Just Answering Questions

Opting Out of Reactionary Centrism

Satire was made for them: How do you expect the party controlling all three branches of government to help us? * If we don’t allow Nazis to publish, are we really any different from Nazi Germany? * Do people actually deserve to live?—what if killing exactly half of everyone is the bipartisan solution Congress is looking for? * If Trump was so bad, why did we make so much money while he was president? * If gender is a “construct,” why can’t we offer some constructive criticism? * If some think the most vulnerable people in the country deserve to die, who are we to correct them? We’re only here to report the facts.

We know all the dots—the banned books, the anti-trans legislation, “groomer” hate speech, the casual remarks from the highest court about dissolving marriages, etc.: is it so surprising when the grandson of a politician from this same political party connects them? That he murdered five people and injured eighteen at Club Q in Colorado Springs on November 19 is a direct result of GOP propaganda. But we also know the fainter dots—the pinkwashing, the LGB “alliance,” and of course the countless editorials published in our national newspapers and magazines. What they form is another connection, a sort of “outer rim” of hate speech garlanded with pleases and thank-yous and “wow, that’s not very civil of you to say.”

In July, the New York Times published Pamela Paul’s “The Other War Against Women”—in its very language equating trans activists with the right-wing extremists who want them (and almost everyone else) dead. Paul, it’s worth noting, used to be the editor of the same paper’s book review, where she seems to have distinguished herself by assigning trans-positive books to suspiciously TERFy reviewers. It isn’t shocking, then, that the Times went with a similar “moderate” approach after the Club Q terrorist attack. While acknowledging the far-right’s “nationwide campaign of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. incitement,” Michelle Goldberg can’t seem to stop herself from adding a dampening proviso—that there are, she claims, “legitimate debates over questions like when puberty blockers should be prescribed or gender-confirming surgeries performed on minors” and linking to a story in the same newspaper about transition therapies. To even suggest that trans activists are overreaching in an essay arguing how LGBTQ individuals were murdered because of rhetoric—and in the same opinion pages increasingly known for publishing transphobic lies—is reprehensible. Especially when that essay tries to ally itself to victims of fascist propaganda but doesn’t mention any of the neoliberal or centrist propaganda that has worked so relentlessly to delegitimize trans activism. She then goes on—“But people who hurl baseless accusations of child abuse are not engaged in a debate”—as though engaging in “debate” about the rights, lives, and futures of others were somehow justifiable—that is, debates that do not affect transphobic columnists like Paul or Goldberg or Bret Stephens or David Brooks and so on and so on (there is and has been a lot of “so on” at the New York Times). By simply raising the specter of debate, Goldberg insinuates that it’s possible, with the right vocabulary—the right aesthetics—to agree with people who want, unconditionally, exactly what they got on Saturday: a few more murders and a lot more grief and despair. She implies that terrorists would be worth listening to if they simply lowered their voices.

It’s uniquely despicable to compulsively argue in the register of ingratiation: at least I’m not x, so you’ve got to hear me out. In its structure it implies a hierarchy or spectrum that doesn’t exist. There is no “middle ground” on whether one’s personhood is recognized or not, on whether it’s harmful to equivocate one’s identity with sexual assault or not. This is the bedrock of reactionary centrism: the idea that it’s important for fascists to like you, the idea that you can look for a little common ground. What this means is that centrists align themselves with fascists; they protect fascists from those who are deliberately working to undermine genocide. This is that amorphous field of pleases and thank-yous, of civility and debate. Centrists, in their fealty, acknowledge the “common sense” of genocidal ideology; they just happen to think it isn’t very nice (or more truthfully: isn’t very practical or profitable). By genocide, I mean white supremacy, male chauvinism, xenophobia, homo– and transphobia, ableism—any pattern of belief or behavior that ranks or prioritizes certain identities over others, invariably resulting in degradation and death.

To what end? Well, there isn’t one—not for the centrist. There is no aim because there is no future, only now. Today’s money, today’s security, today’s “balance.” This is why centrists react: they can’t envision a culture or a society in which they don’t profit from genocide. This, too, is why so many neoliberal intellectuals and entertainers veered to the right after Trump destabilized centrist power and invited a more visible and vocal leftist opposition. After decades of talking down to them, of making fun of them or making vulgar entertainment about their deepest beliefs, however harmful, the “tell it like it is” neoliberal (e.g., Bill Maher) has realized how important fascists are for their own livelihood and identity. Because just as they ingratiate themselves to fascists, so too must they ingratiate themselves leftward: at least I’m not a Republican, so you’ve got to hear me out. This is that “both sides” centrists imagine themselves between, regulating the language, the comportment, of vulnerable people and those who want to kill them.

In this absence of future or imagination (or even policy) lies the great extent of American power, an enormous ethical vacuum that, ultimately, regards genocide as a species of entertainment, as something to discuss—even laugh about—over drinks. Centrism—neoliberalism—offers nothing. Its “balance” is a politics of inaction. Faced with such nihilistic indifference, people voting, clamoring, screaming for the mass death of fascist control, fascist action, is no longer so surprising in a nation of overwhelming, suffocating desperation. And neither should it be a surprise that people—other people, more people—demand something better.

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Thank you for reading! If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ve noticed this letter is now called Entertainment, Weakly. Since social media seems so much less stable than it was a month ago, I’ve remodeled a bit. Going forward, I’m working toward making this a “weekly letter against feeling absolutely hopeless about entertainment, culture, and politics, and the way art touches all of them.” It’ll be a little cringe, a little spice, a lot of books. Please tell your friends if it seems like something they’d like to read. And, as ever, if you enjoyed reading this, you may be interested in my books, Image Control and Some Hell. Talk to you again soon <3