There’s a lot of postmortem going around this week about the twentieth anniversary of the second invasion of Iraq, which by any definition was absolutely catastrophic. It crippled American power in ways both real and perceived. It squandered the moral high ground of September 11 and shredded the international support for attempting to thwart Al=Qaeda and its affiliates. It marked the final collapse of mainstream American media into a fetal position begging not to be called liberal or unpatriotic (never forget, Maddow fans: MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for being insufficiently enthusiastic about war in Iraq). And it marked the ascent of bullshit worship to the highest ranks of the GOP. From that moment on, if asked who they were going to believe, the Republican Party pledged to choose its leader over its own lying eyes.
Bullshit worship really began a decade earlier, though, when any and all manner of conspiracy and calumny against the Clintons was uncritically accepted as true, or at least as worthy of chin-stroking mournful-sounding “just asking questions.” Members of Congress shooting watermelons in their yard to disprove Vince Foster’s suicide should have been a sign that we were off the rails, and anyone with a lick of sense could have said “wait, this is getting crazy,” but between Rush Limbaugh (nay he writhe in Hell) and Roger Ailes (dittos!), a media ecosystem had emerged into which bullshit could thrive and flourish and eventually drown out rational thought and the evidence of one’s own eyes.
Thing is, if you can say whatever you want, believe whatever you want, and no one can force you to acknowledge anything you don’t want to be true, what you end up with is the cult of the Asshole. The Asshole is the embodiment of self-regard, of “I got mine fuck you”, of being able to shit on anyone else you like. That’s why there is a fundamental underlying substrate that connects Wall Street, the VCs of Silly Con Valley and the cult of the Founder, the Neo-Confederates in search of their next untermensch, and the army of car dealers and realtors and small business owners with a seventy-year inferiority complex that fueled the rise of the pre-Goldwater conservatism in the first place.
But what we have gotten in the last 20 years is a full subculture, an ersatz ethnic group of Whiteness that steers hard into green-beer Irishness and performative redneckery and loudly trumpeted how oppressed it is – because for the first time, it’s a genuine minority. You only have to look at California to see how powerless it is when the rules aren’t rigged in its favor with an Electoral College or a filibuster-armed Senate or complete gerrymandering – or when the identity of Whiteness is the basis of politics the way it is in the South.
And thus we come to a discomforting truth being borne out across the pond at the same time. The DUP has declared that it will not support the Windsor Agreement – thus opening the door to sandbag the Stormont assembly, in which they would presently be obligated to share power with Sinn Fein, who got more votes. Just as in America, it is an effort to throw on the brakes and halt a process that they could not stop at the ballot box. The DUP never supported the Good Friday Agreement, and is now holding it hostage in the name of hardening a Brexit that Northern Ireland did not vote for.
It is very hard not to feel like my people – the Scotch-Irish – are in fact history’s useful idiots, the ones who the wealthy of England or Wall Street or Fox News can always rely on to hate whoever The Man tells them to. The people whose lives were wrecked by corporate globalization, pointless endless wars and runaway for-profit health companies have turned their fiery wrath on…transgender people. Gay people were plentiful and affluent enough to push back, their precious self-starter small businesses depended too much on undocumented labor, their daughters were women, but by damn, they could sure go after that 0.3% of the population without fear of pushback!
My people aren’t inherently scared of anything different. But they don’t flinch from being taught to fear what is different, Never have. The best you can hope for is for them to learn it imperfectly in the first place, the easier to pull them away from it once they’re exposed to the wider world. But if we want the same kind of broadly centrist world of the 1950s that everyone seems fixated on, it’s going to require two things: 1) the acceptance that everyone is free and equal before the law and entitled to mind their business and live their life, and 2) the containment of boomers and bullshit-worshippers and a refusal to let them influence the political process any longer.
That’s it, ultimately. When you’ve spent twenty years fucking up, you don’t get to play any more, and you need to go stand in the corner and sit with the consequences of your wrongness while others clean it up. And that is what the GOP needs: the same kind of forty-years-in-the-wilderness exclusion that lasted from LBJ to Clinton. Every Republican needs to be made to disavow Trump, to disavow Bush, to regret the Iraq war and protest that they don’t just do whatever Fox tells them.
You’re not a Trumpist? Prove it. Beyond a shadow of doubt. And this had better be amazing. And until you do, your fitness for political and moral life is less than zero. And that has to stand up until they’re all gone. It’s the only way to get to something approximating normal.
And it’s never going to happen.