Wokeism vs. "Semi-Fascism"

Both sides suck, which is worse?

Photo credit: Peter Cade, Getty Images

Editor’s Note: Ask a question, any question, at askmattlabash@gmail.com Though keep it (relatively) clean, and leave Matt’s mom out of it. Matt’s very sensitive about his mom.

Dear Matt,
You seem like a right-leaning both-sidesist – and I know when I see one because I am a left-leaning both-sidesist. That must be why we get along so well. Anyway, why do you find yourself being so harsh to your townfolk? Does it sell subscriptions? Do you have a conscience? Are you trying to get Rachel Maddow to convert to a paid sub? Is it something else? Plus, for extra credit (although everyone gets a participation trophy), when will you become more proactive about bashing wokeism? We need your criticism badly over here! If nothing else consider it a prayer request.
Daniel Herndon (writer of The Lorem Ipsum)

Thanks for your question(s). All twenty of them. I will try to answer as straightforwardly as possible, with occasional writerly flourishes, the latter of which is why you pay me the big bucks, or at least five dollars a month. Which in these inflationary times, buys me about 20 ounces of a 40-oz Steel Reserve. You know your country is in trouble when you can’t even afford to get drunk enough to forget how much peril it’s in.

As I’ve stated before, and very recently, I am not a both-sidesist. I’m a neither-sidesist. As my late, great pal, P.J. O’Rourke, used to say, “Don’t vote, it just encourages the bastards.” I’m pretty sure P.J., a committed right-winger, albeit an independent-thinking one, voted. Sometimes even for people he loathed (Hillary Clinton), to cock-block people he loathed even more (Donald Trump). As he said of his extremely-pained Hillary endorsement:

I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.

Unlike P.J., I couldn’t bring myself to hold my nose and vote for Hillary. But neither did I vote for Trump, who even when I agreed with him (yes, open borders are bad, yes, America should not be China’s trainbearer), I regarded as a sociopathic lunatic. Proving, once again, that first impressions are usually accurate ones.

Forget the four years he spent kicking the hornet’s nest every single day, trying to divide the country worse than it already was before he came along. Forget the coup attempt he inspired and actively spurred, becoming the first president in history to sic a mob on Congress for performing their constitutional duty of ratifying the people’s will. We don’t even need to go back that far, to the long-ago days of 2021. Why, in just the last week or so, Trump has engaged in his favorite hobby: sitting at his crack-pottery wheel to repurpose barmy QAnon talking points on his ironically named Twitter knockoff, “Truth” Social. And of course, he’s just been found (in spite of the protests of  purportedly law’n’order loving Republicans, many of whom now want to defund the FBI) to have broken the law by squirreling away boxes-full of documents at his golf club, plenty of them top secret, with precisely zero coherent explanations as to what he was up to. And then, to put the cherry on top – Trump, being a Maximum Leader, usually puts at least two cherries on top – he demanded that he be reinstated as president, effective immediately, even though he lost the popular vote and the electoral college by a wider margin and nearly as-wide-a-margin, respectively, than Trump lost to/beat Hillary by in 2016. (Which Trump referred to as “a landslide.”)  This, after scores of courts, including ones presided over by Trump-appointed judges, and loads of Republican election officials reaffirmed the outcome, even as Trump tried to muscle one of them (on tape!) to overturn his state’s election results.

If my fellow “conservatives,” a term I can now only use in scare quotes in good conscience, refuse to acknowledge the realities biting them in the ass every day, that’s on them. Not on me. If failing the ideological litmus of refusing to believe and echo an obvious lie (which has become the purity test by which most Republican elected officials are judged nowadays, since Trump is still the party’s standard-bearer and prohibitive favorite to win the party’s nomination again) makes me a non-conservative, then who gives a toss? I don’t. So be it. I didn’t get into this line of work to tell people what they wanted to hear. I got into it to tell them the truth. Also, to get free office supplies. (Back when I had an office.)

So I have to laugh when my winger friends accuse me of trying to curry favor with the left, when every financial incentive for a right-winger for the past half-decade has been to sell out hard to a certain tangelo-flavored real estate developer. I’m doing just fine, subscriber-wise. But I could easily have five times as many if I did that. To that end, I highly recommend former Republican operative Tim Miller’s excellent book, Why We Did It: A Travelogue From The Republican Road To Hell. Tim, who I only know through very infrequent emails, names names and takes scalps, some of whose are people he used to work with, who know better, but who went along to get along anyway, often financing their new beach houses along the way. I won’t name any of those names now. (Okay, one: Ari Fleischer, who is such an unrepentant phony, he warrants a special shout-out. In fairness, I don’t know if Ari has a beach house. Though it would be convenient for him if he did: a place where he could more comfortably bury his head in the sand.)

As for the left’s excesses? The left’s hare-brained excesses are why -  despite how much I loathe what Trumpism has done to not only the country generally, but people I know and love, personally -  I’m not a lefty, either. Trumpsters and the new breed of often former-lefty anti-anti-Trumpsters who make a living milking them until they moo, like to pretend that history began around half past yesterday, when the War on Wokeness kicked into high gear. But I was on it back when it was still called “political correctness,” and when Trump was still a registered Democrat and only on his second wife.

