Two of former president Donald Trump’s most prominent backers in the right wing influencer sphere fretted Wednesday after early voting numbers showed massive early turnout among women that could imperil their candidate’s path to victory.
“Male turnout in Pennsylvania for Trump has been a disaster,” tweeted Mike Cernovich on Wednesday. “Unless this changes, Kamala Harris takes PA and it’s over.”
Cernovich is a longtime far right gadfly and commentator with a massive online following
He’s been around long enough to have played a role in the anti-feminist Gamergate harassment campaign and to have helped spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, though has disavowed the alt-right and drifted closer to the mainstream conservative movement in recent years. (Trump’s eldest child, Donald Jr., once said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize).
When a follower questioned his assessment, Cernovich pointed out that conservative organizer Charlie Kirk, who he called “one of the most significant [get out the vote] activists in the country,” had also raised the alarm.
“Early vote has been disproportionately female,” tweeted Kirk earlier Wednesday. “If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.”
Kirk, whose conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA is a central force in organizing and coordinating right wing campus activism across America, is a close ally of Donald Jr., though has not yet been tipped for a Pulitzer by the former president’s eldest offspring.
Preliminary data supports their concerns.
A Politico analysis of early vote data in battleground states published on Tuesday showed a 10 point gender gap in early voting, with women comprising 55 percent of those who had cast ballots. Nation-wide early voting data compiled by NBC showed Thursday that, of roughly 58 million mail-in and early in-person votes cast across the country, 54 percent came from women.
National and swing state polls show Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, with a commanding double digit lead among women voters.
“In some states women are actually exceeding their vote share from 2020, which is at this point shocking to me,” Democratic strategist Tom Bonier told Politico. “I never would have bet on that.”
Cernovich even made fun of the Joe Rogan podcast audience:
“Problem is thinking that Draft Kings coupon code link clicking alcoholics who space out when tuning into podcasts while high, vote. Women vote, and more needs to be done!”
Oh my…
Apparently, men do tend to vote on Election Day so maybe all those bros will roll out of bed, grab a latte and head out to their precinct (the location of which they will have researched earlier) to stand in line with a bunch of old ladies so they can fill out their ballot and proudly wear their “I Voted” sticker. It would be so like them.
A couple of weeks ago the gang down in Mar-a-lago was popping the champagne and gleefully drawing up plans to further destroy the White House gardens once the Trump’s are in residence again. They were looking at the early voting in the swing states and they figured they had it in the bag. According to Puck’s Tara Palmieri:
It hit Trump in the last couple of weeks that early voting is a good way to win,” a person with knowledge of his thinking said. The campaign has been papering Pennsylvania with signs like, “Swamp them with votes,” “Make it too big to rig,” and “Vote early today!”
They’ve actually been strutting around for a while, but that’s to be expected. Republicans always go with the bandwagon effect, and no one is more natural at it than Trump who just last night told an audience in Arizona, “if Ronald Reagan came back from the dead at the height of Ronald Reagan, if he went to California to have a rally, he would 250–300 people in a ballroom. We have fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand people.” (At the same event he fanatisized about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad in lurid detail, so he was really on a roll.)
However, Palmieri wrote an update to her piece yesterday and the mood down in Florida has dampened a bit in recent days. She writes that the campaign is starting to believe that surge they were al celebrating was premature. Apparently. the campaign still feels confident that they can win the sunbelt states (N. Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada) but since Michigan is looking less and less doable, Pennsylvania is the must-win state. And suddenly things have started to look very dicey there “where women have outpaced men by 13 points in the early vote which has sent the campaign into a tailspin during the past two days.”
This has led to the most predictable reaction in American politics today:
Not unlike 2020, Trump and his allies are preemptively making outlandish and extreme assertions to lay the groundwork for a claim, if they don’t prevail, that the election was stolen. They’re also engaging in the early stages of election lawfare.
“They’re going so crazy here,” said a campaign source. “Anyone who hears how rabid they are about this issue can’t walk away from this and think they feel comfortable about where they’re at in PA. They’re talking about criminal referrals. They want to find poll watchers who they feel are engaged in voter suppression so that they can refer criminal prosecutions.
