The mighty never fell

The Republicans you used to think were better? They weren't

© 2019 Gage Skidmore, used under a Creative Commons license

One thing I’ll say about our current slide into fascism: It’s not easy to miss. Maybe those of us who’ve been paying attention — a tiny sliver of the population — are taking longer to catch on than we’d like, but I think it’s happening.

As I said before the last presidential election, you could see in the 2018 midterms and polls (and eventually in the 2020 vote) that the nightmarish things Trump had done didn’t go unnoticed by the voters; it takes an awful lot for 21st-Century Americans to deny a president a second term. (They didn’t even refuse one to George W., and his claim on his first term was even weaker than Trump’s.)

People dislike Biden because he disappoints them, but they hate Trump because he horrifies them. And the polls on how they feel about the Roe overturn and about the Supreme Court generally suggest that they haven’t lost their capacity for smelling a rat. They may interpret the situation differently than you and I would, being less likely to attribute it to late capitalism and false consciousness and more likely to attribute it to stupid people going nuts, but at least they’re not hypnotized by the high-pressure propagandists.  

Much good may it do us! There are still plenty of zombies out there and, the Thomas Court having shown itself copacetic with the over-the-top gerrymandering with which Republicans are rigging elections, we may not achieve the 7% lead we need to just squeak through, and then the fun will really begin.

But I want to return to the electorate’s awareness that the Republicans are shit, and to make a distinction: That if they didn’t fail to notice it before now it wasn’t because Republicans were much better, but because their awfulness was disguised, in large part due to the horrible tendencies in the media that we talk so much about today.

Let me use Rudy Giuliani to illustrate this point.

People look at Giuliani today rightly as a nightmarish figure out of old fairy tales — a goblin, a troll, a homunculus who, having served as Trump’s Renfield for years, now haunts the fringes of public life embarrassing himself, seemingly compulsively (as with his ludicrous claimed assault at a Staten Island ShopRite).

But once upon a time, people over 30 will recall, he was a celebrated figure. Many people — you hear them all the time — say, “How could Rudy, our beloved Rudy, the Mayor of 9/11, have come so low?” They talk about it like some tragic fall.

But I was around for the beginning of his career in New York and knew from the start and for a fact that Rudolph Giuliani was always just no damn good.

His Wall Street perp-walks as a U.S. prosecutor were a tip-off — they accomplished practically nothing except the kind of performatively cruel spectacle that excites a certain class of voter. He beat David Dinkins on a purely racist play after having instigated a racist cop riot against the then-Mayor. (The year of his first victory in 1989, the Manhattan GOP challenged my ballot, which only added ardor to my undying hated.)

A lot of people attribute the crime drop during his mayoralty to Giuliani’s get-tough attitude but, number one, the “Safe Streets Safe City” program that increased NYPD street patrols and thus got that ball rolling began with Dinkins and, number two, crime also went down during the subsequent tenures of Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor de Blasio — the latter of whom also managed a drop in crime to unprecedented levels despite simultaneously ending the racially-unbalanced stop-and-frisk program that rightwingers really, really wanted to give the credit to. (Your Republican friends will sputter, but them’s the facts.)

But the press was always on Giuliani’s jock because, despite being a pasty-faced little doof, he affected the sort of strutting toughness that pencil-necks appreciate — as mayor and as prosecutor, he liked to show the skels (i.e. everyone outside his immediate circle) his contempt, and the media ate it up.

He installed a little gate by Rockefeller Center, ostensibly to prevent jaywalking but really for no good reason except to be a prick. Prickish, too, was his enforcement of ancient cabaret laws to hassle bars and clubs. Much worse were his famously brutal responses when cops killed unarmed black people — see “Giuliani” and “altar boy,” for example, or just watch Do The Right Thing. He never missed a chance to stroke the cops who rioted for him in 1992, no matter how vicious and criminal their behavior.  

Because he didn’t shit his pants on 9/11, Giuliani’s media buddies made him “America’s Mayor.” But, as I have pointed out, there were two problems that kept the national GOP from rewarding him with higher office. First, Giuliani could not extricate himself from the gun control position that had served him well as Mayor of New York — clearing the streets of guns, and bragging about it, had made him popular with local voters, but the NRA-maddened hayseeds hated him for it.

More to the point: Those voters got a chance to study Giuliani without his retinue of press supplicants waving palms and giving off distracting hosannahs, and saw a little of what guys like me had seen in New York: That he was in fact a repulsive specimen whose contempt for ordinary people and disinclination to serve them anything but the back of his hand was, once the media halo had been knocked off him, fucking obvious.

Ironically enough, that GOP rejection was where I think Giuliani’s mask slippage began. He kept up a version of his usual act — but in the face of events and the electorate’s changing attitudes and increased awareness, it lost its appeal. As I wrote in 2020:

And if anyone thought Giuliani as Mayor stroked the cops every time they gunned down a black guy only because he believed in their incorruptibility, that illusion has been amply dispelled by Third-Act Rudy, who seems to seek out opportunities to announce his racism. He bitched out Beyonce for her 2016 Super Bowl performance, saying she “used it as a platform to attack police officers” because she was dressed like a Black Panther (I mean, I guess that was why — that’s the only thing about his complaint that makes even a little sense). Later that year, at the VMA Awards, Beyonce briefly paid tribute to some black men who were shot by cops, and Giuliani went on a deranged grandpa rant (“I saved more black lives than any of those people you saw on stage”). His recent claim that the Black Lives Matter protestors on whom those two St. Louis crackers pulled guns were threatening to rape white women will probably not be the last such slurfest he gets into…

That was get-tough, back-the-blue Rudy — but after George Floyd everyone smelled the bullshit. Even getting that guy from the grocery store arrested for slapping him on the back last week hearkened back to his old, cruel use of the law. But no one’s fluffing him now, so everyone can see how mean and pathetic it is.

I could say something similar about Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, et alia… and maybe someday I will! But for now let’s leave it at this: These people, the Republicans who some of you seem to think have lowered themselves over the years, have not in fact lowered themselves; they were always shit. And the more people see this, the better off we’ll be.