John Daniel Davidson’s fatwa
In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov, two brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, have a conversation. Alyosha is a monk, and Ivan is an atheist raising questions about God and church to challenge his brother. Ivan tells Alyosha a story about Jesus returning to earth in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition. In the story, Jesus performs miracles, arousing the love of the people, and just as happened in the Gospels, Jesus is arrested — this time by the church, by the inquisitors — and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor interviews Jesus the night before the scheduled execution. The Inquisitor tells Jesus that he has disrupted the activity of the church, explaining to Jesus that he had made a mistake when he was being tempted in the wilderness (Matt 4:1–11). The three temptations of the evil one are to turn stones to bread, to survive being thrown off the temple wall, and to have all the kingdoms of earth bow before him. The Inquisitor says they are all the same temptation — the temptation to political domination. Feed the people and they will be still. Dazzle them with magic and they will be awestruck. Control them through force, and they can be redeemed whether they like it or not. The people are weak and stupid, explains the Grand Inquisitor to Jesus; he never really understood human nature. Ivan tells Alyosha that the Grand Inquisitor is actually an atheist, like Ivan, but that he has chosen for the good of humanity to raise up the church’s power over this chaotic species. The devil was right, says the Inquisitor. The spirit of death and destruction — that is, domination and conquest — is necessary to control humankind.
“We are not with Thee, but with [the devil], and that is our secret! For centuries have we abandoned Thee to follow him.”
At the end of Ivan’s story, Christ kisses the Inquisitor on the mouth, and the Inquisitor releases Him.
When Ivan finishes his story, he asks if Alyosha is now done with him; will he renounce Ivan as his brother? Alyosha kisses his brother on the mouth. Ivan says, “That’s plagiarism.”
John Daniel Davidson has accomplished the impossible. He’s made libertarians look reasonable.
In his recent fatwa against “the woke left,” entitled We Need to Quit Calling Ourselves Conservatives, written for the Federalist, he’s made a clear call for an interregnum of right-wing state violence to “save Western civilization.” Unfortunately, he’s just amping the existing rhetoric of the woke-panic-right which has already gained plenty of traction. Fortunately, his jackbooted bombast is self-circumscribing, Davidson himself being transported by his own costumed exclamations — a legend in his own mind. Any time someone uses the term “iron-willed,” my horseshit meter pegs.
Reading this screed, it would be easy to dismiss Davidson as a toy fascist; but the term doesn’t strictly apply. Davidson actually advocated for a number of things that would win the approval of real leftists (not the “woke left” which is a petit-bourgeois liberal phenomenon): breaking up monopolies, ending military adventurism, and promoting unionism. He’s not a fascist, because he’s not a militarist, he’s not (at least explicitly) an ethno-nationalist, and he doesn’t idolize party or state. He sees the state as an instrument, although one he would use, in his own words, “bluntly” against his enemies.
Davidson may not be a fascist, but he is fascist-adjacent. I can only compare him here to Donald Trump. Trump was never and could never be a fascist. That would require a greater commitment to some philosophical vision. Trump wouldn’t know a philosophy if it bit him in the ass. He’s never read or written anything longer than incoherent tweets. Trump enabled fascists (real ethno-nationalists), but that was a contingent matter — the contingency being anything that appeared to support Trump. He wasn’t fascist, but he was fascist adjacent. Davidson obviously has a better CV, and he can write a coherent sentence. But his little fatwa will send little frissons of pleasure over the penile frenums of today’s toy fascists. While Davidson may oppose military adventures abroad and the rising financial and cultural power of Silicon Valley, and while he may profess to be pro-union, he is a male supremacy restorationist. And at the heart of the fascist impulse — too seldom mentioned — is domination-and-conquest masculinity. They love them some “iron will” talk. One of the most seldom-mentioned appeals of Trump — a Rorschach blot upon whom bitter, dissatisfied men (and a fair number of wimmin) everywhere projected — was this macho belligerence. Davidson himself — for all his erudition — projected his fantasies onto Trump as well, calling him “a champion of the forgotten millions.”
In reading Davidson’s little tirade, we find plenty of that self-important, swole-up belligerance. To enact his fantasy-authoritarian programs, he says, “on a scale sufficient to save our country will require political power — and the willingness to use it.”
This is dick-swing oratory.
