by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
By all accounts, the MAGA New Right has lost the culture wars. America is browning. The Republican Party’s policies are extremely unpopular and it refuses to have any sort of re-calibration. And there’s an entire media bullshit infrastructure design to protect the Republican Party from any sort of introspection.
So, it was inevitable that the MAGA New Right would circle the drain down to the crack hit that is simple abstract fears on the part of white Christians about “cancel culture” or Critical Race Theory.
Let’s take Cancel Culture. Here’s my best attempt at some sort of definition, from the point of view of Republicans — “Cancel Culture:’ The ruining of a conservative’s life for being conservative, usually associated with a public event or comment being recorded by smartphone that goes viral.”
Ironically, the definition has drifted considerably from what it might have been around the time of #MeToo. During that era, a lot of very powerful men — usually white — were being “canceled” for legitimately doing shitty things. There was the occasional odd excess as the revolution made its way through culture and different industries — Aziz Ansari being a prime example — but, over all, bad men did bad things and they got “canceled.”
But here we are in the post #MeTo Era and Republicans have latched on Cancel Culture because just its invocation is enough to strike terror in the hearts of evangelical white Christian women in the suburbs. From my experience, people in that particular demo live in existential terror of themselves doing something “conservative” that evil liberals record and it proceeds to go viral. They will lose their jobs and be publicly shamed just for being conservative.
Another, similar, thing that really bugs the conservatives I know is “woke” corporate culture. I think what is really going on is the MAGA New Right has lost the culture wars and, as such, corporate trainers are doing a mop up operation — shooting the survivors, if you will. But if you’re a bed rock conservative whose self-perception is “I don’t see race” (read: systemic racism) if you have to go through any type of sensitivity training you get really, really, upset.
In fact “woke” corporate culture is probably the main source of the rage against Big Tech. While I have a lot of concrete, fact-based fears about MAGA New Right POTUS Mike Pompeo throwing me in an ICE camp, my conservative relatives have abstract fears that one day Google will listen to their conversations via their phone and turn them in to the evil libtards of the Deep State.
The specific instance of someone being “canceled” that comes to mind is the police officer in the Hampton Roads are of Virginia who lost his job after an online leak of a Kyle Rittenhouse’s donation effort reveled he had contributed $20 to his defense fund.
To me, the guy got what he deserved — Rittenhouse is a deranged triple murderer. I don’t care if we found out because of a leak — if you’re on a police force, you shouldn’t be contributing any money to Rittenhouse’s defense. But that’s not how my conservative relative saw the situation. He was upset that the police officer got in trouble because of a leak. And he was upset that it was just $20.
The fact that Rittenhouse went WAY out of his way to murder people for political reasons was a lulz.
The point of all of this is the reason why Republican’s attempts to keep the base enraged by screaming hysterically about “cancel culture” or “Critical Race Theory” are so successful is the center-Right and center-Left now rarely actually ever interact with each other. In 2016, I often got into it with MAGA people about Trump. Now, this almost never happens. As such, the two sides have an exaggerated sense of what the other believes.
At the core of all of this, of course, are the some pretty potent macro trends. In general, the nation is growing browner, more secular and more open minded about more “modern” sexual mores. All these changes are happening at an alarming rate — at least for conservatives — but they don’t even really know what, exactly, bothers them so much.
FOX News, OAN and NewsMax know this on an existential level, so they give conservatives a media narrative that helps them make sense of their general unease.
All of this is very corrosive, of course. But there are no easy answers. It definitely seems, at least to me, that as I keep saying, that all of these abstract fears will cause a very concrete choice to face America soon: autocracy or civil war.