Of course they are. They’ve already started with the lawsuits. They complained that in Bucks Country people standing in line to apply for a mail in ballot past the deadline should have been allowed to get them anyway. A judge agreed and actually extended the deadline there and in another county until Friday. If you are rolling your eyes at the irony of Republicans demanding that deadlines be extended in the voting process, you aren’t alone.
But of course, the point of the whole thing is to help spread the idea that the election system is rigged against him, even when he is being accommodated.
Here’s Trump reaction:
He’s claiming that they’ve “found votes” which is blubbering nonsense:
And it begins. Trump spreading claims that the election is being stolen in Pennsylvania.
"We found a lot of votes in a certain county in York county… Lancaster county… We found a lot of stuff." pic.twitter.com/CoczZVkRwY
We’ve already been through two presidential elections with Donald Trump and in both cases he said that he would only accept the results of the election if he wins. And even when he won he insisted that he actually won the popular vote and established a commission to investigate it (which went nowhere.) Contesting the elections is now par for the course in presidential elections. We have no idea what will come after if he loses but nobody in this country thinks for a minute that he will concede gracefully. This is how we do it now.
A big part of the strategy (and at this point I don’t think we can see it as anything else) is the touting of phony polling numbers that will convince his followers that he was leading so much before the election that it makes no sense that he possibly could have lost. In fact, one of his staunchest supporters and top surrogates, Tucker Carlson, laid it out with his patented snotty delivery at the Madison Square Garden hate rally last weekend:
It’s gonna be pretty tough for them, ten days from now, to look in the eye to America with a straight face — it’s gonna be pretty hard to look at us and say, “You know what? Kamala Harris, she’s just, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive. As the first Samoan, Malaysian, Low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support.
Trump MSG rally, Tucker drawing a line in the sand right now: nobody is going to believe that Kamala got 85 million votes pic.twitter.com/9oJ7O5XNFW
This week the campaign “leaked” an internal polling document to Axios that showed Trump leading everywhere based upon the Real Clear Politics averages (which includes all the right wing pollsters that have been flooding the zone without weighting them.) The author Mike Allen writes, “the memo reflects the exuberance that Trump staffers and allies exude in interviews and behind-the-scenes conversations.”
It’s not uncommon for campaigns to slip reporters positive internal memos during the campaign for any number of reasons. In this case it’s just the usual Trump spin that he’s winning more than anyone’s ever won and nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But it’s done to reinforce the new Republican doctrine that Donald Trump cannot lose unless the other side cheats because he is so obviously superior to his opposition whether it’s Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. In fact, Trump said the same against fellow Republicans who ran against him and his followers believed him when he said that too.
There are many plans to contest the vote, file lawsuits, intimidate voters, whatever it takes to make sure that Donald Trump will never, ever be seen as a loser among his cult followers. Nothing is more important than the belief that any loss is the result of a corrupt conspiracy to deny them their rightful victory and the leader they truly believe is the preference of the vast majority of the American people. As their Dear Leader told them just today:
Trump: "They only thing that can stop us is the cheating. It's the only thing that can stop us." pic.twitter.com/O1Xp9c87Ru
His campaign knows he’s lying. They’re still trying to win legitimately. But they go to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that even if they lose they can just claim they really won but the other side stole it. And it’s not just campaign operatives. Tens of millions of people in this country will believe for the rest of their lives that our election are all rigged unless their candidate wins. How long will it take before we have a majority of American who believe in democracy again?
The Monster from the Id is the main antagonist of the 1956 American science fiction film Forbidden Planet. It is a creature made of solidified psychic energy derived from the subconscious thoughts of Dr. Edward Morbius, powered by the Krell Great Machine.
Driving the MAGA movement and what was once the GOP this election are several notorious Ids. But one in particular. Even Matt Drudge sees it.
On Trump's ugly violent fantasies about Liz Cheney, don't let anyone get away with pretending he's raging at her because he's "anti-war." That's pure MAGA bullsh-t that deserves nothing but ridicule and contempt. This is *only* about her being an effective force *against him.*
Trump has reason to be having violent fantasies about women such as former Rep. Liz Cheney. There are a lot more where she came from (Newsweek):
Women are dominating early voting in the 2024 election so far, prompting concern among some of former President Donald Trump‘s allies.
