Why I Don’t Write About Republicans More Than I Do

They're mostly interesting as a cautionary tale.

When I was a writer at Last Week Tonight, this was the Trump clip that broke me:

TRUMP: “He’s got a problem with the carbon footprint. You can’t use hairspray, because hairspray is going to affect the ozone. I’m trying to figure out – let’s see, I’m in my room in New York City, and I want to put a little spray…

(crowd cheers in response to the word “spray” for some reason)

TRUMP: Right?

(more applause – who are these idiots?)

TRUMP: But I hear where they don’t want me to use hair spray, they want me to use the pump. Because the other one – which I really like better than going bing! Bing! Bing!

(crowd loses their shit)

TRUMP: So, I’m sitting in this concealed apartment, this concealed unit – you know, I really do live in a very nice apartment – but it’s SEALED! It’s beautiful! I don’t think anything gets out.”

What the fuck was I supposed to write in response to that?  “Ummmm, ACTUALLY: Ozone and climate change are different issues. And your apartment is NOT airtight – if it was, you’d suffocate. And ‘concealed’ doesn’t mean ‘sealed’. And I don’t think it’s wise to roll the dice on a global climate catastrophe just because you prefer the tactile experience of the old hair spray cans CAPTAIN NINCOMPOOP!!!” 

Who’s the audience for that joke? What person who might be persuaded by Trump’s shitty re-working of a Drew Carey bit from 1992 would then be set straight by my incisive Captain Nincompoop joke? And why the fuck would that Trump fan be watching John Oliver? Did they fall into a coma during Game of Thrones and can’t turn off the TV? 

There was no denying it: If I spent my time debunking statements that mind-bendingly stupid, t’was I who was the idiot.

I’ve been dealing with intense feelings of “what the fuck is the point?” when it comes to American politics for the past few years. This is a major event in my life; I used to enjoy the blue-versus-red combat. I spent the ‘90s reading Al Franken, the 2000s watching Jon Stewart, and the 2010s writing for Pedantic Liberal Hissy Fit Tonight with the Nerdy Guy from the Daily Show No Not John Hodgman. Most LWT writers felt their soul leave their body some time during Trump’s first year, but I managed to keep my zeal for “accountability” (ha!) well after that; through at least the Mueller Report, I was of the “we can’t allow this!!!” school of thought, having failed to consider that the “we” in that sentence was a comedy show known mostly for frequent use of the f-word and a Supreme Court comprised of dogs.

But somewhere around 2018/19 -- around the time I encountered Trump’s hairspray riff -- writing a point-by-point rebuttal of a dumb Republican argument started to feel like writing a Jungian analysis of Dude, Where’s My Car? I’m not sure why that was my breaking point; I could have broken when conservatives started showing up to protests covered head-to-toe in teabags, or when a leading presidential candidate got caught plagiarizing from The Pokemon Movie. Maybe my reduced zeal for combat was just a product of age; I’m now at an age where “big weekend plans” means “watching a ballgame and eating an apple”. Or maybe it was because I realized there aren't any Republican writers I care to hear from. There are conservative writers that I read, but they’re not Republicans. A thinking conservative in 2021 has a podcast, not a party.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the GOP isn’t just a nutty bunch of goofballs that I can laugh off. I’d like to laugh them off, and when Fox News covers Mr. Potato Head’s gender identity like it’s the fall of the fucking Berlin Wall, it’s tempting. But the GOP’s anti-democratic turn is serious. Their climate denialism is pathological. Their determination to make voting more difficult is undemocratic. And the recently-released Republican “autopsy” of their 2020 performance is terrifying; they’ve gone beyond trying to eek out a voter-suppression-aided Electoral College win and are kicking around the idea of stealing an election by refusing to certify the vote. The GOP isn’t “crazy” like a wacky, whimsical birthday clown -- they’re crazy like that deranged, psycho clown who tortures kids in that movie, Patch Adams. 

I don’t really see the point of churning out frequent critiques of Republican arguments. I don’t think my readers include highly-politically-engaged Republicans who are exactly one jocular takedown of a Ted Cruz quote away from thinking “perhaps these fellows are not playing with a full deck.” And, obviously, I’m at a loss trying to relate to Trump-y, QAnon types. I mean, sure, the QAnon belief that Tom Hanks is a pedophile cannibal sounds true, but I can’t ignore the fact that USA Today rated the claim that Tom Hanks became a Greek citizen because he’s a pedophile “partly false”. (Great work, USA Today! Let’s hope people read past the headline to see whether it’s the “became a Greek citizen” part or the “is a pedophile” part that’s false!) So, I’m not going to persuade many Republicans. If I wrote daily missives about how Republicans are bad, that would just stroke Democrats’ egos, and I swear to you I will never, ever bring my readers joy or make them feel good in any way.

But I’m not sort-of ignoring the right just because they’re boring; I’m also doing it because the left is interesting. And by “interesting” I mean “interesting in a troubling way”, like finding an ear in your soup. Because I’m worried that the left might be going insane. We’re showing some troubling signs. And I might be paranoid, because I just watched the right succumb to degenerative brain disease. But these days, whenever the left does something odd, I find myself wondering: “Is this normal, or is this the early stages of the disease?”

