When Your Allies Refer To You As "Cancer", Maybe They're Not Really Your Allies

Two of MSNBC's most ubiquitous Never Trumpers had their own colloquy at their own clubhouse this week, and the subject of you and me came up. 

(Obligingly-but-not-surprisingly, it just happens to fit hand-in-glove with a TL;DR post I've been fiddling with for a week and published earlier today entitled "The Seven Horcruxes of True Conservatism".)

 This is a free-sample snippet of  the Bulwark's "Just Between Us", subscription podcast.  The snippet is entitled “Cancer Versus Heart Attack".

Charlie Sykes is reporting back from a conference held at "an undisclosed location in Phoenix, Arizona" last week, but which my sources tell me was something called the "Patriots & Pragmatists conference".   Which is described by The New York Times as a coalition of “leading donors and operatives from the right and left", and which, according to one of the many organizations which gives them large sums of money is...

"...a fiscally sponsored project of Policy Impact, is a cross-ideological network and convening space through which civic leaders and influencers debate, envision, and realize a brighter future for American democracy. The project was founded on a simple proposition: that people of goodwill from across the political spectrum could put aside their differences to explore together how to address the various challenges facing American democracy. Intentionally curated and well-facilitated convenings, along with active network weaving, are the centerpiece of the project’s work, enabling participants to build deep and lasting connections across ideological and disciplinary lines."

Which is more fizzy, frothy, empty consultant-speak than I've heard since days when I was in upper management at the City of Chicago.  I mean, doesn't "intentionally curated and well-facilitated convenings" sound like something that'd run you $50 extra on the charcuterie board of the most pretentious restaurant you've even been to?

Anyway, both he and fellow-Bulwarkian Mona Charen attended and this was their takeaway.

Charlie Sykes:  How do you defend liberal...

Sorry, I've gotta stop for just a moment to explain a thing.  Whenever Mr. Sykes talks about "liberal democracy", he gets very worried that someone out there somewhere might think he was defending icky liberals like me and you, so he always stops to make it very clear that he is not an icky liberal.

Sykes: ...We talk a lot about democracy.  What we really mean is liberal constitutional democracy... So it is about small "L" liberalism when we're combatting the rampant illiberalism that we're seeing around the country.  And... and the point was raised by many of the people there, including me, that you cannot defend liberalism against illiberalism if you ignore the...

Wait for it...

Wait for it...

Sykes: ...if you ignore the illiberalism on the Left. 

And there it is!

Sykes:  Not this is not to say that they are equivalent...

Except that is exactly what you're about to do.

Sykes:  ...but we have a two front war here.

Weird that our "ally" thinks of us as one of the enemies in a "two front war", don'tcha think?

And then, Sykes mounts his High Horse and we're off to the Both Sides Do It races.  There is the usual yadda yadda yadda, and then:

 Sykes:  And the best analogy -- the best analogy -- was this description of this.  And I've been trying to find out whether anyone has written it, so this is why I wanted to ask you [Mona Charen] about it, because you would know about this.  Was to compare what is the, uh, various threats.  The dealing with the anti-democratic illiberalism of the MAGA Right is a heart attack.  But the illiberalism of the Left is more like cancer. 

This is who we are supposed to treat as our ally, kids.  Who we are told to defer to and if we find any faults with them, for God's sake, shut the fuck up because democracy is at stake!  Which is passing strange considering that Sykes is never rebuked for shitting on us, which he does on a daily basis from a platform vastly larger than any Liberal will ever have.

 Sykes:   So they're both serious, but in terms of what you need to focus on right now, we need to focus on the heart attack.  When someone has a heart attack, you don't worry about chemotherapy.  You just... you save the patient.  [yadda yadda yadda Donald Trump] But it's naive to think that we don't have a problem [on the Left.]

Sykes then lapses into his "Unnamed Liberal Person Who Might Object To My Bullshit" voice.  And if you listen to him for any length of time, you'll notice that none of the objections to his obviously biased bullshit come from any actual Liberal with names and voices.  Instead they all come from same, lazy "some people say" slop trough where Donald Trump finds all those sweaty, bald men wo are always coming up to him to tell him that he's a fine, upstanding, Christian man who was the Best President Ever.

