Ridicule

The new regime is now spinning into high gear, regaling us with bread and circuses, signaling to MAGA culture warriors that the power of the state is now on their side. The specter of rounding up families, mass deportations, and shutting down the southern border remain uncertain, as does the promised use of draconian tariffs in place of serious economic policy. All of this will surely get ample attention in the coming months and years.

Here at Idiosocratic, however, the present question is, how to approach public discourse at this juncture? Through the events of the past few years, one thing has become very clear: Facts and reason don’t matter.

It’s a bit humbling, because I think most of the people I respect already knew this. My temperament tends to prevent me from facing this dispiriting reality.

I will continue to pursue reality-based knowledge of the world, and I will continue to reflect as reasonably and critically as I can about what we generally call “facts.”1 What might be different going forward, however, is a new acceptance that this kind of discourse is not going to change anybody’s mind about anything.

To be fair to myself, it’s not as though I previously believed reasoned political discourse changed people’s basic political commitments, certainly not on a scale that would swing national elections. And obviously I didn’t believe anything I wrote here would have anything beyond a microscopic effect on the public conversation, in any case. What’s changed is that it’s become extremely clear to me that in this political climate there’s no longer any point in attempting to engage in dialog with the postmodern American Right.

Early in the Trump era, many of those who opposed Trump were chastised for their snobbery, their elitism, their tendency to “talk down” to Trump supporters. We were challenged to try to understand the Trump voter, to grapple with the social, economic, and political realities that gave rise to the MAGA movement. And we did. There was no shortage of public intellectuals, journalists, social scientists, and academics of all sorts who devoted considerable efforts to understanding Trump supporters in their own words and in light of real-world pressures that might drive decent people to embrace a figure like DJT.

This got us nowhere. Sure, we understand. We get it. But this has made no difference. Conveying this understanding to MAGA loyalists does not impress them one bit. It is nearly unheard-of for Trump supporters to meet such efforts halfway, or to show an interest in understanding why we have such grave misgivings about Trump. From the MAGA perspective, it’s clear that center-left and center-right critics of Trump are radical Marxist, Maoist, Orwellian, free-speech-hating, baby-killing lunatics who want to shut down churches, eradicate white culture, trans the kids, and inject poison into the bodies of all citizens. From the MAGA perspective, critics of Trump are, at best, simply “deranged.” So, I give up. I am no longer concerned that I might seem condescending. I see no intellectual seriousness in the MAGA Right, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.

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Non-MAGA commentary, of course, never had any hope of persuading the main body of Trump’s base, which is a mixture of decent and not-so-decent folks who have decided that they will follow Trump into hell itself if that’s where he chooses to lead them; they are the people who would support him even if he “shot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight.” These folks are currently beyond the reach of reason. Modern media gives them everything they need to sustain perfect confidence in their devotion to Trumpism and their contempt for everything else.

There is another set of Trumpists, however, of whom I have a somewhat different view, and for these types I did hold out hope that meaningful engagement was possible. These are the conservative, educated elites who have careers in academia, think tanks, and media. They are people who “know better,” but who support Trump because they think he’s a necessary evil. He’s obviously an oafish vulgarian, but he’s electable; and he’s reckless enough to disrupt institutional ossification. These elites continue to believe Trump can be contained, or that even if he turns out to be uncontrollable, something better than what we have now can be built after he finishes wrecking the china shop.

These are people who, if they were persuaded that Trump was truly dangerous, would be in a position to help the situation. They have influence with those who possess the power to alter popular opinion. The solution to the Trump problem has always lain with influencers and opinion-shapers. I can point to what I mean by saying this: If Fox News, for example, were to run stories critical of Trump on a daily basis for months, and if their primetime lineup was similarly dismissive and critical of Trump, easily portraying him as the grotesque buffoon he is, the MAGA movement would be significantly diminished. This briefly occurred in early 2021, and if it had continued MAGA would have gone the way of the Tea Party, and something new would have taken its place. But the people shouted, “Give us Barabbas!” and the elites shrugged.

It has been my project, in my own small way, to make reasoned arguments to people in a position to influence the Influencers. More significantly, there are many people attempting this at all levels of popularity. But all to no avail. The people who (presumably) know better refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem. When confronted with the manifest wretchedness of their movement, they prevaricate and change the subject. They have been inoculated against cognitive dissonance by mundane Democratic blunders and by tropes invented by clever right-wing commentators designed to excuse the worst excesses of the MAGA Right, often by means of wholesale dishonesty.

In short, the people who should know better are unable to act in the nation’s interest because somewhere along the way they began getting high on their own supply: they now seem to actually believe their own rhetoric, which has caused them to become as impervious to reason as the MAGA voter-base. There is much to say here, and perhaps another time I’ll write about the specifics. For now, and for a while yet, I’m afraid I see no use in attempting to reason with anyone on the Trumpist Right, even those Trump supporters who imagine themselves to transcend MAGA.

If we give up on reasoned discourse, what’s left for us to do? There is one thing that comes to mind: ridicule. There is an ancient wisdom that recognizes an important place for satire, and this is something that should be explored and deployed more frequently in opposition to the new MAGA establishment. There is some truth in the claim that ridicule is a tactic to which people resort when they are unable to make a proper argument. (Trump himself is a good case in point.) It’s also plausible, however, that when one’s opponents are unable to hear proper arguments and seem themselves only able to jeer and scoff, mockery might be all that remains as a way to get through to them.

I think it’s time to adopt the practice of artful ridicule on a large scale. Late-night comedians have been mocking Trump for a while, but I think it would be good if the ridicule came from every quarter. It’s tricky because satire is a special skill. Most of us are not able to pull it off properly. But some version of mockery is likely within reach of many in the non-MAGA press who normally never stoop to it.

One avenue for this was recently explored by Rex Huppke, who observes that Trumpism has made stupidity acceptable, and that we should push back on this accomplishment. “Stupid” isn’t simply a cruel epithet for people who are mentally deficient; stupidity, rather, is the celebration of ignorance. The swagger with which MAGA celebrities say very stupid things should not be given a pass, out of the misapplied principle of being respectful to all points of view. We should oppose the Republican attempt to gaslight America into normalizing idiocy. Huppke concludes that we should “make stupidity embarrassing again.”

I agree with this, and I hereby pledge to do my part.

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