Per Usual, Conservatives are Mad as Hell and Not Taking It Anymore
PLUS: A review of Steven Soderbergh's "Kimi"
For the past couple weeks, daily life in the Canadian capital of Ottawa has been besieged by a convoy of truckers who have clogged streets with their tractor units and brought the city to a standstill. Residents are beyond annoyed with the occupation, which, despite the noise, economic disruption, and a few instances of lewd behavior, has largely remained peaceful. Authorities recently broke up a similar blockade on the Ambassador Bridge, which carries approximately $300-360 million of trade between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, on a daily basis.
The truckers are protesting a mandate imposed by the Canadian federal government requiring truckers crossing the border between the United States and Canada to be vaccinated for COVID. The strike has expanded beyond that, however, with many right-wing and far-right protesters joining the demonstrations in Ottawa to air their grievances with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. (Trudeau is the son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau and a member of Canada’s centre/centre-left Liberal Party, which has dominated national Canadian politics for much of the past century.) Particularly unnerving has been the appearance of Trump, Confederate, and Nazi paraphernalia, as well as shady fundraising efforts that have raked in over $10 million for their cause.
The protests have left Canada stunned. Catherine Porter summarizes it well in the New York Times:
The unrest seems a rebuff to the cherished mythology imposed on Canada’s citizens from abroad and held by many Canadians themselves as moderate, rule-following, levelheaded — and just plain nice.
“It feels like a national nervous breakdown,” said Susan Delacourt, a veteran Canadian political columnist from Ottawa who like many of her fellow citizens is wondering what exactly is happening to her country right now.
As most Canadians (including Canadian truckers) are quick to remind observers, the protesters represent a political minority in the country. Over 80% of Canadians are vaccinated, as are 90% of truckers. Pandemic restrictions have, for the most part, been observed and accepted throughout the country. If anything, Canadians are upset Trudeau hasn’t done more to crackdown on the protesters. (Trudeau did declare a state of emergency on Valentine’s Day, and authorities began clearing out protesters this weekend.) What really has Canadians worried, however, is that the demonstrations represent the birth of (or perhaps a coming-out party for) a Canadian alt-right movement, one that would threaten to shatter Canada’s more consensus-driven politics.
Of course, what’s happening in Canada is what we here in the States tend to call “Wednesdays.”
Unlike Canada, whose citizens regard political hysteria as the exception rather than the norm, the United States seems to careen from one political temper tantrum to the next, many of which are fueled by the right-wing rage machine. This isn’t how conservatism is supposed to work. No less an authority than Edmund Burke would remind us the conservative temperament is one of moderation, good manners, and steadiness. When others get swept along by panic and passion and hair-brained ideas, conservatives remain cool, calm, and collected, inclined more to weather tumult than act rashly and add to it. If they must act, conservatives prefer to step cautiously rather than get carried away and further agitate the social order. Few in America today, though, would consider modern conservatism even-keeled or sober-minded, a philosophy of restraint and forbearance.
One might forgive the occasional conservative outburst if it is set-off by events that offend deeply-held conservative sensibilities. In our current era, however, American conservatism is in permanent Hulk mode, constantly agitated and on the rampage. They’re only happy when they’re mad. The only thing that makes them angrier than the existence of liberals is the possibility that liberals might hold power. When Democrats put the most moderate and broadly-acceptable candidate in their primary field at the top of their ticket in 2020 and that person then won the presidential election, many conservatives responded by denouncing the election as a hoax. Then a bunch of them stormed the Capitol. At the time, those events shocked many Republicans; a few weeks ago, their party’s national committee called the riot and the rhetoric that instigated it “legitimate political discourse.”
Now we’re headed into a midterm election with a Democratic president in office. Recall what happened the last time those conditions were met. Republicans spent much of October 2014 railing against the Obama administration for not doing enough to keep an Ebola outbreak in western Africa from spreading to the United States. That’s right: Republicans in 2014 totally lost their cool demanding the government do more to combat a potential pandemic.1 One rather notable Republican social media addict blasted out approximately 100 separate Tweets on the topic in the months before the election. For the record, the United States totaled 4 cases of Ebola with 2 fatalities. Compare that to the COVID-19 pandemic and…well look, you can do the math for yourself.