[Conservatives] might, looking to American history for inspiration, conjure up the image of the Pilgrims — those iron-willed [whoops, there it is!] and audacious Christians who refused to accept the terms set by the mainstream of their time and set out to build something entirely new, to hew it out of the wilderness of the New World, even at great personal cost.
Or they might claim the mantle of revolutionaries, invoking the Founding Fathers’ view (or, at least, Thomas Jefferson’s) that periodic revolution to preserve liberty and civil society has always been and always will be necessary. (Davidson, “We Need to Quit Calling Ourselves Conservatives”)
This is dick-swing oratory refracted through fantasy frontier-masculinity, hewing its way out of an imaginary wilderness — one in which a pretty substantial number of human beings already lived without all that strenuous hewing.
If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.
To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.
For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road. (Davidson, “We Need to Quit Calling Ourselves Conservatives”)
Is this Robespierre before the arrest at 9 Thermidor? Is this Thomas Paine? Alas, it is but a tweed-suited denizen of 712 H St NE, uptown DC, just down the street from Pizza Waylay and the Potbelly Sandwich Shop.
It’s a theatrical pose. All that’s missing is the costume.
I wrote a book about this compensatory manly shit, published by Wipf and Stock back in 2015, called Borderline: Reflections on War, Sex, and Church.
With the slow death of an imperial-frontier masculinity that defined much of Marshall Brown’s [a serial rapist I served with in Delta Force, SG] nationalistic machismo, under assault by gay Boy Scouts and even by consumer culture, a newer, far less stable masculinity is becoming hegemonic, inside and outside the military: the addictive narcissism of American consumer capitalism that, rather than liberating women from internalized oppression, has dangerously consigned men to that selfexploiting space with them. Sometimes, this is a space with no rules. Men are now developing eating disorders and being lashed through the malls by fashion. This state of constant and inescapable disequilibrium dissolves old masculinities and femininities and reformulates new ones, and with it throws the relations between men and women into confusion and disarray. The faster the social change, the more deeply is this destabilization felt on the skins, in the bellies, and in the very psyches of individuals. It is this disequilibrium — global, financial, social, and sexual — that has given rise to strategies that have shifted the discourse from the public to the private, from the social to the individual, and which has allowed those with the most material power to redefine themselves, in the resultant confusion, as victims. Just as the rich have redefined themselves as the victims of the poor, men shift premises to construct themselves as the victims of masculinized women.
In reaction, we get Man on Fire as a new myth and Marshall Brown as a new reality. (Borderline, 118)
Frontier masculinity is still a powerful cultural trope in the United States, as evidenced by our undying attraction to the genre of the Western. Nearly every American white man my age played Cowboys and Indians; the Indians, like the wilderness, the bears and wolves, the harsh weather, and the women, were mere backdrops and props in the articulation of this masculine ideal. (Borderline, 157, n. 21)
[Theodore] Roosevelt was an emblematic leader when “a fear about the softness of American society raised doubts about the capacity of the United States to carry out its imperial destiny.” Continental expansion had ceased, and with it the basis of the national myth of frontier masculinity. There was a fear that the loss of masculinity constructed as conquest would lead to national impotence. Churches spread this fear as well, along with the fear that urban life would bring about a “moral softening.” Immigration had increased, and this discourse included talk about “race suicide.” (Borderline, 234)
The American Boy Scouts were founded in 1910, modeled on an English version of the same founded by General Robert Baden-Powell, as an antidote to urbanization’s deleterious effect on boys’ manliness, individualism, and patriotism. Many of the early scout leaders were former military men, and the male mythos they promoted was frontier masculinity, with figures like Daniel Boone as archetypes. The closing of the frontier was considered by Progressive men and muscular Christians alike a dangerous loss for American masculinity. Scouting was seen as a corrective for potentially feminizing contamination in the school classroom, which, while it promoted a Prussian respect for authority, co-located girls with boys. Allen Warren writes that scouting was understood to promote the personality of a combination of “military scout, trapper, and colonial frontiersman.” Baden-Powell, the guru of the scouting movement, believed that schools were remiss in their concentration on literacy and the classics, which, after all, might be mastered by girls as well as boys. He wanted to build men, and a particular kind of man at that. Baden-Powell even decried football, though not participation in it but the fact that urban male youth were hanging out around the matches, where they “slouched” and smoked cigarettes. Roosevelt himself pointed out that industrial civilization had these downsides, and praised scouting as an activity that would build men who were “good soldiers and good citizens.” (Borderline, 284)
Republican masculinity emphasized the somewhat Oedipal struggle for “liberty” against the aristocratic fathers; frontier masculinity was an artifact of expansion and empire building. Real men were those who, on civilization’s behalf and as civilization’s racial representatives, left the comforts of the core and ventured into the borderlands to establish new outposts against the disorder of nature and those peoples defined into nature — the savages, the natives. (Borderline, 287)
What would emerge from this gender turmoil as hegemonic could not be clearly seen then, but in retrospect, because mass media and popular culture had become such powerful homogenizing forces, we can track the development of a pre-World War II hegemonic masculinity and the masculinities that revolved around mass media and literature through the male cultural archetypes of the postwar and Depression era.
In the United States, Hollywood was mobilized as a palliative. Chirpy movies with happy endings became a major film entrée. Westerns were most popular with men and boys. The Western hearkened to American mythical frontier masculinity, portrayed by “virile” men — heroic, autonomous characters who dominated women, land, animals, and savages, a story of mastery and control as the antidote to the vagaries of the Great Depression.
“The hero’s triumph over the wild things dramatizes the mastery of the patriarchy,” writes Margery Hourihan. Virility breaks down the resistance of all things passive — and we see in many films, as well as in bodice-ripper literature, how the female lead nearly swoons before the masculine mojo of the leading man . . .
. . . Marvin Severson goes a step further, saying that the “violent American male is not simply a figure in American life, a figure of entertainment, but rather the figure around which American culture is oriented.” Richard Slotkin notes that mythic-frontier masculinity exists along the boundary between the civilized and the savage, as a kind of sentinel. (Borderline, 316)
It is also interesting that Lewis’s notional fascist militia called itself the Minute Men — harkening back to both republican and frontier masculinity — and that today the Minuteman Project (MMP), founded in 2005, is a paramilitary organization of extreme xenophobes who unofficially “patrol” the U.S./Mexican border. Not only does this recall the male obsession with borders, MMP founder Jim Gilchrist, a Vietnam combat veteran and professed Christian, promotes military masculinity as necessary to prevent “the death of this nation.” (Borderline, 322, n. 29)
You get the picture. See Davidson’s appeal to boundaries, borderlines that separate his idol — Western civilization — from the savages of “the left,” whose intent is “to dismantle our constitutional system and transform America into a woke dystopia.” The solution is to abandon conservatism, because there’s naught left to conserve (one point on which we agree). His examples were “arranged marriage” and “trial by combat,” of which he appears to lament the loss even as he pronounces them dead. To regain that mastery and control will require some good, old fashioned, iron-willed, testosterone-fueled hewing. We need to water the Tree of Liberty with some woke blood.
In an earlier era, this made sense. There was much to conserve. But any honest appraisal of our situation today renders such a definition absurd. After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In just my lifetime, they have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law. (Davidson, “We Need to Quit Calling Ourselves Conservatives”)
Actually, John, marriage as we Boomers knew it in the American fifties — and which you yearn for — wasn’t even the same for three decades, much less millennia. I know, it’s that same-sex thing that exercises you; so my advice is, if you don’t want to marry a man, don’t. I’ve been married for thirty years to Sherry, now, and gay marriage hasn’t threatened that in the slightest. As for the First Amendment — about which I’ve always been skeptical, and which Davidson professes to enshrine — his own draconian suggestions would abrogate in fairly short order. The border-protection-talk is more fear-mongering — Biden has been nearly as cruel as Trump on that account — but it verifies my own points about the boundary-psychology of Davidson’s masculine pose. I agree with him that the vain and idiotic attempt to discursively disappear human sexual dimorphism is a problem, but like many on the right, he’s lumped it together with a red piller demon called feminism — another thing about which they appear to know next nothing beyond some pop-conception whose face is Hillary Clinton.
These are all right-wing battle-horns. Call up the militant masses who read the Federalist! Davidson wants the right to exchange the term “conservative” for “radical restorationist counterrevolutionaries,” which is all fine by me — though I’ve looked in vain for the revolution. Capital has been running the show from the beginning, and nothing’s changed.