Sykes:   Now for the people who are saying "Well, you're Both Sidesism!"  or, y'know, "You're drawing a moral equivalence!", no we're making a distinction here. 

He says this very slowly because, as you know, we are all very stupid and do not understand what words mean.

Sykes:  Between what we need urgently to focus on, but also acknowledging that this thing is real [whatever "this" is] and I... and I think it's a problem for some of our more progressive listeners and readers that sometimes they pretend as if it doesn't even exist.  So we don't even talk about it.

Except you and your Never Trump friends talk about it incessantly.

Well OK, Charlie, I have an easy way for you to find out what Liberals really think.  Instead of limiting your interactions with icky Liberals to a cage-raised, milk-fed, Bulwark-housebroken "I agree with everything you have to say, Charlie" 'liberal' like Will Saletan...go toe-to-toe with Digby.  

I dare you.

Or Allison Hantschel.

Or Brother Charlie Pierce.

Or Brad Friedman

Or my wife.  

Have some of those "more progressive" people over for a live, on-the-air chat or two.  I guarantee you it would be...lively.

Mona Charen:  Oh yes!  Members of my family, actually, even, um, y'know, argue that it's waaay exaggerated and it's not really an issue.  And there are a number of ways you can track that it is an issue.  One of them is, when you look at polling, y'know, of young people, and, well, Americans in general, but even of college students and others, who say, "How often do you self-censor because you're afraid that you can't say what you think without fear of retribution?" and it's very, very high.

She goes on to explain that a group called "people" feel "stifled" because of a regime of "rigid censoriousness" that we Liberal ruthlessly enforce using our mighty Liberal thought-control powers.

Which is fucking hilarious: believe me, I try to conjure our mighty Liberal thought-control powers every day, and I have yet to notice anyone at The Bulwark or The New York Times or The Atlantic hesitating to share their ridiculous opinions far and wide.

I think a big part of the problem is that elite media bubble creatures like Mona Charen have no clue that people out here in the Real World self-censor all the time for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with our mighty Liberal thought-control powers.  

Trust me, I'm self-censoring like a mother right now.  

I was tossed in Twitter jail four times over nothing, and Twitter-banned for life over less-than-nothing.  When I went back to school as an adult and found myself in classes where I was smarter and more accomplished than the fragile, suspicious manchild who was teaching a course in research, damn betcha I kept (most) of my opinions about his qualifications to myself. 

You know who else self-censors out here in the real world?  Anyone with a job with an shitty boss, who wants to keep that job.  Anyone who goes to church and doesn't get up and shout "This is all bullshit!" when the pastor dips into Leviticus, even though they know it's Bronze Age theocratic garbage.  And Liberals, living in Trump country -- out here where there's racist wingnut sewage vomiting out of the radios 24/7, and the assholes are rage-drunk and armed to the teeth.

You know who doesn't self-censor out here in the real world? 

The racist troglodyte at the end of the bar who will begin loudly sharing his rustic views on "the coloreds" after a couple of beers.  

Also those aforementioned assholes out here in Trump country, two-count-'em-two of which I clocked at the hardware store yesterday, each proudly wearing a different "Trump 2024" cap, and staring daggers at everyone in the store, practically daring someone to start something.  

Also the occasional customers at my stepson's cashier job who feel the need to spontaneously share with everyone in line whatever it was they sopped up on Fox last night.

I can personally attest to these examples and a hundred more because, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, by day I can move among them without causing their "Obummer-loving libtard" alarms to go off.  I look like them.  I'm a bald white guy with a beard and a ball cap.  I wear Carhartt flannels and jeans.  And to get along out here in the real world I self-censor every day, even if it's just taking care not to break out any big vocabulary words when I'm out and about, because that's a "tell".

As I wrote earlier today...and have, in a sense, been writing for the past 18 years:

So...with six of the seven True Conservative horcruxes stripped away and destroyed either by the indifference of the GOP base or by the catastrophes created by True Conservatives actually getting their dearest wishes granted, what, at last, is left to sustain the rapidly disintegrating True Conservative soul?

Just two things. Their hardwired sense of moral superiority/contempt for dirty Liberals like you and me. And, of course, the all-powerful, all-occasion conjure words that keep this last, mingy fragment of their soul from turning to ash: Both Sides Do It...

Except, of course...

Both Sides Don't