Right-wingers love to claim the left is trying to “destroy America”. Joe Biden, a long-time politician who isn’t a radical in any way whatsoever, is accused of the same. (They also sometimes call him a “communist” — at least they know enough about communism to know they’re against it.)

David Roberts, who operates a newsletter/podcast about clean energy and politics called Volts, explains what they’re doing:

In his book The School for Dictators, Ignazio Silone famously called fascism “a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place”. There is much wisdom there.

A core feature of reactionary (I’ll use that term rather than “fascist” because people love to pointlessly debate semantics) movements is an inversion of power. They cast the weak as looming threats and status-quo powers as the trembling victims.

This is a familiar move … in every reactionary movement. You see it in the US when they talk about gay or trans people imposing themselves on everyone, forcing their lifestyle down our throats. Or when they talk about how white people face more racism.

Or, on a grander scale, when they talk about how social justice warriors have taken over every institution in the the US, ruthlessly imposing their woke worldview.

It’s self-evidently ridiculous, but why do they do it so consistently?

The point is to justify their own escalating violence and lawlessness. They hate difference, they hate the status quo being challenged, they hate the existence of Others in their midst, so they need to convince one another that it’s ok to cast off norms and let the violence [or criminality or immorality] out.

This is why the only mode of moral argumentation you ever see from a reactionary is whataboutism. The point of “they did it first” (for whatever “it,” censorship or voter fraud or whatever) is not that “it” is bad and no one should do it, but that it’s ok for us to do it too.

It’s not even really a moral argument. It’s just a permission structure — they did it, so we can’t be held accountable for doing it too.

So when they create this mythology about Democratic voter fraud, the point is not “voter fraud is bad,” the point is, “it’s ok for us to do it too” [which explains why the people found to have voted twice or somewhere they don’t live are almost always Republicans].

The long-running narrative about left bias in the media is not about “bias is bad”, it’s about, “it’s ok for us to make full-on propaganda”. The point about violent rioting urban lefties is not “violence is bad”, it’s “it’s ok for us to be violent”.

The cliché goes “every conservative accusation is a confession,” and that’s kind of true, but it’s more accurate to say every accusation is permission — permission for the right to do in reality what it has worked itself up to believe the left is doing.

Oh I forgot to mention the classic example we’re living through: endlessly accusing the left of censorship to justify banning books and rewriting history.

It’s all a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place — a way of defending and reinforcing status quo hierarchies by exaggerating the power and efficacy of the marginalized and vulnerable, the outsiders trying to reform the status quo in an egalitarian direction.

I was thinking about this the other day listening to the @IfBooksPod episode on Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”. Goldberg desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an intellectual, but literally the only thing he could think to do is the World Biggest What About. It’s “we’re rubber, you’re glue” puffed up to hundreds of pages. It’s just how their brains work. It’s never “people should be good”. It’s always, “you can’t call us shitty because you’re shitty too”.

And that is the most primal and formative feature of reactionary psychology: the belief that everyone is selfish, everyone is out for themselves, it’s a zero-sum world in which tribes compete for dominance, and all the progressive talk about universalist values is just a clever con.

They have to believe that. Their worldview has no room for people of good will trying earnestly to do good for humanity. They need for all the Others they hate to be sinister and powerful and right on the verge of taking over and destroying everything.

They need it because it gives them permission to indulge their base instincts. “We have to do this violence/censorship/lawbreaking, it’s the only way to stop the gays/immigrants/professors from destroying our way of life”. Every time it’s the same.

A friend reminded me that I forgot the most perfect example for this thread: all the “Flight 93 election” stuff! If you’re not familiar, this is the right-wing idea that US culture has been hijacked by the left and is headed for some grim end, so anything the right does to regain control is justified, even if it crashes the plane. The danger from the left is so severe, so immediate, that even blowing everything up is better than the alternative. Again, the point is always to create that permission structure.

“You prosecute us for real crimes, we’ll prosecute you for fake crimes!” Sigh.

Unquote.

Mr. Roberts then provides a few recent examples of this phenomenon:

In case you haven’t heard, some of the worst House Republicans are pushing to impeach Biden. On what grounds? They don’t know yet, but there must be something, either real or imaginary.