Women are outpacing men in casting ballots nationally and in all seven battleground states, according to NBC News’ tracker of early ballot returns. Of the more than 58 million mail-in and early in-person votes that have been cast nationally, 54 percent were cast by women and 44 percent by men.
In the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina, there is at least a 10-point gap between men and women in the early vote. The gender gap was widest in Pennsylvania as of 2 a.m. ET on Thursday, with women accounting for about 56 percent of the early vote, and men for about 43 percent.
In North Carolina, the gender gap was 11 points when I ran the numbers on Wednesday.
When you’re a Republican, they let you do it. You can do anything.
Republicans ignore voters’ wishes. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Democracy is not exactly their jam. They’ve made that clear again and again. But now there’s a little-noticed study analyzing that affliction in our beleaguered constitutional republic.
Timothy Noah gives the study by Mary Ellen Klas and Carolyn Silverman published last month in Bloomberg Opinion some extra press at The New Republic.
The way elections are sold, candidates tell us what they promise to do for us (or in MAGA’s case, to us) “and then voters decide which set of policies they prefer.” If only.
See, Democrats are more likely to respond to the majority of voters’ wishes than their GOP counterparts:
The Klas-Silverman piece didn’t attract much notice when it was published because it was packaged, in rather boring fashion, as a story purporting to show that in the 40 “trifecta” states where a single party controls both halves of the state legislature and the governorship, voter preferences get ignored. A plague on both your houses! But what the story really shows is that Republican officeholders in the 23 Republican trifecta states routinely ignore voter preferences, even as Democratic officeholders in the 17 Democratic trifecta states work much harder to do what voters want. Indeed, Democratic trifecta state government policies match up with voter preferences more frequently than in states in which power is shared between Democrats and Republicans.
[…]
“For the past quarter century,” Klas and Silverman write, “the public has become more progressive on many social issues,” including “abortion, gender identity, climate change, guns, immigration and voting rights.” Blue trifecta states have kept pace with these changes, they write, and red trifecta states have not. Instead, they’ve become known more for “rejecting Medicaid expansion, relaxing gun laws and cutting unemployment insurance.” The authors go on to explain that “Blue monopolies channel the goals of their voters, while red monopolies channel the goals of their legislators (often at the expense of voters).”
It’s not that Republican trifectas never give the majority what it wants. They just do it far less than Democratic trifectas.
What’s a voter to do? Vote out the malefactors of great wealth? Maybe in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, but not in ours. Republican gerrymandering, particularly after REDMAP-powered 2010 redistricting, has ensconced politicians in state legislative seats where, Klas and Silverman, explain:
Nearly half of all state legislators running for reelection in recent decades faced challengers only in the general election, and 35% of all legislators were elected with no opposition at all, according to Steven Rogers, professor of political science at Saint Louis University.
It’s not that Democrats don’t gerrymander, Noah writes, but data suggests “gerrymandering is almost entirely a Republican problem.” And what gerrymandering doesn’t accomplish, GOP vote-suppressing measures supplement.
Klas and Silverman:
A Bloomberg analysis of data compiled by the non-partisan Voting Rights Lab found that more than 120 election law changes in Republican-led states over the last four years have had at least one component intended to restrict voter access or election administration — such as tightening voter ID requirements, restricting mail-in voting, limiting ballot drop-off locations and shortening the early voting period. By contrast, the analysis showed, Democrats’ legislation has focused on improving voter access by standardizing voter registration, ensuring a sufficient number of polling sites and expanding the early voting period.
“They want everyone to vote,” complained Paul Weyrich, co-founder of The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, in 1980 to a conference of religious conservatives. “I don’t want everybody to vote.” In GOP circles, that’s chiseled on stone tablets.
