"Owning the Libs"

 At some point in the ascendency of Donald Trump, a great sea-change occurred in the terms of debate between the American left and right. It was a change so vast in its consequences and so sudden in its execution that many of us are still baffled by it. We continue to try to wage the old contest on familiar ground, even as the main struggle has shifted over onto entirely different terrain. 

It used to be the case, we may recall, that the left and right wings of the U.S. political spectrum were both competing for the mantle of virtue. Both sides could be presumed to share a set of broad social values in common: patriotism, personal liberty, equality of opportunity, the basic elements of an open, free, and multicultural society. Whether they were the best possible values or not, they were ones that every American politician had to at least appear to espouse. 

And if every politician was competing for the reputation of being the most virtuous promoter of the same set of shared social values, then it was clear the weapons that were available to them in the dispute: they could create a scandal about their opponents (thereby showing that they were less virtuous); or they could catch out their adversary in a "gaffe" (which usually meant getting them on the record in a moment when they idly blasphemed against one of the shared values).

Understood in this light, the 2012 Obama vs. Romney election appears the ideal type of the old-school American presidential contest. One of Romney's worst nights in the campaign, you will recall, came when he was asked a question about the lack of gender parity on his team, and he blustered through an explanation about how his advisors had gone through "binders full of women" looking for plausible candidates. 

Romney obviously misspoke embarrassingly on this occasion, and the point went to Obama by comparison. But what we perhaps did not appreciate sufficiently at the time was that—even in the course of flubbing this response—Romney was nonetheless paying homage to the shared values. He was acknowledging that presidential candidates have some obligation to try to ensure diversity and gender equality on their staff. We can therefore only regard such a "gaffe" in hindsight with nostalgic appreciation. 

What happened with the launch of the Trump candidacy was something altogether different and unrecognizable to many of us, schooled as we were in the old virtue-contest. Here was someone who completely, brazenly, and defiantly failed every element of the virtue test. Every campaign speech he gave was one long "gaffe" by the standards of the old debate. Every gesture of his stubby fingers and every glint of his porcine eyes blasphemed against the presumed shared values. 

This, above all else, was the reason we all kept thinking his campaign was imminently doomed. By every rule of the game as we had seen it played before, he had already lost. We had seen Romney doomed because of comments about "binders" and "takers" and "self-deportation," so how much more completely—we thought—must Trump fail when there was video footage of him talking about assaulting women, recorded speeches of him describing Mexican immigrants as "rapists," and public statements from his campaign staff calling for a "ban" on people on the basis of religion?  

At some level, we almost couldn't believe our luck. The Republicans had seemingly left the field of combat. They had ceded the mantle of virtue to us by default. In the old days, we had to deal with a rival who was claiming superior rights to our own cherished values. We had to confront neocons who insisted that they cared more about democracy and human rights than we did. When we accused right-wingers of being racist and sexist, they might very well turn it around and challenge us on the same ground: pointing to some Democratic politician who had just made a racist gaffe, etc. 

With the rise of Trump, something very different occurred. Here, for the first time, the Republicans were saying: actually, we don't care about democratic alliances abroad or the promotion of human rights. Actually, we don't give a damn about racial justice or women's equality—in fact, we openly oppose both. 

Democrats and liberals were suddenly in undisputed possession of the trophy. We had won the game!—at least as we had always played it. But at the same time, the rules had changed. The trophy-holder was no longer declared the reigning champion. It had become a hollow prize at the very moment we finally grasped it. What a very confusing situation!

And the MAGA Republicans didn't stop there. They soon began to portray each defeat they suffered on the field of virtue as in fact a victory for them. This, properly interpreted, is what the oft-discussed practice of "owning the libs" really amounts to. A MAGA Republican would say or do something blatantly abhorrent: re-post anti-Semitic memes on Twitter, say, or attend a white nationalist conference. Liberals would then point to it as a decisive failure according to the rules of political virtue. "You just lost," we would say. And the MAGA Republican would turn around and declare that, actually, the fact liberals were now so "angry" about their actions, the fact that their "heads were exploding," the fact that they "took it all so seriously," was itself the true victory. They were proof the MAGA Republican had "owned the libs."

Speaking on the Daily Beast podcast Fever Dreams last week, co-host Kelly Weill gave an example from deep in the bowels of the MAGA-right internet: the tale of the reinterpretation of the "A-okay" or "perfect" hand gesture. This gesture—long familiar and seemingly innocuous in everyday American life—is formed as we all know by making an "o" between the thumb and index finger, and raising the remaining three digits skyward. But at some point a few years ago, I started to hear people saying "oh, we shouldn't use that anymore; it's been appropriated by the alt-right."

The version of the story I heard at the time was that white nationalists had claimed the symbol as their own because the gesture could be construed as forming a "w" and a "p"—short for "white power." As Weill explained, however, the truth was a bit more complicated. It was more that the denizens of various right-wing internet fora decided it would be a hilarious way to "troll" the libs if they could make them think the gesture was a white nationalist symbol, and then use it at various right-wing events. Then it would be amusingly ambiguous whether they were trying to signal their support for white nationalism or not. 

From the liberal (or, simply, non-MAGA) standpoint, it's hard to see the victory here for the right. Why would MAGA Republicans think they had "owned" or triumphed over anyone by appearing to confirm that they are white nationalists. Doesn't that just make our point for us? Doesn't it amount to them saying, "Yes, you're right, you win; what you've been saying all along about us is true: we are in fact fascist and un-American; we do in fact reject the core values of our modern pluralistic society." Where's the victory for the MAGA side? 

What is happening here is a shift of fundamental strategy that one can imagine occurring in any dramatically unequal contest. 

In rivalries where the two parties are more-or-less evenly matched, after all, one can imagine that they are largely content to fight each other according to a shared set of rules. The soon-to-be salutatorian, say, will believe as earnestly as the soon-to-be valedictorian in the validity of the GPA as a measure of success, and will simply try to push hers over the top before the end of the final semester. 

Thus, so long as the Republican party was fielding candidates who could plausibly claim to move forward the cause of modern American values—freedom, democracy, equality of opportunity, pluralism, etc.—they would be content to compete with Democrats according to the same standards of virtue. Particularly because, by those standards, Republicans frequently won!—at least in the eyes of a majority of voters. 

But when the Republicans suddenly found themselves fielding Donald Trump — against the wisdom and wishes of the party elders—they realized that they had on their hands a candidate who could not possibly win according to the old standards of value. Here was a would-be politician who failed every possible standard of public and private virtue. According to those rules, he had already lost. And so, the party had little choice but to try to subvert the standards. Thus, they have been seeking ever since to effect a transvaluation of values: what was good is now bad; what was bad is good; up is down; down is up, etc. 

This is what accounts for the strange seeming toothlessness of many of our conventional strategies for defeating them on political grounds. Many of the old tactics, as we saw, involved publicly shaming our adversaries. We would catch them in scandals or gaffes, reveal that they fell short of the agreed-upon standard of virtue, and they would have to prove that they were good people after all, or that their opponents were even worse, or else risk defeat. 

Many of the tried-and-true methods of social protest depend on something similar. They take for granted that, fundamentally, people want to be seen as the good guys. Gandhian civil disobedience, for instance, relies on the fact that the ruling powers want to maintain the moral upper hand, and that if they can be shown to be losing it, they will correct their behavior to try to at least appear more benevolent and wise. 

What is supposed to result from these tactics is a virtuous circle. Parties to a conflict of interest struggle to outdo one another in shows of beneficence and virtue. The result may be a net increase in public hypocrisy that can be grating and obnoxious—but as we have realized in recent years to our chagrin, there are worse things that can befall public life than that.

According to the old rules of a contest between two evenly matched political adversaries competing for the mantle of the same set of public virtues and standards of value, therefore, the signaling of virtue in one of the parties usually prompts efforts to outdo them on the part of the other. "Oh yeah, well I'm even more virtuous than you are." A benevolent gesture can therefore be expected to call forth an equivalent or greater show of good will from the other party—even if it is only so as not to be outdone, and does not stem from any true inward affection.

But where this process can misfire is when one of the two parties to the contest is so manifestly unequal to the challenge—so blatantly lacking in virtue and good will—that they have no hope of winning according to that standard of value. Then, they have no alternative but to adopt the transvaluation of values strategy. 

We see an example of this dynamic in William Godwin's 1794 novel of social protest, Caleb Williams. In this book, Godwin—the great radical philosopher and father of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley—poured into the format of the racy eighteenth-century novel a blistering denunciation of the English legal and caste system, in which the servant Caleb Williams suffers unjust persecution, gradually increasing in severity, at the hands of his apparently-benevolent employer. 

In this atypically-structured three-part tale, volume one recounts the earlier adventures of the employer, Mr. Falkland—and in its pages, Falkland appears in the light of unexampled virtue and benevolence. (It is only in the subsequent volumes that he emerges as a more ambiguous, and ultimately sinister figure; his transformation thereby serving to illustrate Godwin's point about the corrupting influence of prejudices of "honor" and "birth," as well as the depravity that attends the use of law as an instrument; Williams himself, when he finally succeeds in ending Falkland's persecution, is forced to rely on the courts to do so, and realizes too late that he has corrupted himself as well in the process—because by relying on the state's coercive power he has destroyed a man who—were it not for the prejudices of his upbringing—could have continued to be a beacon of good will and benevolence in the world.)

In the first volume, when Falkland still appears in the role of the ideal man of virtue, he is confronted in rivalry by a fellow landowner, Mr. Tyrrel. And at first, in their relations, Falkland makes the mistake of approaching Tyrrel as a potential moral equal. He therefore proposes to set off a virtuous circle by treating Tyrrel in a spirit of utmost goodness, including by visiting his home and inviting him into friendship. 

Tyrrel, however, is too much of a spoiled petty tyrant and vulgarian at heart to have any hope of defeating Falkland in a contest of virtue. Therefore, he rejects the overtures of friendship and resorts to methods of overt opposition and—ultimately—brute force. 

