Letting It Rip

There’s a small pantheon of quotations about Donald Trump that ardent Never Trumpers can recite from memory, chapter and verse, because of the insight they provide into the minds of his supporters.

The most notorious one appeared in the Washington Post a few days after the 2020 election as Trump’s propaganda campaign to discredit the result picked up steam. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” an unnamed Republican official said, shrugging off the conspiracy theories being spread by the then-president. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.”

When you want to make a point about how willfully, idiotically naive many of his fans are about what Trump is capable of, that’s the quote you reach for.

Another member of the pantheon comes from a New York Times story published in early 2019 about federal prison personnel working without pay during a government shutdown that Trump engineered. One prison employee who supported him in 2016 was aghast at his priorities. “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she complained to the paper. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Hurting people isn’t usually a priority for major political movements in the United States but it sure is for Trump’s. No quotation captures the malice at the heart of postliberal populism as succinctly and memorably as that one.

Today has brought us a new member of the pantheon, flagged by our friends at The Bulwark this morning.

The Financial Times published a story on Monday about corporate America “going MAGA” after Trump’s victory, a topic that’s familiar to readers of this newsletter. Amid the details about companies hurriedly canceling diversity initiatives and titans of industry tongue-shining the king’s shoes at Mar-a-Lago comes this all-time banger:

Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say that Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.

“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”

After nearly 10 years of debating precisely what it would mean to “make America great again,” at last we have an answer. A new dawn for the greatest country in the world means letting filthy-rich Goldman Sachs bros call each other “retards” at lunch without needing to worry about some bleeding heart at the next table overhearing.

Mark my words: When, not if, Trump commits another civic abomination on the order of January 6, the Financial Times quote is the one Never Trumpers will point back to. “The bad news is that the president no longer feels bound by the Constitution. The good news is that you’re free to call the Dispatch subscriber in your life a ‘pussy’ for caring.”

As facile as the anonymous banker’s logic is, though, I think it really does explain a chunk of Trump’s appeal. If the Reagan revolution was about economic deregulation, the Trump revolution is about cultural deregulation. After years of having to watch what they say for fear of leftist reprisals, Americans are ready to let it rip and voted accordingly.

The age of overcorrecting for “problematic” speech is over. The age of undercorrecting is here.

Anything goes.

Speech policing is like immigration policy. In both cases, leftists are so far out of touch with mainstream opinion that their own leaders in Washington have felt obliged to say so forthrightly since Election Day in hopes of earning back the trust of the great persuadable middle.

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, very much a man of the left, grumbled recently to Politico about his side’s maddening preoccupation with “magic words.” It ranges from pushing little-used woke neologisms like “Latinx,” he said, to lapsing into tin-eared academic-speak about “centering” the working class or what have you. He remembered once catching flak from progressive activists for demanding a “cessation of hostilities” in Gaza instead of a “ceasefire,” the preferred magic word.

Leftists are very attuned to language, eager to use their cultural power to regulate it, and willing to inflict professional consequences on those who use it to offend “vulnerable communities.” The world’s most popular author has made herself a pariah among international progressives simply by refusing to accept their orthodoxy on transgenderism, to the point where her arrest for “hate crimes” under Scottish law briefly became a live question last year.

Following their head-spinning success in building support for gay marriage, those on the American left seem to have assumed that all of their cultural preferences could be similarly mainstreamed through sheer force of will. They were mistaken. Americans don’t like woke lingo, don’t use it, and regard cancellation campaigns as “a threat to our freedom.” The usual left-wing three-step in advocating for pet social causes—destigmatize it, normalize it, brutalize the resisters—alienated too many voters. As the saying goes: This is how you got Trump.

To put that another way, progressives overcorrected in trying to “moderate” public discourse, not unlike how Facebook overcorrected in moderating political content on its platform. Now, with Trump ascendant and the left in retreat, Americans—like Facebook—are almost certainly going to undercorrect in deciding what is and isn’t appropriate.