It’s worth thinking about how the Party of Lincoln ended up shuffling around with Kleenex boxes on its feet muttering about how Joe Biden is going to cancel meat. My political consciousness began in 1994; the midterms that year were the first election I sort of “got” -- I understood that the angry-baseball-coach-types had beaten the elementary-school-art-teacher-types. As it happens, many consider that to be the moment when the GOP turned inexorably towards Nutville¹. Republicans swept into power behind Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the Republican freshman class, an ominous development except for the fact that the concept of a loudmouth, middle-aged freshman may have inspired the cinematic masterpiece Back to School. 

The silver lining (maybe).

If 1994 was an inflection point in Republican history, then my entire political life has overlapped with the GOP’s slow progression towards total brain death, culminating with the election of President Total Brain Death in 2016. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why Republicans went insane; what follows is my heavily-condensed telling of that story. It's a story I think about when I try to assess the left's mental health. It’s not radically different from what you’ll hear from people like Jonathan Chait or E.J. Dionne, though my narrative is the only one that posits an origin story for Back to School (Chait does argue that the Whitewater investigation led to Ladybugs).

Watch it again -- it's obviously a metaphor for an Arkansas land deal.

You can’t talk about Republican idiocy without talking about conservative media. Roger Ailes et al. set out to create an alternative to traditional news, and they succeeded. By the late ‘90s, Fox News, talk radio, and online media had grown to the point that, if you didn’t like objectivity and journalistic integrity polluting your news, you could curate your media diet to be pure, unadulterated bullshit. It's why Fox News’ first slogan was “Sew your lips straight to the cow’s anus!” In the last decade or so, Twitter and Facebook have entered the picture, turning what was already an assload of misinformation into several metric fucktons. When the three most influential figures in conservative media were Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, and Andrew Breitbart, it seemed like things couldn’t get worse. But now that the top three are Q, Your Cousin Who Wears Camouflage, and a Russian bot stirring up shit as part of a reverse-mortgage scam, things are definitely worse.

Conservative media built an environment that made it easy to spot and punish heretics. The 2000s saw regular purges of “Republicans in name only”, or “RINO”s, which was a perfect name because they were basically hunted to extinction. The Tea Party ran crackling lunatics in primaries against any Republican deemed insufficiently pure, and they successfully ousted the House Majority Leader and beat an ex-Governor with a candidate who was forced to argue -- not entirely persuasively -- that she was not a witch. Meanwhile, Grover Norquist, the NRA, and the fossil fuel lobby demanded maximalist positions on tax cuts, guns, and climate change, and any Republican who didn’t toe the line risked having the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page include the sentence: “Was defeated in a primary by a woman forced to argue -- not entirely persuasively -- that she was not a witch.” 

That set the stage for Trump. Somehow, decades of fudging the truth and reinforcing in-group/out-group dynamics had created a base with no regard for the truth and a thirst for a candidate who did nothing but rage against out-groups. Who -- other than any political scientist working in the 50 years following World War II -- would have guessed it? Trump is, it must be said, remarkable for his ability to embody some of the right’s uglier tendencies, especially racism and hostility towards democracy. Establishment Republicans would prefer a candidate who can advance their agenda without words like “insurrection” and “pussy” featuring so prominently in their associative word cloud. But, in the end, the snooty, country club set had no choice but to gnash their teeth and deal with the crude, abrasive rich guy with no respect for...with no respect...whoa, holy shit -- THAT’S CADDYSHACK!

I’m definitely on to something here!

That’s my account of the Republican Heart Of Darkness narrative. But...what was all that? I’ve been using euphemisms -- “insanity”, “total brain death” -- but what’s the key feature of this tale? What does it mean to be brain dead? I think it’s a break from epistemology -- Republicans stopped using reason. They built a world that punished truth-seeking and rewarded group loyalty. Once that became true, they got stuck in a feedback loop completely untethered from reality, and the vortex grew and grew until it sucked in enough people to take control of the GOP. That vortex built and intensified until it suddenly spun off into space in 2016, leaving Republicans who value rational inquest party-less, dazed, and muttering something about an Evan McMullin candidacy.

And now the big question: Are we seeing something similar happen on the left? Yes, I think we are. My reasons for feeling that way deserve their own essay, but suffice it to say: These aren't the salad days for critical thought on the left. The boundaries of acceptable debate are narrowing. Dissenters are being publicly flayed. A concept of journalistic "objectivity" has formed that, if heavily applied, could provide intellectual cover for news that promotes a viewpoint instead of seeking the truth. I don't think we're insane just yet -- I'm greatly comforted by the fact that our standard-bearer is Joey Blue Blockers -- but I think we definitely have a problem.

So, sometimes I write about that problem. It's worth my keystrokes because there are still people on this side who listen to arguments -- it's one of the reasons why I think we're not completely batshit! I don't have that "what the fuck is the point?" feeling when I write about the left -- I know what the point is. The point is to try to ensure that this country has at least one party remaining that’s capable of governing. That, and also to defang the very-serious threat coming from the right by giving the GOP -- which is purely reactionary at this point -- as little as possible to react to. Those goals won't be served by Mitch McConnell Turtle Joke #12,578,006. The moment calls for an orientation that tilts slightly towards the debates that are happening on the left. Along with -- I guess I'm going to argue -- multiple references to the esteemed film catalogue of one Mr. Rodney Dangerfield.

1. People like George Nash, Geoffrey Kabaservice, and Rick Perlstein trace the roots of GOP insanity to the conservative movement of the early ‘60s, and I’m certainly not in a position to disagree. Still, in every telling of the story, 1994 is a big moment.