Midterms have a tendency to motivate the party out of power in the White House, but they really whip conservatives into a frenzy. The 1994 midterms gave us Newt Gingrich, whose political disposition was captured that year by this Time magazine cover:
Four years later, conservatives rampaged through the spectacle of impeachment; it was actually one of the few times Americans in the moment punished them for going overboard. (In all honesty, my view on that episode has changed somewhat. While I still don’t think Clinton should have been impeached, he would have done the country a big favor by resigning.) The 2002 midterms don’t exactly qualify—one of their own was in the White House—but they did use the elections to demagogue the country into a war in Iraq as a way to lash out for what happened on 9/11. And then, shortly after Obama took office, the Tea Party movement morphed from an attack on a government plan to help homeowners with underwater mortgages into a full-on assault on the Affordable Care Act, a market-oriented law patterned on a piece of legislation enacted by a Republican governor/future presidential nominee of the Republican Party that delivered health insurance to 31 million Americans this past year but that prominent Republicans thirteen years ago said would end up creating “death panels” and “pull[ing] the plug on grandma.” I guess the point is I can’t wait to see what sort of crazy we have coming our way over the next nine months.
In all fairness, political outrage and hysteria is not exclusive to right-wing politics (although, as Davin Phoenix has argued in his book The Anger Gap, Democrats are a less angry party not only because anger resonates less with Democratic voters than appeals to feelings like hope and pride but because many Democratic politicians—particularly Black politicians—face an electoral penalty for coming across as angry.) A lot of Americans perceive Bernie Sanders as an angry politician, and it’s not hard to see why. Nancy Pelosi once shredded a copy of a Republican president’s state of the union address from her perch on the House floor immediately after he finished delivering it. Like anyone else, liberals can get really angry on social media. They get angry a lot on The View, too. Additionally, the sort of disruptive form of protest we’ve witnessing in Canada is not exclusive to right-wing politics. Demonstrators affiliated with left-wing causes in the United States have blocked roads and intersections and clogged airports in the recent past. Following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, protesters occupied a section of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle for nearly a month and forbid police from entering.
I also don’t want to suggest anger has no place in politics or is a politically forbidden emotion. I’d be pretty angry at the government if it changed my city’s water source and ended up poisoning my drinking water with lead. I’d be angry, too, if my child was killed in a war the government launched under false pretenses. I remember being infuriated when I watched on TV as riot police cleared protesters out of the area around the White House so Donald Trump could get his picture taken holding a Bible in front of a church. Anger isn’t a pretty emotion, but in certain circumstances it is an understandable reaction to events.
Yet rage, particularly since Trump ascended to the heights of American politics, has become the default setting of the American Right. (Some would argue that’s the way it’s been for decades if not centuries, but that’s a subject for another article.) Its avatars are Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, the MAGA Shaman and the mask-less parent screaming at their school board about CRT. It threatens to consume our politics at a time when Americans are already on edge after two years of living with the pandemic and the effect it’s had on their personal lifestyles, the educational system, crime rates, and the economy. Combine that with the Right’s antigovernment attitudes and racial resentments, as well as their slide toward authoritarianism and embrace of conspiracy theories, and it’s more than clear we’re living in highly volatile times.
American democracy has always been spirited and cacophonous. That’s often listed as one of its charms, and in many ways it is. Yet while it’s true democracies in general are more tumultuous in nature than other forms of government, democracy does not need to be as hysterical as it currently is here in the States. Americans, in our arrogance as the forerunners of democracy, too often assume politics is a circus and a sign of our democracy’s health. Yet a Canadian looking at the streets of Ottawa and wondering if they’ve suddenly been teleported to a Trump rally in Texas may beg to differ. (I had a professor in grad school once who told my class his Canadian friends would often tease him about the way Americans revere the genius of their hard-won democratic system and the Founding Fathers who created it when Canada achieved just as much in terms of independence from Britain and crafted a form of government ranked higher on indexes of democracy without first needing to resort to a bloody revolution.)
