Messy bitches

Conservatives abandon policy for bad manners

I had a post here recently about A.R. Moxon’s essay on the conservative idea of “friendship” between themselves and liberals.  Moxon’s point as I took it was that, while friendship traditionally involves a give-and-take between the parties, and awareness and understanding of one another’s foibles, when it comes to friendship with liberals conservatives take a my-way-or-the highway approach.

The point can easily be misperceived — it’s not that conservatives don’t deserve friendship or any of the gifts of a benign God, it’s that their terms for friendship with liberals are so bizarre and extraordinarily self-serving as to be broadly unacceptable. This is most easily seen in the way conservatives get in a huff when liberals don’t grant them the friendship they feel themselves owed, as seen in this 2021 column by Tim Graham of NewsBusters, the premise of which is that liberals are intolerant bullies for not being pals with people like Tim Graham. “Today, merely stating to friends that Trump did anything right as president could cause a frothing horror,” he says, and an attentive reader must wonder: If this is really what he thinks of liberals, why is he so mad that they don’t want to  hang out with him?

And of course there’s the weirdly common male conservative complaint that liberal women won’t go out with them, as expressed in essays with titles like “Your Refusal To Date Conservatives Is One Reason We Have Donald Trump.” (No, I’m not kidding.) The overriding theme is that liberals owe conservatives affection just because it’s their privilege — which ties in neatly with their more technically political beliefs, such as their negative reaction to women’s and minority rights. I still recall one of those Can’t We Just Get Along thumbsuckers at the Atlantic about a conservative gal and a liberal gal who were best buds, in which the words “gay” “LGBTQ,” “race,” et alia do not occur in a word search.

You do want to be careful about laying political differences to personality flaws, and I am aware that everyone of whatever political stripe, including me, has those. But I will say this: It really seems that many specific personal traits normally considered negative are encouraged among conservatives, to the extent that these obnoxious attitudes and behaviors, rather than philosophy or morality, guide their punitive politics. Like I’ve said before: Being an American conservative nowadays is mainly about being an asshole.

I thought of this during the recent publicity around the bad weather and emergency measures at Burning Man last week.

Now, I have to admit, there are all kinds of things about BM (which I have never attended) that are ripe for mockery. Though its roots are grassy and legit, it has attracted a lot of rich assholes of the sort one would like to see caught in a genuine disaster. If I didn’t have several Burner friends who went to Black Rock City, this year and in previous years, I might have been more inclined to schadenfreude when the rains made the BRC terrain impassable, closed the road in and out, and obliged Burners to shelter in place and reserve resources.

The crisis is apparently over, the Man has been burned, and people are on their way home. One person is reported dead, though for an event with 72,000 attendees that’d be pretty good under any conditions. (I liked the guy who said “Did Burning Man just pick ‘British music festival’ as the theme for this year?”)

So I can understand mean jokes about the scenes of mud and misery. I’m less sympathetic toward the people who pushed the idea that Ebola, panic, and terror had broken out at BRC.

I may be a little more sensitive about this because I remember the last time conservatives tried to pull an Ebola thing during the Obama administration, when a case appeared in Texas and they labored mightily to tie the exotically black President to what they characterized as a plague — notwithstanding the CDC and other agencies beat back the threat quite capably. (This was of course back before Trump gutted our medical disaster preparedness.)

During the days of confusion at Burning Man I saw a lot of wingnuts shooting out stuff like this:

cf also this and this and this (“Dad, Husband, Christ follower “).

Now, I know many of the shit-stirrers who clearly hoped people would believe their lies are of unknown political provenance. But whenever I looked at their backgrounds, they were nearly always also involved in COVID denial and other rightwing shit. And I generally notice this kind of edgelord behavior — trying to make something bad look apocalyptic, ostensibly for lulz but apparently out of some deeper need to spread chaos — is much more of a staple on the right than on the left; and the reason, I think, is this kind of outrageous lying and fraud is not only more acceptable among conservatives but actually, like the other bad behavior I mentioned earlier, part of the package.

It reminds me of all those guys who, during the 2020 George Floyd protests, spread images of some bench or building on fire — or simply Photoshopped distant streetlights to make it look as if the streets were aflame — and swore that these proved the nation’s major cities — New York, Washington, Chicago, etc. — had been “burned to the ground” by BLM thugs.

Contrast that with the January 6 attempted coup, to which the liberal reaction was to spread… hours of documentary footage of the actual event. The bullshit only rolled in when conservatives started peddling false-flag stories. And as revealed by the insurrectionists’ prosecutions (including that of Trump), it turns out the reality of the plot was even worse than most liberals dared say it was — because panic-spreading simply is not as big a part of their arsenal as it is that of conservatives.

I can understand how someone who had been teleported here from years ago, before the Trump era (let’s make it before 9/11, to make it extra piquant!), might think I’m just being childish, identifying conservatism — a respectable political philosophy with well-spoken avatars who like to cite Edmund Burke and Adam Smith (notwithstanding both these worthies would recoil in horror from the association) — with such repulsive attributes. But if you’ve been around the past quarter-century and paying attention, you’ll know what I mean.