The Chapo Guide to Revolution

by Chapo Trap House

  This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton and Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.

  In the 28 Days Later red-pupiled eyes of the Right, Clinton was a flag-burning, pot-smoking, USSR-visiting philanderer who, with his cookie-hating lawyer wife by his side, clambered over a heap of dead Arkansawyers to steal the White House with just 43 percent of the vote. One didn’t have to be a sovereign citizen under the unfringed flag of Ruby Ridge to divine that Slick Willie was an illegitimate president. For all his Third Way–ism, Clinton did undo Reagan-Bush abortion restrictions, let closeted gays serve in the military, and sign an assault weapons bill that took everyone’s dang guns away. With no major economic policy differences between Clintonite pragmatism and GOP orthodoxy (while the former at least accepted a social safety net, both supported NAFTA, the line-item veto, and prioritizing deficit reduction), culture-war issues and latent racial animus became more salient priorities to voters. After all, one party was promising to put an end to the daily baby Holocaust and throw Cadillac-driving welfare queens in prison, while the other was offering James Carville–garbled bromides about fiscal responsibility and “investing in opportunity.” Team Clinton’s feeble attempts to find middle ground with reactionary suburbanites—decrying black “superpredators” and Sister Souljah—proved unsuccessful in withstanding the electoral tidal wave propelled by the burgeoning populist right.

  In 1994, Newt Gingrich inner-tubed that wave of resentment straight into the speaker’s chair. Joining Newt’s Republican Revolution were such solons as Bob Dornan, who had recently outed a gay colleague and told a reporter that “every lesbian spear-chucker in this country is hoping I get defeated,” V and Col. Ollie North, who had committed some light treason by selling weapons to Iran and raised over $20 million from direct-mail solicitations (an early form of Kickstarter) to GOP grassrooters in his losing Senate bid.

  This new Republican Congress set about dismantling welfare, shutting down the government, and banning third-trimester abortions. But the antiestablishment fervor of right-wing voters—stoked by “feminazi”-hating outsiders like Rush Limbaugh, who was feted as the “Majority Maker” and made an honorary member of the class of ’94—was hardly sated by Newt’s modest changes to Congressional Process.

  In 1996, Pat Buchanan was back, baby—this time wielding a literal pitchfork to continue his peasant revolt against Washington, DC, which he thought was once a nice Southern town “before all that crowd VI came rolling in and took it over.” Despite a brief stint as front-runner, Buchanan lost the nomination, yet the old-style racial resentment at the amorphous DC establishment articulated by his campaign continued to metastasize. Buchanan later abandoned the GOP, announcing, “Neither Beltway party is going to drain this swamp,” but his brigades of aggrieved white suburbanites stayed, placated for the time being by the siren song of “compassionate conservatism” and a glibly pious cowboy LARPer from Texas.

  Bush Was Right

  * * *

  Based on the trajectory of his domestic agenda, George W. Bush was destined to be a one-term president. He inherited the dot-com bust, a recession, and a massive corporate-accounting scandal. His priorities were a tax cut for the rich and a bipartisan bill with Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy to inject the feds into public education. Sure, the frothing populist base got some weak-sauce pandering with stem cells and faith-based bullshit, but with Clinton and his blow job crimes receding in the rearview mirror, the grand old coalition of big business and lunkheads seemed destined to fracture. If only there were some sort of banner or, perhaps, flag they could all rally around . . .

  The 9/11 attacks finally gave the ambient cultural grievances of grassroots conservatism direction, focus, and energy. The global War on Terror became a fighting faith for the twenty-first century. This particular American combination of protestant wrath and militarized nationalism unleashed itself on the world, and woe betide any Arab or Frenchman who got in its way. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were blood rituals, sacrifices to a God who embodied a pure, retro vision of America in which the cultural pollutants of feminism, secularism, and multiculturalism were purged with fire. And no petty class grievances could ever disunify the GOP base, so engaged were they in the holy quest that gave new meaning to their lives.

  For an on-the-ground view of the populist right during the Bush years, here’s a first-person report from our own Matt Christman:

  Sometime after the invasion of Iraq, I worked in the bursar’s office of a public university in the Midwest. I spent my days typing up labels for files and updating student information in an open bullpen. I was accompanied by a few sounds: the piped-in nursing-home music of the local smooth jazz station and, from the office behind me, the soft murmuring of local right-wing talk radio and the wrenching, wheezing cough of the man inside. His name was Neil, and he was a thin, balding man with glasses and a failing mustache. His job was to badger students who were delinquent on their loan payments; otherwise, he listened to local talk-radio shitheads and coughed.

  One day I came into work and his office was empty. My boss told me that Neil was dead and that I should clean out his desk. There wasn’t much in there besides a travel-sized cologne bottle and some hard candy. The only other personal touch in the office was an editorial cartoon that Neil had cut out and pinned to his corkboard, depicting Uncle Sam standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier next to a row of fighter jets. He said, “Can Saddam come out and play?” This man had spent the last years of his life slowly suffocating and being yelled at by broke college students, his only source of pleasure and purpose coming from his imagined connection to the violent triumphs of the American military.

