Romney author:gattsuru
gattsuru
4mo ago
Hradzka has a good bit on what he expected Richard Spencer was trying to do with the term to start with, and what a lot of progressives were doing as well. Or see this New York Times piece (by Singal, of course) that separated the 'alt-right' from the 'alt-light' -- and contrast, even contemporaneously, other pieces.
There's a lot of if-by-whiskey, where sometimes the alt-right was just the nutty white nationalists when defining their ideology, others where it was people who hadn't denounced them heavily enough, and then other times the alt-right was pretty much everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. And to a lot of the progressive and leftist movements, the difference was kinda marginal : if you think Mitt Romney was a white supremacist, you're worried about all of them.
This is very much not my recollection of that election, what are you talking about?
The current sitting President of the United States, then VP campaigned against Romney by claiming he would put African-Americans back "in chains". Romney was campaigning against hormonal birth control, somehow. Romney's VP pick faced attack ads that had him wheeling grandma off a cliff. Ann Romney was a repeated target of pretty shitty media coverage that conveniently intersected with her multiple sclerosis. People were absolutely sure Romney-Ryan were going to ban gay sex, somehow! The IRS leaked NOM donation records that just conveniently happened to have his donations included, and just so happened to get delivered to the HRC.
Harry Reid famously and falsely claimed that Romney'd paid zero taxes on the floor of Congress, and after it had been widely distributed, widely believed, and at cost proven wrong, then years later said he had no regrets because "he lost, didn't he"!
The last Presidential election had a first-party ad under the candidate's own twitter account insinuate an innocent man was a White Supremacist, so there's at least one that I'd consider people personally and deeply irresponsible for publishing. And this isn't the first time I've brought it up, or even brought it up in a conversation with you, even if I am pleasantly surprised a few other predictions related to that were flubs.
Romney was personally responsible for a woman's cancer death, Kerry had the SwiftBoat mess. Go back a little further and you have the famous Daisy ad and Confessions of a Republican (remade for the 2016 season!) in a single election. "Read My Lips" and "Act of Love" were mostly unusual for being somewhat near honest.
They don't all have wikipedia articles, but a good number are memorable; with the exception of Confessions of a Republican and maybe "Act of Love", I'd hope anyone who's been paying attention politically in the last decade is familiar with most of these. A rare few aren't even attack ads; Reagan's "bear in the woods" ad has a wiki article because... some reason? The deletionists haven't heard about it yet?
It's not like this is even specific to Presidential elections: see The Agenda Project anti-Paul Ryan ad, or the hilariously offensive attack ad on Abbott in Texas.
And the Horton ad is at least believed to have been hugely effective, along with Dukakis' infamous tank ride, as part of why he lost in a landslide. I'm not sure how much I buy that compared to the macro-economic trends or broader policy disagreements -- same for Romney and Kerry, while I think Jeb! had broader and deeper issues than immigration policy -- but at least in claimed reasoning a lot of people point to them.
Some of it's literally just me, and just used as an example over other cases like Palin or Dubya because Romney's more recent.
That said, just because it looks like harsh weapons sometimes get used doesn't mean that there are no rules, or motions about rules that people 'should' follow. LBJ's famous (alleged) pigfucker politics weren't exactly shared as aspirational goals -- note this summary is from a clearly progressive partisan Dem! And we do not see many serious attempts to call random politicians literal pig-fuckers today, and indeed that progressive partisan Dem mostly does not highlight statements from either serious politicians or their cutouts.
Part of that's because 'no one would believe it' (uh...), but the bigger part is that after a certain point this is the sort of thing that gets the Wohl's convicted or Project Veritas driven to bankruptcy. There are rules, as arbitrary and ill-enforced as they might be.
More critically, there's a point where the published violations of those rules would be more costs than the benefits might hold. It's like the people who wonder why Peter Thiel doesn't just hire private detectives to ruin the lives of everyone who pisses him off: the very act of trying to hire them would be a far bigger story than anything they could come up with would be, in ways that would undermine anything they could come up with. Scott Alexander might call this a specific form of bounded distrust, and while I don't particularly agree with his analysis, it's not completely wrong, either.
The flip side to 'Bounded Distrust' is that, even assuming it to be true, those bounds are not set in stone or engraved into golden plates, and the 2012 election was either a major shift or the revelation of a major shift, here. People point to the 2008 Swiftboating of Kerry, and maybe th at was another shift, but it was one where a rando PAC made allegations. We did not have a handful of plausibly connected cutouts claiming Romney would put "Black people back in chains"; we had the sitting vice president of the United States do it. We did not have some sketchy tabloid mag claiming Romney did not pay taxes; Harry Reid stood on the Senate floor and made his case.
But probably the more damning bit is that Romney made no small part of his public persona his decency. There's a (fair!) argument that this was always skin-deep: 47%, and all, and I've got a draft post I've been working on pointing out how much he was just as prone to snickering about his opponents as Trump was, just behind their backs rather than to their faces. Yet he made a large number of costly commitments to that skin-deep 'decency', while no small number of partisans on both sides were talking up how vital it would be both for the Republican project and for the American democratic project as a whole to elevate discourse.
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