The “antisemitic logic” behind the conservative counterrevolution
A gyrating guitar player from Tupelo and four lads from Liverpool were part of a Communist conspiracy to poison the minds of twentieth-century youth. Or that’s how conservatives saw it then and perceive how culture works now.
Greg Sargent points to a thread by Seth Cotlar on the right’s perception that “woke elites” are “orchestrating liberal cultural change.” Cotlar proposes that the right’s mantra that “politics is downstream of culture” has roots in the paranoid style of politics that sees sinister forces behind prosaic cultural changes.
“Antisemitic logic,” writes the Willamette University professor of history, drives the conservative mind to postulate such notions that “((Hollywood))) secretly controls American culture and politics.”
“It’s the genealogical descendent of the idea from the 1960s that the anti-christian (((Communists))) must be the force behind this rock and roll music that is poisoning the minds of white children and making them sympathetic to the civil rights movement.” Cotlar tweets.
It’s similar to the most recent freakout over Bud Light advertising to LGBTQ people. As if somehow Budweiser corporation is responsible for there being trans people in the world, rather than Budweiser responding to cultural changes in order to, you know, sell beer.
Authoritarian leaders and followers (and evangelicals — same thing?) are predisposed to believing cultural change is not organic, but engineered by someone(s). By the Devil. By Communists. By the international Jewish conspiracy. They view events as driven from the top down. Their counterrevolution, naturally, involves top-down responses.
The right’s grievously inaccurate diagnosis of how culture works, like any inaccurate diagnosis, will lead them to devise “cures” that won’t work. Like, if you think you’re tired because 5G waves are weakening your brain and you wrap your house in tin foil…it won’t work.
So if you think “young people seem to really like John Oliver and Trevor Noah and so we’ll just bankroll Steven Crowder and that’ll bring the youths into the GOP!” then you’re mostly just enabling Crowder to get rich off your credulity.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crude cultural crackdown against “wokeness” in Florida, for example. The political debacle last week precipitated by Tennessee GOP legislators’ attempts to quash gun-control protests. Both are prime examples of thinking culture can be controlled, even dictated, from above. Everything from “from insanely broad book bans to shockingly harsh proposed punishments for abortion to anti-transgender crackdowns” flow from this “Fortress MAGA” mentality, writes Sargent, and has a way of blowing up in reactionaries’ faces:
If the adage was “all politics is local,” we can now say that “all local politics is in danger of going viral.” And the more onerous the use of state power in these situations, the more attention it gets.
Tennessee illustrates the point: If Republicans hadn’t sought to expel the Tennessee 3, you might never have heard of them. As commentator Charlie Sykes puts it, Republicans both “look horrible” and have turned the Tennessee 3 into national “superstars.”
But hand it to Republican Jim Jordan (Ohio-reactionary). Unchastened by Republicans’ faceplant in Nashville, he expects to steer the national narrative by staging a Trumpish sideshow in Manhattan built “around the overriding goal of generating content for Fox News,” Sargent writes this morning:
Now, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is set to chair a Judiciary Committee hearing in New York City on Monday that will target Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former president Donald Trump. But the emerging details are already shining a harsh light on what you might call the “governing by Fox News” problem, in which Republicans use committee hearings to create right-wing media boomlets but ultimately run into the buzz saw of outside scrutiny.
Jordan’s hearing will purportedly highlight “victims of violent crime in Manhattan.” This is meant to serve as the next chapter in Jordan’s attempt to weaponize his committee against Bragg’s prosecution of Trump by dramatizing the GOP talking point that the district attorney is illegitimately prosecuting Trump while letting countless “real” criminals walk free.
While Jordan is swinging a bat at woke beer, Democrats on the committee will use his venue market their message that the daily slaughter of gun violence must stop to an audience that actually wants to buy.