You thought we’d put this behind us?
A reliable feature of our politics is that people from the center to the left, including the press, direct more fire at Democrats than at Republicans. It’s not that Democrats deserve more criticism. It’s that the aggrieved see more chance that their complaints will leave a mark on the left than on conservatives better armored against them. If shamelessness is conservatives’ superpower, giving a damn is the left’s kryptonite.
Protecting our freedoms matters. Improving other people’s lives matters. A more perfect union matters. Equal justice under law matters. Just not to our opponents, if ever it was.
Joe Biden’s terrible debate performance bleeds, so it leads. The media feeding frenzy is dispiriting in the extreme. Some Democrats tearing out their hair in panic and others circling the wagons around Biden makes quite a messy show. Pixels and ink, eyeballs and clicks.
And while the piranhas chomp away at the party that actually gives a damn about salvaging a country once aspirationally dedicated to the proposition that all men persons are created equal, supposed Real Americans™ who never accepted that proposition (except as a marketing slogan) march towards reformatting the United States as a monarchy similar to the one we declared ourselves free of on July 4, 1776.
The cruelest irony is that it was a mad king that drove our 18th century forebears to separate from England. Now, MAGA Republicans want not just to restore the monarchy, but with a 21st century mad king. A poor person’s idea of a rich person, a foolish person’s idea of a smart one.
I keep returning to something Matt Taibbi (in his snappier days) wrote about in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse about Americans’ inability to muster outrage at the people who really screwed them over. We kiss up and kick down. No matter how many indictments, convictions and scandals, no matter how many lies told or people cheated, no matter that the MAGA GOP means to end the American experiment by crowning a king who can do no wrong:
It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.
That was 2009. It has gotten weirder. A large swath of a country birthed by the Enlightenment now rejects learning, science, and even honesty and common decency. In Jesus’ name, even. Democracy is too hard, too demanding. Being a subject is easier.
Behold, the MAGA mad king.
Warnings not to normalize his ravings fell on deaf ears. Those with the loudest voices in our democratic polity gave up broadcasting how depraved and insane Donald Trump is and always was. Easier to fire arrows at targets on the left who might actually feel their sting and bleed real blood.
As the super villain from Mystery Men (1999) noted, it’s always easier to get the better of people who actually care about one another.
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