Citing the collapse of local newspapers and “news deserts,” Klas and Silverman suggest perhaps voters’ lack of information contributes to politicians stealing their candy. Noah adds that
… this problem is especially acute in conservative areas. Steve Waldman and Lori Henson, crunching data from the 2023 Medill State of Local News report, note that fully 83 percent of those counties Medill judged either news deserts or in danger of becoming news deserts voted Republican in the 2020 election. The 13 states with the most news deserts—Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, etc.—were all red states except Georgia. In the absence of information, people vote based on cultural affinity. When people self-identify as conservative, as they do in many regions of this country, they vote Republican.
Noah devotes a lot of pixels to these news deserts. Granted, as he explains, “Democrats’ primary obstacle is that 80 to 85 percent of Americans pay little attention to any news source, readily available or not, according to the political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, both of the University of Michigan.”
But I’m not so sure news deserts account for people voting based on cultural affinity more than on policies. They just do. “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like” is how most people really vote. On their guts. Voters in 2000 thought they’d rather have a beer with Gov. George W. Bush, recovering alcoholic, for heaven’s sake. They’re not looking for more information (see disingenuous complaints about Kamala Harris) as much as authenticity. That’s as true for national candidates as it is for state officials.
Many of our conservative neighbors simply find the orange con man more authentic than Democrats. Perhaps because they are accustomed from childhood to being sold prayer cloths, prosperity plans, and afterlife insurance by loudmouth hucksters in church pulpits. It’s what they know. It’s comfortably familiar.
Send your prayers to God and send your money to me has a parallel in politics.
Mark Cuban explains how Trump started the high inflation:
In April 2020, in the early days of Covid, the gas prices were $1.87. Oil companies went to Trump and said: we're getting crushed. You have to talk to your friends MBS and Putin and ask them to reduce production. And he… pic.twitter.com/PoDrVqyDJn
Yes, the pandemic supply chain problems threw the world economy into chaos and there was plenty of price gounging and external events like bird flu that raised the cost of eggs. But guess who put his foot on the gas?
Mark Cuban explains how Trump started the high inflation: In April 2020, in the early days of Covid, the gas prices were $1.87. Oil companies went to Trump and said: we’re getting crushed. You have to talk to your friends MBS and Putin and ask them to reduce production. And he did. That was the day inflation started.
Trump is saying that he’s going to “drill, baby, drill” like a madman to reduce inflation. Yeah. Not gonna happen. American oil production is at an all time high and the energy companies are not looking to raise prodiction to the point that they will not make money. Just looks what happened during the pandemic. I don’t know if he knows this. He’s not exactly a very stable genius.
But I guess he’ll always have his tariffs. Which will raise inflation. So there’s that.
Across the United States, companies that rely on foreign suppliers are preparing to raise prices in response to the massive import tariffs that former president Donald Trump promises if he wins the election Tuesday.
Producers of a range of items, including clothing, footwear, baby products, auto parts and hardware, say they will pass along the cost of the tariffs to their American customers.
The planned price increases next year would come as consumers are beginning to enjoy relief from the highest inflation in four decades, and they directly contradict Trump’s repeated assurances that foreigners will pay the tariff tab.
“We’re set to raise prices,” Timothy Boyle, chief executive of Columbia Sportswear, said in an interview. “We’re buying stuff today for delivery next fall. So we’re just going to deal with it and we’ll just raise the prices. … It’s going to be very, very difficult to keep products affordable for Americans.”
Trump vows to impose the heaviest tariffs since the 1930s, including a 60 percent tax on products from China and a 10 to 20 percent fee on all other foreign goods. Doing so will encourage companies to produce inside the United States using American workers rather than buying from foreign suppliers, he has said.
Trump also has repeatedly claimed that foreign companies — not Americans — pay such import taxes. “The countries will pay,” he insisted this month during an interview with John Micklethwait of Bloomberg News at the Economic Club of Chicago.
In fact, American importers pay all tariffs to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency at the time their products enter the country.
It appears that almost half the voters in this country, which includes the man who’s proposing it, are apparently too dim to understand how this works.
Remember all those people t the Economic Club speeches laughed and cheered his incoherent rants? Yeah, they were smart as whips for doing that.
As I am obsessed with cults (for obvious reasons) I’ve read many books and watched a lot of documentaries about fundamentalist polygamists like Warren Jeffs and David Koresh. They inevitably take their cult to live in compounds where they can more easily control women and breed large numbers of children. Guess who’s following in their footsteps?
