On Liberal MAGA
PART 4: The liberal inversion of idealizing a past that never was.
Blue America flatters themselves over their commitment to Facts and Truth, despite spending the Trump years grasping for any explanation of why the 2016 election was a nightmare aberration, an inevitable Hillary coronation thrown off the rails by a perma-tweeting, out-of-work game show host on a political suicide mission. Of course, this devastating loss had nothing to do with Hillary’s twerking, gaffe-ing, galactically entitled presidential run that made her unappealing to broad swaths of Americans who already saw her as untrustworthy and corrupt. Rather, the default replacement explanation became this “Great Man” theory swirling around Trump, that he is a wizard-like swindler who entranced a savage, atavistic horde of baying jackals that can only be appeased with Golden Corral. Upscale, urban, blue-leaning news consumers worked righteously backward from there. There were also supplementary rationalizations like racism, sexism, “economic anxiety,” social media disinformation, and a cloak-and-dagger election-fixing espionage conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin. These were certainly part of the story, but not the whole picture. Rather than coming to terms with the totality of this grim spectacle and taking on the difficult work to envisage an alternative, many Democrats retreated into a coping mechanism that offered them a semblance of structure, security, and authority: Liberal MAGA.
So much of the MAGA phenomenon is about denial. Donald Trump’s appeal represents the fact that we’ve never had a real reckoning with either our bloody past or our similarly bloody present — an absolute whitewashing of America’s sins from slavery on.
Liberal MAGA is also a denial mechanism. It assumes America’s institutions are unquestionably good, and that Trump tainted what was already great about this country. It is powered by an intense desire to look away from the depravity scuttling and swaggering hideously in the open. It nostalgizes and romanticizes the Obama years as a quaint idyl of comity and competence and yearns for a return to this normal. It refuses to countenance the fact that Hillary Clinton was the Bill Buckner of presidential candidates. It insists that Joe Biden is restoring the soul of this nation while the Supreme Court has stripped women of their reproductive rights and Republican governors work to propagandize elementary school children, ban drag shows, and restrict access to voting. While Trump and his Koch-fueled cronies were dismantling whatever remained of the American regulatory system and social fabric, the popular rallying cries of Not My President and This Isn’t Who We Are became outright disavowals and arm-flailing dismissals. These grim rhetorical formulations represent an eerie, twisted inversion of American exceptionalism: There is nothing fundamentally busted with a system that produced Trump, it just needs the “right” people in charge to administer pragmatic and incremental tweaks.
The essential problem here is not that liberals are as “bad” as conservatives—it’s not as if blue-haired they/thems are shooting up Cheesecake Factories in the name of anti-bias seminars. Rather, there is a giant sucking void at the core of this atrophied iteration of liberalism, one that rationalizes the Democratic Party’s inaction in the face of oligarchy and Trump’s dictatorial aspirations. Instead of a backbone, liberalism has performative allyship and guilty consciences. Instead of politics, it has a Democratic Process to assuage those consciences. Instead of conviction, it has a stubborn desire to appear reasonable to “respectable” Republicans. Instead of moral clarity, it defers to credentials and experts and competence porn. Instead of introspection, it blames Russiagate and Bernie Bros. Instead of vision, it has Back to Normal. Instead of charting a new course, it cowers under the specter of the Orange One. Throughout the Trump years and into the Brandon regime, this mindset is increasingly given to grandiose delusion and stubborn denial, pitted against a stupendously bad-faith and revanchist negotiating partner that has only grown more perverse and proudly signals every day that it is not interested in cooperation.
American voters have at least some lingering grasp of their alienation from their time and their labor — neoliberalism appears to be ideologically and materially ill-equipped to alleviate this problem, let alone diagnose it. By this dint, QAnon is something more than a goose-chase to investigate the inner machinations of a satanic cabal of pedophiles running the Deep State; it is a crowdsourced attempt to investigate reality itself, even if the dots are connected with kitschy iconography.
While Russiagate was not quite as psychically twisted as QAnon — Robert Mueller’s probe did deliver 34 indictments and convictions — at its peak, it was dragged and stretched to some insane hyperbolic lengths. Russiagate was pure cope, providing Blue America a form of escapism that would explain why Trump won the 2016 election while exonerating them from any reevaluation. Because of their own media consumptive bubble, Liberal MAGA reeled from the shock of an election result they were wholly unprepared for, and thus plunged into this Trump-as-Putin’s-Puppit rabbit hole. The liberal emotional investment in this titillating conspiracy was the easier and more comforting choice than accepting their own shortcomings.
