There is, as Ecclesiastes says, a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die, and so on. All that turn, turn, turning also includes a time to tear down and a time to build. This is something that American conservatives need to bear in mind as the electoral cycle rolls on to 2024.
The year of 2016 was a time to tear down: tear down the stuffy arrogance of the Establishment. That’s why 2016 was the year of the Great Meme War and Pepe the Frog, and clowns like Milo Yiannopoulos and Donald Trump. This is not to denigrate clowns, in the sense of court jesters: court jester is an ancient and honourable role. The tearer down of king-sized egos, the placer of tacks on thrones and thrower of custard pie at bishops.
Still, eventually you’ve got to get down to the serious, dull business of actually governing, or at least, providing a credible alternative to the sad joke currently sitting on the throne. So, sorry, Donald, you did a magnificent job when the time was right, but your time has come and gone.
Because what was funny and devastatingly effective in 2016, is just looking crazy and stupid in 2022.
Just to prove the point, with a crucial runoff election in Georgia that would determine whether the Democrats got a Senate majority, what were conservatives hyping up? Whether or not praising Hitler is beyond the pale. Yes, with the 2024 campaign set to launch within the next year, the right are whipping themselves up about a crazy black guy getting booted from Twitter for praising Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Jeffrey Dahmer.
(It’s rather telling, too, that out of that roster of evil, the only one the left-media talk about is Hitler.)
Whether or not it’s more Twitter censorship (it’s not: it’s moderation, and fair enough, too; even Jordan Peterson backed the decision, on the grounds that Kanye clearly needs protecting from himself). Twitter’s moderation policies are fine so long as they’re evenly applied and one side of politics isn’t given a golden ticket to silence anything that embarrasses them.
But that’s all a sideshow: the bigger issue is that the right took the bait and started hootin’ and hollerin’ that, hey, fanboying for Hitler is just A-OK.
And if you’re reading this and formulating your own response to the “should Kanye have been banned” question, I’ll say gotcha, because my point isn’t whether Ye deserved to be banned or not. My point is, rightists got suckered into a pointless debate that associates them with Hitler, and they got suckered into it by the actions of the insane and stupid within their own ranks.
There’s a straight progression from Tucker Carlson saying (with his patented high-pitched laugh) “a-haw-haw-haw, my interview with Kanye West will prove we’re not racists”, to Kanye declaring “I love Hitler and there was no Holocaust,” to conservatives becoming obsessed with a new distraction from issues that matter.
In 2016, for all the jester antics, Trump’s message was clear and unambiguous and absolutely relevant: Make America Great Again. Build the wall. Stop the wars and start no new ones.
How the fuck did Hitler and the Holocaust appear in this dialogue? Why are we talking about any of this?
Looking forward to 2024 and the Republican nomination is set to be a showdown between Trump and Ron De Santis. De Santis has been solidly racking up the wins for the past two years, while Trump, bless him for 2016 and all, has been…
This ex-president allowed the black Hitler-loving lunatic, the white sucker of black cock, and the Hispanic Holocaust denier to dine with him and use him as an op to launch their own presidential campaign, which led to the three stooges appearing on the show of a man who thinks Obama built a phony elementary school and had dwarf actors impersonate children to fake a mass shooting so he could take away our guns (even though he never took away our guns), and the black lunatic uttered pro-Hitler statements on the show that were so outlandish the “Obama dwarfs faked Sandy Hook” guy looked sane by comparison.
Does that strike anyone as a winning strategy for the American right?
How’d the right get here? How’d things go from six years ago, when leftists were stupidly braying about “punching Nazis” and rightists were rationally countering “border controls aren’t Nazi,” to now, when a guy promoted by Tucker Carlson as the right’s great black hope talks about “loving Nazis” and rightists are like, “Hell, yeah, let’s debate that!” […]
Face a stark reality: Wacky has failed you. Wacky has taken you far astray from the things that matter. Can we be done with it now? Can we move beyond the wacky phase? Trump’s wackiness has worn out its welcome among the blue-collar right-leaners who gave him his slim 2016 victory. And the wacky characters he brought with him […] have only succeeded in creating distraction upon distraction and complication upon complication.
Politics is, in the end, the art of the possible. It’s not there isn’t any room for crazy in politics: every now and then, the stuffy Establishment needs to be shaken up and taken down a peg or two by the court jester.
But then everyone has to get back down to the dull, essential business of running a country.
The next time someone tells you ‘DeSantis is good but dull,’ say yes.
Yes, he is.
And thank God.
Takimag
Takimag
