The Laundering of American Fascism
Something’s afoot at the Gray Lady. Whether it’s the title of a recent opinion piece by Damon Linker entitled “My fellow liberals are exaggerating the dangers of Ron DeSantis,” the title of Michelle Goldberg’s recent essay “Don’t Let Politics Cloud Your View of What’s Going On With Teens and Depression” or the title of Pamela Paul’s most recent attempt at the essay form, “What Liberals Can Learn From Ron DeSantis,” the New York Times has been pushing some rather blatant centrist clickbait in their Opinion headlines as of late.
In the case of the Linker piece, the author’s thesis seems to be that while every single part of Mr. DeSantis’s record suggests he’d be a dangerously illiberal president,
“Exaggerating the threat posed by the Florida governor could inadvertently increase Mr. Trump’s prospects in the Republican primaries. And if Mr. DeSantis does get the nomination, progressive overreaction toward him in the primary contest could ultimately undermine the case against him in the general election.”
And thus our author posits DeSantis would only be a threat if we treat him like one, or if “progressives” put ourselves in the position of being too hyperbolic about his obvious negatives.
The problem with this centrist-skewed thinking is when it comes to Trump and his political children like DeSantis and Marjory Taylor Greene, any possible hyperbole is generally inadequate to the scope of their ambition and moral rot, which creates a situation in which the more traditional “neutral” or both-sided approach necessarily becomes an inadequate lens.
There is no way to speak truthfully to our current reality from that perspective when one party’s “radical wing”believes that health care and housing are human rights and the other party’s “radical wing” believes that black history should be suppressed, that LGBTQ people shouldn’t be allowed to exist freely, that “transgenderism” should be “eradicated” and that Trump should have been installed as President for life.
There is no un-skewed rational center when the Overton window is so perilously lopsided.
This is perhaps what headlines or lines of inquiry like this are meant to erase or obfuscate.
Michelle Goldberg, in spite of the aforementioned headline, “Don’t Let Politics Cloud Your View of What’s Going On With Teens and Depression” actually offers a nuanced look at her subject matter, and so why does her essay and its accompanying headline need to invoke the seditious Josh Hawley at all? The headline is justified thus:
“The idea that unaccountable corporate behemoths are harming kids with their products shouldn’t be a hard one for liberals to accept, even if figures like Hawley believe it as well.”
Does Hawley also like soup? Must we come to terms with that as well?
And Goldberg doesn’t even agree with Hawley’s conclusion! That Goldberg and Hawley have examined a similar body of research work is a flimsy pretense for the introduction of Hawley into the body of the essay, let alone the headline.
So why mention him at all? I uncomfortably posit that the Times has sent a message to its opinion writers that they must hew to a fiction that we are currently living in a two party system where in good faith both parties want to govern the full population of this Country, but merely have different notions of how.
When of the two major American political parties has no interest in governance, but only the midwifery of performative outrage in pursuit of power, a complicity between that party and the media becomes necessary to assert that there *is*an actual center to report or opine from.
Which brings me to Chris Lehmann’s very necessary and entertaining rebuttal in “The Nation” to whatever series of points Pamela Paul was fumbling to make in her recent NYT essay suggesting that liberals could learn something from preening Florida governor: Ron DeSantis, “You Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, “Gotta Hand It to” Ron DeSantis.” https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pamela-paul-ron-desantis/
As if diagramming a run on sentence, he breaks down Paul’s recent unfortunately-titled essay in its every farcical conceit with a ruthlessness that the original unfortunately merits.
To posit that we should look to learn anything from an unabashed textbook fascist who terminally looks like an aggrieved infant, who apparently has eaten pudding with his bare hands on a plane*, and is very plausibly a Russian asset under the handling of the aggressively charmless Christine Pushaw, it might seem necessary to bring in some actual receipts, but with Paul, it’s all “feels,” Ivy-League affiliation and upper-middle class solidarity.
Clearly, it’s a headline without a viable body, but that seems to be the point—the headline launders the notion that we really need to give the DeSantis’s and Hawleys of this present moment some credit, just to be “fair,” and that ultimately dulls the edges of their extremism.
It may not currently be a five alarm moment for the current stable of New York Times opinion writers, but with the remaking of the Supreme Court, the great Moscow on the Gulf DeSantis experiment in State-level fascism currently happening in Florida, and the attacks against drag as proxy for the purposeful eradication of LGBTQ culture and lives, it would be helpful if the paper of record centered it’s editorial viewpoint a little more squarely on these current dangerous realities, rather than pretending that the current torrent of right-wing extremism is just politics as usual.
However, given that the New York Times has historically been on the reactionary side of almost every single social justice issue, and on Sunday August 20th, 1939 actually published this headline: “HERR HITLER AT HOME IN THE CLOUDS; High up on his favorite mountain he finds time for politics, solitude and frequent official parties,” I may be asking a bit too much…
Had the January 6th coup actually succeeded, I fear the Times and The Post would’ve treated the new political reality that would have ensued with white gloves, not wishing to appear partisan, or to favor the recently executed. I am absolutely sure the Wall Street Journal would have, if trading continued uninterrupted.
But this actually *is* a serious moment for those not comfortably gathered into the folds of Christian, White Supremacist Patriarchy. “Eradicating Transgenderism,” which former Ted Cruz Podcast co-host Michael Knowles advocated for at CPAC, is intrinsically a call for genocide, and in such a charged cultural environment, feigned neutrality is nothing but a comfort to the unabashed enemies of Democracy and plurality.
* Ron DeSantis’ Aloof Persona, Odd Demands Already Impacting 2024 Race