The Year in BS #4: Gone kill-crazy

The civil war in conservatives’ heads

©2014 Mario Modesto Mata, used under a Creative Commons license

I’ve been tracking conservatives’ public statements for decades now, admittedly not in a friendly way, and it’s worth noting how their self-presentation has changed over the years.

In some respects conservative arguments (such as they are) remain the same as they were when I started: basically, liberals over-tax Good Americans Like You*, which is the worst thing anyone can do and tyranny besides, and they give your money to the untermenschen, who deserve instead to suffer but will now buy T-bone steaks with your money and cause you to suffer by laughing about it, thus shrinking your penis, etc. (*white pricks)

There has always been a hint of violence in the conservative gestalt — guns, for example, have for years been celebrated as a means to keep those overfed poors from invading your keep. But back in the day, only a few nuts even suggested that those guns should be used, not only to defend your home, but also to murder your neighbors if you felt they were getting too big for their britches. No respectable person, right or left, looked at The Turner Diaries or the Unabomber Manifesto, for example, and said, yep, this reflects my views and I’m proud to be associated with it.

In my observation things began to change for mainstream conservatives about 10 years ago, during the second Obama administration. You may recall those guys raised an unholy ruckus during the first term, and by 2012 had convinced themselves that, enlightened by their Tea Parties and tantrums, their fellow white citizens would rise up and eject the Kenyan pretender.

So confident were they that when regular polls showed Obama with an advantage, prominent conservatives spread the word that these polls had been “skewed” by nefarious liberals (adding pollsters to the list of institutions the Gramscian Left had captured!).

When Obama won, Karl Rove marched from the Fox News decision desk to the backstage analysts and demanded to know how they could possibly say Ohio had gone for the Pretender, thus becoming the Patient Zero of conservative election conspiracy theorists.

There’s always been sour grapes and we-was-robbed yak around lost elections, but 2012 seemed to curdle conservatives’ blood. (Really, give that linked Village Voice column a look — they were doing the whole now-familiar routine back then, including claims that Romney rallies were bigger than Obama rallies and thus presaged victory.) It was as if the first time the American people elected Obama, they could be forgiven — but the second time proved (assuming you thought he had actually won!) that they meant to do it, for which conservatives have not forgiven them to this day.

Conservatives also got more violent in their rhetoric. In 2014, when the Cliven Bundy clan started claiming government lands as their own and facing off with federal agents, law-and-order conservatives who routinely called for punks who defied cops to be taken down — like Ted Cruz and Rick Perry — sided with Bundy. And the kind of blacks-are-coming-to-kill-you fantasies that were usually left to kooks in klaverns, like an alleged “knockout game” epidemic targeting whites, worked their way up into mainstream conservative discourse, boiling their blood for battle. Their Tea Party “don’t tread on me” act was turning from cosplay to kill-play.

It would be too much to say that in the Trump era they relaxed; rather, they seemed to think America (or the minority that elected him, anyway) had seen the light, and relied on their hero to do the violence they dreamt of. But voters kicked their guy out in 2020, and Republicans were apparently incapable of going back to their old tricks or learning new ones, and just got even more bloody-minded.

Hence growing acceptance by conservatives not only of election denial, but also of the January 6 attempt to overturn the election. Liberals tend to make fun of the contradictions in their arguments about that — one day the insurrectionists are noble patriots, the next, false-flag federal agents. But that misses the point, which is that whatever happened was bad only because they didn’t win, and that while violence used against them, even by cops, is always illegitimate, violence used by them is always good.

In other words, it’s not an argument at all — it’s a standing threat.

That’s why conservatives got so excited this year when a country singer had a hit with a song endorsing vigilante violence. To get an idea about what an innovation this is, try to imagine Merle Haggard even suggesting such a thing in “Okie from Muskogee” — a song by a secure man about pride of place and people, rather than a paranoid rant about how he’ll kill you if you attend a protest he doesn’t approve of.

That’s why conservative hearts rose as one when Daniel Penny killed an obstreperous unhoused man in the subway last summer. They even got up a fundraiser for him. Their excitement is obviously driven by the thought of a white man murdering a black man with the justification of a potential threat — like what they fantasize they’d do if those people tried that knockout game on them.

And that’s why they’re always talking about civil war. Sure, some survivalist nuts have always talked like that, but now it’s a catchphrase among Republican candidates and elected officials. Some promote it in a weaselly way — like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who calls for a “national divorce,” as though a resident of Georgia wouldn’t know what happens when you try to serve papers on Uncle Sam, and Fox News’ Jesse Watters, who says it’s actually liberals who are trying to trick conservatives into a civil war.

They usually want to go all Fort Sumter for absurd reasons like wokeness or CRT, but many of them are focused on Trump’s various indictments as a casus belli. Again, there’s nothing like what you’d call an argument involved; as with the lost election, they’re just not getting what they wanted, so rightwingers like Erick Erickson and Sarah Palin (who, you will remember, was once the vice-presidential nominee of the Republican Party) are raising the specter of Civil War.  

It’s good to remember that very few of them would actually try that boogaloo bullshit they like to talk about. But among people not blessed overmuch with introspection, fantasies of violence based on disappointed entitlement come out in other perverse ways.

You may marvel, sometimes, at the weird cruelty of conservative politics — like the glee with which they hunt down women suspected of violating their reproductive health bans even accidentally; or their devotion to making it difficult for poor people to get food, medical care, and other necessities of life; or the pleasure they take in throwing colleges into upheaval, not to improve the students’ education, but to stifle alleged academic trends that they can’t even coherently describe; or their vicious habit of bussing refugees to northern cities to Own The Libs. The answer is depressingly simple. They’re not promoting policies, they’re promoting punishment, driven (one might say driven mad) by the civil war constantly raging in their brains.