Elon Musk is obsessed with procreation. We know this because (1) he frequently says things like, “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far” and (2) he’s fathered nearly a dozen children with three separate women, and presently appears to be trying to at least double or triple those numbers, with whoever will accept his offer of DNA.
The New York Timesreports that in addition to the women he’s already had children with, Musk has “offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances.” One of those acquaintances, according to the Times, was former independent vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, whom Musk reportedly proffered his DNA to in 2022; Shanahan, who would go on to become Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, is said to have declined. Other people whom the richest man in the world similarly offered his seed to include “a married couple he had met socially only a handful of times,” according to two people who witnessed his proposal, which reportedly took place last year at a dinner party “at the home of a well-known Silicon Valley executive.” (It’s not clear how the couple responded.)
The Wall St Journal reported earlier that Musk routinely asks his female employees if he can impregnate them which is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever read. And I’m sure you remember this from Musk after Taylor Swift endorsed Harris:
On a quiet, leafy street of multimillion-dollar properties, one stands out: a 14,400-square-foot mansion that looks like a villa plucked from the hills of Tuscany and transplanted to Austin, Texas. This is where Elon Musk, 53, the world’s richest man and perhaps the most important campaign backer of former President Donald J. Trump, has been trying to establish the cornerstone of an unusual family compound, according to four people familiar with his plans.
Mr. Musk has told people close to him in recent months that he envisions his children (of which there are at least 11) and two of their three mothers occupying adjoining properties. That way, his younger children could be a part of one another’s lives, and Mr. Musk could schedule time among them.
He’s planning to build more on the compound to accomodate additional birthing vessels for his seed. So far, all his wives aren’t on board but I’ve got a feeling he’ll be able to coerce some other women to join him and breed prolifically. He is the richest man in the world after all.
As Vanity Fair concludes:
Musk is currently doing everything in his power to elect Donald Trump, a man who knows a little something about having large numbers of children with numerous woman. Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate appears to be as equally obsessed with procreating as Musk is, and believes that anyone who chooses not to become a parent is worthy of scorn.
JD is all in on the pro-natalist patriarchy. And if Trump wins it’s almost certain that he’ll inherit the presidency one way or another.
Patriarchy is humanity’s oldest organizing principle and it’s not going quietly.
How about a little poll analysis crack? Don’t worry this won’t make you want to throw your phone across the room. It’s actually very interesting.
NBC News took a look at the extremely tight state polling right now and came away thinking maybe there’s a little “adjusting” going on that is giving us all the impression that it’s actually a tie:
Analysis: Even in a close election, random chance means polls should be showing a broader range of results. That raises the question of whether we’re in for another polling surprise.
Recent polls in the seven core swing states show an astonishingly tight presidential race: 124 out of the last 321 polls conducted in those states — almost 39% — show margins of 1 percentage point or less.
In fact, the state polls are showing not just an astonishingly tight race, but also an improbably tight race. Even in a truly tied election, the randomness inherent in polling would generate more varied and less clustered results — unless the state polls and the polling averages are artificially close because of decisions pollsters are making.
The results of a poll depend on the opinions of the voters and the decisions of pollsters. Decisions about how to weight polls to match the expected composition of the electorate can move the results of a poll up to 8 points. This is true even if pollsters are making perfectly reasonable decisions on how to weight their survey data, as survey researchers have been forced to consider new methods and ideas for weighting and addressing falling response rates following polling misses in 2016 and 2020.
But the fact that so many polls are reporting the exact same margins and results raises a troubling possibility: that some pollsters are making adjustments in such similar ways that those choices are causing the results to bunch together, creating a potential illusion of certainty — or that some pollsters are even looking to others’ results to guide their own (i.e., “herding”). If so, the artificial similarity of polls may be creating a false impression that may not play out on Election Day. We could well be in for a very close election. But there’s also a significant chance one candidate or the other could sweep every swing state and win the presidency somewhat comfortably, at least compared to the evenly balanced picture in the polls.
