Ross Douthat Conducts The Worst Worldcon Panel Ever

As in a dream, I don't remember how I got there exactly, but there I was, in the middle of the night, staggering I down an infinitely long corridor, bottle of Lagavulin in one hand and the foot-thick World Science Fiction Convention Program Guide in the other,  looking in vain for either the  "Blue Drazi/Green Drazi:  Can Mixed Marriages  Ever Work?" panel or the one listed as "From Pufnstuf to Hufflepuff:  One Woman's Journey Through Fantasy Fandom".

It was late, OK?  The pickings were slim.  The place was desolate and the rooms poorly marked and, to be 100% honest, I owed a lot of money to various unsavory types up in the Con Suite.  A lot of money.  Which is why, when I stumbled through the first open door I found into a dimly lit room with a pasty, paunchy guy on stage fiddling with his noted and a few sleepers and coughers sitting around in folding chairs, I figured I could at least take a load off, dodge the various Fetts on my trail, and resume my hunt for the panel of my dreams in a while.

Then the panel began.

I could not find it listed anywhere in the program, but it appeared to be entitled "What If, Maybe, Someday in The Future, The Democratic Party Becomes as Shitty as The Republican Party???!!  I'm Not Saying It Will Definitely Happen.  Or Even That It Will Probably Happen.  Because Who Knows, If  a Bunch of Stuff Changes it Could Happen, People!  It Could Happen!!!"

And it was so mesmerizingly bad -- so "The first time you saw Plan Nine From Outer Space and realized, holy shit, they weren't exaggerating!" bad -- that I sat though the whole thing:

A Trumpism of the Left

Ross Douthat OCT. 5, 2016

...In a world where a figure like Donald Trump is a major party’s nominee for the presidency, why shouldn’t a character like Alicia Machado aspire to high office as well?

I’m joking (and anyway Machado is constitutionally ineligible for the presidency), but there is an interesting underlying question here. Trumpism represents the conquest of the still relatively staid world of politics by tabloid seaminess and the reality-television carnival. But that seaminess, that carnival, is hardly limited by ideology or partisan affiliation.

Democratic voters swim in the same cultural sea as the “Apprentice”-watching Republicans who helped make Trump the G.O.P. nominee...

Given all this, could a Trump-style celebrity takeover someday befall the Democrats as well, without the white identity politics but with all the raging telenovela drama that’s trailed in Trump’s wake...

Right now it couldn’t, because the Democratic Party...

I raised my hand because I knew the answer and because the poor, rambling doofus seemed so fucking lost at this point I kinda felt sorry for him.

Oh!  Oh!  I know!  Because the Democratic Party isn't a madhouse of bigots and imbeciles?   Because the Democratic Party is noticeably lacking in overwhelming numbers of bigots and imbeciles because they're all in the Republican Party?  Because the modern Republican Party was built on a strategy of flattering and pandering to bigots and imbeciles?

But Mr. Douthat was not taking questions at this time.

Instead he lumbered on --

-- heedless of his own absurdity:

But what’s true today might not be true forever. The differences between the Democratic Party’s younger, poorer, browner base and its older, whiter, richer and more moderate leadership are a potentially unstable equilibrium.

The anger coursing through left-wing protest politics could find a cruder, more nakedly demagogic avatar than Bernie Sanders...

A Hillary Clinton administration could supply various betrayals and compromises or foul up in some disastrous way...

...a Trumpism of the left would imitate the left-wing populists of Latin America and Asia — the Chavismo of Alicia Machado’s native Venezuela, or the Trumpian socialism presently being served up by the ranting, trigger-happy president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte...

This may sound implausible, indeed frankly un-American — but so did the ascent of Trump’s National Front-ish politics, and yet here we are...

Yes, here we are.  Here we are indeed.  An while we are here, I just can't help noticing that while Mr. Douthat has so very many words to spend pondering the Possible Democratic Hellscape of Tomorrow, he spends so few asking just exactly why we are where we are today.

Nary a word to be spared to condemn the Republican Party's disastrous decision to bet its future on recruiting militia nuts, racists, xenophobes, homophobes, anti-science dominionists and various other species of human flotsam from the shallow end of the American gene pool.  Nary a word to be spared mentioning that the arrival of someone like Il Douche was hardly implausible to those dirty American "Chavismo" Liberals who have been warning about the madness, bigotry and open-mouth-with-tongue flirtations with fascism which have been running wild through the GOP for decades -- warnings which gutless Conservative brain wizards like Mr. Douthat have chosen to ignore.  

Nary a word to be spared for any of that.

Instead...

Cultural and demographic change can ripple into politics slowly, and then all at once. The elite checks on a gonzo left-wing populism are real and powerful, but so are the cultural forces roiling underneath...

And the same demographic changes that have made the right more nativist and populist, more European and reactionary, could expose the left to a Latin American temptation if liberal governance ever really hits the rocks.

If and when it does, the Hillary Clinton campaign’s skillful deployment of Alicia Machado may be cast in a somewhat different light. It’s Clinton’s Democratic Party today — managerial, technocratic, polished, a little smug. But Machado’s wilder, messier, “I’m not a saint girl” style might have its own claim on the American left’s future...

Then it was over.  His New York Times bearers whisked him away, leaving the rest of us stunned and silent.   As we began to shuffle out.  I noticed Maureen Dowd  mating grimly with some nameless, ancient horror in the dark corner behind the door. 

Her panel was next.  

I  killed what was left of my Lagavulin and lurched into back into the hall, this time with renewed purpose and resolve.

It was time to face whatever was waiting for me up the Con Suite.

Because honestly, nothing they could dish out could possibly compare to the existential pain I had just experienced being punched in the brain by so much stupid in such a short period of time.