It’s already begun at Facebook parent Meta, in fact. Some of the recent tweaks made to its moderation policy aim to open up debate over contentious public policy, reasonably enough. “We do allow content arguing for gender-based limitations of military law enforcement and teaching jobs,” Facebook has said, as an example. But the changes go beyond that: According to training materials obtained by The Intercept, statements like “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of sh-t” are also newly permissible.

Mark Zuckerberg can do what he likes with his platform but let’s please not kid ourselves about the costs of undercorrecting. In a Wall Street Journal story published Tuesday about the freakish ubiquity of antisemitic beliefs worldwide, the head of the Anti-Defamation League blamed modern information clearinghouses for making Jew-baiting propaganda easier than ever to access. “Social media is a superspreader of hate that allows antisemites to export their views to the masses,” Jonathan Greenblatt said. “A younger audience that consumes news on TikTok and Instagram has a less informed view of the world, with information provided by influencers not based on expertise, but based on the appeal of their memes.”

Undercorrecting would feel less sinister than it does right now if the right-wing zeitgeist that propelled Trump to victory was discerning about distinguishing well-meaning victims of left-wing pressure campaigns from bad-faith provocateurs and hateful demagogues. We should all prefer to “let it rip” when it comes to speech, after all. The more conscientious the public is, the more ideal an “anything goes” ethic for public discourse becomes. 

But that’s not the zeitgeist we have. What we have is a cultural moment in which some of the Wall Street cognoscenti yearn for nothing grander than being able to call their enemies “retards” again.

Which brings us to Andrew Tate.

Anti-morality.

It’s not quite worthy of the pantheon of Never Trump quotations but Trump adviser Alina Habba girlishly cooing “hiiiii” at Tate on Benny Johnson’s show a few days ago is another memorable window onto the postliberal mind. 

Tate is an accused rapist and sex trafficker who’s facing criminal charges in Romania and the United Kingdom. During his downtime he likes to cheer for Hamas and fulminate against “the Jews.” He’s so repellent a human being that even populists who have built up a sky-high tolerance to moral disgust after years of exposure to Trump rhetorically barfed on Habba and Johnson for cozying up to him. Daily Wire honcho Ben Shapiro was sufficiently appalled by the spectacle that he ended up posting a 25-minute plea to his supporters to see Tate for what he is. (Ben is an eloquent voice against antisemites when he’s not busy employing them.)

Why is so much energy being spent lobbying Habba and the wider right to ostracize Tate, you ask? Because he’s fantastically popular, here and abroad, with the sort of disaffected young men who gobble up “manosphere” content and admire Donald Trump’s boorish bravado. Millions of right-wingers need to be actively talked out of supporting an alleged sex criminal known chiefly for aggressive misogyny.

And why wouldn’t they? Tate has always struck me as embodying all of the elements of Trump that appeal to his fans except more so. He’s a cartoonish “alpha male,” a professional kickboxer whose every utterance aims to convey machismo. He loves to boast about his wealth. He preaches and practices overweening dominance, especially toward women. And he’s an unabashed postliberal, rebelling against the pieties of the weak, dying Western order—such as, in this case, “Hamas is bad.”

No wonder Trump barnacle Alina Habba and many (although not all) Trumpers think he’s the bee’s knees. MAGA worships ruthlessness and Tate, even more so than Trump, is ruthlessness personified. He’s precisely the sort of “anti-moral” character whom the populists’ campaign of cultural deregulation is designed to empower, which the shameless Benny Johnson understands even if the slightly less shameless Ben Shapiro doesn’t. J.K. Rowling might come on your podcast to discuss how the left tried to cancel her for her trans skepticism but she’s not going to affront your political enemies by calling them “retards” or “pussies.” Tate will.