If this issue is of interest to you I urge you to read the whole thing. If this is correct, these super-tight polls are suspicious.
It’s certainly possible that the race is a tight as the polls suggest. What’s unlikely is that all these polls that uniformly show this aren’t herding. There should be more variation in the polling just because of polling randomness.
Anyway, I thought it was quite interesting. We’ve got a huge poll coming up next Tuesday so any poll-gazing at this point is really just a form of masochism. But I know that some of you are interested in this stuff (as, I confess, I am) so I thought I’d share it.
There is no end of scrutiny of the 2024 election polls – who is ahead, who is behind, how much the polls will miss the election outcome, etc., etc. These questions have become even more pressing because the presidential race seems to be a toss-up. Every percentage point for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump matters.
But here’s the big problem that no one talks about very much: Simple and defensible decisions by pollsters can drastically change the reported margin between Harris and Trump. I’ll show that the margin can change by as much as eight points. Reasonable decisions produce a margin that ranges from Harris +0.9% to Harris +9%.
This reality highlights that we ask far too much of polls. Ultimately, it’s hard to know how much poll numbers reflect the decisions of voters – or the decisions of pollsters.
At this point I’m all about vibes and I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. But then I’ve felt that way throughout the campaign. As I felt in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 when Democrats have pretty much run the table.
Last night I posted that the Dodgers winning the World Series wasa good omen because they won last in 2020 and Joe Biden was victorious as well. It’s silly. But just for fun here’s some more:
While the stock market is not necessarily representative of the broader economy, the S&P 500’s performance in the run-up to Election Day has historically been a strong indicator of whether the incumbent party’s candidate will retain control of the White House — correctly forecasting all but four presidential races over the last 96 years.
If the index is falling, the theory goes, investors are bracing for more uncertainty from a new administration. But a climb in the S&P 500 signals that the market is expecting the current president’s party to win. And the index’s recent rise is suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris, who took over the Democratic ticket from President Joe Biden this summer, could be bound for victory.
While the weirdo billionaires are betting on Orange Julius Caesar, the actual day-to-day money people are betting with their wallets on Harris. Good to know.
By the way:
Aaaand this:
More registered voters say they have been contacted by Kamala Harris’ campaign (42%) than by Donald Trump’s campaign (35%). The question asks about contact by email, phone, in person, mail or some other way. When Gallup asked the same question in the 2008 and 2012 election years, roughly one in three voters reported being contacted by the major-party campaigns, although Barack Obama’s 2008 figure was somewhat higher than that.
The majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 58%, say the Harris campaign has contacted them. That compares with 40% of Republicans and Republican leaners who say the Trump campaign has contacted them, which is on the low end of what Gallup has measured in the past for supporters of the nominee’s party. However, the 25% of Republicans saying they have been contacted by Harris’ campaign and 31% of Democrats who have been contacted by Trump’s are fairly typical for contact from an opposing party’s campaign.
In the final week of the presidential campaign, the country’s two most prominent newspapers extended into a second day their credulous coverage of Republicans’ fake outrage over President Biden’s “garbage” comment.
The NYT and WaPo each made it a front-page story in Thursday’s editions, with above-the-fold, prime-real-estate treatment.
Considering that Trump routinely calls Harris voters scum, garbage vermin and worse this is journalistic malpractice. Have they ever put his comments above the fold like that in this campaign even once, much less in the final week? I don’t think so.
Josh Marshall put it like this:
Good to point out this essential feature of Trumpism, a melange of "fuck your feelings" and "lighten up" mixed with performative outrage & feigned agony over insults that in most cases never happened. https://t.co/jcBJyjbcPO
It’s actually a long time GOP tactic, one of their most infuriating, not because they do it but because the mainstream media falls for it every time. And sometimes the Democrats do too.
I wrote about this years ago:
The Art Of The Hissy Fit By digby
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
I first noticed the right’s successful use of ostentatious handwringing, sanctimony and faux outrage back in the 90’s when well-known conservative players like Gingrich and Livingston pretended to be offended at the president’s extramarital affair and were repeatedly and tiresomely “upset” about fund-raising practices they all practiced themselves. The idea of these powerful and corrupt adulterers being personally upset by White House coffees and naughty sexual behavior was laughable.
