On Rick Wilson's "O Tempora! O Mores!" Lamentations

Professional Republican Ratfucker, Rick Wilson, spent pretty much his entire adult life making a very good living cutting the brake lines and sugaring the gas tank of American politics in order to advance the fortunes of the worst people on the Right.

Rick Wilson now makes a very good living surveying the carnage he helped create swearing Very Loudly that he has no idea Wha' Happened?

Of course, since Mr. Wilson bills himself as a Unparalleled Political Genius possessed of secret authoritative insider knowledge that none of us dirty Libtards have access to, it would be positively unnatural for Mr. Wilson not to have developed at least the skeletal outlines of a theory to explain who is to responsible for the wreckage we see all around us.

And because even the hackiest Republican Never Trumper eventually winds his way to the safety of the Great Both Siderist Sea, it will come as no surprise where Professional Republican Ratfucker Rick Wilson has located the blame for the collapse of our politics and the rise of Trump.

Mr. Wilson blames...everyone.

Well, not himself, of course.  And not Republicans.  In fact you will not find the word "Republican" anywhere in Mr. Wilson's jagoff jeremiad.  But damn if his end-of-the-decade "O tempora! O mores!" lamentation ("A decade of loss: What slipped away in America in the 2010s") isn't as positively riddled with "we" and "we're" and "us" and "Americans" as any ten shitty David Brooks' columns, which is why I've added emphasis here and there as it suited me.

To begin with, according to Mr. Wilson, there is simply no way of knowing exactly what has gone so horribly wrong with our politics.  Sad!

So we probably won’t be able to identify exactly when it happened...

But he knows for sure that "we" are all to blame

...but sometime in this last decade, we lost the thread.

According to Mr. Wilson, technology is probably the Devil in all this mess:

Bit by bit, technology changed the culture. Bit by bit, the culture changed us...

Because, according to Mr. Wilson, "we" were all probably too engrossed in our Instagrams and Snapchats --

We’re selfie-filtered into unrecognizable oblivion.

-- and reality teevee shows --

Perhaps it was the slow creep of reality television into every living room...

-- to notice that the country was going to hell on a Hoverboard.

The water comes to a boil slowly and the frog, or in America’s case 330 million frogs, don’t notice until it’s too late.

And of course, now that Ratfucker Rick has been magically transformed into Respectable Rick, he must pay for his Beltway Insider Club membership by throwing a couple of sops in the direction of the holiest of Beltway dogmas:

Or perhaps it was the increasingly oppositional-defiant disorder politics both sides of the political spectrum embraced, scorning the old, slow era of give-a-little, get-a-little bipartisanship where no one on either edge came away happy but the system stumbled along in its way.

And:

Perhaps the most depressing trend in recent years in America was how we’ve become an InfoWars society, how the rise of lies, conspiracy nonsense and absurdly over-dramatized news has eaten away at the vital center of American discourse, leaving this decade feeling so bitter and hollow. Facebook, in particular, was rocket fuel of nutcase beliefs from anti-vaxxers to Seth Rich conspiracy crazies.

And because "we" all failed our democracy so equally and uniformly,  according to Mr. Wilson --

We fumbled away our continuity, our resilience...

-- and

We stopped believing...

And because "we" all lost the thread and fumbled away and stopped believing, according to Mr. Wilson:

Little wonder we forgot who our enemies are...

According to Mr. Wilson:

Little wonder we shredded our alliances and replaced the idea of America as a beacon of freedom with a kind of “Screw you, pay me” mercenary attitude.

According to Mr. Wilson:

Little wonder we told the world, “You’re not welcome here.”

Little wonder that slogging through this midden pile of hand-wringing, self-absolving dreck gave me a sharp pain in my fundamental and a pronounced Herbert Lom twitch in my eye.  And so rather than wasting a lot of time tinkering together a whole new post about why all of what Rick Wilson just wrote is arrant bullshit, in the spirit of the season, allow me to re-gift this old post of mine to you:

Our Lonely War On Pronouns Continues...

...because both Republicans and the Beltway media never stop trying to diffuse responsibility for their catastrophes by "we"-ing the rest of us into their shame circle.

As you probably know, we here at the DGBG Productions (driftglass blog, The Professional Left Podcast, etc.) have been waging a long, lonely war against the promiscuous use "we", "us", "The American people", "The Congress", "Washington D.C." and any other language deployed by the media and by Republican politicians in the service of pretending that somehow everyone and all institutions are collectively and equally culpable for explicitly Republican cowardice, Republican barbarity, Republican racism and Republican sedition.

Or that, conversely, the energetic and resolution opposition to explicitly Republican cowardice, Republican barbarity, Republican racism and Republican sedition is something that "we" are all in together.  That, for example. stripping tens of millions of Americans of their health care in order to pay for tax cuts for plutocrats with something up with which "the American people" would not put.

No, no and no.

Because other than geographically, there is no such critter as "the American people".  This is the unhappy truth which the Beltway media damn well knows but would rather pull its own head off rather than speak aloud, which is why the word "we" has been so brutally abused by everyone with something to hide.

Exhibit A:  Raving racist deadbeat liar and former Republican congressman from IL08 turned belated Never Trumper, Joe Walsh.

We all deserve this. All of it.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) December 13, 2018

Goons like Walsh never actually change.  They just shift with the prevailing wind.  And along with the rest of the Never Trumpers, current weather conditions have temporarily knocked him off the GOP dungheap, but the minute conditions improve, you can bet the mortgage that Deadbeat Joe will go right back to pounding his little tin wingnut drum.

Exhibit B:  At the other end of the respectability spectrum we find that bastion of relentless Beltway Both Siderism, The New York Times, and a lesson in how applying pressure to pressure-sensitive Both Siderists can sometimes yield happy results. 

Here is the Times' headline about the rise of far-right extremists before Liberals starting yelling at them on Twitter.

Here are a few example of Liberals yelling at the NYT on Twitter

Thank you, Jesus.

— Lisa Glass (@LMplusG) December 13, 2018

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been warning of this rise and documenting it in detail and often resisting it successfully in court.

— George Wolff (@Wolfflak) December 13, 2018

No one makes the word “we” work harder than the NYTimes headline and tweet writers.

— Xay (@xayide) December 13, 2018

And here is the same NYT headline after Liberals starting yelling at them on Twitter.

Lesson:  If it gathers enough momentum (and enough support from Bluechecks), sometimes publicly shaming Both Siderists actually works.

For example here is a small and almost-forgotten skirmish in our lonely war on pronouns from January of this year: Ms. Joy Ann Reid setting Ezra Klein straight on the abuse of the word "we".

Not “we.” Republicans. And not fear. Indifference, since they are getting what they want out of him, including direct monetary gains for themselves and their estates through the tax code. https://t.co/7Em46240Ho

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 3, 2018

Today you can still click on Joy Ann Reid's Tweet and see it in its original state.  But Young Ezra's original Tweet now exists only as a memory -- trapped in the amber of my post from January 2018, because he has since deleted it :-)

So however maddening it is to be right all along and ignored all along, never let anyone tell you that holding Both Siderists publicly to account doesn't work.

Because sometimes it does.

Behold, a Tip Jar!