Blood and Gore on the Right

The American midterms and the beginning of the end for Trump.

I recently had the too infrequent pleasure of rereading a favourite book of mine, The Last Empire, by that American treasure, the late Gore Vidal. Published in 2001, before the 9/11 terror attacks and the tumultuous period which followed (has it ended?), the collection of essays was my introduction to a more nuanced approach to American politics, history and culture.

Read a quarter-century later, the book serves as a useful reminder that the moment the US now finds itself in is not without its antecedents. In its final section are two enlightening essays entitled The New Theocrats and Chaos. I can’t help but shake my head in wonder at how little has changed since old Gore wrote the essays twenty-five years ago. In The New Theocrats, he writes of a convention of Southern Baptists denouncing Disney and its subsidiary the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) “for showing a lesbian as a human being, revelling in Pulp Fiction violence, flouting Christian family values.”

Fast forward to the lead up and aftermath of the 2022 midterms, and conservative fear-mongering, moral hysteria and faux outrage are as virile (and viral) as ever. Ron DeSantis, incumbent governor of Florida, cruised to victory on November 8th after a campaign and four-year term largely spent focused on the supposed threat gay and transgender people posed to the state’s unsuspecting children, who were being “groomed” into perverted lifestyles by godless communists and other undesirable elements (in other words, their teachers). "In the state of Florida, we are not going to allow them to inject transgenderism into kindergarten,” DeSantis railed. The Parental Rights in Education act (or “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as its opponents have labelled it), passed by Florida’s Republican-controlled legislatures and signed into law by DeSantis, bans instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation “in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Critics have pointed out the bill’s easily weaponized vagueness and many have accused it of solving a problem that doesn’t exist (a common tactic for Republicans), since gender identity and sexual orientation have quite understandably never been on the curriculum for the grades affected.

DeSantis is hardly alone in capitalizing on exaggerated fears of a “woke agenda,” regardless of clashing logic. In Texas, the just reelected Governor Greg Abbott would presumably also claim to be protecting parents’ rights (?) with his order directing the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to “conduct child abuse investigations of parents who give medically necessary gender-affirming care to their transgender children.” But as Vidal documented in the essays alluded to, to expect consistency with Republicans is a fool’s errand. The point isn’t for their grotesque right-wing versions of (un)virtue-signalling to make sense, but rather to rile up the base and antagonize the left. Remember that DeSantis and Abbott are the same governors that sent buses and planes full of migrants to New York and Martha’s Vineyard just a few months ago.

In response to this enduring species of poison, Vidal in 1997 called for Disney to bring the Baptists to court over a threatened boycott on “chilling-of-First-Amendment grounds as well as for restraint of trade” so that they might get “a lesson in constitutional law they will not soon forget.” Yet the signs are all around us that the firm hand conservative zealots seem to always be in need of has not yet come. When Walt Disney Chief Executive Bob Chapek belatedly voiced his disappointment with Florida’s Parental Rights in Education act last spring, Governor DeSantis revoked “the company's special status that allowed it to essentially self-govern its 25,000-acre (10,120-hectare) Walt Disney World complex.” When tech firms such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple added their names to the more than 60 companies running ads opposing Governor Abbott’s above-mentioned order, it was just more grist for the mill, feeding a Republican narrative of hard-working, honest Americans under attack from all sides from wokeism run wild.

The country was going to hell and it was all the Democrats’ doing. They were the ones destroying the country with their woke ideology and election fraud, infecting schools, corporations, democracy itself. Never mind Donald Trump’s endless lying and demagoguery. On the heels of momentous setbacks inflicted on abortion rights decades after Roe v. Wade, who cared that Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker had pressured several women to have abortions and that evidence existed that he had paid for at least one of them? Control of Congress was at stake!

In an atmosphere such as this, where logic and sanity seem to have been abandoned by half the voting population, the urge to throw your hands up in despair and give up on humanity is quite strong. Certainly Vidal at the end of his life evinced a certain whiskey-fuelled depression at the state of the American experiment. As the 2022 US midterms approached, you could sense the jittery incomprehension from the left that they were about to be rejected once again in favour of the craven hypocrites. According to the normal rules of American politics, the Republicans expected a tsunami of protest votes against the incumbent Democratic Party to propel them to a comfortable majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The economy is according to some already in a recession, and inflation is eating into what little wage growth workers have seen. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, sits with an approval rating of 41.5% as of this writing. In any normal year, the president’s party, especially one holding all three chambers, would be completely wiped out, as we saw with President Obama and the Democrats in the 2010 midterms in response to the Great Recession and health care law. The last time a president’s party defied this gravity was in the midterms after 9/11 when Republicans achieved gains in the House and Senate.

But the widely predicted ‘red wave’ never came. Instead, the Democrats will hold the Senate and may even increase their seats by 1, should incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock defeat Herschel Walker, as seems increasingly likely. Some may protest that the Democrats will lose the House of Representatives, but that is to miss the point. At the height of the Republicans’ confidence, there was talk of a haul of upwards of 60 seats in the House. They’ll be lucky if they take control by 4. And for Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to have been denied the Senate majority for the second time in a row and under these circumstances can only be viewed as an unmitigated disaster.

Someone or something must be blamed. 9/11 was the obvious cause in 2002. In 1998, the other modern example, it was Republican overreach with the Clinton impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate. For that, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was tossed from his speaker’s position. Now who do you think will get the blame this time? Who was it that lead the Republicans into not just this clusterfuck, but the one in 2020 as well?

Who could it possibly be?

Can America pull free of the Trump vortex? Drawing by the author.

We all know the answer to that question, or at least there’s no excuse not to, but Republican grandees and their respective cliques are currently circling each other with daggers drawn to determine it, and their answer, whether it comes in the months ahead or in 2024, will decide what bloody corpse is left on the floor as the GOP picks up the pieces. DeSantis and Abbott, though, with their squash victories, make it clear that the party’s base continues to be prime hunting ground for the cynical opportunism of the Republican establishment. In other words, despite independent voters’ rejection of the most dictatorial features of Trumpism, the new theocrats remain alive and thriving.

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In the essays I mentioned, Vidal explores the philosophers Plato and Vico’s theory of the inexorable stages human societies must pass through.

First, there is a theocratic age, next an aristocratic age, followed by a democratic age, which degenerates into chaos and out of which some new idea of divinity will emerge to unite us all in a brand-new theocratic age, and the cycle begins again.

It’s an admittedly neat and tidy (and as such, simplistic) way to look at things, as Vidal allowed, but in times like these, such theories sometimes prove useful. The last few years have for many of us provided the shocking spectacle of seemingly sane family, friends, and acquaintances all but rooting for the end of our democratic age and the advent of chaos, with some apparently of the view this could be quickly skipped en route to a new theocracy. It is a desire borne of inchoate, unreasoning rage, itself the result of a metastasizing powerlessness in the face of overhyped expectations, which I remember briefly having in my teenage years and early twenties, minus the religion part. Why? In our naïveté, we perhaps imagine the conditions hindering us would be swept away, and a new blockchain-enforced utopia would descend from the heavens. But that’s not how the world works.

It is my sincerest hope that the relief so many of us feel now that the American voters have signalled their preference for those “out of touch rather than out of their minds” is not something transitory, but a sign of a deeper shift. If the American experiment is to survive much longer, this hope will have to be vindicated. It is a hope old Gore died without.