Falkland is baffled and astonished by this—why would someone respond to an open-handed gesture of decency and magnanimity with even fiercer opposition? What he fails to understand is that, to a person of Tyrrel's description, a display of virtue on the other's side can only appear as an attempt to "put one over" on him and succeed on a field of battle—namely, that of virtue—in which he himself cannot hope to succeed. 

Thus, every display of benevolence and fellow feeling that Falkland uses to try to sue for peace and end the conflict only inflames Tyrrel's opposition still further. "It seemed as if," writes Godwin, "the more incontestibly [Falkland's] excellencies displayed themselves, the more bitter and inexpiable was the abhorrence [Tyrrel] conceived for him." 

In this he is much like the sinister Mr. Claggart in Melville's "Billy Budd, Sailor." There is another figure who realizes that he cannot possibly win in a contest of virtue. And so he conceives an insupportable hatred and "envy" at the fact of Billy Budd's unrivaled goodness and virtue; and the more Budd's fundamental decency and beauty of soul is revealed, the more Claggart hates and wishes to destroy him for it. 

This is much the situation of the two American political parties in the present day. Liberals are still playing the same game of virtue as Mr. Falkland or Billy Budd. They expect that by doing so—by "virtue-signaling," to put it in a derogatory light—they will call forth equivalent efforts from conservatives. The latter will wish to meet and best them on the field of virtue. 

But MAGA Republicans have hitched themselves so irretrievably to a string of political leaders—Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, etc.—who so decisively fail the standards of American political virtue that they know any such efforts to be virtuous will fail. All they can do, therefore, is to pursue a course of total and unyielding opposition not only to liberals, but to all the virtues they stand for. 

This accounts, as I have argued before, for the radicalizing tendency of the modern right. They realize that they cannot beat liberals at their own game of virtue, so they have no choice but to simply destroy the game, and destroy the liberals. Since they cannot hope to be virtuous according to current standards, they feel the need to entirely subvert the standards of value, and put the definition of virtue on its head. In that earlier piece, I quoted Alberto Moravia's anti-fascist novel The Conformist to illustrate the point. The mentality he describes there could well be said to belong to the Trumps, Claggarts, and Tyrrels of the world: "What he needed was the complete success of [his own political movement.] Only in this way could what was normally considered a common crime become, instead, a positive step in a necessary direction[.]" (Calliope trans.)

This is how the bizarre dynamic of our current moral politics so often unfolds. Democrats have what appears to be a decisive moral victory: MAGA Republicans were just caught out, let's say, using a white supremacist symbol. And the Republicans turn around and say: what you call catching us in the act, and see as a moral victory for you, is precisely what we call a triumph for us and a defeat for you: your "head has exploded"; you've "freaked out"; you have been "owned" and successfully "trolled."

What is so strange is that—in the very act of declaring victory—Republicans appear to be conceding the main point. "You're right," they say, "we are less virtuous. We don't care about democracy, equality, or any of the rest of it." And so, their would-be triumph is simultaneously a defeat. They are throwing in the towel. They are acknowledging the superiority of liberal values in the very moment they claim to destroy them. 

This is perhaps what Godwin is getting at, when he continues—in the same passage about Mr. Tyrrel: we could "lay it down as a sort of general maxim that the greatest criminal, when he perpetrates the most atrocious act, is upon the very eve of yielding to the energy of truth, and relinquishing for ever his odious designs." 

Another way of putting this is to say that in the face of an apparent failure to claim the mantle of virtue—such as Republicans suffered in 2012—they are confronted with a moment of decision. Here is the moral crisis. One way or the other, they have to concede a moral defeat. So what do they do? Do they "yield to the energy of truth" and try to run a candidate next time who can beat liberals at the game of virtue? A famous  report from Republican strategists at the time—the 2012 "post mortem"—recommended exactly that. Be less racist, the report said, in so many words. Be more multi-cultural and pro-immigrant. Face the Democrats on their own terrain of shared American pluralistic values and triumph. 

As we know, though, the party chose the opposite direction. Like Mr. Tyrrel, like Mr. Claggart, they instead opted to harden their hearts. They preferred to simply reject all virtue and, instead of competing with the virtuous, to try to destroy and supplant virtue with new more dangerous and destabilizing standards of their own. And so it was, on the "very eve" of their moral realization—their intuition in the 2012 post mortem that they had been getting it slightly wrong—they instead veered off in the polar opposite direction. Instead of trying to win through greater virtue, they decided to try their luck by succeeding to increasingly extreme crime. 

And when a party has chosen to make vice their standard of value, then it does indeed become possible for them to recast every moral defeat they suffer as in truth a victory. Every time they are caught red-handed, they say: well, we meant to get caught, so that it would rile you up. Congratulations libs, you have been owned!

And we, with Mr. Falkland, have no choice but to shake our heads and wonder at this obstinate perversity. Far from being owned, we think, you've just confirmed our victory. You have admitted that we are the better side. And this moral victory in fact showed itself at the 2020 polls, when Democrats took the White House and both chambers of Congress. 

Will it hold again in November? Or will Republicans effect a true transvaluation of values, and install vice, racism, misogyny, selfishness, inequality, and personalistic authoritarianism as the new standards of public virtue in the American heart?