But they did it, oh how they did it, and it often succeeded in changing the dialogue and titillating the media into a frenzy of breathless tabloid coverage.
In fact, they became so good at the tactic that they now rely on it as their first choice to control the political dialogue when it becomes uncomfortable and put the Democrats on the defensive whenever they are winning the day. Perhaps the best example during the Bush years would be the completely cynical and over-the-top reaction to Senator Paul Wellstone’s memorial rally in 2002 in the last couple of weeks leading up to the election.
With the exception of the bizarre Jesse Ventura, those in attendance, including the Republicans, were non-plussed by the nature of the event at the time. It was not, as the chatterers insisted, a funeral, but rather more like an Irish wake for Wellstone supporters — a celebration of Wellstone’s life, which included, naturally, politics. (He died campaigning, after all.) But Vin Weber, one of the Republican party’s most sophisticated operatives, immediately saw the opportunity for a faux outrage fest that was more successful than even he could have ever dreamed.
By the time they were through, the Democrats were prostrating themselves at the feet of anyone who would listen, begging for forgiveness for something they didn’t do, just to stop the shrieking. The Republicans could barely keep the smirks off their faces as they sternly lectured the Democrats on how to properly honor the dead — the same Republicans who had relentlessly tortured poor Vince Foster’s family for years.
It’s an excellent technique and one they continue to employ with great success, most recently with the entirely fake Move-On and Pete Stark “controversies.” (The Democrats try their own versions but rarely achieve the kind of full blown hissy fit the Republicans can conjure with a mere blast fax to Drudge and their talk radio minions.)
But it’s about more than simple political distraction or savvy public relations. It’s actually a very well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation (or Ritual Humiliation) as this well trafficked internet article defines it:
Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.
The article goes on to lay out several defining characteristics of ritual defamation such as “the method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.” Perhaps its most intriguing insight is this:
The power of ritual defamation lies entirely in its capacity to intimidate and terrorize. It embraces some elements of primitive superstitious belief, as in a “curse” or “hex.” It plays into the subconscious fear most people have of being abandoned or rejected by the tribe or by society and being cut off from social and psychological support systems.
In a political context this translates to a fear by liberal politicians that they will be rejected by the American people — and a subconscious dulling of passion and inspiration in the mistaken belief that they can spare themselves further humiliation if only they control their rhetoric. The social order these fearsome conservative rituals pretend to “protect,” however, are not those of the nation at large, but rather the conservative political establishment which is perhaps best exemplified by this famous article about how Washington perceived the Lewinsky scandal. The “scandal” is moved into the national conversation through the political media which has its own uses for such entertaining spectacles and expends a great deal of energy promoting these shaming exercises for commercial purposes.
The political cost to progressives and liberals for their inability to properly deal with this tactic is greater than they realize. Just as Newt Gingrich was not truly offended by Bill Clinton’s behavior (which mirrored his own) neither were conservative congressmen and Rush Limbaugh truly upset by the Move On ad — and everyone knew it, which was the point. It is a potent demonstration of pure power to force others toinsincerely condemn or apologize for something, particularly when the person who is forcing it is also insincerely outraged. For a political party that suffers from a reputation for weakness, it is extremely damaging to be so publicly cowed over and over again. It separates them from their most ardent supporters and makes them appear guilty and unprincipled to the public at large.
Ritual defamation and humiliation are designed to make the group feel contempt for the victim and over time it’s extremely hard to resist feeling it when the victims fail to stand up for themselves.
There is the possibility that the Republicans will overplay this particular gambit. Their exposure over the past few years for incompetence, immorality and corruption, both personal and institutional, makes them extremely imperfect messengers for sanctimony, faux or otherwise. But they are still effectively wielding the flag, (or at least the Democratic congress is allowing them to) and until liberals and progressives find a way to thwart this successful tactic, it will continue. At this point the conservatives have little else.
What do you suppose today’s enforcers of proper decorum would say to this?
Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place – the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. — Mark Twain
That was written years before Trump became a political figure. Maybe someday the media will stop falling for it.
