I’m not sure where I read that title line recently, but I think it’s spot on. It goes back to the yosta bees who turned hard right after 9/11. Or the anti-anti-racists and anti-anti-feminists — no, they’re not misogynists or racists, they just support the Necrotic Toddler because the push for equality has gone too far (no, it hasn’t. Give us one day without rape or harassment and we’ll talk).
Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, for instance insists he’s a centrist who only voted for the Felon because Biden was obviously losing it. Which given Biden was not on the ballot, is dubious reasoning. Michelle Goldberg notices his new film, After the Hunt, is classic reactionary centrism: “a loathing of wokeness so intense, it led some elite former Democrats to support Donald Trump.” Grazer has specifically said the movie — about the damage spawned by false accusations of rape (or harassment or something bad — it’s unspecified) is to dramatize how MeToo has gone too far.
Suffice to say it hasn’t, but lots of important men — and men not so important — recoil from the thought that they, or someone like them, can be held accountable for the way they treat women. Columnist Ron Hart, who believes putting an innocent man to death is an acceptable price of having the death penalty, has also written that he finds false accusations of rape absolutely unacceptable. So killing a man isn’t as bad as accusing (not imprisoning, nor convicting, nor even charging) him of sexual assault. The Felon bragging about “grab them by the —” for some people, was a sign that voting for him would bring back the good old days.
The media, of course, give excuses too. Biden was too old and losing it. Hilary Clinton didn’t manage her email servers properly. Yet the Felon administration is as bad on both counts and we still get coverage asking is Portland in ruins or not? It’s not. This is not a subjective assessment. The Felon Administration is lying.
Or consider this: “NBC News eliminated its teams dedicated to covering issues affecting Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ groups” This seems to be partly a response to Republicans’ ongoing war on POC and LGBTQ but I wonder if it isn’t also that the people at the top of the company are happy not to have to show interest in that stuff any more (much as Ronan Farrow’s bosses at NBC weren’t excited about him exposing Harvey Weinstein). Certainly the media were conscious about diversity when they were sending reporters to single out white Felon voters and ask what they think.
Paul Campos probably has a point about how one of the fuels for Trumpism is how the “practically universal experience of sexual frustration gets ideologized among young men into a kind of pervasive nihilistic rage against the world in general and women in particular.” He lists several other factors driving the shift to the right, as do some of the commenters (“It’s crucially important that this is mostly a movement among culturally Christian white people. No group suffering more has anything like the institutions telling white-wingers how they’re entitled to have all the power and all the goodies.”).
Aaron Huertas defines the problem as reactionary centrism: “Someone who says they’re politically neutral, but who usually punches left while sympathizing with the right.” (which would include anti-anti racism). These are people who for whatever reason claim to believe Both Sides Do It — the left are just as bad about X as the right! And yet when they start throwing punches, as Huertas says, they throw them more at the left. People who think MeToo goes too far never give more than lip service to “sexual harassment is bad too.”
Rather than the centrist standing in the middle between two extremes, they wind up getting hooked by the right, even as they deny it.
So we wind up with the recent reveal that Young Republicans in private texts drop ethnic slurs, joke about loving Hitler and sending people to the gas chambers, crack rape jokes. I doubt we’d find anything as extreme in text messages on the left (I wouldn’t be surprised to find some rape jokes, though) — “Stalin was so cool! Yeah, let’s send everyone in the Republican Party to the gulag!” And JD Vance would not be defending them as kids making edgy jokes (the youngest person in the group chat was in their late 20s). People who want to be edgy, like so many centrists, are far more likely to decide being misogynist and racist is cool rather than mocking rapists and Klansmen.
