Have You No Sense of Decency?
What's dangerous today isn't woke ideology, trans people, or immigration. It's the tolerance for violence, vulgarity, and sheer meanness of spirit.
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When I was growing up five hundred years ago, “decency” was part of the square, bourgeois normalcy that I — as a privileged, rebellious, closeted teenager in suburban Tampa, Florida — hated. It was epitomized by the Reagans and their old-fashioned values and anti-drug crusades. I wanted to tear it all down.
Now, of course, I’m a lot older. For one thing, I see how much of my adolescent rage was misguided – I was angrier at shopping malls and “hypocrisy” than racial or economic injustice. I was Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, equal parts privilege and angst.
For another, the poles of decency have switched.
Today, the Democrats are the party of decency, and the Republicans are the party of trolls, name-calling, vulgarity, and extremism. They want to tear it all down, “it” being the globalized and multicultural society that has ‘ruined America.’ And accompanying their radical zeal is a puerile, trollish nastiness that makes Holden and me look like Gandalf the Grey.
Of course, this “decency” was always a part lie, since it lay atop so much oppression and violence. The dominant group was never that decent to women, people of color, immigrants, the disabled, or queers, to name a few. After all, I stayed in the closet for a reason.
But there were at least some standards for how public figures, especially politicians, behaved. Reagan shredded the welfare state, created the wealth gap that is still growing today, and ignored AIDS for years, but he didn’t brag that he could grab women by the pussy. That should count for something.
It’s not just Trump, though. Trump may have raised populist American vulgarity to a demagogic art form (Jeff Sharlet has written about how it is the main point of his rallies) but there was plenty already there in the Tea Party movement and, of course, in the once-far white nationalist Right. Now it oozes beyond Trump to tens of millions of Americans who love nothing more than to own the libs, like some powerless teenagers vandalizing a city wall because they have no other way to flex their muscles.
Take, for example, the entire GOP’s insistence on mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s first name. Everyone who follows politics knows that she pronounces it KOM-ala, not kam-AH-la. Yet at the RNC, nearly half the speakers intentionally mispronounced it. Indeed, looking at the Washington Post’s chart of who said what, the mispronunciation tracks one’s MAGA-hood. Matt Gaetz yes, Nikki Haley no.
There are at least two reasons for this bullshit. First, it serves to otherize Vice President Harris. “Everyone” – meaning, every white person – can pronounce Donald, Tim, and JD. But “Kamala”? That’s weird. Foreign-sounding. Especially with the accent on the second syllable. It’s a subtle birtherism, but it’s birtherism nonetheless.
Second, and I think more importantly, it’s just trolling. Disempowered MAGA men love to imagine that they’re making woke progressives cry “liberal tears” by their mean little antics. They say Kam-AH-la — and “Democrat Party” instead of “Democratic Party” — simply because it’s name-calling, because they hope it will get a rise out of us. Again, like a pathetic schoolyard bully.
And of course it’s not just mispronunciation. Trump has called Kamala Harris “dumb as a rock,” “nasty,” a “bum,” and “real garbage.” I’ve seen numerous memes making fun of Harris, who is clearly quite intelligent and whose vocabulary and sentence structure dwarfs that of Trump, as “dumb.” I’m not sure if this is trolling or racist/ sexist delusion: The Nation has devastatingly catalogued the way Trump denigrates Black women in particular.
These people think that what is new and dangerous about America are things like woke ideology, trans people, and immigration. But what’s really new and dangerous is their tolerance for violence, their vulgarity, and their sheer meanness of spirit.
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Of course, as soon as the poles of mockery are reversed, right-wing snowflakes call foul. “Don’t condescend to Trump voters,” coastal elites like me are always told. And part of me (especially the rabbi/meditation/psychedelic part) agrees. It’s manifestly obvious that the name-calling and lib-owning are, like all bullying, symptoms of a deep self-loathing and profound insecurity. These people know that the country they once loved — the mean, chauvinistic, white-dominated, Christian-first, English-only, gay-bashing one where they or their husbands were in charge — is never coming back, even if Trump wins the election. I think they know, too, that they have allowed themselves to be victims of globalization and economic change, even if they blame their loss of status on elites and immigrants rather than billionaires, large corporations, and their political enablers. They know that their old ways don’t work anymore; their disregard for truth and decency has, at its root, a sad, nihilistic despair. So I do feel some compassion for them.
Then again, a lot of people experience grief, loss, and change. Not all of them turn their pain outward, scapegoating and dehumanizing “illegals” or supporting a boorish demagogue. Some accommodate themselves to new realities, find ways to grow with them, and take responsibility for their shortcomings, rather than blame someone else.
But MAGA lashes out in vengeance, rage, and nihilism. Do 90 million Americans really believe the Big Lie, or do they just not give a fuck? Trumpism is a lot like pro wrestling (maybe not a coincidence, since arch-hucksterer Vince McMahon played a big role in creating both). Everyone knows it’s fake, but they still shout along as if it isn’t.
I’m reminded of this well-known passage by Hannah Arendt, writing of past totalitarians but equally apposite to Putin and Trump:
This constant lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.
This seems mostly true today, though now the lying is done by sinister overlords to manipulate the people, but by a demagogue and television networks responding to ‘audience capture.’ Maybe Trump’s billionaire backers are engaged in mass manipulation, but Trump, Carlson, Vance, and the rest? They’re giving the people what they want.
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