Sunday, February 12, 2023

Weekend reading - How GOP grifters get ahead due to MAGAt weakness and fear

Wanted to forward this excellent column by David Roth in Defector, which does a great job explaining how GOP voters view the world, and how that MAGAt mentality can lead directly to them buying into grifting scum like George Santos.

Roth begins the column by describing "a perspective on the world that only comes through the windows of a car." And from this perspective comes two worlds - the inside cocoon where these inidviduals are in control of everything, and an outside world that is a threat to all of that self-ascribed importance. And that allows them to both be obnoxious, and also very easy to sucker.
It's hard to know what to do with this. It is strange to know that some of your neighbors are constructing or currently inhabiting a reality in which you, and everyone else, are an urgent threat to their safety. They are in fear of their lives, and as such feel entitled to do whatever they need to do to keep themselves safe from a world that only ever shades further into a state of urgent and omnipresent risk; they melt the enamel off their beings because they believe that's what it means to be informed and aware and engaged. And it is stranger still when you look at how these people act, and what they do with the license that they believe this fear gives them. That duality is what contemporary American conservative politics is. It is about creating a list of enemies, and fantasizing about all the things that might justifiably be done to them, and building the necessary fortifications; about turning on the TV and never turning it off. But also it is about having fun—expressing yourself to the fullest, getting as much as you can of everything you want, never apologizing and never going to bed.

The wreck that this has made of the culture—which is atomized, simultaneously cynical and credulous, blithely predatory and outraged at its perceived victimhood, bottomlessly thirsty and generally too angry and lonesome and scared to think straight—is all around. There are a number of things to say about people who experience the world this way, but one is that their confusion and fear, and the fantasies of retribution and impunity that grow from that, and the fake-it-til-you-make-it recklessness that grows from that, make them not just reactive and jumpy and distractible, but extremely easy marks.
And you see this in the constant whining that is part and parcel of today's GOP. Take a look at the absurd House Committee hearing from this last week where GOP Performance Artists like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Lauren Boebert used taxpayer dollars to whine to Twitter executives about how THEIR RIGHTS were violated when that private platform chose to ban them for spreading lies and generally beeing boorish trash.

Roth adds that GOP Performance Artists never have to come up with solutions or try to understand why something is happening. They just whine and complain and create their own Bubble of BS as to what is a "problem" to mention and take actions on, and they use these created threats to believe they don't have to follow the rules they lay out to others. Given that MAGAt voters also marinate in that us-vs-them, closed-off mentality, they fall for this crap.
Someone out to enrich or empower himself at the expense or just through the credulity of such people wouldn't even have to be an especially artful liar. Such a person would need only to tell those people the types of lies they like, and then just keep doing it. The problems can never go away; the problems are the only thing holding this curdled worldview and constituency of crabs in a barrel together; the terrifying/titillating lawlessness of the world outside is what justifies the giddier lawlessness that applies for those on the inside. So the sales pitch is merely a matter of reading The News back to the people who have made themselves its captives, and doing so in a way that suggests that you also believe it. If they hear the right tones of distaste and delight, these inside men and women will vote for that candidate, and for the problems that order their lives. Of all the many, many lies that George Santos told in hustling his way into the House of Representatives, these were surely the easiest.
A grifter like Santos is the natural outcome of this, where he has no core beliefs, and all that he talks about are things that he thinks will sound good to others. Since GOP voters don't require solutions or any actual substance, and instead just want to be angry and feel important, Roth notes that there are no standards that need to be followed. And the job of the Performance Artists is to keep talking and building the Bubble of RW BS even higher.
Beyond the freakish vastness of his dishonesty, what’s compelling about Santos is the extent to which his personal scuzziness, as expressed through his aspirational scamming and cheesy little grifts alike, so fully embodies the institutionalized lawlessness of his movement and its moment. Whatever Santos set out to do in arranging all this clutter and camouflage around himself— to make himself look bigger or to disappear, to get over on people or hide from them, honestly who cares— is ultimately less meaningful than the clutter he chose. All that aggro bluster and idiot cruelty and round-the-clock relentlessness is fundamentally a diversion, both in the sense that it exists to deflect and in terms of it being a game. It’s also a fantasy, and his inventions lay that fantasy’s particulars out in a more comprehensive and revealing way than any candidate's actual life ever could.
And continuing a tradition that dates back to former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, Santos and other non-white straight male Performance Artists use their race, identity, and background to insulate themselves from their BS, which allows these grifting lowlifes to be promoted, as a way for MAGA types to say "See, we're not bigots!"
It is possible to look at the long trail of fantastical lies that comprise Santos's biography and see him figuring this out. He starts by inventing stuff haphazardly, generally silly showbiz shit, to seem like the sort of fabulous and notable person he actually wanted to be; this was all infantile, and hard to parse for how illiterate it is. Later, during his Supermarket Sweep-style run through various aliases and identities, the signifiers that he claimed as his own were things that conservative discourse had held up as get-out-of-jail-free passes, and all of them — as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, as the son of a 9/11 victim, as the employer of multiple men killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting — were fundamentally things Santos believed would protect him from criticism.
But grifters like Santos wouldn't have a chance of winning a seat in a district that voted for Joe Biden (!) if we didn't have a media that goes out of its way to give air time and attention to these empty Performance Artists, elevates their non-issues, and won't follow up on their lack of solutions. Roth says this was especially true in and around New York City ahead of the 2022 election that gave Santos his seat.
In the suburbs of New York City, this strategy worked unusually well. News of unprecedented chaos and carnage ran on a furious loop for months before the election, in shrieking tabloid headlines and prissy Times-ian locutions alike, without anything like rebuttal; the city's uniquely distractible mayor seldom speaks with any evident interest about any other topic. While the histrionic coverage of the crime surge putting your family at risk predictably dropped off in frequency and intensity after the election, it did what it was supposed to do in New York's third congressional district. "If you don’t feel safe," a new Republican voter in Santos's district told the New York Times after his win and before his exposure as a world-historic fabulist, "then it doesn’t matter what all the other issues are."
Grifters like Santos and Ron Johnson and other GOP trash believe that once they slip by in an election, it immunizes them from responsibility for the rest of their term in office. Add in GOP "leaders" like Kevin McCarthy, who care only about (the appearance of and use of) power than any kind of improvement of the country or solving of problems, and this is how the country's political system keeps sliding down with lesser people serving in it.

The only way this ends? Making the GOP lose for this Performance Artist BS, and lose big. While it likely won't work in trailer trash House and legislative districts, it needs to become impossible for Republicans to win any kind of swing district or the White House. We already have more Americans living under states with complete Dem control than GOP control, and that isn't changing any time soon as long as GOP promaries are decided by a small percentage of morons that GOP politicians care about, vs the overwhelming majority of us who live in and deal with the outside world.

And to speed this along, we don't need to listen to grifters like George Santos or weak-minded MAGAts. Instead, we should burst their Bubble of BS, and mock them to any and all bystanders who might not know the difference.

Once again, here's the David Roth article. Read it, and pass it around.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)