belief that you’re right, and that your opposition knows it. Cringe means following rules that you did not write, hewing to norms and tradition and nuance, and broadcasting your own sensitivity to the feelings of others. The cringe politician assumes that the world is changing and he or she had better get ahead of it; the based politician assumes that he or she can stay in the old world and force everyone else to adapt. Nobody claims to be cringe, but plenty of people claim to be based. Part of the fun of declaring yourself being based is getting to label the other side as weak, wrong and pathetic — and, well, cringe.
Half a century after the Lewis Powell memo and the conservative backlash to liberation and long hair, conservatives have let theirs down. What trickled down from the Reagan era was their commitment to ethics and American democratic principles such as one person/one vote. Republicans have devolved from being the “the party of ideas” to being the party of bad ones (Max Boot) or none at all.
Fifty years on, Trump’s radicalized party is anything but conservative. They can lie with abandon. They can flaunt the law. They can be based and proud of it. They can hate anyone openly and boast that it is a sign of strength, not abandonment of principle, community and mutual respect. They haven’t saved the country for conservatism. They’ve been liberated from it.