MAGA’s world without art

A Culture War update

In my most recent alicublog post I mentioned the hilarious musical guest hiring for Trump’s White House Cage Match and how nearly all the nostalgia acts the promoters engaged (or claimed to have engaged) have pulled out. I mentioned also one of the crazier rightwing responses to it at The Federalist — one of the sites I used to scan a lot back when such fringe conservative propaganda vendors were more interesting, because that was where the Right really let its freak flags fly; now, of course, you can read similar lunacy in major media outlets and even among top Republican officials, including the President, who reacted to these cancellations with a deranged rant in which he promised “to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’” (which, I remind you, had been proudly announced for the event only days before).

There’s all kinds of fun to be had with this. I like to imagine Tubby in his Jackie Gleason Miami Beach outfit from some of our Mar-a-Lago sketches, doing an endless monologue: “And how about that Tala-freako, huh folks. All transgendered up, he wants to trans you, we’re not gonna let that happen, we got that guy, real man’s man, Rex Paxton his name is. Or should be, it’s a good name for him, more x’s, makes him sound like a cowboy star, like Rex Rexson I think he was, Sexy Rexy, remember, ladies? This Paxton doesn’t have movie star looks, tell the truth, he looks like he ran face first into a big rock, but very manly, mmmuy mmmacho as they say in the prison camps...”

But if I may, I’d like to pull off the red nose and the bald cap and address this slightly more seriously. Because this event brings a sharp focus on conservative culture war, a topic I’ve been covering for years, and how it’s evolved since the Reagan years.

Charlie Pierce had an interesting piece up about American political satire, the better sort of which he associates with Twain and Mr. Dooley, and how the Right cooked up its own shitty, retrograde version during the Reagan era, spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh, “a national phenomenon for aggrieved white people across the nation” who “gloried in jibes against the poor, women, and various minorities.”

Pierce seems to think there hasn’t been significant response to this from satirists on the left. For obvious reasons I disagree. But I do notice that the basic grievance-based worldview expressed by Limbaugh — and all the little Limbaughs, intentionally funny or not, that came after — hasn’t changed much in the last 40-odd years: Now as then, they think non-white non-males (and any other people who consider them human) are the cause of all America’s troubles, and rather than argue against the political and social changes these people endorse they slur them with stereotypes and fantasies — the feminazi, the welfare queen, the limousine liberal etc — “othering” them so that honkies who may have forgotten their tribal loyalties may be scared back into the barn. The terminology may change but the blueprint never does.

Of course when non-conservatives get politically popular — or, as now, conservative malfeasance makes voters turn away from them toward the sorta-liberal Democrats — the othering goes into hyperdrive, as we have seen in the grotesque, parodic butch poses of Paxton supporters in Texas who seem to think their best hope to fend off the Democrat Talarico is basically to call him gay and/or trans (with the help of the typically clueless Prestige Press outlets like NPR, which describes this playground routine as a debate over “what it means to be a man”). This is too stupid to succeed (though it is Texas, so maybe I shouldn’t speak too soon). But it’s always the card they play.

This is generally what I mean when I talk about their culture war. There are many moving parts, but it’s all really based on this essential model: Trying to win with an ugly caricature of their opposition in the absence of anything actually helpful to or popular among voters. You folks want universal health care? Watch out, that Dumocrat likes them there transisexuals!

It’s only about culture in the broadest sense — that is, about what kind of world you want to live in, or can be scared out of wanting. That’s why they rant about 15-minute cities as a menace when no one wants to force it on them, and portray medical science breakthroughs that defend us from deadly diseases as an intolerable infringement by egghead know-it-alls on our right to be sick.

But when the conversation turns to the arts, something to which the word “culture” more properly applies, conservatives get extra weird. Because, while their target audience may be unfamiliar with the people and trends conservatives like to slander, and thus may be easily convinced to suspect them, everybody likes to see a show or hear some tunes.

And conservatives don’t know what to do about that, especially now that casual sexism, racism, and other retrograde attitudes are less prevalent in pop culture than once they were. That’s why they’re always yelling that fun stuff is woke — Star Wars, Andor, that Odyssey movie where for some perverse reason they let a black lady play the most beautiful woman in the world. Occasionally they try to grab a toehold on entertainment things that seem “conservative” to them — like that weird delusion they recently developed that only the Right had the capacity to appreciate Sydney Sweeney’s tits.

But it always comes off creepy and sad. You might convince some people at least that trans kids on sports teams or bike lanes or vaccination drives or no-fault divorce are attacks on their way of life; but when you tell them the same is true of the movies they watch and the songs they dance to and the stories they read, voluntarily and with pleasure, your chances of success are exceedingly low. It’s like telling them it’s un-American to eat ice cream or take a bath.

Trump has made it even weirder than usual by portraying the artists his own team had chosen to draw crowds to his bizarre Trump-and-America-birthday bash as “third rate” and offering to serve as the night’s entertainment in their place, a proposition unattractive to all but the most devoted MAGA heads.

In a way it’s similar to Trump’s professed loss of interest in the Kennedy Center, which his cat’s-paws had been mangling on his behalf, now that a court has told him to take his name off it, and his denunciation of popular entertainers like Bruce Springsteen. It strikes me as significant that MAGA stars like Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood et alia haven’t been rushed to the breach. Maybe it’s a deliberate signal that not only are artists who reject the Leader useless; all artists are unnecessary when you have the Leader to entertain you.

Maybe Tubby’s too far gone to realize it but this isn’t a good idea. It’s one thing to raise a ruckus about Ellen DeGeneres being gay or Murphy Brown being a single mom. It’s another to say, hey, the music and shows with which you while away your leisure hours are for losers — what you want to do is cheer your President as he makes the anniversary of our nation’s founding all about himself and maybe dances to “YMCA.” Especially with hamburger at eight dollars a pound.

They’re just gonna get weirder. You watch.