The Steele dossier piss romp was the Magna Carta of Russiagate, and since then, there was little pretense that the Mueller probe was supposed to be a neutral fact-finding mission, as opposed to religious allegory. The steely and silver-haired former FBI Director was cast as the hero sent to slay the monster with “presidency-wrecking” conspiracy charges. For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in DC hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in, the OJ trial, and any celebrity meltdown combined. Anonymous officials, they were often anonymous, promised Trump would “die in jail” and that he committed acts “nothing short of treasonous.” Some even proclaimed he might have been recruited by the KGB in 1987.
Russiagate followed a fairly consistent pattern. Shock viewers with a salacious headline; then days or weeks later, news would emerge that proves the story is shakier than initially believed; and afterward, the report is either walked back or retraced by the publication, or the less principled and/or less discerning journos doubled-down. None of this mattered, really, because the point and principle of Liberal MAGA — and Trumpism to a greater degree — is to believe all of it with a wholly cosmetic certitude, even and especially where those blunderbuss blasts of bluster are circular and contradictory. These rationalizations are held tightest when they are most tenuous.
None of this is meant to downplay Trump’s seedy relationship with Russian oligarchs, or his criminal behavior, or Russia’s foreign policy interest in influencing American elections. But it is unknowable, unquantifiable, and unfalsifiable to conclude whether KGB-backed troll farms swung enough would-be Hillary voters or non-voters to clinch the presidency for Trump, or if they further radicalized already existing right-wingers.
Lost in the clickbait, as Russiagate was unfolding, criminal lawyers and constitutional experts expressed doubts as to whether the Mueller probe had sufficient evidence to clear the very high legal bar of convicting Trump of conspiracy (this is the closest legal term to the utterly colloquial “collusion”). Regardless, “COLLUSION!” was repeated and posted into de facto reality until it all flubbed. The amount of literal truth contained within this mania was supposed to be beside the point, but it never managed to stay on the sidelines. The same mainstream news outlets that contributed to Trump’s elections underwent a faux-comeuppance by posturing this wall-to-wall anti-Trump fervor as journalistic rigor, but they were making the cynical decision to ride the #resistance train to easy money by pumping up these hot-take crazes. In the bleak cosmology of Russian perfidy, the possibility of inconvenient facts and undermining counterarguments would inevitably contaminate, so it was reflexively disregarded as the cockamamie ramblings of closeted Trumpers and useful idiots. The #resistance fancied themselves as this witches coven that could tweet their way into vanishing Trump.
I resent myself for dedicating these next two paragraphs to relitigating the 2016 Democratic Primary in 2023, but Joe Biden—the man who was sold as the most objectively electable Democrat—has floundering poll numbers in five battleground states (as of this writing) while down-ballot Democrats are mostly coasting on the backlash to Republican overreach on abortion. It seems like no lesson has been learned since 2016. Throughout that contentious primary, it was amusing to see the same libs who claim to love facts and data dismiss poll after poll that indicated that Bernie Sanders matched up more favorably against Trump than Hillary in a general election and that he cleaned up with independents. None of this would’ve guaranteed a Bernie victory over Trump, but this should’ve been, at the very least, quantitive evidence that disproves the notion that the Vermont socialist was wholly unelectable. Clinton apparatchiks scoffed at those polls, asserting without evidence that Republicans would’ve ruthlessly mauled Bernie without much regard for how Republicans are already convinced that Democrats are socialists, Hillary has long been a polarizing figure, and Republicans have been sinking Hillary for decades. Regardless, swaths of libs clung to the MSDNC narrative that Bernie supporters were responsible for Trump’s election, which provided the Church of the Blue Establishment a years-long window to deflect from their own failures. It was an added bonus that they got to grind an axe against Bernie supporters who—as the numbers also show—overwhelmingly voted for Hillary and turned out for her at higher rates than disgruntled Hillary voters pulled the lever for Obama in 2008.