Democracy means a lot of things. It literally translates as “rule of the people.” For many, that means being able to choose their own leaders. For others, it entails, in the words of Lincoln, a government “of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” These are noble sentiments encompassing a multitude of ideas, some of which end up at odds with one another. For instance, you may not have voted in favor of the person the majority of your fellow citizens selected to represent you in government, which means your leader may not act in accordance with your political preferences. In other words, despite being part of the people, you do not rule. This is particularly frustrating for those who think democracy means “getting one’s way,” which, frankly, despite the accommodations each of us has made with the procedural idea of majority rule/minority rights, is a legitimate gripe. But it also feels like a base understanding of democracy. It’s not just that in a pluralistic society, the formulation of “democracy = getting one’s way” flirts with entitlement, intolerance, and authoritarianism, but that an insistence on only “getting one’s way” diminishes the “pursuit of a better way,” which democracy in a higher, more refined form can achieve.
Democracy does not merely have to amount to an articulation of desire, which, when unfulfilled, may result in feelings of great frustration. As the form of government characteristic of a free society, democracy is also conducive to good government. In an open, democratic society, citizens can search for and share knowledge. They can debate the merits of that knowledge, apply it when governing, and review their actions to see if their plans are working. In this sort of democracy, citizens and lawmakers are not left to merely express preferences; they can find other options and make better, more informed choices.
I’m not advocating for a technocracy here, just a more informed, considerate, deliberative democracy, one energized less by rage than reason and thoughtfulness. Maybe that’s hopelessly naïve. Maybe democracy, no matter how refined it may seem, is a roiling cauldron of popular passion. Plato was no fan of democracy for this very reason. He believed the ancient Athenian democracy was flawed because its governance reflected the appetites and passions of the masses rather than the wisdom of philosophers. Plato based this belief on personal experience, of course: When the wisest man he’d ever met called Athens out on this—that is, when Socrates returned to the cave to point out the shadows on the wall—the citizens of Athens made him drink the hemlock.
Athens took great pride in its democracy. Its leader Pericles extolled its virtue in his famed Funeral Oration; then he died of the plague. But even in the Oresteia, a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus that could be considered the founding myth of Athens, the more dispassionate principle of justice—a virtue reliant on persuasion rather than violence—does not prevail over the baser, more furious motive of revenge on its own accord. It is up to Athena to intervene and tip the scales in favor of justice. This outrages the Furies, the representatives of passion, who demand to be satisfied. Athena does not battle and banish them from the polis but instead pacifies them, dresses them in blood-red robes, grants them a place of honor amongst the people, and roots them in the soil of the city. Reason may rule, but passion remains.
The Oresteia—one of the earliest known Greek tragedies—is a dramatization of the conflict between rage and reason. One of the unsettling implications of the play is that reason is rather meek when pitted against passion, and that reason only triumphs once passion is somehow tamed. There is a lesson here for Democrats and progressives confronting the right-wing rage machine. A well-reasoned argument isn’t going to win the day on its own. The people will not magically come around to hear the call of reason when it beckons to them. Rage does not go away if it is not confronted.
At a minimum, Democrats need to call angry conservatives out for what they are: Angry, ill-tempered, petulant, dyspeptic, cranky, rabid, unstable. The face of the Republican Party is a seething hot-head consumed by rage who lacks the necessary temperament to preside and uses his unbridled fury to bully the rest of his party into accepting his whims. Make it clear that a vote for the Republican Party is a vote for institutional madness, for the unruliness of the mob. Acknowledge the source of the people’s anger and frustration if necessary, but follow that up by pointing out that a party that’s constantly throwing temper tantrums lacks the basic composure needed to govern.
American politics these days feels like an ancient Greek drama that has taken as its subject the primal forces of human nature. Talk of policy and administration—the things that actually make a difference in the lives of citizens—is so easily overwhelmed by hysterics and rage. Anyway, Senator Rand Paul said last week “it’d be great” if a convoy of truckers came to the United States to “clog things up.” There are reports such a convoy may arrive in Washington DC around the time Biden delivers his State of the Union address. We’ll see. This could be a long and angry nine months. God help us all.
