The Overton Window of Deviance

Posted on Wednesday 20 November 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Amanda Marcotte on how Christians seem not bothered by the immorality of Trump or his Cabinet picks;
  • Bret Stephens on defining deviancy down;
  • Timothy Snyder on how Trump is actually a fascist — and how fascists use narratives;
  • David French how different kinds of voters pay different kinds of attention;
  • And a couple items about lunatics.
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Christians seem not the least bothered.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 20 Nov 2024: How Mike Johnson’s Christian “morality” provides cover for Matt Gaetz, subtitled “Shielding Matt Gaetz fits with the long religious right tradition of defending bad men at women’s expense”

Opening:

It seems unshakeable, the Beltway press’s faith that Christian conservatives mean all that jibber-jabber about sexual morality. On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper laid into Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., for supporting the recently resigned Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., despite allegations that Gaetz paid an underage girl to have sex with him at a drug-fueled orgy. “You’re a man of faith, you’re a man of God, you’re a man of family. With some of these nominees, Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., I wonder — does it matter anymore for Republicans to think of leaders as people who are moral in their personal lives?” Tapper asked Johnson, who smirked before dodging the question.

Ending:

That’s why there’s simply no conflict between the Christian right and the leering version of MAGA represented by Gaetz and Trump. What binds them together is a belief that women are objects, to be used however the men who own them wish.

Despite their Jesus-talk, Christians apparently prefer the OT to the NT.

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Another perspective on the same issue? A concept similar to that of the Overton window.

NY Times, Bret Stephens, 19 Nov 2024: Defining Deviancy Down. And Down. And Down.

It’s been a little more than three decades since Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous essay on “Defining Deviancy Down.” Every society, the senator-scholar from New York argued, could afford to penalize only a certain amount of behavior it deemed “deviant.” As the stock of such behavior increased — whether in the form of out-of-wedlock births, or mentally ill people living outdoors, or violence in urban streets — society would most easily adapt not by cracking down, but instead by normalizing what used to be considered unacceptable, immoral or outrageous.

Perspectives would shift. Standards would fall. And people would get used to it.

Matt Gaetz, et al.

There’s a guiding logic here — and it isn’t to “own the libs,” in the sense of driving Trump’s opponents to fits of moralistic rage (even if, from the president-elect’s perspective, that’s an ancillary benefit). It’s to perpetuate the spirit of cynicism, which is the core of Trumpism. If truth has no currency, you cannot use it. If power is the only coin of the realm, you’d better be on the side of it. If the government is run by cads and lackeys, you’ll need to make your peace with them.

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From Timothy Snyder, who wrote ON TYRANNY (summarized here). As I’ve pointed out myself, the word has become a meaningless insult. That doesn’t mean Trump isn’t, in fact, technically, a fascist.

The New Yorker, Timothy Snyder, 8 Nov 2024: What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?, subtitled “Trump takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We should expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a cult of January 6th martyrs.”

It was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things, as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name.

Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean?

When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia has preserved the habit: a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are “fascists.” This is a trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers to his enemies as “fascists,” with no ideological significance at all. It is simply a term of opprobrium.

Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. When a fascist calls a liberal a “fascist,” the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.

With this key point about narratives.

A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump.

And this is Trump: his stories aren’t consistent, and don’t match external reality.

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How different kinds of voters pay different kinds of attention.

NY Times, David French, 17 Nov 2024: Donald Trump Is Already Starting to Fail

If you’re like most Americans and don’t follow the news closely, it’s easy to see why you would see Trump in more conventional terms. A Politico analysis of the Trump campaign’s ads showed that “the single most-aired ad from his campaign since the start of October is all about inflation, Medicare and Social Security — arguing that the vice president will make seniors already struggling with high prices ‘pay more Social Security taxes,’ while unauthorized immigrants receive benefits.”

…
Throughout the campaign, Trump ran with two messages. On the airwaves, he convinced millions of Americans that they were electing the Trump of January 2019, when inflation was low and the border was under reasonable control. At his rallies, he told MAGA that it was electing the Trump of January 2021, the man unleashed from establishment control and hellbent on burning it all down.

But here is his fundamental problem: The desires of his heart and the grievances of his base are ultimately incompatible with the demands of the majority, and the more he pursues his own priorities, the more he’ll revive his opposition. He’ll end his political career as an unpopular politician who ushered in a Democratic majority yet again.

We can only hope.

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Lunatics.

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