You hate moronic diversity initiatives in the military, when their only real job is to kill people and break things? So do I!  Here I am, back in 1997, actually traveling to Cocoa Beach, to the military’s official diversity institute, cataloging all the inanities I saw there. (There were many.)  I did the same with the government contractor grievance-group Olympiad at an Orlando conference in 2009.  Here I am on transgendered-politics language/logic distortions back in 2015.  You hate the ideological thugs in Antifa? #MeToo! Here I was beating the rhetorical hell out of them in 2017, even as they beat the physical hell out of my profile subjects in the purported cradle of free speech, Berkeley, as lefties of “good conscience” looked on, untroubled.

As one of my favorite mandal’ed socialists used to put it, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. (Ring any bells, lefties?) Just don’t chuck that stone at my subjects’ heads, please.

The problem here, of course, isn’t that the black-pajama’ed anarchists aren’t still anarchists. They are. The problem is that Republicans, instead of combating them, have come to resemble them. It’s just that their anarchists wear golf shirts and khakis and MAGA hats, while threatening FBI agents and to overturn elections.

“Sad,” as their anarchist-in-chief is fond of saying.

As I’ve stated here outright on many occasions, I’m no Joe Biden fan. And there were perhaps many things not to like about his speech of the other night, the one that has Republican panties-in-a-bunch, as they decry Biden as a “divisive president.” (This, after seven solid years of excusing and even extolling the utterances of their Divider-in-Chief. Irony-awareness is always the first casualty when embracing autocracy.)  I could’ve done without some of it myself, such as Biden mounting the dais at Independence Hall in front of red, Mephistophelean mood lighting  that made him look like he was about to kick off  Death Metal Night at the senior center.

Still, plenty of what he said was objectionable to “conservatives,” not because he hadn’t removed the beam from his own eye (say, the destructive Summer of 2020 riots, which Democrats conveniently love to never acknowledge),  or because he was being “polarizing,” but because much of what he said was true.  And hard truth, as we know, often leaves a boo-boo.

So when Biden intones:

Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic. Now, I want to be very clear, very clear up front. Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know, because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. But there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.

Yeah, kind of. (Though not so sure Biden wasn’t being overly magnanimous when he stipulated the majority weren’t MAGA Republicans.) Just witness all the election-deniers who have prevailed in recent Republican primaries. Many of whom probably don’t even believe their own bullshit. They’re just parroting the new party line for the sake of convenience and self-advancement.

And when Biden says: “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election, and they’re working right now as I speak in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself”?   

Ditto.  Based on the overwhelming evidence, it’s hard to argue with that. If election-denying Republicans don’t like partisan Democrats like Biden calling them “semi–fascists” – here’s a novel solution: stop acting like semi-fascists! If you don’t like the truth, the answer – for the health of the republic’s sake, if you have no regard for your own personal moral hygiene – isn’t to deny the truth, but to act in such a way as to turn it untrue.  Wanna prove that your party isn’t against democracy? Then quit rewarding undemocratic charlatans.

Which is why I’m no longer on the side I’ve (mostly) always been on, even if I haven’t joined up with the other side, which has its own problems.  Luckily or, depending on your viewpoint, unluckily, the only way to resolve our differences, if you’re the sort of originalist “conservatives” so often pretend to be, is through our constitutional processes. Not through blowhard-pundit-gasbaggery or impassioned pitchfork-wielding.  We have to settle differences at the ballot box, not in the streets or in the broken-glass-strewn, feces-caked halls of Congress after an angry mob has invaded it, at the behest of their then-president and with cover-fire laid down by their elected representatives who are afraid of him.  And if a large portion of one-half of the country refuses to live by those results, well, that gives me even greater pause than some lefty nutjob cancelling comedians or insisting I use invented pronouns that are enemies of the English language. Which admittedly, are awful.  Both behaviors evidence stupidity, petulant temper-tantrum throwing, and nods toward totalitarianism.  But only one of those behaviors – the former – could permanently undo my ability to punish and eject the jackasses who embrace such stupidity.

George Orwell nicely outlined the hazards of choosing your side, and sticking with it no matter how misguided your side becomes.  In his 1945 essay, “Notes on Nationalism,” he wrote:

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by “our” side……The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them……In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.

Telling the truth shouldn’t be considered a pose, to curry favor with one side or another. It should, instead, be the only available menu option.  And if one side or the other can no longer tell the truth, no matter how long that side has been “our” side, it no longer deserves our loyalty. Instead, it deserves our enmity.  For such dishonesty doesn’t just make a mockery of truth, but of us.

Bonus Track:  This song breaks me in half and has been on my mind a lot lately.  So now seems as good a time as any to include it. It’s the Dave Rawlings Machine doing “Pilgrim (You Can’t Go Home).”  I love everything about it. I love Rawlings’ high lonesome whine. I love the back-up vocals by his longtime collaborator, Gillian Welch. I love the mandolin strains. I love the fact that the last two minutes of it sound like something Levon Helm would sing lead on with The Band.  I even love the lyrics:

So they kicked you out of paradise
Grinned and locked the garden gate
What those devils called your greatest sin
Gabriel and I called your great escape

You’ll want to put this one on repeat: