Well, we don’t know how the debate will go down for another couple hours at least, but one thing is for sure, the Clusterfuck to the 2016 GOP Presidential Nomination has gone what the wags at Every Day Should Be Saturday used to refer to as “Full Ham.” Last I saw, Donald “Il Douche” Trump had booked his own event, billing it as some sort of wounded warrior benefit and setting it up to compete with the Fox debate from which he ran like a scalded dog once he learned he would be exposed to the moon-goddess witchcraft of Megyn Kelly (as one person said, if you’re not going to have a last name could you at least spell both your first names right?), and at least one undercard-class debater (Hee Haw Huckabee WOOOOOOOO TENTH PLACE SOOOEY) will be joining him there. Other candidates (including Carly “Demon Sheep” Fiorina and Ted “I’ve Picked Up All Ben Carson’s Holy Rollers So Don’t You Dare Call Me A Maple Beaver” Cruz) are offering millions of dollars in PAC money as charitable contributions to try to buy a 1:1 with His Hairpiece, and all we’ve really learned so far is that “Support The Troops” hasn’t yet yielded to “Support The Police” as the all-outs-in-free conservative shibboleth just yet.
Meanwhile, I wonder if any of the candidates will be asked about their support for the Vanilla ISIS contingent in Oregon which was not only so stupid that their entire leadership went on a long drive to a rally AND ANNOUNCED IT, but so stupid that those left behind were webcasting the aftermath and their planning ON A LIVE CAMERA complete with one donk with a text ringtone OF A SUPPRESSED GUNSHOT. After all, Trump’s base voters are fair game for discussion, right?
This is no way to run an election, and Josh Marshall nails it once again: this is what he once indelicately referred to as the Bitch Slap Theory of Politics run wild. And that’s a crucial element of the Southern style of politics: you basically have to demonstrate dominance over your opponent in much the same way a rutting dog in the street might. You have to smack your opponent around and leave him unwilling to come back at you in the same fashion, which is why Dukakis lost horribly and Clinton won handily twice. And right now, this is The Donald basically carrying on a campaign in the same fashion as his WWF Wrestlemania appearances in the 1990s.
The critical thing is that not one single binding vote has been cast, in caucus or primary, to determine who will be the nominee. Polling in Iowa is notoriously unreliable, and polling in general is in poor odor on the GOP side after the “unskewing” fiasco of three years ago, but Trump sits in the lead most anywhere and everywhere…but he has exactly no votes to show for it yet. No one has had their viability as a candidate marked to market yet, and we have Iowa and New Hampshire and most of the SEC yet to vote, all in a time period where we could either have the public tire of the clown show for good or else decide that it’s all right to select the leader of the free world with the equivalent of talk radio braggadocio and reality TV histrionics.
All of this, though – the election, the occupation in Oregon, the emerging Twitter phenomenon of the “Bernie Bro” (since no lessons were learned from Ralph Nader or Howard Dean or Jerry Brown or Walter Mondale, apparently), the general state of the online world and the angry electorate – so much of it comes back to one thing, to my mind anyway: society hasn’t come to grips with what it means to be a man in the 21st century, in a world where ethnic diversity and a changing economy and three waves of feminism have altered the fabric of what used to be reality. Time was, you graduated high school, you could get a job, get married, buy a house, raise a family and send your kids off to college with the promise of a better future. You could support a family on one income, have a pension to retire on, and probably be assured of a steady job for thirty years.
Now, either you have a college degree and probably six figures of student loan debt to go with it, or you’re scrambling for some sort of entry-level manual labor job, because the medium-sized businesses – what the Germans refer to as the Mittelstand – is largely hollowed out. There are small businesses, there are mega-coprorations, and the rank-and-file business in between has either been absorbed, acquired or plowed under. So when Donald Trump brays about making Apple build its products in America, he misses out on the fact that for fifteen years now, the entire supply chain for computer electronics has been in China. Components, assembly, all aspects of manufacturing: they aren’t done in America because for the most part they literally can’t be. We don’t have the fabrication, we don’t have the tool and die operations, even the custom-assembled-in-Fort-Worth first-gen Moto X was put together from parts made in Shenzhen or thereabouts. And this happened because it was cheaper – and if it’s cheaper to move manufacturing halfway around the world, how much cheaper to move your pension obligations into some sort of stock market roulette and be spared that expense too? Wrap it all up in a blanket of entrepreneurship and personal responsibility, and the next thing you know, your parents are still living off their pension while you’re looking at a flatlining 401K and wondering how you’ll ever afford to send your kids to college. And if you’re young enough, you and your spouse are probably both working and looking at your loans and trying to decide which two out of three pieces of the American Dream you’ll take: kids, home ownership or financial stability.
And so guys fixate on the stupidest stuff imaginable. The felicitously-slurred “cosplatriots” of the Pacific Northwest are typical of their breed: aging white guys who want to need the guns and fancy themselves highly elite and specially trained and basically just the sort Blue Ant wanted to market to in William Gibson’s Zero History. The keyboard commando warbloggers of a decade ago, and their bizarro-world “progressives” on Twitter sneering at anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders as an agent of Trumpism, are the political equivalent of Gamergate neckbeards – all slurs and slander online from the safety of anonymity. Masculinity is reduced to whoever can be the biggest dick. I got mine, fuck you. It’s toxic and it’s unhelpful and it’s quite frankly unsustainable, because the same globalization that wiped out American manufacturing is now coming for American services. Being a big swinging dick with an MD won’t help you out much when the local HMO decides to cut costs by having some nice young person in Hyderabad look at your patient’s MRI over telepresence and make a diagnosis.
And as with so many things, the solution isn’t technological or even legal, it’s societal. Time was, being a loud-mouthed jackass who waved your money around made you kryptonite in polite society. Now it’s good for 41% in Iowa. People praise themselves for being “politically incorrect” in a fashion which thirty years ago would merely have been disposed of with the term “unmannerly.” And to hear its current defenders, the cause of free speech is only worthwhile if it’s protecting the right to racist and sexist abuse that would almost certainly have drawn a punch in the nose – or worse – in a pre-digital era.
Maybe we’re actually well overdue for a little fascism – albeit by way of Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt.