anonymoose
Classical Liberal
Good article on the transformation of the Republican Party
Excerpts:
There was a telling moment, for the American Right, in Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kyle Rittenhouse. The 18-year-old had just been acquitted of murder charges for shooting three people, killing two, during riots last summer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Carlson asked Rittenhouse whether he believed the government would protect him from threats he was receiving. “I hope so,” he said, “but we all know how the FBI works.”
You would expect that kind of statement from a “defund the police” advocate, but Rittenhouse is a former youth police cadet whose support for “Blue Lives Matter” was used to try and paint him as a racist and far-Right extremist. His world-weary cynicism about the FBI, expressed as Carlson nodded along approvingly, signals a major shift in a central axis of American politics.
Imagine how those same people feel now, after Special Counsel John Durham’s indictments have exposed the FBI’s role in perpetrating the Trump-Russia dossier fraud.
What does it mean when America’s law-and-order party comes to see law enforcement, along with much of the federal government, as fundamentally illegitimate?
In a campaign ad, Masters describes a nation under siege from within, “up against a media that lies to us, schools that teach our kids to hate our country, and corporations that have gotten so big, they think they’re bigger than America.”
… the Rittenhouse trial seemed tailor-made to illustrate the premises of their brand of populist nationalism. A young, working-class, white Trump supporter, Rittenhouse was subjected to a public smear campaign in which President Biden himself impugned him as a white supremacist in a campaign video. Meanwhile, the state prosecution deflected attention away from the evidence supporting Rittenhouse’s self-defence claims and onto his motives by suggesting that he had come to Kenosha looking for trouble — despite the fact that Rittenhouse could be seen on video, shortly before the shooting, offering medical aid to Black Lives Matter protesters.
As the prosecution bumbled its way through the trial and got publicly scolded by the judge, it only further proved the point of those who see an American regime spanning the upper layers of government, media, and business that is not only illegitimate but incompetent, run by emissaries of a “clown world,” as a popular phrase on the Right has it.
Think about what this says about our disgusting elite leadership in this country,” Vance said in a video message recorded days before the Rittenhouse verdict. “If we don’t defend this young boy who defended his community when no one else was, it may very well be your baby boy that they come for.” The day Rittenhouse’s acquittal was announced, Masters tweeted: “This case reminded us that our justice system, like every other institution our ancestors built, is under siege, and that the besiegers are very close to victory.”
… where Trump’s approach was visceral and inseparable from his singular personality, his would-be successors are more sober and more ideological. They are also supported by the kind of political infrastructure that was conspicuously lacking in the chaotic and chronically understaffed Trump administration.
… there are signs that the old version of bipartisan centrism in DC may be unsustainable. A recent Harvard poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 found that 39% overall believe American democracy is in trouble.
Read more here:
https://unherd.com/2021/12/the-rise-of-rittenhouse-republicans/?=refinnar
Excerpts:
There was a telling moment, for the American Right, in Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kyle Rittenhouse. The 18-year-old had just been acquitted of murder charges for shooting three people, killing two, during riots last summer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Carlson asked Rittenhouse whether he believed the government would protect him from threats he was receiving. “I hope so,” he said, “but we all know how the FBI works.”
You would expect that kind of statement from a “defund the police” advocate, but Rittenhouse is a former youth police cadet whose support for “Blue Lives Matter” was used to try and paint him as a racist and far-Right extremist. His world-weary cynicism about the FBI, expressed as Carlson nodded along approvingly, signals a major shift in a central axis of American politics.
Imagine how those same people feel now, after Special Counsel John Durham’s indictments have exposed the FBI’s role in perpetrating the Trump-Russia dossier fraud.
What does it mean when America’s law-and-order party comes to see law enforcement, along with much of the federal government, as fundamentally illegitimate?
In a campaign ad, Masters describes a nation under siege from within, “up against a media that lies to us, schools that teach our kids to hate our country, and corporations that have gotten so big, they think they’re bigger than America.”
… the Rittenhouse trial seemed tailor-made to illustrate the premises of their brand of populist nationalism. A young, working-class, white Trump supporter, Rittenhouse was subjected to a public smear campaign in which President Biden himself impugned him as a white supremacist in a campaign video. Meanwhile, the state prosecution deflected attention away from the evidence supporting Rittenhouse’s self-defence claims and onto his motives by suggesting that he had come to Kenosha looking for trouble — despite the fact that Rittenhouse could be seen on video, shortly before the shooting, offering medical aid to Black Lives Matter protesters.
As the prosecution bumbled its way through the trial and got publicly scolded by the judge, it only further proved the point of those who see an American regime spanning the upper layers of government, media, and business that is not only illegitimate but incompetent, run by emissaries of a “clown world,” as a popular phrase on the Right has it.
Think about what this says about our disgusting elite leadership in this country,” Vance said in a video message recorded days before the Rittenhouse verdict. “If we don’t defend this young boy who defended his community when no one else was, it may very well be your baby boy that they come for.” The day Rittenhouse’s acquittal was announced, Masters tweeted: “This case reminded us that our justice system, like every other institution our ancestors built, is under siege, and that the besiegers are very close to victory.”
… where Trump’s approach was visceral and inseparable from his singular personality, his would-be successors are more sober and more ideological. They are also supported by the kind of political infrastructure that was conspicuously lacking in the chaotic and chronically understaffed Trump administration.
… there are signs that the old version of bipartisan centrism in DC may be unsustainable. A recent Harvard poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 found that 39% overall believe American democracy is in trouble.
Read more here:
https://unherd.com/2021/12/the-rise-of-rittenhouse-republicans/?=refinnar