It’s not this fundamental social-ordering mechanism— capitalism — that has Davidson frothing; it’s the culture war. He calls it “a war,” and he speaks as if he would — in his martial fantasy — prosecute it like a war. General Davidson riding his imaginary steed across the imaginary battle front.
His editorial rant is a call to violence — state violence, but violence nonetheless. I know I’m leaning into ridicule pretty hard, and I’ll admit I’ve little patience with this kind of macho posturing, and even less with calls to violence. Probably because I’ve been guilty of both machismo and violence in the past. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
As I said, I agree with Davidson, provisionally, on a few points. In some respects, he could be part of the post-liberal conversation I’ve promoted, and still promote, here on these pages — where refugees from the right and left might have principled discussions and debates about the collapse of liberalism — a phenomenon we both agree is in train. Instead, Davidson is engaged in inflammatory phrase-mongering that will put off principled conservatives and find its nest only with the most mentally unstable. It’s gained him a good deal of attention, though — something Trump cherished as well. Even his own (former) allies are calling Davidson out.
Look, even I am giving him the attention he craves!
The problem with his sensible proposals — union-support, non-interventionism, monopoly-busting — is that he doesn’t appear to believe in them except as a means to an end — winning his culture war, restoring male supremacy, scapegoating sexual minorities, and “defending Western civilization.”
Davidson attacks big tech — and rightly so — but he fails to acknowledge that the resurgence of the right was and only could have been facilitated by . . . well, Big Tech. It’s an online phenomenon. The very reason people can so easily be peer-mesmerized by ideas that are batshit crazy is we’ve been pre-sorted by Jeff fucking Bezos’s algorithms. Davidson’s beef with Silicon Valley, of course, is standard right-wing fare. Nothing to do with opposing monopolies. The issue is that they support Democrats. All contingency, no principle.
Here again, I find myself agreeing with Davidson’s premises, as disingenuous as their presentation is. The Democratic Party, a corrupt political machine all the way down, needs its woketivist pop-poststructuralist faction for pure numerical reasons. Like the Republican party, the Democratic Party is a coalition machine. And Silicon Valley has had a destructive effect on both culture and politics.
Horse. Barn. Live with it, dude.
His and the right’s portrayal of “the left” and Democrats, however, would be laughable if it weren’t so perniciously effective at holding the Republican’s tottering coalition together. I was a real communist once, and I can tell you, the left was destroyed more effectively by both itself and the Democratic Party than any other forces. These twits on twitter with their little online performative virtue posses, especially those who promote Butlerian gender ideology (a flight from reality which began in the academy), are not leftists. They are liberals. I’m neither (any more); but there is a difference, a big one.
The old left I remember despised liberals down to a molecular level. What’s left of that “left” — a left which is now a political dead letter after being infiltrated by these woke liberals — would agree with Davidson on several counts. Non-interventionism, union support, monopoly-busting . . . go team! Meantime, please, brother John, either read some actual history of the left or quit muddying the waters with drivel that refuses to acknowledge the difference between Joe Biden and Joe Stalin. Fucksake!
The irony here is that the conservative movement, such as it has been since the Goldwater campaign of 1964, was always conceived within the paradigm of the Cold War, as a defense of capitalism against the communist menace. Conservatives wanted “culture” to remain contained inside capital’s control, and that cultural containment existed once, administered by churches. Conservatives rightly understood that the brake on capital’s amoral spread into the cultural sphere was some version of the sacred — the institutional expression of that being the idolatrous nationalist church.
As we pointed out here, however, capital doesn’t work that way indefinitely. Capital — as Marx correctly discerned — is in continuous cycles of crisis, which require the (qualitative, not just quantitative) expansion of the commodifying and extractive processes to overcome. When it’s made all the necessities, it creates demand for more stuff. And when it can’t sell stuff, it commodifies the more intangible fields of life. In the dialectic of capital and culture, and faced with the inevitable limits to expansion in any given commodity, it has to go after new sources of extraction and surplus value. One capitalist will go after private prisons to lock up marijuana dealers this year, and cash out on legalization the next by putting small producers out of business.
This is not driven solely by greed. It’s driven by necessity that’s built into the whole “growth” dynamic. There will always be people greedy enough or power hungry enough to fill the positions, but the positions are already in the personnel flow chart.