Signals and Noise
Denmark was one of the first nations to get hammered by Omicron this past December. Unlike here, however, its Omicron case numbers and death rates have continued to climb. Denmark also just lifted its remaining COVID restrictions. This article by Andrew Romano of YahooNews is an excellent study in comparative COVID analysis. I’m sure many would say that if even Denmark is ending its restrictions, the United States can too, but the United States has not managed the pandemic nearly as effectively as Denmark has. Time will tell if Denmark has gotten this right, but man, having the US follow Denmark’s lead here might be like putting an amateur in a bobsled on an Olympic track.
From the Washington Post: “Why I’m Not Ready to Unmask” by John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (“One…lesson [my high school football coach taught me] seems particularly relevant to where we are now in the pandemic: He often said that late in a game, when both teams are tired, some players get sloppy while others somehow concentrate even more, focus more, push more — and win.”)
You can now purchase this mug on Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s campaign website:
Hawley personally confirmed “this is not a pro-riot mug.” You can see a screen grab of the order form (“This Made in America mug is the perfect way to enjoy Coffee, Tea, or Liberal Tears!”) here, as well as proof provided by Republican Missouri Rep. Billy Long (irritated he didn’t get Hawley’s endorsement in the Missouri Senate race) that the mug was actually made in China here.
Donald Trump is charging his PAC $37,541.67 per month to rent an empty office in Trump Tower. Not to be outdone, Melania Trump bought an NFT now worth $185,000 that she herself originally listed for sale. Artificially inflating the value of an NFT this way is called wash trading and made NFT traders millions of dollars last year. Not to be outdone, I have purchased from myself for $786,000 this jpg of an approximation of a Bob Ross landscape my daughter painted when she was five years old. Bidding starts here at $790,000!
From The Hill: “Centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on Monday said he would not support confirming another nominee selected by President Biden for the Supreme Court immediately before the 2024 presidential election….Manchin said he would prefer to wait until the country knows who will occupy the White House in 2025….That’s the position he and other Democrats took in the fall of 2020 after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September of that year.” How reassuring. Granted, the odds of this scenario actually playing itself out are extraordinarily slim (and if he wanted to confirm a justice after the election, he could easily ditch this principle without experiencing any political pain since he would either be a lame duck or starting what would likely be his last term as a senator before retiring) but there’s a fine line between following precedent and hypocrisy, Joe, and you’re on the wrong side of it on this one.
After an initial shipment of pillows he tried to deliver to anti-vaccine protesters in Ottawa was stopped at the US/Canada border, MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell has devised a scheme to drop them by helicopter over the Canadian capital. Lindell explained they will be equipped with “little parachutes” but wanted to be sure to note that users should “put that part in, or it could be dangerous,” which raises the question, Just how not-soft are these pillows? Does their descent from the sky to the ground really need to be slowed with a parachute? Is the risk of suffocating by parachute really less than getting concussed by a pillow dropped from 1,000 feet? This is probably one of those science questions I’d be surprised to learn the answer to, but if anyone’s done their research on the subject, I’m sure it’s Lindell.
Golfer Phil Mickelson is interested in joining a Saudi-financed professional golf league. Here’s why: “[The Saudis are] scary motherf---ers to get involved with….They killed [Washington Post reporter and U.S. resident Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.” Let’s check in on Phil over on the 10th…
Vincent’s Picks: Kimi
In his latest film Kimi, Steven Soderbergh channels Alfred Hitchcock to create a Rear Window for the digital age. Soderbergh’s thriller stars Zoë Kravitz as Angela, who works for a Seattle tech company named Amygdala that has launched a smart home device called Kimi. What distinguishes Kimi from other virtual assistants like Alexa or Siri is that actual human beings like Angela review recordings of Kimi’s failed interactions to improve its service; for example, when Angela listens to a recording of a woman getting upset with Kimi for failing to process an order for “kitchen papers,” Angela updates the device’s programming so it now understands “kitchen papers” means “paper towels.”
One morning, Angela grows concerned when she thinks she hears a woman scream in the background of one of the recordings she is reviewing. After removing the loud music that dominates the track, she suspects what she has heard is the sound of an assault or even worse. Her boss at Amygdala wants her to pretend she didn’t hear it to save him and the company the hassle of dealing with law enforcement. Angela, a survivor of domestic abuse, disregards the request and begins her own investigation, which eventually gains the attention of people who really don’t want her snooping around the case.
