The Give-Up Caucus

Maybe the actual resistance is just insistence

The idea for the novel occurred to me several years ago when I saw a television interview with an elderly gentleman who had served as a British army officer in the events leading up to the fall of France in 1940, and the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk. After arriving safely in England he had been billeted with an aristocratic family in southern England during the period of the Battle of Britain. He had said in the interview that he had been quite shocked when he found out that a number of landowning families thought that Britain should surrender to Hitler so that they might preserve their landholdings. —John Bainbridge

I was put in mind of this by J.D. Vance’s recent comments on the Russia-Ukraine war:

Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” that he is opposed to sending more aid to Ukraine because he does not believe the country will ever be able to overpower Russia. He questioned why sending billions in aid to Ukraine is going to help the country at this point in its war against Russia, considering previous aid has yet to end the war.

Like some other rightwingers these days (and a few leftists), Vance at times portrays his call to abandon Ukraine as a kind of half-assed pacifism (“The thing that’s in our interest and in theirs is to stop the killing”) but mainly his argument is literally defeatist; he doesn’t argue (not out loud anyway, not yet) that he prefers that Putin have the victory, but rather that resistance is futile:

“But on the Ukraine question in particular, everybody knows, everybody with a brain in their head, Jake, knows this was always going to end in negotiation,” Vance said. “The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 border was preposterous; nobody actually believed it.”

It seems a lot of rightwing propaganda these days is based on inevitability. When Trump recently started making fascist dictator noises — not the cryptic kind he always made, but overt my-opponents-are-vermin I-will-assume-total-power-day-one — it wasn’t the transparently bullshit response of his fellow conservatives that he was only joking that bothered me so much as the collective shrug of some of our prestige press poohbahs. Here’s William Cooper at CNN:

The widespread fear that Trump will actually be a dictator, however, is misplaced. If Trump wins the 2024 election, American democracy might be suspended, at least temporarily. But it won’t be replaced by a dictatorship, which is a coherent and recognizable system of government.

Cooper says some stuff after this about the ensuing “chaosracy” which is very reminiscent of the prestige press debates over whether Trump’s fascism was actually really-really fascism, remember that? But it’s hardly worth bothering with. What is notable is that Cooper thinks if “American democracy” is “suspended,” it might be “temporary.”

It’s sort of like that West Wing episode where Bartlett invokes the 25^th Amendment so the Speaker of the House can run the country while he worries about his kidnapped daughter, and then he comes back, problem solved. In fact, you might think it’s the apotheosis of West Wing Brain — the absurd fantasy of bullshit liberals that everything can work out for America no matter how bleak the circumstances because they were born in it.

But what I see is something worse than West Wing Brain. It’s something that emanates mostly from horserace coverage of the 2024 Presidential pre-pre-election that seems to habitually refer to Biden as doomed and Trump as destined to return to office as a don’t-call-him-a-dictator. I see it also in Vance’s argument that, even if you think Ukraine has a case for autonomy and we are supposed to be (remember?) freedom’s last best hope, you should just accept that the defense of democracy abroad isn’t worth even spending money on.

And, similarly, if you’re shocked and disgusted by Israel constantly bombing the living shit out of Palestinians — because you’re an American and Americans learned this was self-defeating behavior in several senseless wars since WWII, and also because you’re not a bloodthirsty lunatic — that too, you are assured, is a lost cause. Sure, Biden, as representative of Israel’s chief funder, makes noises about protecting civilians, but the subhed at the Times says it all: “The Biden administration is pressing Israel to do more to protect civilians. But it has not publicly discussed any consequences if it does not.”

In other words, everyone knows it’s war crimes all the way down in Gaza, but only a fool would expect anyone in power to really do anything about it, or to suffer any consequences for failing to do so (though noticing this gets you called an antisemite and maybe fired).

In other words, the message of our times is a call to just give up — to acknowledge that what’s going on is terrible but there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. Which, as a practical matter, is the same thing as going along.

The worst people in the world — and we all know who they are, as they have held the title for decades — are always the worst, but sometimes in the past they would make noises as if they were not the worst but good, and try to prove this to the American people and win their hearts and minds with the idealism and moral righteousness of their cause. Compassionate conservatism, thousand points of light, shining city on a hill, all that. No more. Now they just dish out shit that everyone knows is shit and expect you to eat it.

I think there may be a connection in the change between the old way and the new way in the utter and complete exposure of both Republicanism and its religious offshoot, evangelicalism, as total grifts and fakes (not to mention crooks and pedos). It used to be only wise guys like us thought they were grifts and fakes — now everybody does, including the grifters and fakers. Only where we say it plain, they imply it with a wink at their undeterred supporters, the clear meaning being “yeah, we’re grifters and fakers — so what? Why should that change anything?”

So now you see the Republicans who claimed oh no, they never wanted to hurt women by overturning Roe v Wade, cheering as Texas’ scumbag AG does a full Javert on a woman who’s trying to save her uterus by getting rid of a dying fetus. They don’t even have to pretend, because everybody knows it’s pointless to resist.

It may just be my contrarianism talking, but I do think there’s still a strain in the American spirit that will react to this — eventually, perhaps too late but then again perhaps not. What little history I know tells me that Americans respond much less well to fatalism than to even a transparently ridiculous call to mission, and will clap back just because fuck you.

That was why, I think, so many people talked about “resistance” in the early days of the Trump administration. Yeah, that was ridiculous, but it still got a lot of people fired up. And at this moment we’re the only ones who can do it. The first thing you have to do is simple: Say the thing they really don’t want you to say, and that even our alleged defenders of freedom don’t have the guts to say: No, I don’t agree. Everything else proceeds from there.