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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Richard Hanania thinks Desantis should challenge Trump to a boxing match. Desantis's campaign so far has been pretty pathetic. He's been afraid to really push back against Trump despite Trump lobbing almost daily attacks against him. Desantis is great on paper, with his victories against woke institutions in Florida, but he's failed to appeal to the Republican id so far. Many Republican voters care far more about appearance and physical vigor than policy positions, good governance, intelligence, etc.

I don’t think Trump can lose a Republican primary at this point. But if I were giving DeSantis advice, it would be to do the opposite of what Abernathy suggests. Republican voters love the stupidity, obnoxiousness, vulgarity, and simian chest-beating. While the conventional wisdom seems to be that Rubio and Cruz tried rolling around in the muck with him and failed, Rubio’s most vicious personal attacks in 2016 didn’t come until after Trump had won the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses, that is, pretty late in the game. And Rubio wasn’t the guy to do it.

Instead of seeing Republican primary voters as concerned citizens seeking a voice, try to imagine them as chimps laying around under a canopy. They’ve chosen the alpha male. He’s the loudest, most obnoxious member of the tribe, and his power depends on the degree to which other apes are afraid of him and give him symbolic displays of respect, which in this case has meant saying, for example, that he actually won the 2020 election. What could break this spell? Not reasoned arguments, but signs of weakness. And no, not weakness in the sense that he might not be the most electable candidate — that’s counting on a level of thinking that is far too abstract for this population.

Rather, one needs to emphasize literal physical weakness. Notice how obsessed Republicans have been with the real and imagined physical and cognitive shortcomings of figures like Biden and Hillary. In many corners of right-wing media, “our opponents are old, fat, ugly” seems to get at least as much attention as actual issues, especially during election season. In 2020, we saw doctored videos of Pelosi slurring her words go viral on social media, and this shows not only how susceptible the Republican base is to fake news, but also how obsessed they are with physical and physiological correlates of health.

The Dylan Mulvaney hysteria is another demonstration of the red tribe being driven by the most base and primitive instincts. These people started shooting beer cans with assault rifles because a company sent a six pack to a guy who acts like a sissy. Good luck explaining to them the importance of going after higher education accreditation agencies.

You might think it’s strange for a group like this to have chosen Trump as their leader. But when he posts memes of himself as an Adonis or says things like he’s in better shape than Obama or Bush were while they were in office, and no one corrects him, that serves to only cement his dominance over the party. Trump’s perfect body is like the unreliability of Dominion voting machines. Shirtless Putin has a similar effect in Russia. Educated Westerners roll their eyes at his primitive demonstrations of vigor, but I suspect that, like Trump, he’s a much better student of human nature than they are. The conspiracy theories might have been false, but the Trump-Putin bromance was real, and no accident.

This means that DeSantis’ best shot is trying to emphasize that Trump is physically weak and he no longer intimidates others in the party. You can’t do this with words alone. DeSantis can call him fat, and Trump can reply everyone is saying that I’m in the best shape of any man who’s ever lived, and the voters will eat it up. The Florida governor needs a way to clearly highlight that he’s younger, stronger, and more physically courageous.

DeSantis should therefore challenge Trump to a boxing match. Trump will almost certainly refuse, at which point he can say that this shows what a coward the former president is. Or, DeSantis could say that, on further reflection, maybe it wasn’t fair to challenge an 85 year-old man (yes, lie and exaggerate, Republican voters love that too), and he understands that his opponent is too feeble at this point in his life to get into the arena.

DeSantis shouldn’t do this out of the blue. He could start by trying to bait Trump into saying something particularly nasty about him, or preferably his wife or kids. Then he can play the role of the justifiably angry patriarch. Every time Trump launches a personal attack, DeSantis can reply by saying that his opponent is a pathetic coward, and if he has a problem with him he’s already made clear that they can settle their differences like men. If he’s not willing to do that, then we can stick to the issues, at which point DeSantis can go on about whatever he did in Florida. At the very least, a challenge to fight will eat up all the energy and make sure no other candidate gets any attention, as one of the main things DeSantis needs to do is make the primary into a two-man race.