One might think Kimi will turn into a commentary about the way tech companies are using their devices and services to invade their customer’s privacy (there’s a memorable exchange in the film after Angela learns Amygdala has somehow acquired her retinal scans about whether tech users really agree to the fine print of tech company contracts) but that’s not really the case. At times the technology works against Angela; at other times, as a savvy user, Angela can use the tech to her advantage. Without Kimi and other devices like cell phones, the crime at the center of the film may have gone unnoticed for weeks and there may have been few clues for investigators hoping to solve the crime to work off of. (We also get reminders we don’t need sophisticated tech to surveil people, as the snoopy neighbor using Jimmy Stewart’s binoculars from Rear Window demonstrates.) What we are left with then isn’t so much a movie that comments on the omnipresence of technology in today’s society but rather a thriller that plays itself out within a technological world.
That’s an achievement that deserves to be remarked upon. Not too long ago film buffs were lamenting the way cell phones, closed circuit cameras, and digital transactions had undermined storytellers’ ability to craft believable crime movies and thrillers, as it had become practically impossible for a cinematic criminal to convincingly cover their tracks. There’s just always a digital trail to follow these days. Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp (who also wrote Panic Room [2002], which he gets around to revisiting here) just takes that for granted.
The big bad guy is one of Soderbergh’s favorite villains: Corporations. Greed leads Amygdala to commit misdeeds of both omission and commission. But there’s also some subtle commentary here about the way corporations as powerful entities leverage their authority over employees to encourage them to do morally suboptimal acts. Angela, for instance, at first reports the crime she hears not to the police but to higher-ups in Amygdala, following what she reasonably believes to be the chain of command. She has enough sense, however, to realize Amygdala, for various reasons, would prefer to sweep all this under the rug rather than get the police involved, leading her to take matters into her own hands. Less conscientious employees may have simply felt that reporting what they believed to be a crime to their corporate supervisors was all they were morally obligated to do.
While Kimi occasionally cuts away to brief scenes with other characters, the film’s focus is almost entirely on Angela. The blue-haired character is something of a departure for Kravitz, who most may recognize for playing a cool, young, laid-back Big Sur wife on the HBO TV drama Big Little Lies alongside Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. (She’s set to play Selina Kyle/Catwoman in the new Batman film that will hit theaters in a few weeks; I suspect that role will make her a star.) There’s an enigmatic, fragile, almost damaged quality to Kravitz—you might call her a millennial version of Audrey Hepburn—that is put to good use here, as Angela is not only a survivor of abuse but also an agoraphobe who works from home. (Soderbergh has set the film during the pandemic, which only magnifies Angela’s anxiety.) Kravitz plays Angela as edgy but she never succumbs to her disorder or fear. Rather than first plunging to a low she then needs to pull herself out of, she instead gains strength over the course of the film. I liked that about her character.
As an homage to Hitchcock, Kimi is a master class in cinematic craftsmanship. It makes sense that a stylist like Soderbergh would be able to pull this off so effortlessly (and efficiently, too, as the film clocks in at a brisk 89 minutes.) Kimi is also a lean, carefully constructed film. For example, at one point we see Angela running and running some more and then running up some stairs which I found unbelievable for an agoraphobe who had just spent a pandemic isolating at home until I remembered a scene earlier in the film showing Angela working up a heavy sweat on an exercise bike. It’s that sort of creative care and attention to detail that makes Kimi such an enjoyable and rewarding cinematic experience.
Exit music: “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” by Nas (1994, Illmatic)
Bill Cassidy, who would win a Senate seat that year, claimed Ebola “pos[ed] an immediate danger [to] Louisiana families.” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin suggested members of ISIS would deliberately contract the virus and then travel to the United States to sicken us all. Former Senator Scott Brown, running for a senate seat in New Hampshire, worried in a debate that “people with diseases are coming through our border.” Senator Rand Paul—a doctor—claimed nurses and physicians were catching Ebola despite being completely gloved down. (Ebola could only be transferred via the bodily fluid of a symptomatic individual.) Rush Limbaugh implied certain “elected people” wanted a deadly virus of African origin to sweep through the United States as a way to punish Americans for slavery. (See this article from NPR and this one from The Daily Beast for further context.)