If Trek is consistent (ha!), then Trump hasn't done anything at all.
One the things about saying Trump is "doing what he said he was going to do", as
Trek suggests↗, and, "Exactly what the majority of of voters elected him to do", is that it's just another nail in the cross of, what, that pretense that just won't die.
Neither is
Billvon↑ wrong; owning libs, or liberal tears, or whatever ridicule of bleeding hearts, is pretty much the only goal Republican voters can find amid the wreckage of their own post-policy campaigning in the time since
reality started to inform differently↗ than their dearest superstitions of heritage.
So, yes, every time someone like
Mr. G↑ makes the point about "certain values that suggest certain consequences for disbelief", and how "the rest is going to happen", it's just another nail driven.
†
In 2018, the idea was called the
"Intellectual Dark Web"↗, a collection of largely self-victimizing wannabe renegades including Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and Ben Shapiro.
It would take a short memory, however, not to notice that these sorts of polemics over political correctness are anything but novel: they have been around for at least 30 years, ever since a strikingly similar set of media debates centered around college campuses took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Toward the end of the Reagan years, political correctness became a favorite bugbear of conservative intellectuals, who believed that college professors had latched onto illiberal or totalitarian notions of equality, and were indoctrinating their students with a subversive view of American society. Today's "dark web" provocateurs rarely mention these predecessors, who not too long ago occupied a similar place in national media debates. But the comparison suggests that the "iconoclastic" ideas of these figures are actually a well-established institution in American discourse: an institution whose home is on the political right.
(Hamburger↱)
And if, for instance, we might recall
2017 discussion↗ of workplace sexual harassment, it is to reiterate yet again that certain values assert themselves consistently in American conservative political results.
How about
2010↗:
In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of "traitor" and "off with his head" at Palin rallies as Obama's election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry's kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to "You lie!" piercing the president's address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.
If Obama's first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It's not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend's abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan "Take our country back!," these are the people they want to take the country back from.
(Rich↱, boldface accent added)
†
The thing is, there is a certain degree to which people were expected to tolerate and even empower this hatred. And there's an example, we weren't supposed to call it hatred. Or bigotry. Or racism. Or misogyny. It's why the 2017 example stands out, that after thirty years, men were still upset at women for not lightening up and taking a joke: Damn it, how's a guy supposed to meet girls if he can't ask his coworkers about their panties?
It's the thing about all those miserable guys at the bar for happy hour. First the liberals tell him he has to tolerate black people at work, and now they say his wife has a say in whether he gets laid, and now you know what they mean when they say they want their country back. As Trump eyes a concentration camp of thirty-thousand migrants, these supporters aren't going to be horrified And like the Confederacy and Nazis before them, when the jig is up and its time to feel remorse for monstrosity and atrocity, they will harbor their resentment for generations.
And when they cry and lash out, there will still be plenty of notaracists to commiserate about the dirty liberals calling everyone who disagrees with them racist, or notasexists who agree that the real problem is those condescending, paternalistic feminists calling everyone who disagrees with them misogynist.
We're years past learning to take a joke. We've known the whole time what it means to play the buzzkill role. But that's also the thing about that characterization. It's one thing if, somewhere in the world, someone said it, but it also happens enough that someone says it to a reporter, like the banker who feels "liberated" to call people "retard" and "pussy" without being "cancelled" (qtd. in
Heer↱) reminds that as far as Trump supporters, themselves, are concerned, it really is about supremacism, conspiracism, and selected craziness.
And it has been the whole time.
†
Each one, another nail; from afar, it looks like a cruciform pincushion. We'd have tanned its hide when it died, Clyde, but the shed is a handful of wood fibers holding the nails together. As a matter of
narrative↗ context↗, a question inevitably arises: Do they really not know?
Pathos:
Empathy. There is a reason why the word is important. If we don't know what to tell certain people, it is because they cannot tell us what is wrong. Cannot? Will not? Well, it's been going on this long, and we still have to guess because they still haven't actually told us. Or, maybe it's exactly what we think it is, and anybody saying no, that's not it, needs to finally explain what they think it actually is.
To some degree, the underlying commonality of these nota narrative contexts is not so much solipsism, as a sort of egocentrism akin to saying, "if it was me". Because, yes, we know,
what I would do in that situation, if it was me, except it's
not me, as such. And that's where the whiteness, or the maleness, or even the Christianity of what someone else would do stands out. It's like the difference between telling women to lighten up and learn to take a joke, or blaming women for playing along; both complaints presuppose a witchy woman. To someone less invested in that demanding narrative, it might just look like sexual harassment.
It's not necessarily how we get to fascism, but it does lead to particular manners of moral relativism: To presume all narratives equal for the sake of having been uttered is one of those last-refuge propositions. It is not necessarily mysterious who or what benefits from such vagary and uncertainty. What we accomplish, if in order to respect another's experience, we must
abandon our own↗, is a known value. It's like all the ways in which someone might expect me to limit my own discourse according to
other↗ people's↗ limitations.
Do they really not know? "The cruelty is the point", as
Adam Serwer↗ put it, and, like
Wallace Shawn↗, refers to Trump's supporters. But we must also wonder about the enablers, the wagging, scolding notas who made excuses along the way. What they pretend they are not is what they end up empowering. Do they
really not know? Or maybe these, too, as Shawn put it: "Maybe they didn't want to be gentle or kind".
Each one, another nail.
____________________
Notes:
@HeerJeet. "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last." X. 14 January 2025. X.com. 1 February 2025. status/1879204568275566860
Hamburger, Jacob. "The 'Intellectual Dark Web' Is Nothing New". Los Angeles Review of Books. 31 January 2025. LAReviewOfBooks.org. 31 January 2025. http://bit.ly/2zP6VXX
Rich, Frank. "The Rage Is Not About Health Care". The New York Times. March 28, 2010. NYTimes.com. 31 January 2025. http://nyti.ms/1HH6NRf
Serwer, Adam. "The Cruelty Is the Point". The Atlantic. 3 October 2018. TheAtlantic.com. 3 February 2025. http://bit.ly/2RpxCYd
Shawn, Wallace. "Developments Since My Birth". The New York Review of Books. 27 October 2020. NYBooks.com. 3 February 2025. https://bit.ly/31LMAhV
