No, It’s the Children Who Are Wrong

It's BullChait!

As you know, I’m a reductive asshole and a lot of my humor comes from the least charitable, most derisive interpretation of conservatives. But I’ll let you in on a secret. As far as the public political figures I write about, I only think there’s maybe a few millimeters more depth to them than my silly caricatures indicate. Yes, I’m that shallow.

I mean sure, these people have loved ones (I guess) and hobbies and (I’m sure) ways of relating to people and events in private that have little to do with living-horseshit performance art that is their public lives. I suppose if I were to try and portray them in longform, I would have account for that better part of them, like for example that villainous character who, sure, is really awful but to be honest has redeeming qualities like his great fondness for his pet Siamese cat… wait a minute, I’m thinking of Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies. Forget it, all these people suck, I apologize for being weak about it.

Anyway, to me the apotheosis of this more enlightened see-both-siderism that I’m too shitty to adopt is Jonathan Chait. (Remember his “The Republican Party Must Be Saved From the Conservative Movement”? Ha, that was a good one!) Chait is prone to act as if the people who are currently trying to turn America into the Fifth Reich are just misunderstood and confused and led temporarily astray, and the real problem is Medicare 4 All leftists who disturb and frighten these noble rightwingers into acting worse than they really are.

I mean goddamn, look at Chait’s latest thing, “Why Conservatives Should Vote for Joe Biden” (did he say Republicans should be saved from conservatives? Now he means the other way around!). Look at the lede. After describing the fall of crime rates across the country (not so much in red states, Chait might have added, but that’s not his style), he describes some typical rightwing jibber-jabber:

Earlier this spring, after USA Today reported on the plunge in violent crime, Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly provided an interesting response. The newspaper, she sneered, was “trying to gaslight Americans into believing that their lived experiences are wrong.”

Now this is a classic conservative shtick — see one of my pre-alicublog pieces from 2002, “Call Them As We Feel Them,” and dozens if not hundreds of my subsequent posts— in which hard facts about threat levels are dismissed in favor of some recent outrage with which conservatives can terrify the masses. Migrants aren’t really responsible for much crime relative to native-born criminals? How about some Murdoch headlines about a foreigner who RAPED A LITTLE GIRL (and we aren’t talking about Jimmy Saville)!  NOW tell us about “facts,” you monster!

But here’s how Chait plays it:

Here the Republican Party, through its official channels, was not only denying plain facts, it was using the terminology and intellectual style of the postmodern academic left. “Lived experience” is a trope used by progressives to claim a person’s standing, usually as an oppressed minority, entitles them to defend a factual claim regardless of its merit. “Gaslight” is another progressive buzzword, used to dismiss any challenge to a deeply held view.

Later Chait says, “there is obviously an element of trolling in this response,” but that’s a blind alley: Whether or not Kelly was having fun using terms one might see used by liberals — in the same way that these people will always smirk that if you don’t buy Juanita Broaddrick’s bullshit, for example, you don’t “believe women” — Kelly’s is a classic rightwing routine of the kind we’ve all seen a million times. It takes something beyond willful blindness to not only focus on the modish lingo instead of the obvious intent but to turn it into a knock on the left — like, if only you progressives hadn’t used these terms (and, really, is “gaslight” something only leftists say, let alone something that’s not even real?), then conservatives would have had nothing to bullshit the public with!

But the central nonsense in Chait’s essay is right up there in the headline, and recurs throughout.  As a Sensible Liberal, Chait has “sympathy for at least some conservative goals, such as social stability and maintaining law and order” — yet, he regrets to tell us, “not every faction of the American right values stability and the rule of law. Some conservatives oppose democracy or social equality…”

Not every faction! Buddy, where are the conservatives of any consequence who don’t “oppose democracy or social equality”? Have you been listening to the alleged moderates in the 2024 Republican presidential race? Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Doug Burgum all support Trump and all his fash fantasies of power, and Ron DeSantis is back in Florida trying to go them one better. What constituency do you think foot-draggers like Mitt Romney and Chris Christie represent? This is the “saving remnant” theory of anti-MAGA conservatism that not even National Review stands by anymore and hasn’t for years.

And yet Chait keeps talking about some nowhere-in-evidence true conservative movement that should be supporting Joe Biden, whom Chait insists “did succeed in reviving bipartisanship –”

The frequency and magnitude of bipartisan legislation under Biden has surpassed anybody’s expectations: legislation on infrastructure, microchip onshoring, gun safety, nuclear energy, and many others. Looking back four years, Biden’s most progressive backers have the greatest cause for disappointment, and his most conservative supporters have the least.

And yet every actual, breathing conservative you will ever see anywhere is constantly telling you that Biden is a senile Communist pedo atheist that must be ground into the dust by The Leader and then thrown into prison.  

Now, in the most generous reading that I can strain to give it, I can imagine what Chait is trying to do here: He knows that people are complicated, as complex as life itself, and surely this applies to conservatives as well as to whatever the fuck he is — and so he is trying to imagine them as three-dimensional, rich-‘n’-variegated not-such-bad-people, instead of the sort of malevolent caricatures I draw.

So tell me: Which one of us is closer to the truth? And I don’t mean in an ideal world, I mean in the one we actually live in. If you told the average MAGA guy that you and he have much in common, because you know he, too, believes not only in “social stability and maintaining law and order” but also “democracy [and] social equality” — well, if I tried to imagine that discussion I fear it wouldn’t be the meeting of minds Chait seems to think would ensue — more like something out of the Three Stooges or Deliverance.

I mean, I’ve been watching them work for decades, but maybe I’m missing a nuance. It would be nice to be wrong for a change!