Enough to make you sick

Conservatives try the Politics of Disgust

Last week I talked about conservatives’ attempts to make people think wearing a mask, rather than not wearing one, is the real offense against public health. Their central idea, such as it is, is that Democrats such as Joe Biden should be modeling the benefits of vaccination by going around maskless, and that by not doing so they were discouraging Americans who would get vaccinated but for the occasional sight of a masked public official.

There’s no data that suggests this is so — also, since when do conservatives, who make up most of the vaccine abstainers, take their social cues from Joe Biden? But as I surmised then, it was consistent with other conservative reversal strategies such as You’re The Real Racist™ and You’re the Real Enemy of Free Speech™ — after months of indulging COVID-skeptic ideas and getting criticized for it, they’re looking for ways to portray liberals as the Real Anti-Science People (pat. pend.).

Since then the trope has gone up the ladder. Peggy Noonan claimed the “distancing, masks and half-empty audience” at Biden’s recent Congressional address “felt insubstantial and goofy, like they were playacting Pandemic Theatre.”

And The Atlantic published an Emma Green thing called “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown.” Green found a couple of people who were nervous about taking off their masks even after being vaccinated, and rather than explore the possible sensible reasons — maybe they were in contact with unvaccinated loved ones to whom they could still transmit the disease — she suggested that “progressive politics” made people “neurotic” because it “focuses on fighting against everyday disasters, such as climate change and poverty, struggles that may shape how some people see the pandemic,” making the “lonely asceticism” of social distancing “a hard idea to give up.”

Dumber conservatives like Meghan McCain just said “If the vaccine works, why do we have to wear masks?” and insisted that if vaccinated persons were themselves safe from serious illness, they have no need to concern themselves with the welfare of anyone who may not be.

To weaponize this line of argument against liberals, however, would seem to require an extra step: Conversations have to convince people that social distancing is not only unnecessary but somehow dangerous. That’s a tough lift. As we’ve seen over the past year, skeptics hate and resent being told what to do, but it’s hard to transmit (as it were) that same level of rage at other people just wearing masks.

But the lift becomes easier if instead making mask-wearers look dangerous, you endeavor to make them look disgusting — particularly on conservative terms of disgust. Which I think explains the freakout that recently ensued when Vice-President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff kissed, for a nano-second, through their masks.

Some psych and behavioral studies have found evidence that conservatives are especially strongly motivated in their politics by disgust — for example, as regards gay rights. These findings have been challenged, but I do notice, in my “Hardcore” investigations of bottom-feeding conservative spam, that a lot of the appeals are to revulsion (“Watch Fauci Whine Like A Toddler”); and we’re all familiar with the common rightwing trope that Liberal California is Covered In Human Excrement —which, like many conservative talking points regarding cities, immigrants, non-white people etc. is not so much a policy argument as a brutal yank on the rightwing gimp-string.

When Harris and her husband kissed, Tucker Carlson [as transcribed by Danielle Campoamor] erupted:

Just today, Kamala Harris and her husband made a point of kissing each other in front of photographers while wearing masks. They did that despite the fact that they are married, that they live together, that they were standing outside at the time, and despite the fact that both have been vaccinated. Now a number of crude jokes come to mind but for once we are going to pass on that. What exactly are we watching here? We are watching the crudest kind of propaganda designed by the cynical for the benefit of a population they consider stupid and weak and malleable...

There’s nothing in there about the bad example Harris and Emhoff were setting for people who are reluctant to get vaccinated. It’s not even about hypocrisy. It’s just a bunch of slurs, a heaving revulsion. (I’m not sure what “crude jokes” Carlson was trying to conjure among his audience, though I do know hardcore conservatives consider Harris a slut.)

The kiss controversy got picked up and was expressed in a similar manner by the New York Post (“The cloth-covered kiss appears to fly in the face of guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention”), Fox News (“when I saw this, it reminded me of that other kissing story of the week.. two San Francisco reporters opined that that final scene where the prince kisses Snow White lacks consent...”), PJ Media (“Do They Do This in the Bedroom Too?”), Sara Carter (“Others, called the kiss ‘cringe,’ ‘absurd’ and ‘ridiculous’”), RedState (“if you’re wearing a mask to kiss your significant other with whom you have been living, something has gone wrong in your mind and in your life”), etc.

Given the audience, it can’t hurt their cause that Harris and Emhoff are a mixed race couple. By the midterms, expect conservative media to be flooded with images of Biden, Harris and other top Democrats modeled after the unsettling pictures in One Weird Trick advertising and prose-picture equivalents thereof. Because having subjected America to four years of Donald Trump, Republicans know they have to work extra hard to portray Democrats as The Real Creeps™.