We won’t even venture down the rabbit hole of casino capitalism, the source of our current ruination (which rightist discourse will always eventually aim at some kind of Jewish conspiracy).
The point is, the virtues cherished by “conservatives” (some of which I share) are not as profitable as vices, trends, fads, and . . . well, selfishness. It was inevitable that capitalists would monetize selfishness against “the common good.” When they wanted coal, they exploited coal miners. When it as cheaper to replace coal miners with machines and mountaintop removal, they laid the workers off. When the families fell into poverty, they sold them lottery tickets and opioids.
Did any “conservative” think this could be contained? Marx — the nemesis none of you knew — said, no.
Did you think you could outsell hedonism with the nationalist church? No, you invited it in with shit like the prosperity gospel.
“The bourgeoisie,” wrote Marx, “has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.… All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
And now, John Daniel Davidson is pissed off at Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — the very people whose commitment to profit-extraction pluralism gave rise to the “new” right, to which Davidson sings from his parapet.
The woke phenom is a capitalist phenom. Once upon a time, capital was advantaged by the Keynesian-enhanced, socially-conservative, white boosterism of the post-war fifties. But capital consumes its own seed corn; and now it’s more well-served by mountain ranges of debt and by the profitable silos of antagonistic techno-identity.
Is Big Tech a threat? Hell, yes. During the truckers’ strike in Canada at the beginning of the year — which liberals perfidiously characterized as “fascist” of course — that liberal twit Justin Trudeau took the unprecedented action of freezing truckers’ personal bank accounts. Already, governments are advocating a transition to a digital-cash economy, where paper money would diminish then disappear. So, we’ll become even more dependent on electronically-powered computational grids that already exercise mass surveillance and data collection on us. Great! And we’ll require our special cards to do monetary transactions upon which we already depend for our survival. Yippee! And someone like Justin Trudeau can flip a switch and shut down our lives because we strike or protest . . . or do anything at all of which the powers disapprove. Oops!
I think that’s pretty damn dangerous. Few people are even talking about it though, and the technological obsessive-compulsives whose numbers increased with each passing, isolated, and alienated day are oblivious to this threat, because they are wrapped up in fucking twitter wars. If I were a Canadian, I’d vote for a skunk before I’d vote for Trudeau after that stunt.
As much as I’m put off by Davidson, his macho bluster, and his fasco-adjacentism, I understand why people are rallying against authoritarian liberals and their new militaristic neo-conservative allies.
The reason the US right and its own shadowy supporters have chosen the culture war and the woke-panic line of attack is because Democrats gave them the cudgel.
Again, Republican reactions against woketivism exist along a continuum, from legitimate grievances (which I’ll outline below) to the dog-whistle racism and grotesque xenophobia of actual neofascists. It’s an effective line of attack, because there is some there there, and it’s not— speaking for the legitimate grievances — “merely” cultural. There are and have been actual and deleterious consequences.
I’m still holding a grudge against Democrats for their woketivist attack-campaign against Bernie Sanders — a social democrat who ran for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2016 and 2020. We need to back up a few years here, for those who don’t remember.
I don’t know when I first heard the term “woke,” but it was a self-description, not yet an enemy epithet, by vaguely bohemian types that Davidson probably encountered many times in Austin. On the real left, we weren’t “woke,” but “conscious,” that consciousness being about class. “Woke” was a self-serving, self-aggrandizing term that differentiated oneself from the unwashed un-woke, ironically with regard to the wokes’ “tolerance” and even acceptance of difference — defined in the most superficial racial, gender, and lifestyle terms. The unifying woke demographic was people who could afford to experiment with “lifestyles” and drink very expensive coffee in trendy shops. Their actual economic status was generally along the lines of white collar professional, what’s now referred to as the professional managerial class (PMC). Much of their performative “acceptance” was a compensation for the embarrassing fact of their class advantages. That didn’t mean they wanted to get rid of those advantages or upset a system in which those advantages were, and are, supportive of then.
This woke mindset spread roots in two directions. First, to a kind of underclass anarchopunk fraction, mostly very young, with problems at home, and obsessed with rebellion as a lifestyle; and second, to ruling class Democrats, who needed the PMC as part of its coalition. The former turned woke-ness into a kind of membership litmus test, and the latter learned to weaponize woke-ness against its challengers. In the latter case, all difference was emphasized . . . except class. In fact, the weaponization of woke was used against the working class and poor and their advocates — like Bernie Sanders.
