The Hollow Men: On the American Right Wing

Image taken from The Machinist (2004) I feel that “Salvation” is a very strong word for it.

There’s a quote from Deleuze and Guattari that I reference occasionally, to the effect that “nothing ever died from contradiction,” and I think that this is a lesson that those of us on the political left need to internalize. As the United States marches ever further toward an election that may define whether the world continues as it has or just gets worse every day forever, this cannot be ignored.

Last week, the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. For many more centrist individuals, this was a tragedy of cosmic proportions. Ginsberg had taken on the status of folk hero for them, and it isn’t hard to see why. Among other things, she was a bulwark against the imagined overturning of Roe v. Wade, the supreme court case that made abortion legal and protected access to it: with her passing, it’s thought that this right is in jeopardy.

Many people further to the left have a more complicated response. While acknowledging her role protecting reproductive rights, they also acknowledge that she was a critic of the Black Lives Matter movement and supported the Keystone XL pipeline that was resisted by a coalition of Native American groups in the latter years of the Obama administration. I understand their frustration, but i do not wish to discuss the late Justice. That’s not what this piece is about.

This discussion on the left end of the American political spectrum, though, is founded upon a fact that is present on the right end of the spectrum. Let’s leave aside the discussion and examine the fact. Consider: in those same latter years of the Obama administration, the Republicans refused to confirm Merrick Garland, saying that – as it was an election year – it would be proper to delay and allow the next President to put forward a Justice, and leave the court short-staffed.

Now, we have a vacancy on the court in an election year, and they intend to ram through a supreme court pick a month and a half before the election, saying that they have a “mandate” to do so because of the outcome of the 2018 election (you know, the one where they lost the House).

Lindsey Graham, pictured here pointing accusingly.

The best illustration of the issue comes from Lindsey Graham. In 2016, he said (according to NPR):

“I want you to use my words against me. If there's a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, 'Let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.'”

In 2020, he said (according to Politico):

“A Supreme Court debate right before an election is good for us . . . It’s a right-of-center nation, certainly in South Carolina it is. It’s an event that will matter in these races.”

If that isn’t clear enough, there’s an article from CNN with the headline “Graham commits to supporting Trump 'in any effort to move forward' in filling Ginsburg's seat”.

We are told that there are two Republican senators – Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine – who are going to break ranks with their party on confirming a replacement, which really means nothing. Susan Collins always makes a show of wringing her hands and thinking about doing the right thing before falling into line.

Of course, all of this will be old news to the people who have been following the situation. The real topic of this piece isn’t the drama surrounding the Supreme Court of the United States, but the bitter lesson that this situation teaches.

Nothing ever died from contradiction. Only the Left — the actual Left — is concerned with consistency and congruity. At no point has the right wing ever been free of contradiction or based on used logic as anything but a means. Consider: the average supporter of the current president does so not because he is good at his job (they lie and say he is, regularly, but it’s obvious that he isn’t) but because he makes “the other side” (that is, Centrists and those further left) upset. It’s an almost fetishistic desire to disappoint and anger the people they consider their enemies.

In short: at no point does the Republican Party as a collective consider whether their actions are right or wrong. They seek to acquire and exercise power, seemingly to no end other than the collective immiseration of everyone else. Note: I don’t necessarily believe that individual Republicans think this way – I’ve met a number who exercised their interpersonal ethics quite effectively, but their politics were absolute dogshit. Chances were, the fact that I am a white male played into at least some of them displaying good ethics in my presence or direction. But as a group, I have yet to see evidence that the Republican Party exists for any purpose other than to collect power and generate suffering.

This is where things get dicey.

I have a great many problems with the Democratic Party – a party I’ve ended up voting for in every major election, much to my chagrin – but I will charitably read them as wanting things to be nice. Not in the sense of good or progressing towards some ideal, but in the sense that they want things to remain relatively where they are and they recognize that they tend to be voted into office by people with a variety of interests. They’re a big tent party and they want to mediate between all of those different groups (more on mediation later). They think that their job is to negotiate among all of the elected officials and come to some kind of conclusion about how to make sure that things remain nice.

The Republicans are playing a different game. Their game, charitably, is whatever game Lucy was playing in Peanuts where she yanks the football out of the way at the last moment. Or at least it was. I think Susan Collins still thinks that’s the game they’re playing. Their game has transitioned over to the cruel “game” of pulling the wings off flies.

It’s not even solely about enriching their donors these days, or about saving money: the Coronavirus Pandemic could be ended in about a month if we locked down properly and insisted on mandatory mask use – give everyone $2,000 to keep them happy in that window, and it would still be cheaper than the $1,000,000,000,000 that was injected into the economy to give it a fifteen-minute boost back in March. All of that money would circulated through the economy, and the wealthy would get their share: a business never needs a direct government payment unless their business is failing, because the whole point of a business is to exchange a good or service for money. That solution was rejected, and I believe that, despite what they say, it was rejected because it was insufficiently cruel.

So, the current political situation in the States can best be summed up as this: our political parties are playing two different games. The Democrats (who are painted as radical leftists by the other side, but are institutionalist centrists), want to “Make Everything Nice.” The Republicans (who have shifted over to being a Reactionary Party of Cruelty) want to play the “Fart-in-Face” game.

At the moment, they are the dominant party in the executive branch and in the senate. They’re looking to install another one of their ghouls in the Supreme Court. It’s looking like they’re going for a Christian Dominionist, a woman with seven children who will give them some cover while they roll back reproductive rights. They are doing this in spite of rules and protocols that they invented, because rules mean nothing. Especially when they get in the way of the exercise of cruelty.

It may seem like I’m being alarmist or that I’m “bad mouthing” the United States, but the fact of the matter is that one of the two political parties that rule this country has never once acted in good faith in my entire life, and the other one continues to try to compromise with them.

Pictured: How “Trickle-Down Economics” is supposed to work.

There is no “exposing the contradictions” of this system, because it was never pretending to be consistent. Leftists tend to judge things on whether they lead to an improvement in the conditions for the average person. If this is your rubric, then of course it will appear inconsistent: that’s not the purpose for them. This system isn’t focused on providing material security or sustenance for the people who make it run – that is, at best a byproduct (as per the Democrats) or a bug that they’re working on (as per the Republicans). The purpose of this system is to be this system. It has no function other than its own continuation. It achieves this by mediating between all of these different groups. Either in perpetuity (as per the Democrats) or until we can safely get rid of those other groups (as per the Republicans).

Anyone who objects to this last proposition should turn their eyes to the southern border, where migrant women are being sterilized against their will by this government. Anyone who objects to this last proposition should turn their eyes to the culture warriors pushing “herd immunity” as their response to the virus. Anyone who objects to this last proposition should note that we are blowing up school buses in Yemen, throwing away $19,000 a pop in the interest of slaughtering children abroad, instead of providing a social safety net comparable to a civilized country.

The point of the game is cruelty, and as George Trow said, “In the situation I’m describing, the Referee always wins.”

If the left can’t stop with the tactic of trying to “expose contradictions” or “highlight inconsistencies” it will never get anywhere. A different tactic is needed.

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