  Ever since then, I think of Neil whenever I contemplate the relentless militarized nightmare of the War on Terror. At the grassroots level, support for obscene military spending and imperial bloodletting satisfies a deep psychic need among neutered and demoralized American men.

  I ate the dead man’s candy and threw the rest of his shit out.

  Jingoism, fear, and explicit homophobia propelled the Republicans to an electoral high-water mark in 2004 (as of this writing, the only time since the 1980s that they won the presidential popular vote). But despite the bodies piling up in Iraq and the yellow-ribbon magnets plating entire car bumpers, those ancient tensions—people vs. establishment, slobs vs. snobs, plucky poor-kid summer camp vs. posh rich-kid summer camp—began to rise from their slumber.

  White suburban boomers were aging and getting ornerier, growing ever more concerned about the proximity of millennials to their lawn. Despite whatever liberalizing drugs they’d consumed in the 1960s, they were now being fed a steady diet of unadulterated rage from scaremongering local TV news, AM talk radio, Fox News, crypto-fascist publishing grifters, FreeRepublic.com, chain e-mails from Bill Cosby warning of the looming saggy-pants crisis, and the nascent right-wing blogosophere. It gave them a junkie’s craving for something harder than Bill Frist or Roy Blunt.

  And soon the slumbering wyrm revealed itself: Bush’s clumsy second-term attempt to privatize Social Security may have pissed off the AARP, but what really raised the hackles of the GOP base was shamnesty: the bipartisan bill to beef up border security, revise guest-worker visas, and offer a grueling path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Not even such seasoned statesmen as Lindsey Graham and John McCain could sell a Kennedy-cosponsored bill to their apoplectic ward heelers, who drew a line in the desert over letting brown people become legal residents. The rancor spilled over into the 2008 primaries, in which the right wing viewed McCain with suspicion or hostility for the immigration bill and his bleeding-heart opposition to using medieval torture techniq
ues on Muslims. To placate the grunts, he ran on generic “country first” militarism, highlighting all the villages he napalmed in Indochina to distract from the fact that this privileged son of an admiral wasn’t exactly a CHUD himself. When that didn’t cut it, he chose, in a desperate act with far-reaching consequences, to elevate one of their ranks to the ticket.

  Sarah Palin, a certified brain genius who has read every newspaper, awakened a primal urge in the populist Right. She proved that one of their own could stand on the national stage spewing verbal diarrhea and, quite possibly (if not for the machinations of the biased lib media), end up a heartbeat away from the presidency. Not coincidentally, McCain’s rallies in the home stretch devolved into screams of “Terrorist!” and “Liar!” and jeers at their own candidate’s feeble calls for civility. One rally full of Minnesota-nice conservatives featured a man cryptically telling McCain, “Obama will lead the country to socialism! The time has come, and the Bible tells us: ‘You speak the truth, and that the truth sets you free.’ ” Another woman told him, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, he’s not, uh—he’s an Arab,” to which McCain responded, Dear God, no, trust me, he’s not an Arab, he’s a normal person, I promise. VII

  Dog Days of Obummer

  * * *

  Then the Gay Muslim Marxist Canine-Eater won. America, Reagan’s shining city on the hill, vanished in a cloud of Choom smoke. Obama spent four years krumping on the Constitution, and real Americans had to just sit back and take it.

  Take it they did, but not well. Almost as soon as Obama was inaugurated, the country’s reserve population of cranks, gun-fuckers, and Revolutionary War cosplayers strapped teabags to their tricorne hats and staged armed occupations of JCPenney parking lots from coast to coast. They watched Fox News with the reverent intensity of an astronomer witnessing the explosion of a supernova. They forwarded e-mails about secret mosques in the White House basement and Facebook memes demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate. Such an awful and alien being simply could not be a real American. He had to have hatched from a glistening black egg in a sun-cursed Kenyan village, then slouched toward Washington, DC, in the dark of night. For the Right, the only psychic balm of those years was bearing witness to Obama’s relentless parade of scandals, frauds, outrages, and humiliations, all of which ensured that he would go down in history as a Carteresque failure who would keep Democrats out of any national power for a generation.

  Then he won again! Despite four years of craven appeasement and bowing and telepromptering and fifty-seven-states-ing and being from Kenya and Fast and Furious movies and LETTING OUR OPERATORS DIE AT BENGHAZI and lying about keeping my doctor and killing that fly and latte-saluting and putting his feet up and ACORN and Candy Crowley, dead and illegal voters somehow

  Schizopolis

  * * *

  Their brains broken by the cognitive dissonance of worshiping a country governed by someone who represented everything they fear and loathe, American right-wingers completely snapped and embraced the nihilistic spectacle of President Donald Trump. Much ink has since been dedicated to the question: Why? Here’s a couple of drops: Because Trump does to liberals and minorities exactly what they thought Obama did to conservatives. Politics has become a realm of purely spiteful grievance. The only way out of this state of gibbering resentment is a positive vision, one that reconciles the concept of “America,” which right-wingers hold sacred, and the fetid reality of multiculturalism and moral decay they see all around them. This vision is currently the one being promoted by the nascent white nationalist movement, which recognizes that the only way for America to conform to the glittering homeland they see in their heads is for the minorities and leftists and liberals and (((media types))) to be driven from the land. Only then, in a country re-founded on blood and soil, will the Starbucks barista write “Cool Dude” on your cup without rolling her eyes.