Sanders accomplished something many of us thought impossible. He put together a viral campaign to the left of the Democratic Party that focused on bread-and-butter issues. It was only under great pressure that the campaign adopted — albeit in the small print — cultural issues. His greatest liabilities were fourfold. (1) He had already pre-hung the label “socialist” on himself, which was a twofold problem; (a) he could be associated with twentieth century state socialism, and perhaps far worse (b) his campaign was pulled within the gravitational field of the fractious and politically incompetent American left itself, where the noisiest and most infantile somehow always manage to take the floor and discredit anyone within smelling distance. (2) He was a man with enough personal decency to lack the killer instinct necessary to go after his primary opponents — both Clinton and Biden. (3) He became an easy target of the in-crowding woketivists, because he didn’t employ the right words with the right emphasis. (4) He aroused the fear of Wall Street, which finances and dictates to the Democratic Party. The latter was also his greatest strength, and it won him support from Independents. In spite of these liabilities, his campaign gave the left what it hadn’t had in some time — something tangible to focus upon, an election, which set aside their ceaselessly stupid, arcane, and internecine debates about how many Trotsky’s can stand on the head of a pin.
Around 45 percent of Democratic voters and 20 percent of Independents identify as liberals. Around 15 percent of Democrats and 10 percent of Independents have postgraduate educations. More than 60 percent of self-identified liberals are “white.” Somewhere in this amalgamation is a numerically essential fraction for the viability of the Democratic Party. Also in this amalgamation is a fraction of the Democratic Party that fell for the weaponized woketivism of charlatans like Clinton and Warren, who painted Sanders as a sexist, and those who opposed him because he was “and old white man.” This was the weaponization of a phony politics of representation, which emphasizes demographic “inclusion” as a way of ignoring economic class, deployed against any challenge from the left. The fact that Sanders’ pet proposals would have disproportionately advantaged women and ethnic minorities was disappeared in these muddied waters.
In the war-on-woke, Republicans and the right have wisely and tactically chosen gender ideology as the point to drive in their wedge. Ironically, the gender ideology wedge terminally fractured one of the right’s nemeses — feminism — back in the nineties.
It’s a complicated issue among academics, but among the rest of us, it can be boiled down to two simple and directly related questions: what is a man? and what is a woman? Fifty-four percent of Americans say that this question is a biological one, determined at birth. Eighty percent of Republicans say so, and 34 percent of Democrats say so. Obviously, this question is with regard to the “transgendered,” a category that was invented in 1974. For the history, see this link and go to Note 4.
Gender ideology has created sharp controversy in three fields: sports, prisons, and schools. Men who “become women” by simply declaring it as their gender have been allowed to compete in women’s sports against natal women. Men who “become women” by simply declaring it as their gender have been housed in women’s prisons with natal women. Schools are allowing boys who say they are girls into girls’ bathrooms and dressing rooms. Schools are allowing boys who say they are girls to compete against girls in school sports. Schools are teaching children rudimentary gender ideology. Not all schools, but with only a few examples, Republicans have an issue to take to parents in a society that has compulsory public schools upon which we all now depend for child care at the very least. The right’s issue is “declarative gender,” and it’s a winner. This is the bomb to which Democrats have strapped themselves.
(Surgically “transitioning” children is child abuse. It is absolutely insane.)
So the Democratic Party uses this phony politics of representation as a bulwark against the left, and I expect we’ll see one result of that in a few days with the mid-term US elections, where I fully expect the Republicans to beat the Democrats like a rented mule. The only attenuation of that will be widespread and bipartisan opposition to the Dodd decision.
For all his bullshit, I am sympathetic to Davidson on another point: warlike neoconservatism, which has migrated from the party of Bush into the Democratic Party, which is now edging the world closer to full-scale nuclear war. The war in the Ukraine was avoidable; and, though I hate to say it, Trump, for purely pecuniary reasons, endorsed then backed away from the way it could have been avoided: by the US withdrawing its membership and support from NATO.
