https://jillybeanmonet.substack.com/p/they-go-low-then-ask-for-a-reacharound
~~ recommended by dmar3 ~~
Every few months some well-moisturised liberal elder wanders out of the civility crypt to remind Democrats that the true test of character is whether they can remain graceful while Republicans are out in the yard hurling raccoons through the windows of the republic. Keep calm. Keep smiling. Keep your language measured. Show the country that one party still believes in norms, dignity, and responsible conduct. Meanwhile the other party can nominate a felon, a sex pest, a conspiracy junkie, a theocratic lunatic, or a man who sounds like he learned syntax from an AM radio hostage tape, and we are all supposed to nod thoughtfully and discuss whether his appeal reflects “economic anxiety”.
I am fresh out of patience for that sermon.
It survives because it flatters the people who repeat it. There is a smug pleasure in being the adult, the grown-up, the last custodian of decency in a collapsing room. It allows Democrats and their admirers to imagine themselves as the final guardians of proper civic behaviour while everything around them catches fire. The trouble is that this fantasy has become politically paralysing. One side keeps being asked to behave like a church deacon presiding over a bake sale. The other is free to rummage through the sewer for whichever moral catastrophe polls best with men who think empathy is communism.
That mismatch has warped the whole conversation. Democrats are judged by standards Republicans abandoned years ago. A Democratic candidate is expected to be emotionally intelligent, intellectually coherent, ethically tidy, temperamentally calm, and polished enough to reassure every skittish columnist with a wine fridge and a panic disorder. A Republican candidate merely has to promise punishment. Punishment for liberals, punishment for migrants, punishment for queer people, punishment for women who want control over their own bodies, punishment for teachers, punishment for cities, punishment for anyone who does not clap on command for the old social order. If he can offer that, his coalition will forgive almost anything else. Affairs, fraud, ignorance, racism, authoritarianism, cruelty, public humiliation, even a flirtation with political violence. The right no longer weighs moral depravity the way a healthy political movement would. It weighs usefulness.
Donald Trump is the monument to that collapse. The man has dragged around a catalogue of disgrace so long it ought to be stapled into the Congressional Record. Multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. Civil liability for sexual abuse and defamation. Two impeachments. Criminal indictments. Felony convictions. Open attempts to overturn an election. Public pressure on state officials to “find” votes. A constant stream of lies, extortion, race-baiting, and strongman filth. He mocked the disabled, coddled white nationalist sentiment, treated classified documents like party favours, and transformed the presidency into a cheap grift with Secret Service protection. Republicans watched all of that and still decided he was their vessel of moral restoration, like a televangelist choosing a mascot from the county lock-up.
That choice tells you nearly everything worth knowing about the current Republican Party. Character no longer disciplines power on the right, it is merely decorative. It matters only when it can be weaponised against an enemy. A Republican can stagger from scandal to scandal with the shambling resilience of a half-dead casino ghoul, and conservative voters will still line up to defend him so long as he keeps promising revenge and judicial appointments. Trump hurts the people they want hurt. He gives shape to their resentments. He offers them a version of America where hierarchy returns, women know their place, queer people disappear from public life, immigrants stay frightened, and liberals are mocked with the sort of wet delight small boys bring to burning ants with a magnifying glass. That is the bond. The corruption, the lies, the legal peril, the psychological sewage, all of it becomes background noise once the cruelty lands in the right direction.
And still Democrats are told to respond with poise. Speak softly. Avoid mockery. Keep your voice level. Do not sound too angry about the party trying to criminalise abortion, erase trans people, gerrymander itself into permanent power, and whitewash an attempted coup. Apparently the real danger is not the movement grinding rights into mulch. The real danger is a Democrat sounding a bit too contemptuous of the bastards doing it.
I cannot think of a better way to train a party into uselessness.
A great deal of liberal respectability culture seems to believe that composure has magical political properties. If Democrats can just remain sufficiently elegant while Republicans claw at the walls and piss in the drinking water, the public will eventually reward them for good behaviour. There is always a fantasy audience hovering in the background of these lectures: a nation of fair-minded moderates who are deeply moved by restraint, appalled by vulgarity, and poised to hand power to whichever side keeps its lapels cleanest. I am sure a handful of these creatures exist somewhere, perhaps roaming the hills of New Hampshire in quilted vests, but they are not numerous enough to justify an entire political philosophy built around tasteful defeat.
Power does not go to whoever writes the nicest statement about democratic norms. Rights are not preserved because one party kept its language free of sharp edges. Courts are not saved by a tasteful refusal to call a fanatic a fanatic. The people who lose under Republican rule do not get their freedoms back because Democrats chose to sound statesmanlike while those freedoms were being hauled to the slaughterhouse. Women in red states are not rescued by the knowledge that the opposition maintained a very even tone while their reproductive autonomy was handed over to a mob of smug theocrats with clipboard fetishes. Queer children are not protected by a particularly elegant floor speech. Workers do not regain labour protections because some Democratic strategist decided the word “extremist” might frighten affluent suburban dads who think fascism is a little gauche before lunch.
That is why the whole “go high” mantra curdles so quickly into something obscene. It asks the vulnerable to bear the cost of somebody else’s moral performance. It asks women, queer people, migrants, poor families, teachers, black voters, and everyone else in the path of Republican governance to accept that the opposition may not actually fight with the urgency their lives require, because preserving the aura of civic decency apparently matters more than winning. It converts ethics into stagecraft. The politician gets to feel noble. The consultant gets to feel prudent. The pundit gets to sigh approvingly about “adult leadership”. Everyone at the top gets a little emotional manicure while the people at the bottom are left to absorb the consequences of Republican power with their bodies.
The Roy Moore episode should have permanently killed any illusion that the right still possesses a functioning relationship with standards. Alabama Republicans were given a choice between a Democrat and a man accused of pursuing teenage girls while in his thirties. The question before them was not particularly difficult. It did not require a philosophy seminar, a pollster, or six Sunday roundtables. It required only a pulse and a basic aversion to electing someone who sounds like he ought to be banned from shopping centres. Yet millions of Republicans still found a way to treat the allegations as secondary to the more pressing horror of possibly voting for a Democrat. That is where the floor is. Somewhere under the basement, clawing at bedrock.
Herschel Walker provided the same lesson in a different key. The man was plainly unfit, and not in some abstract or technocratic sense. He was a catastrophe in public. Accusations of domestic abuse, hypocrisy over abortion, intellectual incoherence, and the sort of halting instability that makes you glance around for the nearest responsible adult. A serious party would have taken one look at the mess and quietly led him offstage before anyone could hand him a microphone. Republicans, on the other hand, treated him as a perfectly viable Senate candidate because he wore the right jersey and could be counted on to help the team. Competence was beside the point. Character was beside the point. Basic dignity was beside the point. The whole exercise had the feel of a cult trying to force a cardboard cut-out through a confirmation hearing.
Matt Gaetz is another excellent reminder that the Republican appetite for moral sewage has no obvious lower limit. Investigations, allegations, a face like a youth pastor who sells ketamine out of a Jet Ski dealership, and still the man remains a conservative darling in large parts of the movement because he screams at the proper enemies and packages depravity as swagger. The right has become a refuge for people who treat shamelessness as charisma. Every fresh disgrace gets recoded as anti-establishment authenticity. Every scandal becomes proof that the media fear him. Every criticism is recast as persecution. It is the political equivalent of watching someone kiss a toad and insist the warts are a sign of leadership.
Ken Paxton deserves his own encyclopedia volume in any honest obituary for Republican morality, because he is the whole scam in one sweating, self-righteous body. Here is a man who has built a career on the usual conservative pantomime about law, order, family, children, predators, sin, and all the rest of the Bible-camp boilerplate they drag out whenever they want to sound like civilisation’s last line of defence. He has spent years posing as a guardian of virtue while governing like a man who would sell the locks off the nursery door if the donor call went well enough.
Then you look at the Adam Hoffman case and the whole act becomes painfully obvious.
Hoffman, a former Waco attorney, had originally been charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony carrying the possibility of life in prison. That is where the case began. Under Paxton’s office, after a mistrial, it got hacked down to misdemeanors. What followed was the sort of plea outcome that ought to end the political career of any man who has ever pounded a podium about protecting children. The final sentence was 60 days. Hoffman got out after 29. Twenty-nine days. A child rape case that once carried the possibility of a life sentence wound up with less jail time than some people get for repeated DUI violations and a sufficiently bad attitude in front of the judge.
And that is the bit that should be nailed to Paxton’s forehead every time he opens his mouth about family values. Republicans love using children as stage props. They wheel them out for speeches, campaign ads, school-board tantrums, and every fresh moral panic they can concoct about drag queens, books, bathrooms, pronouns, and whichever other imaginary menace is useful for stirring up the faithful. They speak of children the way medieval priests spoke of relics, with trembling reverence and one eye on the collection plate. But when an actual child sexual abuse case landed inside Paxton’s prosecutorial world, the great defender of innocence somehow found his way to a deal so limp it practically dissolved on contact with air.
That is who these people are. Not protectors. Opportunists. Moral exhibitionists. They reserve their harshness for the powerless and their mercy for the politically convenient. They can summon oceans of theatrical concern when the target is a librarian, a trans teenager, or a teacher with a rainbow sticker on her classroom door. Put a real abuse case in front of them, one that might require seriousness instead of pageantry, and suddenly the iron fist turns to custard. The standard is never the harm done. The standard is always who can be used, who can be sacrificed, and who still has value to the machine.
Every time some civility addict insists Democrats must stay gracious while Republicans sink lower and lower, I think of men like Paxton: men who wrap themselves in piety, scream about saving children, and then preside over outcomes that leave you wondering whether the whole “family values” routine is anything more than a cheap Halloween costume for sadists and frauds. Expecting Democrats to stay polished and decorous while Republicans elevate men like Paxton turns “virtue” into a rigged game, one side bound by standards, the other rolling around in filth without consequence.
So when Democrats are told to “be better,” my first response is always: better for whom? Better for the women trapped in states where doctors now need legal counsel before treating a miscarriage? Better for the trans teenager being used as a punching bag by a governor desperate to distract from his own mediocrity? Better for the black voters watching Republican legislatures carve electoral maps into little racist origami swans? Better for the school librarian wondering whether a stack of books will cost her a career because some mother with an Instagram account and a God complex thinks Toni Morrison is pornography?
The moral pressure placed on Democrats would be merely irritating if the stakes were symbolic. Roe is gone because Republicans fought like rabid sewer rats for half a century while Democrats too often treated abortion rights as a permanent feature of the landscape, something that could be defended with speeches, good intentions, and the occasional fundraiser email. The post-Roe horror show has been exactly what many of us warned it would be. Women denied urgent care. Doctors terrified of prosecution. Wanted pregnancies turned into medical hostage situations. Legislators with the emotional range of damp plaster deciding that a woman’s body is now a site for ideological theatre. The same conservatives who shout “freedom” until they are blue in the face have spent years trying to force women into childbirth and then gut the support systems that might keep those women and children afloat once the cameras leave.
And still there are Democrats who think the main challenge here is not to sound too harsh.
I would love to know what quantity of human suffering finally qualifies a Republican as deserving of open contempt. How many dead women. How many terrified children. How many families ripped apart. How many libraries purged. How many election lies. How many judges plucked from the Federalist Society’s taxidermy basement and dropped onto the federal bench to gnaw at civil rights for a generation. At what point does a Democrat earn permission to stop sounding like a diplomat at a hostage negotiation and start sounding like someone who recognises the moral ugliness of the people in front of them.
Because anger, contrary to the soft-headed liberal suspicion of it, is not some embarrassing loss of discipline. Sometimes anger is what honesty sounds like when the stakes are no longer abstract. Sometimes fury is the only proportionate response to organised cruelty. A woman forced to carry a doomed pregnancy because a Republican legislature wanted to cosplay as the Vatican is entitled to fury. A queer teenager watching adults in suits debate whether he should be allowed to exist in public is entitled to fury. A worker watching the right strip away labour protections while sermonising about family values is entitled to fury. If Democratic politicians cannot summon that emotion in public, if they insist on translating every atrocity into consultant-approved mush, then they deserve every ounce of suspicion voters feel toward them.
What Democrats need is not a moral lobotomy. They need a moral vocabulary with some actual fucking teeth. Keep the commitment to facts, law, evidence, and democracy. Keep the refusal to lie the way Republicans lie or dehumanise the way Republicans dehumanise. Keep the belief that public office ought to involve something better than grift and revenge. But stop speaking about Republican barbarism as though it were merely an interesting disagreement between honourable colleagues. Stop wrapping every indictment in so much cotton wool that the point arrives at the audience already half-dead. Stop behaving as though calling a bully a bully or a demagogue a demagogue somehow stains the speaker more than the subject.
A political movement trying to ban books, terrorise queer kids, criminalise healthcare, overturn elections, and fuse church dogma to state power should not be met with one more moist appeal to common ground. It should be named, cornered, mocked, exposed, and beaten at the ballot box with the kind of sustained fury that leaves no voter unclear about the stakes. The people driving this project are not misunderstood moderates with a few regrettable blind spots. They are zealots, opportunists, sadists, cowards, and careerists who discovered that bigotry and authoritarianism pay better than decency. They are building a politics around punishment and hierarchy. Speak about them that way.
The old fear, of course, is that if Democrats fight too hard, they will somehow become the thing they hate. This is the favourite bedtime story of every consultant who thinks a raised voice is the first step toward dictatorship. It is nonsense. A party does not become authoritarian because it uses plain language about authoritarians. A politician does not become indecent because she treats indecency with contempt. The collapse comes when a movement starts lying, scapegoating, and crushing democratic restraints for power. Democrats are not in danger of becoming Republicans because they finally stop speaking about Republican cruelty in the tones of a museum docent.
They are in danger of becoming irrelevant if they do not.
Enough with the pearl-clutching over tone. Enough with the idea that Democrats must always be the emotional support civilisation for a country half in love with right-wing barbarism. Enough with the fantasy that one more performance of grace will shame Republicans back into standards they buried years ago under a golf course in Florida. The Republican Party has made its peace with indecency. It has embraced corruption when useful, fanaticism when profitable, and cruelty when fun. It has lowered the bar so far that a candidate can crawl under it on his elbows, covered in feces and criminal exposure, and still be hailed as a champion of virtue so long as he vows to hurt the right strangers.
Democrats owe the country something better than a tasteful surrender to that reality. They owe the country a fight.
Not a dishonest fight. Not a lawless one. Not a fight built on conspiracy sludge and revenge porn for the Christian right. But a fight with force, contempt for bad faith, and enough moral confidence to stop asking permission before naming filth. A fight that understands there is no medal for sounding gracious while a reactionary movement tears through the rights of women, queer people, workers, migrants, and voters. A fight that does not waste half its energy trying to reassure people who would never reward it anyway. A fight that treats Republican depravity as the emergency it plainly is.
Democrats can keep the values. They can keep the facts, the evidence, the law, the belief that government should serve rather than punish. What they need to lose is the addiction to looking lovely while getting their teeth kicked in. The age of elegant defeat needs to die, loudly and without a priest at the bedside. Let the pundits whine. Let the civility addicts clutch their pearls until they leave finger marks. Let the Republican Party keep nominating moral roadkill and calling it leadership. Democrats should stop trying to win admiration from people who would watch the house burn so long as the flames singe the right family.
The country has had more than enough of beautiful losers. What it needs now are winners with a conscience and a mean streak.
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