We are well into the blame stage of the election, and it is absolutely fatiguing. I get it, there’s a lot to go around. The lines between shame deflection and sober critique so we can improve, it’s all a bit of a wash. Third Party voters, cowardice on Gaza, the “undecided voters” strategy, Liz fucking Cheney for some reason? The weird Biden fetish of a bipartisan fantasy that has literally never existed in this country seemed to be on full display, at odds with the performative “I’m Leftier than thou” wing. Any sober analysis has to recognize, however, that while possibly these things aggregated to move the needle, they didn’t unhinge the campaign in any truly functional way.
Oh, absolutely, falling into the trap of moralizing at Trump instead of hammering on the issues – the real Hot Labor Summer wins and economic stability through the inflatedemic that was the envy of most countries, to name just two – was a misstep. Not having the courage to truly engage on Gaza was another. Disappointing to see more “in the name of electoral gamesmanship” cowardice from the National campaign, while our more courageous State politicos won convincingly. At some point, the Dems have to be a true Party of clear values and strong policy, and be willing to stand by their convictions. If you think you’ve got the right vision, fight for it. This perpetually terrified defense and show-them-your-belly-so-they-like-you bullshit has GOT to stop. Fr fr, no cap. As the kids, I hear, say.
All of these things assume a traditional, mainstream election process, though, that does not exist. And this is the real kicker.
The Tea Party was born out of the same fires as Occupy Wall Street, and in the early days of 2008’s flaming global economic meltdown, they weren’t all that dissimilar. Anger at the ruling Capitalist elite, the crashing system that felt out of our control, the crony handshakes funneling billions in rapidly diminishing cash to prop up Wall Street as Main Street lost the very houses they lived in. For a brief, shining nanosecond, we all looked at this flaming pile of garbage that was once a fountain of endless hope, growth, and ads for house flippers, and raged against the same machine.
Occupy was independent, fiercely grassroots, decentralized, and organic, much like the Black Lives Matter movement would be a decade later.
The Tea Party was, by contrast, immediately seized upon by astroturf organizations like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, David Koch’s Americans For Prosperity, and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks. Absurd amounts of billionaire spending took a working class movement against the ridiculous antics of idiot financiers and fed them a Libertarian vision of an economy that somehow needed LESS regulation, LESS government oversight, and LESS intervention.
Inchoate rage with no answers coming for years while the forces that led to the 2007-2008 crash were still being legislated by the forensics was unfortunately ripe for the sweeping into the politics of rage. THOSE PEOPLE are the ones that DID THIS TO YOU. Look, I’m not going to go through the whole history of this. I just need you to see the villain origin story.
The Tea Party swept into the 2010 elections like a wrecking ball, primarying establishment Republicans, staging demonstrations in weird Lipton-tinged colonial cosplay,and howling about everything from The Invisible Hand Of The Market to gun rights to property rights. The problem was, however, that traditional Libertarianism doesn’t have the same protectionist economic policy nor the virulent culture war guff these Conservative PAC owners saw as necessary to evolve the group’s identity.
Enter Ron “the South was right” Paul. A surprisingly strong showing in 2008 led to his mind-boggling 2012 campaign that galvanized the then nascent memes-and-conspiracies demo of young men looking for more of that reads notes tough guy machismo exemplified by W and his cronies? Ok, sure. They wanted to feel special, and Ron had an iconoclastic vision of freedom that appealed to both fans of his virulently racist newsletters and hentai enthusiasts looking to abolish age of consent laws. The Daily Paul website was an early cesspool of conspiracy theories, reactionary positions, “ironic” racism, and the kind of unfettered shenanigans also folded into early proto-Nazi breeding grounds as 4CHan. Books like Elle Reeve’s Black Pill, Andrew Marantz’s Antisocial, and Alexandra Minna Stern’s Proud Boys And The White Ethnostate are all good reads on the rise of this type of dipshit.
At the same time a particular type of largely male population was delving into an extraordinarily toxic vision of masculinity based on competition, domination, violence, and superiority uber alles, older Conservatives were building a media structure based on similar themes of violent, reactionary opposition to literally anything our first black President said, did, thought, ate, looked at, wore (seriously, there was a tan suit controversy), with Republicans tanking their own bills if Obama came out in favor of them, an insanity described in Mann & Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.
The synergy of a “libertarian” viewpoint that appealed to oligarchs looking to remove the fetters on their moneyhoarding exploitation schemes, young men looking to form a powerful identity that not only allowed but demanded the shittiest behavior their little chronically online minds could imagine, and media and political grifters just frothing at the crotch to take advantage of it all? Perfection.
This is what we were up against. a decade of shit stewing in shit, as the core of their identity. These are the men who chased women out of their homes for daring to suggest that Princess Peach wasn’t a paragon of agency in female character design, or because they got mad at a dev for getting laid or something? I dunno, man, these people have been deeply weird and fundamentally poisonous for years.
And here’s the point: no rational campaign was going to make a dent in this fascist juggernaut without extraordinary effort from the institutions that failed us repeatedly over the last 6 years. I’ll go more into this, but it’s impossible to overstate how powerful this fascist vision of patriarchy has put all of its weight on the wrong side of the scale, and the time to do anything about it for this election was years ago.
Kelsoland.Institute 