The whole notion of “electability” spilled over into the 2020 primary, which was less about ideas and mostly squared on the concern of ousting The Commander-In-Tweet from the presidency. This all-but-official electable prototype should’ve been utterly discredited after a vinegary, inveterate pussy grabber barreled down the gates of Obama’s White House in a Sherman’s March of taboo politics and testosterone fury. Nevertheless, conventional wisdom persevered, despite our current president being a doddering, atavistic Wall Street-backed mummy whose brain is egg yolk leaking out of his ears. “Electability” is a subjective vibe, a feeling for people who wanted to post-hoc rationalize their decision to vote for a woman because it was her turn, and to leverage nakedly cynical plays to identity politics to dismiss any principled objection to the total control of capital over both political parties, or to deny that any “electability” concerns for Hillary were proven absolutely, totally, indisputably correct (this applies to arguments outside of blatantly sexist attacks or psychotic conspiracies against her).
As Trump exited the presidency, millions of Americans are living with the damage that an erratic and idiotic mishandling of a pandemic can create, in terms of the sickness and suffering and death that surrounded us. But there isn’t a sense that any meaningful insights have been accumulated, let alone any urgency in facing the task of remedying it. Being trapped in the thralls of Blue Twitter and the NYT/WaPo/NPR/Atlantic ouroboros is a nightmare of eternal recurrence where everyone drilled a hole in their frontal lobe to ingest loads of information while preventing themselves from actually learning anything. There is no corrective mechanism for contemporary liberalism, as Trump’s election and Russiagate and the cynical bastardization of social justice politics after George Floyd created a toxic dynamic of rigid moral absolutism: Any deviation from the most narrow interpretation of current progressive dogma is apparently an expression of reactionary tendencies. The only remaining delineation between a full-scale Trump cult delusion and Liberal MAGA remains in the latter being compulsively wedded to institutions like the Democratic Party, mainstream media, and Hollywood. Of course, this reverence only manifests itself in a way that layers partisanship onto American exceptionalism onto a logical system that is fully realized but drizzled with therapeutic self-affirmation and suffused with existential despair.
The collapse of a shared reality across the online sector unfolds in this fudgy, vagued-out language describing cycles of offhand umbrage and gilded bluster that cossets people in their own epistemological realm. Social media is a sort of fun-mirrored hothouse full of internet-damaged hobgoblins exploring some truly avant-garde dimensions of public mutancy. It is a realm inherently counterproductive to pursuing truth, the ideal breeding ground for the kind of petty irrationality that incorporates the narcissistic character-building of the personal brand. Without Twitter, Trump himself is a spent force, just another inexcusably rich golf blob. But he is airborne. He is alive in all the Americans who are blinkered and vain enough to believe that wearing a mask or getting the vaccine is somehow the same as dying in the Holocaust, but who are also convinced that they must live-stream their spastic, baby-brained conniption fits in defiance of Trader Joe’s cashiers or municipal cops. But #resistance accounts like Jeff Tiedrich, Palmer Report, Neera Tanden, Angela Belcamino, Brooklyn Dad, Sarah Cooper, and Mueller, She Wrote are grifting the most gormless rubes in the Democratic base, despite them having the charisma of someone who’s been involved in multiple child abduction trials.
The belief system that has emerged from these incentives and pressures is defined by simple stubbornness and thirst and strident idiocy. The game is to leverage your limitless vanity and every cheesy chiseling gripe to push whatever you find most intriguing and that which centers you most. From there, the long con of being a political influencer is to keep devising more elaborate and extravagant ways to profess that belief, all the time. For all the clammy and overdetermined machinations these aspirants undertake to snare a blue checkmark or to be the most notable and vociferous anti-Trump crusader, it is plain to see the compulsive shitposting and defiant ugliness as pure clout chasing built on whatever already assumes their, and their audience’s, conclusions.
The terrified and fuming derangement that cable media sought to embed in its consumers has blossomed into a swelling tranche of detached and deluded people with a seemingly sincere receptiveness to hair-trigger credulity, heads filled with Cobb salad and warped by dizzying righteousness. Whether it’s out of some sincere belief or lazy suspicion or secondhand gripe or idle vendetta, the most important point is that their ideology is nothing more than an obsessive taxonomy and weird fixation on enemies. It’s all performed through relentless arias of anger and anxiety until this very specific type of grievance disperses into a concentric field of threats.
Trump himself is nothing more than a cable news addict and an attention-seeking moron. His mind is a television that changes channels every few seconds and every channel has an infomercial on it; it cycles every day and night without ever quite cohering into a signal. Despite this clear state of arrested cognition, Trump’s specter still lords over a debased political party and a servile fanbase that would gleefully revert American democracy back to a white Christian apartheid state for no other reason beyond a spiteful and reflexive hatred of liberals. The big-picture horrors are often lost in the day-to-day hyperbole. It occurs through the snowballing accumulation of utterly terrible and disturbing sidebars that #resistance libs claim to be Big If True, all of which occlude and then obscure very real and demonstrably bad news.