Right now, the DeSantis strategy is to try to get the Republican voter to ask questions like “who is more electable?” or “who has shown more focus in fighting woke?” Those are exciting questions to conservative intellectuals but way too boring for the Republican masses. They will never tell a pollster this, but they resent anyone trying to make them think too hard, which is part of the reason they hate liberals in the first place.

There are a lot of ways that this could go wrong, and it probably wouldn’t work. But I think people are still yet to truly understand that, if things proceed as normal, Trump is going to be the nominee. Making sure he’s not would require meeting Republican voters where they are, instead of continuing to wish they were something else.

Republican voters love the stupidity, obnoxiousness, vulgarity, and simian chest-beating.

Instead of seeing Republican primary voters as concerned citizens seeking a voice, try to imagine them as chimps laying around under a canopy. They’ve chosen the alpha male.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a lot of words, but Hanania may as well have written, "ooga booga you dumb" for all he's said. Wojak is at the Republican primary, standing in the corner, his feet hurt, I bet they don't even know how I've transcended simian instincts. This is just dumb, Hanania is arguing against a cartoon Republican he just made up in his head.

In 2020, we saw doctored videos of Pelosi slurring her words go viral on social media, and this shows not only how susceptible the Republican base is to fake news

Good morning, it's Sunday Morning.

These people started shooting beer cans with assault rifles because a company sent a six pack to a guy who acts like a sissy.

This is exceptionally dumb. In one paragraph Hanania is kvetching about media hyperreality, and in the very nexy sentence Hanania is using some video of some person shooting a beer can to characterize the whole Republican base. This is not an argument, it's gesticulsting, and it's not even well-informed gesticulating. (The word "imagined" is doing a lot of work in his argument: I can trivially find examples of Biden, Hillary, and Pelosi all having senior moments.)

If this is Hanania's usual stuff, then he's a pseud and deserves to be ignored.

That is his angle and it works. Many of his readers span the spectrum of the rationalist-right and center-right, who share a large overlap of readership with similar blogs . Hanania is not catering or speaking to to the Fox News demographic or the 'Republican base'. There is a huge and underserved audience of centrist and rationalist conservatism, who reject Fox News low-brow or populist conservatism. Had he parroted stale trad or mainstream-con talking points, his blog and Twitter-pundit career would have been DOA. he would need to go on TV instead.

There is a huge and underserved audience of centrist and rationalist conservatism, who reject Fox News low-brow or populist conservatism.

I can't say how huge, but this is a point that I've tried expressing to others, only to get met with a fairly perplexed look. The conservative mainstream (i.e. Republican) is always desperately going to try and gatekeep the term to maintain as much of the political marketshare on the right-wing that they can. But I remarked to a friend back in 2016, that there were a lot of different conservative voting blocks that all thought they were going to get what they impressed onto Trump. The Jared Taylor faction thought they were going to get their white nationalist into power. Libertarians thought they were going to get their free market utopia enacted. A disgruntled Democratic voting block wanted to thumb its nose at the party for sidelining Bernie. Everyone thought they were getting what they wanted with Trump.

Yes, I still remember some of the contortions that some libertarians I argued with about Trump would put themselves through to explain to me why Trump was libertarian despite his clear authoritarian/"get things done by any means necessary" streak and the fact that he implied multiple times that Edward Snowden should be executed for treason.

The smarter ones of the bunch at least realized that Trump was not actually libertarian and instead tried to convince me along the lines of "well yeah we know but he's better for libertarianism than Hillary..." Although I am pretty sure that at least half of those types were actually smitten with Trump on an emotional level and were just saying what they thought it would take to convince me, not what it was that had actually convinced them.

Trump was always going to be a self-absorbed individual before he would ever become an ideologue with a 'vision' to carry out. I think the people that ended up being the most disappointed with him were the ones that had the most unrealistic expectation of who he was. And even in retrospect, I do think he was better than what I think it would've likely been with Hillary. And in 2020, I maintained that he would've still been better than Joe Biden. I'm not saying Biden hasn't done good things that I would agree with, because he has. But people overwhelmingly focus on the wrong thing where it concerns Trump, and that's his outward personality instead of what he does in his capacity as President. If I want a sobering assessment of Donald Trump, I'll try and see what Noam Chomsky has to say about him. The irrational TikTok tirades of the left and disaffected right-wingers that feel he betrayed them, have nothing worthwhile to offer me as far as critique goes.

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