  Remember—and remember well—that anyone who tries to feed you a line about how Donald Trump is not a “real” conservative is absolutely full of shit or is trying to sell you the next big lie. Trump represents everything that this vicious and corrupt project has valorized and promoted for the last forty years, and what’s more, the disasters of right-wing governance have created a country exactly as stupid and desperate as the one that actually elected a buffoon like him. The problem Trump now presents for the conservative intelligentsia is that he’s simply too much like the hogs who’ve been lapping up the slop of conservative ideology for decades and not enough like the undead ghouls who’ve been ladling it out. Since he has absolutely no intellectual foundation, he lacks initiation in the rites, rituals, and codes that have allowed previous conservatives to present themselves as thoughtful.

  So strap in, folks. This is only the beginning. Trump himself, with his Heritage Foundation brain trust and Goldman Sachs cabinet, may look like a creampuff compared to the next generation of Republican demagogues who take the bloodthirsty, nativist, white-power ideology far more seriously.

  * * *

  I. Deborah Solomon, “Of Manliness and Men,” New York Times Magazine, March 12, 2006.

  II. Ayn Rand, “Screen Guide for Americans,” The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, 1947, http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/screenguideamericans.pdf.

  III. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 218.

  IV. “I think God made all people good, but if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?” Pat Buchanan, quoted in E. J. Dionne Jr., “Is Buchanan Courting Bias?” Washington Post, February 29, 1992.

  V. Francis X. Clines, “Appearing Nightly: Robert Dornan, Master of the Put-Down,” New York Times, June 27, 1995.

  VI. Black people.

  VII. Jonathan Martin and Amie Parnes, “McCain: Obama Not an Arab, Crowd Boos,” Politico, October, 10, 2008.

  Taxonomies

  * * *

  BOW-TIE DIPSHIT

  You remember the kid who carried a briefcase to school since he was eleven? He grew up into this creature. A very specific subset of right-wing anti-intellectual intellectual, the Bow-Tie Dipshit represents the upper crust of the conservative movement. Loathed by his peers from college and beyond for reminding teachers that they’ve forgotten to assign homework and for reporting his roommate to the FBI for having sex, a robust hatred of academia nevertheless courses through every molecule of the Bow-Tie Dipshit’s body. That body can currently be found enjoying lifetime tenure at Stanford’s Hoover Institution or George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

  Indeed, valorizing the pastimes and tastes of the conservative base is the main function of the Bow-Tie Dipshit. Where your average dipshit rube yelled “Shut up and play!” at the Dixie Chicks in 2003, the Bow-Tie Dipshit channeled his everyman populist rage into a three-thousand-word piece for his vanity project the Clarion Criterion about how the conductor of the New York Philharmonic attacked him personally by calling George W. Bush an “ignoramus.” This results in endless books, articles, and quotes cribbed from Thucydides about why NASCAR, hunting, smoking cigarettes, driving a hundred-thousand-dollar pickup, eating hog fat, etc., is the culturally and philosophically correct pastime as opposed to the frivolous and elitist hobbies (drinking wine, drinking coffee, sodomy) of the coastal types that Bow-Tie Dipshit spends all his time around.

  BACK CATALOG: Sell Your Child and Save: A Guide to Austrian Economics; Baseball: The Most Beauteous Sport; Modern Pericles: Why George W. Bush Will Join the Pantheon of Classical Heroes

  FAVORITE COLORS: Periwinkle, mauve, chartreuse, seersucker

  YOUTUBE LOGIC GUY

  This species is a hybrid synthesized from several preexisting ones. The Message Board Atheist, the Libertarian Logical Fallacy Man, and the
Age of Consent Warrior all existed as separate entities in the earlier days of the Internet, times when different types of people were cordoned off in different webrings that unified like-minded peoples. But ever since the vast online worlds merged into a few main social networks, these previously distinct species began to interbreed, chiefly to take on the incursion of disruptive, illogical species into their shared space.

  From their asexual reproductive methods emerged YouTube Logic Guy. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter were somewhat hospitable to this mutated progeny, but Twitter’s character limits imposed ceilings on the level of genius he was allowed to dispense at one time, while Facebook’s insistence on using real names prohibited the bravest soldiers of truth from employing all the weapons in their arsenal. It was not until YouTube was discovered that they could settle into an ecosystem that truly nurtured their biology, a platform that allowed them to stare directly into a webcam and talk about how Miracle on 34th Street misinforms children that it’s okay to not use reason for three hours at a time.

  While YouTube Logic Guy’s deformities—such as unearned intellectualism and obsession with boring-ass books that suck shit—may confuse the untrained into thinking he’s just an energy drink–swilling variant of the Bow-Tie Dipshit, he is vastly different. While the Bow-Tie Dipshit loves long-dead European authors, YouTube Logic Guy likes only one deado—Christopher Hitchens—and usually defers to living writers such as Sam Harris and GamemasterAnthony.