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I usually try never to go in for the latest tempest-in-a-teapot media outrage hashtag-o-rama, but, yes, please #FireTuckerCarlson. What a nasty misogynistic little piece of shit. He's always been a piece of shit but now they've "got" something on him. You're cancelled dude
No big surprises here. A huge chunk of what passes for "conservatism" is just raw and unmitigated contempt for women, dressed up as an ideology or philosophy we're supposed to take seriously
#FireTuckerCarlson
#FireTuckerCarlson
"Chicks just need to be put in their place bruh." "Trump that bitch." "Ima fuck some sense into her." This is the great intellectual heritage of Western civilization that the Right is so keen to defend
All this garbage about morality, virtue, self-restraint, community, blah blah blah. I could go on for hours or days, but just look at no less an icon than Phyllis Schlafly: a bizarre performance of self-hatred ("I like being inferior! It's great!") & naked collaboration w/ power
I was talking the other day about appreciating the tradition of social conservatism represented by people like Weaver or Kirk, vs. raw Trumpian revanchism or psychopathic libertarianism, but let's be honest: the traditionalist position is all about power & subordination too
Wanting to go back to an "organic" and ordered but unequal society organized around family, community, and traditional virtue is explicitly about putting women, children, and minorities back into their proper rank-ordered positions vs. the radical egalitarianism of the modern age
People can obfuscate & prevaricate, but I got the receipts. The republicanism of the founding fathers: based on an idea of virtue that envisioned a rank-ordered society in which wise property owning husbands & fathers represented the interests of their wives, kids & slaves...
The proslavery "ideology" (such as it is) worked out by the apologists of the Old South: not that different. The patriarch is the king in miniature, with a kingdom of lessers (women, kids, slaves, poor men) around him. Masters of Small Worlds, as Stephanie McCurry put it
So it has continued ever since. The evasions and obfuscations change - the raw capitalism of the Gilded Age was justified by a racist and classist deformation of Darwinism; it's still about keeping the powerful in power & the poor in the ditch - but the central conceit remains
Not a big surprise that biologically essentialist explanations have come back into vogue in this age of widening & exponential inequality (I heard a hilariously awful Ted Talk in this vein just yesterday), but that's a bit of a different subject
This ain't my first rodeo, folks. It's my third. I've been to two before is what I'm trying to say
. @CoreyRobin, as always, is annoyingly right about this. The whole history of conservatism was, is, and will continue to be a set of bullshit fables designed to justify the subordination of women under men, minorities under whites, poor under rich & so on
Which brings us back to #Tucker. Why is it that people who prattle constantly about morality & responsibility also think rape is not a big deal (possibly hilarious), feminists are just obstreperous harridans, & lesbians just need a good deep dicking? It's a *feature*, not a bug
It seems to me that all this authoritarianism-that-we-call-conservatism is fundamentally rooted in the gender relation - the basic organizing principle of men over women. Tawdry as it is as an example, this is why "grab em by the pussy" didn't faze Trump's supporters one tiny bit
It may be reductive or a monomania on my part, but it seems to me that the gender schema is the source code for all the other forms of inequality developed over time: racism, slavery, economic inequality, caste, homophobia, transphobia, & so on
Racism: gotta protect "white womanhood" from predation, which is code for emasculating, subordinating, and killing black men, and also raping black women. The central authority of the white father/husband becomes the pretext for all the other bad shit they want to do
Homophobia: it has always seemed to me that the Right's fixation on LGBT is less about the Bible & more about how various sexualities seem to threaten the gender relation (remember back in the day when men were men and women were women?)
Hence the extreme hatred of gay men (allegedly relinquishing their role as patriarchs & "effeminate," which means being like a woman, which is the worst possible thing) & the lurid bro-y fascination with lesbians (#Tucker thinks it would be hot as long as it's not his daughter)
I don't know where trans comes into this, except that gender variation seems to destabilize the authoritarian and unequal gender script that these people are so psychologically welded to. It's interesting that the "bathroom bills" recapitulated racist Southern rape fantasies
Everything comes back to Protecting Our Women and making sure they Stay in the Their Place - which becomes the ur text for all kinds of other inequalities, which inevitably get gendered & sexualized in manifold bizarre ways
People were vexed about why some women (about 42% I think) voted for the ogre Trump, but it shouldn't be too surprising (loop back to Schlafly). Most people most of the time are invested in the social order they're part of, even if it's unequal & even if they're subordinated
In the end it's Vichy France & we're all collaborators to one extent or another, despite all the pushing back & negotiation & resistance so many people do every single day. The cost of changing the script is great when the most cherished axes of power are at stake
