(Title is lyrics from “You’ve Got to Stand For Something” by Aaron Tippin, though I believe the phrase goes back further than the song).
As I’ve written about previously, my rule of thumb is that 10 percent of people are heroes, 10 percent are villains and 80 percent can go either way, depending on circumstances: what does their boss want? What will be profitable? How do their buddies feel? What are the chances of success? (For a more detailed analysis, click here). Like some of the potential Nazis in Dorothy Thompson’s Who Goes Nazi? essay, they don’t stand for anything. They don’t have enough of a personal code or principles to resist blowing with the wind, whichever way it’s blowing.
Being afraid of what President Toddler, ICE or other forces can do is reasonable. But as Adam Serwer says, major corporations aren’t scared, they’re chickenshit: “fear is part of human existence. Bravery is the overcoming of fear, not its absence. Acts of cowardice can be provoked by genuine danger—think of a deserting soldier fleeing the peril of the battlefield. When you’re chickenshit, you capitulate to avoid the mere possibility of discomfort, let alone something resembling real risk. Disney is one of the largest companies in the world, with a devoted following and a market cap bigger than many countries’ stock markets. It did not have to cave.”
Or consider the Department of Justice. The Felon wants his enemies arrested because people opposing him hurts his snowflake fee-fees sooo much. John Bolton is on the list; some of the DOJ’s political leadership suggest doing it “to placate the president.” If Bolton hasn’t done anything, he shouldn’t be charged; the leaders who want to do it to please their boss do not deserve they’re position. They’re 80 percenters all the way. (Bolton has since been charged by a grand jury). Ironically some of the people the Felon hates are no better: former FBI Director James Comey is no Trumper but his warnings about Clinton’s emails helped the Felon win in 2016 — part of the “feckless elite response” that didn’t think the outcome would be a big deal.
Anti-vax Governor Ron DeSantis refuses to say whether his kids are vaccinated. I assume that means despite his caving to anti-vaxxers, they are. And coming up with bullshit rationales such as fewer mandates means more vaccinations. I’m proud some blue state governors are standing up and doing the right thing.
School administrators faced with Republican whines they’re not doing enough to deify Charlie Kirk sometimes fire people for offenses that don’t deserve it. They’re pre-emptively complying, which makes it much easier for the other side. And it won’t save them: ABC paid $16 million to the Felon to settle a dubious lawsuit, then he came back and pushed them to fire Jimmy Kimmel — and contrary to Vice President JD Vance, it was a threat. While $16 million is chump change to Disney, ABC’s corporate owner, it was wasted chump change (on the plus side the wind blew so intensely against Disney’s decision, they tacked and changed course).
And let’s not forget the sensible centrists who don’t necessarily hate LGBTQ or women or POC the way Republicans do, but they’re happy to throw them under the bus because having principles is not a winning tactic.
The 80 percent (I admit the percentage is a guess — I’d like to think it’s a lot lower) aren’t all the same. There are people who have principles but fold under pressure. There are people like JD Vance, whom I think would go Nazi, Communist or go anything that would advance his career. As someone put it online, he’s made a conscious decision to sell out and to whom at every step of the way. Then there are those who don’t stand for anything because they don’t believe in anything, whose beliefs are a mix of irony and nihilism like the recent ICE shooter, whose attitudes at the link are described as “half-irony — where you’re half-kidding, half-serious, just in case.” In other words, not even committed to irony. “He was into politics only in the 4chan sense — contrarian, provocative, boundary-pushing for laughs, not conviction.”
Those laughs included “‘rape jokes — “playful shock humor,’ the friend said.” Which shows one aspect of the problem: nihilistic, half-ironic young men (and it does seem to be young men) are likely to turn misogynist or fascist in a non-ironic way. And they’re very likely to break bad even without that: “People without an ethos — people who don’t believe that anything is true or that anything matters — are always dangerous.“
At the same link, Fred Clark quotes from The Screwtape Letters about flippancy: “In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.”
