Taking the Neither Pill
On talking with Ben Shapiro, the death of Roe v. Wade, and the end of Normie politics
Last Thursday, I sat in a studio in Newark for the above interview with Ben Shapiro. It was a wide-ranging and oddly friendly discussion between a former Breitbart staffer and the author of Andrew Breitbart’s mostly infamously obscene obituary, in which the fact that the interview could even happen at all was among the most interesting things about it (more on this on a Callin discussion tomorrow).
Ben and I talked about how it was the political left that years ago was famous for being willing to engage anyone, while the business model of right-wing media was a heated conversation with itself about an always-expanding regimen of enemies, a catastrophic strategy that allowed the Jon Stewarts and not-yet-unfunny Stephen Colberts of the world to win huge audiences by default. Add the lack of a sense of humor, which made Frank Zappa, Larry Flynt, and Dee Snider automatic winners over crusading curmudgeons like Jerry Falwell and John Tower, and the culture war for decades was never a real battle. “There’s no question that the left had been in the ascendancy my entire lifetime,” is how Shapiro put it.
Now the script is flipped. The press mainstream has borrowed from the old Fox model and not only (as Shapiro notes) excludes dissent via the “laundering of expertise” but leads interminable crusades against an exploding list of deviationists within their own ranks. You may have thought you were solidly a progressive, but you can catch a permanent green-room ban for going against narrative on any issue, whether it’s Syria or Ukraine or Russiagate or trans issues or any of a hundred other things. This is the same losing strategy that hurt the old GOP, which logically should lead to the same losing outcome, except this is a political atmosphere where no one seems to be winning.
On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision granting women a constitutional right to abortion. This exact moment was supposedly why I owed my vote to the Democratic Party, and indeed the Supreme Court was on my mind when I pulled a lever for Hillary Clinton, a politician I couldn’t stand, in 2016.
Four years later, I voted neither. The Democrats between 2016 and 2020 not only lost my vote, but reveled in the idea that they didn’t need or want it, denouncing critics in all directions as traitors, white supremacists, and terrorists, no different from the “deplorables” who voted for Donald Trump. In that time they perfected an attitude of imperious condescension and entitlement so grating that at least half of America wouldn’t piss on someone like Adam Schiff if he were on fire. Then Friday happened and it was the same song everywhere: “See! We were right all along! You do owe us! And if you ever criticized us, this was your fault! ”
No, it wasn’t. Friday was the result of decades spent building a political project so incoherent, unsellable, and untrustworthy to ordinary people that in 2016 they chose Donald Trump over the person Barack Obama called the most qualified candidate in history. The justices who cast the critical votes Friday were picked by a man denounced by all of institutional America prior to election. All those voices were ignored. That total collapse in trust, not Jill Stein’s candidacy or Putin’s Facebook ads, led to Dobbs v. Jackson. Until Democrats reckon with that problem, which incidentally spread to every category of voter except white men in 2020 and looks poised to spread even more in the midterms, there will be more moments like this.
Or maybe not. The other side of this coin is that Dobbs might remind a lot of moderates what it was about Republicans that freaked them out so much once upon a time:
Like, I suspect, a lot of America, I feel politically homeless. Life in this country increasingly is like watching a ping-pong match between the two most unhinged people in the institution. How did we get here, and what happened to the mighty engine of dependable non-change that was America just a few years ago?
Before 2016 the choices were distasteful but clear. The “transactional” Democrats represented by Clinton and Obama were vile two-faced cynics, but the pre-Trump Republicans were an even worse joke. The old GOP was a crude political heart-lung machine, in which the interests of job-exporting manufacturers, energy executives, and weapons makers were carried to Washington atop the votes of middle- and working-class conservatives.
To me the marriage of laissez-faire corporatism and religious social conservatism always seemed tenuous and absurd, especially since I’d gone to fancy schools with the sons and daughters of America’s corporate leaders and knew these people had nothing but contempt for the megachurch flyover territories where they hunted votes.
Rich coastal Republicans for decades voted on the assumption that their party would never deliver on the big asks coming from the base: school prayer, banning naughty books and art, overturning or advancing gay rights, etc. Abortion was the big one. Not only were corporate leaders increasingly women, but the campus Republican types I’d known who carried the Weekly Standard around, went to Ivy League schools, and worked in places like Washington or Wall Street, they had daughters and girlfriends, too. Most of these people were neither religious nor social conservatives in any real sense, a fact since borne out in the dramatic shift in the voting behaviors of the very wealthy, who’ve made an unsurprisingly effortless transition to overwhelming support of Democrats.
