Quote:
Originally Posted by Autocratic
I've been meaning to post something along these lines for a bit, and LordJVK reminded me:
It is important for liberals to understand how wrong the perspective that the left is currently "overreacting" to Trump is just in terms of what works politically. It's crazy that it can even be a discussion after the last 8 years.
I see my liberal friends posting that if we react strongly to EVERY Trump outrage, it diminishes our ability to protest when he does something reallllly bad. This is flatly wrong.
The Outrage Machine has propelled fringe, conspiratorial conservative politics into a position of dominance on Capitol Hill. If you talked to a Trump supporter before the election, it might strike you how few of the things they talked about were events you had even heard of. Huge percentages of their discourse was nonsense that you had to be in the conservative bubble to even hear about. Clinton murder conspiracies, Obama secretly being gay, etc. But those bull**** stories aggregated to create a feeling among those people that this was the apocalypse. Liberals were upending an established order and replacing it with their own, where gender isn't real and pedophilia is totes natural and sharia law is right around the corner.
That outrage machine sustained itself for 8 years and kept the base motivated. They continuously put fringey idiots into power because of it, and it culminated with Trump. Continuous, all-consuming outrage works, and the Democrats should be feeding into it to mobilize their notoriously finicky base.
This is absolutely true. I think it's the correct play for the left writ large now. In fact in the age of Trump, it's almost a solemn patriotic duty to stay outraged and do everything we can to keep allies outraged, energized, and willing to resist.
And still. This energy is really hard to constructively manage. It's on the lower tier of movement building principles, certainly a lower order of governing principles. In the tumult of the moment we have no choice. I think it's highly effective as we've seen on the right, but the outcomes to the conservative movement allowing it to fester are manifest: they almost literally can't ****ing govern effectively because the entire movement is grievance and outrage. Key word is effectively. They are now governing. But in a moment of basically minority rule with no popular consensus and they are completely, totally bereft of ideas on how to build it.
Consider that here we stand at apex of the right-wing outrage machine, and its movement leaders are guys like Bannon and Milo. Totally empty shirt trolls with one trick to simply troll people and get them angry.
Don't get me wrong -- I am not predicting sunshine for the immediate future. The right-wing movement, fueled exclusively by anger and outrage -- it will have victories in the next few years. They will certainly grift. They will roll back consumer, environmental, and labor protections. They will harm immigrants, blacks, voting rights. They might get that war porn bloodlust in the streets or in Iran or whatever they so deeply crave, with the sight of cops beating protestors or waging war in Iran.
But none of this is popular. They haven't built anything made to last. This is a particularly trenchant criticism of Obama and it's valid: by circumventing the dysfunctional Congress and relying on executive power to achieve legislative outcomes, it's all open to almost immediate erosion.
The same measures of political dysfunction on the right are present such that almost none of what Trump is doing has permanence, outside of the immediate gratification for his supporters and pain for the victims of his policies. The GOP can't even get their **** together to replace Obamacare; all their side has is outrage and fictions, but they face a stark reality that rolling back coverage and care for people is going to turn the outrage and anger on them. It's the result of a generation where any notions of political compromise and pluralism that governs healthy political systems have been degraded and eroded, so their base wants these irrational, nonsensical outcomes like removing Obamacare but preserving the ACA. They want to instigate trade wars but they want cheap technology and jobs. They want manufacturing jobs in the American hinterlands, supply chain economics are for the Chinese to figure out we guess. They want a wall to stop immigrants and they expect Mexico to pay for it. They've been conditioned for a generation that this sort nonsensical ordering of the world is normal and OK. GOP can't solve any of this easily.
Consider one of the genuinely alarming and destructive things Reagan did to the American political culture is entrench a bunch of right wing ideas
because was extremely popular. When you think of leaders and movements that made enduring, lasting achievements in our political culture, it is people like Teddy Roosevelt and his impassioned arguments for progressivism and conservation building the National Parks system, FDR and the New Deal, and then Reagan and the Chicago Boys rolling it back. But they did it with
popular consensus. Trump and the modern right are extremely dangerous but their outrage-fueled mayhem means they've not built any political capital for any of this. All they've got is mouth-breathing and anxiety and grievance. I get that Trump breaks all the rules but at some point, political gravity will catch up with them or they'll lose or just have to turn to out-and-out-force. I shudder at the thought of that and the immense human suffering that it might entail, but we can respect the human order enough to know turning to drastic autocratic measures are the least durable forms of consensus building.
It's not the left doesn't have this mindset and look where we are in some quarters: Trump is destroying the modern democratic order and some dude less than 10 posts above is still nursing some wounds about "the way Bernie has been treated by liberals on this forum is a disgrace." We can treat him as a microcosm of the kind of product the Outrage Machines churn out on the production lines, really the only thing they offer: a guy scouring the internet desperate to find someone who has victimized him while the world devolves around him. Not healthy. They're useful to build up an army of this type of person to oppose Trump but the long-term political value of this hard to control and channel into producing long term, durable benefits. It's an extremely useful mindset for Bannon types who just want to destroy the dominant order of the world but hard to draw into constructive governance.
So in the end: let's at least admit that the tact we're taking here is a bit of a Faustian bargain, that a political movement which turns itself over to manufacturing grievance and outrage can be both highly effective but that unchecked and unmoored from delivering outcomes beyond beating back opponents, it ultimately results in the modern right-wing -- beholden to constant titillation and manufacturing threats from the outside to sustain activity. I think it's our duty to do it now but it's a dangerous game.
Last edited by DVaut1; 02-05-2017 at 08:37 AM.
