Elite conservatives want you to be a terrible person
Washington Post
Supporters of then-President Donald Trump protest the ballot count outside TFC Center in Detroit on Nov. 5, 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Every political movement contains within it a critique of the present and a vision of the future, an agenda of problems to be solved and a series of solutions that would bring us to a better existence. But political movements also say something about people, both who they think we are and who they’d like us to be.
Keep that in mind as we look at where elite conservatives are putting their attention and energy, to understand what they think of Americans and how they think we ought to be living our lives.
A rant that Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the chief propagandist of today’s right, delivered this week was shocking even for him. The subject was the evolving thinking on mask-wearing outdoors; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just released new guidance on the subject, which, as expected, reflects the understanding that transmission of the coronavirus in outdoor settings is extremely rare, particularly as more people are vaccinated.
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But that’s not good enough for Carlson. He urged his viewers to start fights and turn on their neighbors:
As for forcing children to wear masks outside, that should be illegal. Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately. Contact Child Protective Services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it. If it’s your own children being abused, then act accordingly.
The truth is that in most cases it is indeed unnecessary for people to wear masks outside — though not in every case, and not for everyone. But the more important question is, why in heaven’s name does Carlson want people to call Child Protective Services on their neighbors for something so unimportant? So that a parent who has their kid wear a mask in the park gets plunged into a bureaucratic nightmare that could result in their child being taken away?
What kind of person would do that? The kind of person Carlson wants his audience to be. Or perhaps the kind of person he already thinks they are.
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What else do you learn on Fox, the central hub of the conservative media universe, about what’s going on in the world? You learn that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, of course, but also that President Biden wants to limit the number of burgers you’re allowed to eat (he doesn’t) and that government officials are handing out copies of a children’s book Vice President Harris wrote in 2019 to immigrant kids (they aren’t).
The conservative media figures and Republican politicians who spread those lies know that they’re false. But they use them to keep their supporters in a state of perpetual outrage precisely because they hold those supporters in such boundless contempt.
You have to think — no, you have to know — that your audience is pretty darn stupid if you think they’ll believe that the president is going to ban hamburgers. But that’s exactly how elite conservatives like their supporters: dumb, gullible and easily enraged.
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The ideology Carlson is developing takes it to another, more repellent level. This isn’t just get-off-my-lawn conservatism (protective of individual liberty, alienated by cultural change, generally grumpy); it takes itself out into the world, building its identity on confrontation.
This version of conservatism doesn’t just want you to hole up in your house feeling fear and anger. It wants you to become a “Karen” (or whatever the male equivalent is), feeling entitled not just to impose your ideas on others but to do so aggressively, unpleasantly, invasively wherever you go, turning every trip to the supermarket into a shouting match with strangers.
Who in their right mind would want to live that way?
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I’m reminded of a Web ad that President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign released to great attention in 2012. Called “The Life of Julia,” it showed how a woman is helped by government programs — she goes to school, then college, then starts a business, has her own children, and eventually retires, with a helping hand from Pell Grants, Obamacare and Social Security.
That was one version of the future Democrats wanted to create, where people lead productive, fulfilling lives with support from the government. Republicans saw it and were horrified, not only because they read “support” as “dependence” but also because Julia didn’t seem to have a husband.
For many on the right, the ad became representative of everything they hated about the liberal agenda and what kind of people it would turn us into — though they also were obsessed for a time with another Obama ad featuring a young man wearing pajamas, which conservatives spun into a tale of Democrats wanting to rob men of their masculinity.
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Some of this is a familiar divergence of visions: In one, people are interconnected and use government to enable human flourishing, while in the other, people are self-reliant and rise or fall on their own hard work. And there are plenty of conservatives who are happy people who treat those they encounter with respect and consideration. But more than ever, elite Republicans want their supporters to build their identity on anger and confrontation.
So “We don’t need to wear masks outside” becomes “Call the police on people who have their kids wear masks outside.” “I can make my own choices” becomes “I won’t take the vaccine because it makes liberals mad” (the actual title of an article on the pro-Trump site American Greatness). The answer to the question “Who are you?” begins and ends with “I hate liberals.”
That might turn out to be politically effective, at least for a while. But it’s no way to live.
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