Because the old GOP donor class had no natural connection to the Middle American voters they claimed to represent, their only workable political strategy for decades was to hire as frontmen a parade of pious, dog-whistling flag-wavers who pretended to be patriots but earned their keep handing out bailouts or corporate tax breaks. It takes a particularly ridiculous kind of person to be good at that job. The signature Republican policy ploy involved people like Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed lobbying to exempt the Northern Marianas Islands from minimum wage and safety laws.
Reed sold the American territory as a place where workers would be “exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ,” with many converting and returning “to China with Bibles in hand.” Only it later came out in a Department of Labor report that many of these sweatshop — er, textile workers — were “subject to forced abortions and… forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry,” as the Washington Post put it.
My lasting campaign image of pre-Trump Republicans attempting to connect with ordinary voters was Mitt Romney putting on stonewash jeans to look “regular” on the stump, as he warned of a “prairie fire of debt” sweeping across America during his 2012 campaign. The Mittster scrupulously avoided the words “private equity” in those speeches and in impressive fashion escaped mention that his business model involved adding massively to that very “prairie fire” by saddling targets of his hostile takeovers with hundreds of millions in new debt, often leading to waves of layoffs.
The virtue in Donald Trump’s act in 2016 was that he exposed politicians like this, from Little Marco to Jeb to John “1 for 38” Kasich, lampooning them as the frauds they are. He spelled out how Republicans had sold out their voters, often mocking their transparent pretensions to regular-person status, going after everything from Rand Paul’s golf game to Jeb’s mom-love to Rick Perry’s smart glasses. It took a while, but Trump’s son Donald, Jr. even eventually went after those jeans of Romney’s:
When Trump sealed up the nomination after the Indiana primary in 2016, I thought his legacy would be the destruction of these Grand Old Phonies, and wrote a gloating epitaph:
Their leaders, from Ralph Reed to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the same haircut—the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube.
Once, the small-town American was Gary Cooper: tough, silent, upright and confident. The modern Republican Party changed that person into a haranguing neurotic who couldn’t make it through a dinner without quizzing you about your politics. They destroyed the American character. No hell is hot enough for them…
Trump’s pantsing of the Clown Car was great theater and would have been remembered as funny, had it culminated in the expected ending of a loss and four or eight years of Hillary Clinton as a conventionally shitty president. I even had a lede written for Election Night that year: “By 2023, the sound of her voice will shatter glass and send dogs and people yelping into the woods…”
Then the Democrats holed the world’s most difficult tee shot and somehow lost that race, leading to the insane divide of now. Trump instantly surrounded himself with the same scumbag insiders and oligarchs he’d run against, effectively announcing from the jump he was full of it. Hiring a spate of Goldman executives like Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin during his transition, minutes after running Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style ads warning about the bank as part of the “corrupt machine” of “global special interests” who “bled our country dry,” was a particularly nice touch.
Trump’s other giant head-scratcher was spending the 2020 presidential election trying to paint Joe Biden — as dyed-in-the-wool a representative of the permanent political establishment as has ever walked American soil — as a “probably communist” radical. Trump’s political instincts, even if not always thought out, were usually effective on some level, but he abandoned his successful 2016 strategy of running as an outsider and instead tried to present himself, Donald Trump, as the “very stable” protector of the institutional middle.
Then, when he lost, he went bananas and ratified every criticism the “totally dishonest” media ever made about him being an existential threat to democracy. Even though a lot of Trump’s bad press was and is bogus, a lot of it isn’t, and especially in his post-presidency, he’s pulled off the seemingly impossible and just by being his usual batshit self made the Democratic Party — now more or less openly the bumbling American branch office of the loathsome Davos elite — seem like a viable electoral choice, even to the people most harmed by globalization and neoliberal economics.
After Clinton’s loss I would have bet every dollar on Democrats embarking on a period of soul-searching, asking how they could have lost to a foul-mouthed game-show host who’d insulted veterans, women, immigrants, the disabled, Asians (“We want deal!”), and virtually every other major voting demographic, even violating the ultimate campaign rule by asking Iowans if they had “issues in the brain” from too much Monsanto corn. Any rational organization suffering such a loss would have undergone a thorough overhaul.
