Spencer Critchley

trump

On the Right, Symbols of Anything and Nothing

by

The Golden Trump idol, beating cops with a Blue Lives Matter flag, Kayleigh’s cross… I’m thinking today about how the right’s flight from reason towards faith has overshot the mark so far that the symbols they use no longer have any consistent meaning whatsoever.

Silver crucifix necklace worn on a black sweater.
iStock

Communicating in symbols, such as the symbols of religion or art, can be a way to express truths that reason can’t. But on the Trumpian right, symbols now appear to be the whole point: they don’t have to mean anything in particular, beyond what you want them to mean in the moment. That is the new freedom.

The Golden Trump presented for veneration at CPAC — with some fans literally bowing before it — could hardly be more blasphemous in the context of a Christianity whose symbols used to have meanings. God literally told his people never to make golden idols, on pain of obliteration.
Then there’s the American flag, which previously flew as a symbol of freedom, now repurposed as shorts cradling the junk of a would-be dictator.

Since a flag is now meaningless beyond whatever one wants it to mean in the moment, the Stars and Stripes can be torn from the Capitol by “patriots.” A Blue Lives Matter flag can be a weapon against blue lives, because law and order means rioting when you want it to.

Not long ago Kayleigh McEnany’s little gold cross was a symbol of eternal faith, morality, and truth — Jesus was the word of God made flesh. By wearing a cross while working as a professional and enthusiastic liar in the service of a dishonest and immoral Caesar, Kayleigh staged a symbolic crucifixion on it every day.

Because it meant what she, her boss, and his followers wanted it to, whatever that was, until the moment they wanted it to mean something else.

Or nothing at all. Down that road towards the void is where we find Cruz, Hawley, McCarthy, McConnell, and the rest, for whom the only goal is power, even over an empty realm.

The Right’s Moral Collapse

by

I believe we should avoid moralism in politics — making moral judgments of people who just disagree with us — but that doesn’t mean we should abandon morality. And understanding the insurrection of Jan. 6 and what led up to it, and what’s still happening now, requires understanding that it was a moral collapse.

The Fall of Tantalus
The Fall of Tantalus, artist unknown.
Ghent University Library, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Anyone who excuses the insurrection, and the people who provoked and led it, has abandoned the fundamental moral values that make democracy possible.

We knew that many Trump supporters were deluded. He’s good at only one thing, but he may be the best ever at that one thing: being a con man.

And we wanted to believe that supporters who saw through the con were just gritting their teeth, waiting for him to be gone, calculating the trade-off in lower taxes or more conservative judges. Cynical, but at least recognizing that right might be better than wrong.

We didn’t expect outright sedition.

But it turns out many Trump supporters liked everything about him. Now that he’s gone, they want him back.

[Read more…] about The Right’s Moral Collapse

Life in Trumpworld Looks a Lot Like Life Under the Soviets

by

Vaclav Havel
Photo of Vaclav Havel by Jiří Jiroutek, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Watching the Trump lawyers’ impeachment defense, I was reminded again how closely life in Trumpworld matches life under the old Soviet bloc as described by dissidents like Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz: Everything is a lie, everyone knows it’s a lie, and everyone goes along with the lie anyway.

Thus they become both victims of the lie and partners in keeping it going.

[Read more…] about Life in Trumpworld Looks a Lot Like Life Under the Soviets

The State of Democracy: An Online Discussion

by

I thought I’d try having an “Ask Anything” discussion on Zoom, focused on what’s happened to our democracy and what we might be coming next. I think it worked out really well, with great questions and ideas from the participants, and plan to do it again. Here it is:

Excerpt:

[The behavior of Republican elected officials] is a massive failure of character, is the short answer.

And politics is always different from ordinary life because these people are elected to represent their districts, and sometimes that means they go along with things that they don’t personally agree with. But if you think about it, there’s a legitimate way for that to happen, because they are supposed to be representatives of the voters who put them there — not just doing what they personally think is the right thing — and the challenge of being an ethical politician is balancing those two things. So you have to represent your voters.

But you have to do it without betraying your core principles. Where I think this crosses the line is actually, I think, fairly clear. It’s just that we’ve lost the ability to talk about morality with clarity.

[Read more…] about The State of Democracy: An Online Discussion

The Revolution Reenacters

by

The Capitol rioters and their supporters seem to think they’re reenacting the American Revolution. They’re about as close to the real thing as Civil War reenacters are.

The Gadsden Flag: "Don't tread on me."
Christopher Gadsden (1724–1805), Lexicon, Vikrum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Actually, strike that. I understand many Civil War reenacters are careful students of American history.

The Revolution reenacters don’t seem to know much of anything about American history, beyond what fits on the Gadsden flag. And even that they misunderstand. The “me” in “Don’t tread on me” meant the united colonies, not the lone “me” at the center of the narcissist’s universe.

Neither do they show much understanding of the conservatism they claim to believe in. Conservatism advocates individual liberty, but it must be “ordered,” so as to protect the other individuals who make up a society. As conservative forefather John Stuart Mill prescribed in his classic On Liberty: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

That’s very different from unbounded selfishness.

And so with the Constitution they supposedly revere. It was designed to promote both private and public freedom, both the “Blessings of Liberty” and the “General Welfare.” Getting that point only requires reading the first paragraph:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And the Second Amendment to that Constitution? While gun control advocates may be disappointed to hear that the Founders did recognize the right to bear arms as a crucial guarantor of liberty, the Second Amendment’s phrase “well-regulated militia” was crucial. In no way did the Founders think everyone had an unregulated right to guns. An excellent, unbiased source on this is A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origin of Gun Control in America, by Saul Cornell — as is any open-minded study of primary sources. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 29:

If a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian of the national security.

But no, the reenacters don’t understand such things, or simply don’t believe in them.

The real Revolutionaries fought a monarch to establish a democracy. The Revolution reenacters fight democracy to establish a monarch.

The democracy born of the real Revolution was based on equality, and it defeated an uprising by slave-owners.

The Revolution reenacters wave the Confederate flag with their Gadsen flag.

It’s time for them to take off their “patriotic” costumes.

They aren’t reenacting the Revolution, they’re attacking it.