The cumulative effect of the generations-spanning right-wing infotainment complex has produced some grisly outcomes: white-supremacist terrorism, Charlottesville, a rising spate of political violence, and a bunch of swirly-eyed gun puds sacking Capitol Hill. It’s more uncertain as to what will come from the fairly insincere and facile hysteria of Liberal MAGA. This is a constant and cascading barrage of tweets and breaking news convincing people this is the biggest crisis ever and this is the most important election ever and people need to be held accountable and this is unprecedented and whatever Trump just did is of earth-shattering importance, followed by the manic cant of pragmatism when the Democrats inevitably flail at doing anything with power.
Despite their disintegrating sanity and ongoing psychosis, even the most die-hard #resistance libs never managed to summon the passion or urgency of QAnon; their curdled paranoia and pure unbridled resentment mostly amounted to stern but enervating, How dare you, sir?? posts. For a year and a half, former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer dutifully served as a beleaguered human punchline who outright lied and rationalized on behalf of an administration that was oft-compared to the Third Reich. Immediately upon resigning from his disgraced post, Spicer was wholeheartedly hugged by the same Hollywood celebs and media elites who drew these Literal Hitler parallels. The Democratic-controlled House during these years also voted to give Trump “everything he wanted” in regards to increasing the military budget after years of lambasting him as a Manchurian candidate for a hostile nuclear state. In context with liberal media circles laundering the reputations of warmonger cretins like John Bolton or applauding obvious clammy grifts like the Lincoln Project, there isn’t really much to glean from the #resistance other than it signaled four years of impotent scolding and howling tantrums.
For the past few election cycles, as their opposition has only grown more perverse and appalling and confounding, the Democrat’s signature get a load of these other guys messaging has intensified into frantic and fervid fears about the looming threat of Trumpist fascism sweeping America. In the absence of fighting for actual outcomes or actual values, Democrats have poured millions of dollars—donations they’ve raised from voters who are terrified of these election-denying psychopaths coming into power—into amplifying far-right candidates babbling about seed oil and weather machines. As it was revealed from the infamous leaked emails, Hillary Clinton’s campaign used the same pied piper strategy with Trump in 2016. So we have a Democratic Party fearmongering about the incoming march of fascism and capitalizing on these very valid concerns, and they are actively platforming it, normalizing it, and increasing its long-term electoral viability.
If the Democratic Party and their aligned media organizations are earnestly convinced that Trump is Literally Hitler, it is rather bewildering—if not disheartening—to watch them charge headlong into the same bleary and faintly queasy slowness generally associated with mixing benzos and alcohol. Leading up to the 2022 midterms, Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin repeatedly thwarted the Biden Administration’s limp efforts at revitalizing voting rights and reforming the filibuster until both attempts at restoring American democracy were rendered diminished and doomed. Even for a party that elevates and exalts process over outcomes and holds a grim patrician stodginess as its central ideological tenet, allowing two senators to derail critical aspects of their own president’s agenda doesn’t match the urgency of their alarmist rhetoric.
The Pelosi-approved methods of strategically working the angles—such as reimagining governance as a series of clever nudges and inspirational dada, or hoping voters will punish Republicans at the ballot box for holding the global economy hostage—is a strikingly ineffective way to govern even in the best of times and the most stable of circumstances. And astute readers will recall the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and gutting affirmative action and also the general relentless miserable grinding failure of Congress, and conclude that these are absolutely fucking not normal circumstances. It has been a long time since any of this felt anything but futile. But futility is something that Democratic leadership has shown itself willing to accept and the Democratic base is willing to rationalize, provided the alternative is something more undignified like changing basically anything. These people are complete cowards, or they are cynical histrionics — they either don’t believe what they’re saying, or they’re not committed enough to care.
The big whiff of Russiagate was completely bypassing Trump's sleazy billionaire owners; most especially Wilbur Ross, Trump's Commerce Secretary and Onsite Supervisor; and Bob and Rebekah Mercer. The Democratic Party bosses have billionaire-ownership problems of their own they'd rather not have highlighted, one would imagine.
the ladies call me Big If True, but i stand with the little guy.
if a pee tape turns up urine trouble.