No luck. Democrats did the opposite in the Trump years, blaming everyone from Susan Sarandon to James Comey to Vladimir Putin to “millions of white people” to Bernie Sanders (“His attacks caused lasting damage”) to Barack Obama, about whom Hillary said:
I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack. Maybe more Americans would have woken up to the threat in time…
This, from the same candidate who’d tried to torpedo Obama’s candidacy in 2008 by leaking photos of him dressed as a Somali elder and telling a McClatchy editor that Obama was born in Kenya, prompting the agency to send a reporter there to check it out! The allegations that Obama was somehow not a “real” American, just a pretty maker-of-speeches like Martin Luther King who “needed a president to get it done,” so infuriated Obama that he made a point of tearing Donald Trump a new one at the 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner, reportedly the moment that provoked Trump to run for the White House.
Add the infamous “pied piper candidates” memo suggesting the Clinton campaign actually wanted to run against Trump, and one can make a convincing argument that the Clintons themselves, more than any quantity of Susan Sarandons, were responsible for Trump’s win, and by extension the events of this past Friday.
With the party’s pathetic collapses on issues like the Iraq War, drones, surveillance, military spending, NAFTA, mass incarceration, “community policing,” and the failure to prosecute financial corruption after 2008 (with corporate defense lawyer Eric Holder’s Justice Department outdoing even John Ashcroft’s in the soft-touch department), and I already felt nauseous supporting Clinton in 2016. I remember, as I voted, thinking of her response to the question of why she’d accepted $675,000 in speeches from Goldman, Sachs, the company whose culpability in helping cause the 2008 crash I’d spent years writing about. “That’s what they offered,” she said. Talk about not having pride in your work! Any politician who doesn’t even feel obligated to lie to the public in embarrassing situations doesn’t deserve high office.
For all that, I kept voting for Democrats, convinced by what seemed their last viable argument, which came down to the Supreme Court and the likelihood that a Democrat would nominate slightly less shitty judges than Republicans. Supposedly, if you care about issues like choice, and I am pro-choice, you had no choice but to vote blue.
This made sense until the party and its pals in media went on to spend all of the Trump years excommunicating pro-choice voices across the landscape, from Joe Rogan to Dave Chappelle to Tulsi Gabbard to, yes, Susan Sarandon and the would-be tip of the choice spear, i.e. gender-critical feminists now regularly denounced as TERFs. The Bush-era Republicans talked about “real Americans” and the current Democrats talk about “allies,” but it’s the same thing, an exclusive club you can be booted out of for any of a hundred reasons. At the very moment Democrats are claiming they need every last vote to defend the country against a fascist takeover, they’re hurling masses of people over the edge as heretics who otherwise would have been loyal voters. It’s a different species of madness from the one infecting Trump, but madness it is, nonetheless.
I remember choices like Dukakis versus Bush, which was like two versions of the same mathematically absolute impossibility of change. Absent a big shift, the next choice will be two arguments for civil war. Does anyone else miss boredom?
About Dobbs. Everybody who went to law
school in the last 50 years knows that Roe is a weak case, inventing a constitutional right to achieve a political/social end. Even RBG thought so. Congress knew this. Democrats knew this. For 50 bloody years they took no action to codify Roe. They had many opportunities to do so. Instead, they used Roe to fund raise and spread fear. They could have passed a law, and they failed. So, do you want to blame somebody for Dobbs? Blame Congress. This could’ve been avoided if Congress did it’s job of making the laws and not abrogating that to the courts. Are you going to reward Dems for their failure?
Couldn't agree more. The Democrats seem to running a wave of destruction that reasonable people have to reject: The school closures have been devastating, especially for poor people. The drug addition/homeless problem is destroying progressive cities. Critical race theory and race essentialism are transparently racist. Letting trans women kick girls and women out of sports is absurd.
Yes, the Republicans are venal, horrible creatures. But if I have to reject both, I'll vote for self interest. My interest is in quality education, clean cities, equality over equity, and a rejection of identity politics and especially gender ideology. Maybe sending Roe v. Wade to the legislatures is a small price to pay,