Putin’s dangerous and bloody belligerence aside, Russia was repeatedly provoked by both the US/NATO and Ukraine. If Ukraine had simply honored its side of the 2014 Minsk agreement, the war wouldn’t have started; and the US served as Ukraine’s enabler, led by Democratic officials who have been demonizing Russia for years — even blaming Russia for their 2016 election defeat. The US maintained the Cold War NATO post-USSR, withdrew from nuclear defense treaties, and stationed first-strike missiles in Poland and Turkey. The US has pumped enormous quantities of war materiel into Ukraine, escalating and prolonging the war, imposed sanctions against Russia, and backstopped Zelensky’s refusal of diplomatic negotiations. Now we stand on the brink of nuclear conflagration. If some Republican ran for President who said s/he’d end US military adventurism abroad, I’d be inclined to cast a ballot for her/him. It’s that important. Nuclear war, dare I say it, is altogether evil.
Some on the right have some real points.
This Republican advantage, however, is no more sustainable than the Democrat’s crumbling coalition; and here is where Davidson’s fatwa is analogous to a calving glacier. When Davidson calls out “market-obsessed libertarians and foreign policy neoconservatives,” he’s pushed out a fraction — but a critical fraction — of a party that only enjoys 29 percent of registered voters and 44 percent sympathy among voters. The Democrats have 33 percent and 49 percent respectively. The only reason Republicans compete ahead of their raw numbers is gerrymandering. In the US Senate — the most undemocratic of elected offices — Republicans hold on because Alaska has two Senators with 737,438 residents and California has two Senators with 41 million residents. If California and Alaska were proportional, Alaska would have two Senators and California would have 111 Senators.
Overall, US adults trust Republicans at a rate of 39 percent and Democrats at a rate of 48 percent, but I think we need to make allowances for the Trump factor here. Trump’s capture of the Republican Party has contaminated it with his spoiled-brat venality and his antagonistic relationship with honesty. Davidson’s claim that he was “a champion of the forgotten millions” is risible. The con-artist of the credulous millions maybe. Trump is still contaminating and marginalizing the party, as the lawyers close in on him from multiple directions like a pack of velociraptors.
With half of all Republicans and Republican sympathizers still supporting Trump (and saying they’d vote for him even if he was indicted!), which translates into around 22 percent of likely voters in elections, the Republicans still have a Trump problem — like a rotting fucking albatross hung around its neck. What’s saving them this cycle is 8.3 percent inflation and high gas prices. The fact that inflation now is an international phenomenon has little effect on voters, who do simple correlations: Biden/inflation/Democrats. That and the general political incompetence of the Democratic Party. And the fact that many Democrats will support giving puberty blockers to pre-adolescent children who’ve been propagandized by shit they see on the internet.
Yes, it’s stupid. The US is a stupid place, stupid as fuck on the left, stupid as fuck in the middle, and stupid as fuck on the right. It’s a cultural thang. The right is stupid as fuck with a gun fetish, and that, along with the Republican affinity for white supremacy and patriarchal restoration, is what continually drives me to vote Democratic in the face of the fact that the Democratic Party is stupid as fuck, corrupt all the way down, and incompetent. As Nina Turner put it, iirc, when you’re forced to choose between eating a big bowl of shit and a little bowl of shit, pick the little bowl. God bless America!
If we want to go all the way down the stupid as fuck hole, we can follow Davidson’s costume drama, where he’s being “persecuted” as he saves Western civilization from a booth at Pizza Waylay.
No, it’s not going to lead us to fascism, any more than woketivism is going to destroy society. The society is destroying itself. It’s been destined to for centuries now, and like any lifetime, here we face an end. This political shit is all damage control now. It’s the larger secular trends, which have escaped our control, which are calling the shots now. (Hopefully, it won’t be a nuclear war that disrupts these trends.) Democrats will fail. Republicans will fail. America will fail. The Eurozone will fail. Russia will fail. China will fail. Many places have already been plundered and scrapped. It’s a runaway train. Meanwhile, John Daniel Davidson and the rest of us — me included — will “strut and fret our hour upon the stage.”
For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road. (Davidson)
There’s not even a first one. Relax, man. Get over yourself. Christians aren’t supposed to “save civilizations,” we wash feet.
What’s left for us — and I’m inviting you, John Daniel, to embrace Christ here — is not manly domination and control, but love with a great deal of improvisation. Control is an illusion of the deceiver who tells us we can be as God.
Now, brothers and sisters, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.