A collection of hysterical whiners
You must prove, you’re a man.
The through line is dominance, dominance by those who believe in their bones in their right (or their tribe’s) to sit atop the human pecking order. All their invocations of freedom? It’s their freedom to set the boundaries of what others may do, say, and believe. And when they sense their control being challenged (even if it’s a mirage), hoo-boy, they turn peevish enough to tan their testicles, storm the Capitol, and disrupt school board meetings.
One sees it in the conservative need to turn the screws on the unfortunate. Are there no workhouses? Bring back the treadmill.
Far-right Republicans in the House grind their teeth “that the work requirements they wanted to impose on food stamp recipients are less cruel than they’d hoped,” writes Greg Sargent. What they failed to impose in the budget deal passed Wednesday night they will bring back in negotiations over the farm bill, writes Greg Sargent:
For months, Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee, which is key to passing the farm bill, have salivated for an expansion of work requirements, with some calling for imposing them up to age 65 and applying them to more people with kids. That’s far more draconian than what’s in the debt limit deal.
There is little evidence that work requirements encourage recipients to work or boost their character, as Republicans claim. Yet, as an analysis from the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) concludes, these bureaucratic hurdles could put hundreds of thousands of additional adults at risk of losing food assistance.
Extracting work or boosting character is not the point.
Sargent and Paul Waldman comment on the recent parent-teacher backlash against reactionaries’ efforts in Florida to bring educators to heel amid accusations of “grooming.”
“No one is teaching your kids to be gay,” Alyssa Marano, a math teacher who resigned told a “raucous” school board meeting in Hernando County, Fla. “Sometimes, they just are gay. I have math to teach. I literally don’t have time to teach your kids to be gay,” she told the room:
At the meeting, right-wing parents and a minority of the school board amplified the usual attacks: Pornography in classrooms, indoctrination, wokeness. Watching them, it was impossible to avoid the sense that they were relishing every second of the tumult they’ve unleashed.
At the meeting, Shannon Rodriguez — a favorite of the right wing Moms for Liberty that led the attack on the Disney movie episode — kept robotically repeating phrases like “woke ideologies” and “woke agenda,” not even slightly disturbed by any sense of obligation to define their meaning. She proudly brandished her solidarity with boycotts of Bud Light and Disney as a badge of anti-woke heroism. Another conservative parent practically shouted, “You have awakened the entire alpha male blood of this country!”
But saner voices were speaking out, too, and having none of it.
“War on woke?” one student said pointedly. “More like war on your children’s future.”
“It’s me and my fellow students who are feeling the effects of this,” said a second student. A third said the removal of books from classrooms is what’s really “indoctrinating students.”
From New York to North Carolina to Montana, liberal parents are refusing to be cowed by reactionaries with their awakened alpha male blood.
If there is a cultural crisis, Walden writes in a third column, it lies with insecurities that drive “alpha” males to testicle tanning and assaults against beer cans:
The result of men’s anxiety is what has been termed “precarious manhood.” Studies suggest not only that people perceive manhood as easily lost but also that when it is lost, it’s because other people no longer view that man as a man. Perceptions of manhood are intensely social.
Conservatives claim that men are being bombarded with messages delegitimizing masculinity. Such messages do exist, but “traditional” masculinity is still everywhere in popular culture. TV and movie screens are still full of hunky leading men who solve problems through violence.
And if the “manly virtues” include strength and stoicism, it’s hard to see them in the collection of hysterical whiners who make up today’s right. What exactly is “masculine” about finding a transgender influencer promoting Bud Light on Instagram so threatening that you have to respond with a public display of violence against beer cans?
But for these alpha males and alpha parents, any sense that their cultural dominance is slipping is emasculating. “Nothing is less manly,” Waldman concludes, than reacting with anger and fear to messages the right amplifies “at ear-splitting volume” to “every new challenge to gender norms.”
Their idea of normal these days is an amped-up version of George Lakoff’s “strict father.” By God, someone’s got to be punished, and they’re the ones to do it.