The whole point of postliberalism, I’d argue, is to not have to distinguish between malevolent demagogues like him and more thoughtful liberal critics of leftist excess. “Anything goes” means that Tucker Carlson, say, is as worthy of being heard and taken seriously as Fox News or, lord knows, the New York Times is. For decades, conservative media critics gradually disabled the right’s ability to distinguish trustworthy sources from untrustworthy ones by flogging the mainstream press mercilessly for its failures while biting their tongues about the naked propaganda on their own side. The only touchstone left for trustworthiness is “reliably tells me what I want to hear.”

That’s the environment in which cultural deregulation is happening. You’ll no longer face cultural consequences for questioning trans orthodoxy—or, if the ascendant right has its way, for calling those you dislike “retards” or maybe even for wondering if women might benefit from a punch in the face from time to time to make sure they know their place.

Crossing lines.

I repeat what I said once before. If the Joker were a real person and fortunate enough to live in this era, he would have already been interviewed by Tucker six times, would boast 15 million followers on Elon Musk’s platform, and would be considering a run for Senate in whatever state Gotham is located.

“I’m just glad I can call Batman a ‘retard’ again,” he would have told reporters as the returns rolled in on Election Night last year, exultant that his preferred candidate had prevailed.

We don’t need a fictional character to illustrate the point, though. If you want to see how amoral and nihilistic the right’s desire to “let it rip” can be in practice, look at the front page of today’s newspaper. 

Early this morning we were reminded that the guy who’ll be sworn in as president six days from now very likely would have been convicted of numerous federal crimes stemming from a coup he attempted four years ago. But he won’t be, because clowns like the unnamed banker quoted in the Financial Times cared more about their freedom to call each other “pussies” with cultural impunity than with holding an authoritarian accountable for trying to invalidate an election.

It’s hard to signal “anything goes” more emphatically than by choosing a man with dozens of federal charges hanging over his head to be leader of the free world. There’s undercorrecting for bad behavior and then there’s undercorrecting.

Or consider Pete Hegseth, who faced the Senate Armed Services Committee today as it considers his nomination for secretary of defense. It should be possible to purge “wokeness” from the military, one would think, without resorting to a possibly alcoholic alleged sex pest with a soft spot for accused war criminals and no relevant qualifications to carry out the task. But I repeat what I said in a column last month: Part of the reason the right is invested in Hegseth’s success is because of the allegations of sexual misconduct that he’s facing. If deregulating the culture from leftist influence means anything, it means right-wing populists should no longer have to answer for #MeToo skeletons in their closet—credible or not.

Republican senators appear to have gotten that message. According to he The New Yorker, Joni Ernst and Susan Collins were given the chance to meet with the woman who accused Hegseth of sexual assault in 2017—and declined. That’s insane as a civic matter but understandable as a political one: If, like them, you found yourself suddenly operating in a cultural environment in which you were expected to grant impunity to abusive men on your side as a matter of course, wouldn’t you rather not know whether a man accused was actually abusive or not?

Ultimately my theory of why Republican voters tolerate bad behavior in their heroes is the same as Jonathan Last’s. “Republicans embrace vice not because they believe that the accused Republican figures are innocent, but because they believe they are guilty,” he wrote today. “And so these voters exist in the hope that their champion will go on to hurt their enemies on their behalf. After all: If a guy is willing to rape a woman, surely he can be counted on to visit destruction on Democrats, or woke generals, or whoever.”

I made the same point in November in working through why so many of the MAGA base’s favorite Trump nominees have been accused of lechery. If what you most want from politics is “hurting the people who need to be hurt,” naturally you’ll want ruthless men in charge who are comfortable with crossing lines. Trump’s movement has incentivized degeneracy by treating it as a form of courage.

Which is not the sort of movement we should want in charge at the very moment that America has begun shifting from overcorrecting to undercorrecting impropriety, I hope you’ll agree. But the die on that has been cast: The right wanted to take its chances with Trump, Pete Hegseth, and Andrew Tate, and in November America handed them the opportunity to do so. What’s the downside of humoring them for this little bit of time?