Best Potential Gay Bar Name Ever: The Rum and Cock
I chose the title because I felt it needed to be said, and I couldn't think of a good relavent title.
It's always struck me as pretty strange that mainstream conservatives don't at least publicly disavow people as completely unhinged as Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.* But, I think I might have figured out why it is.
Modern Conservatism is a very conflicted ideology. It relies upon reactionary fundamentalist Christians for political power, but it does not necessarily embrace fundamentalist Christianity. And yet, vestiges of older conservative ideas (usually bigotry against women, minorities, gays) rest in their head, and sometimes peak out through their chosen mouthpieces (this conflicts very directly, of course, with those members of the movement who are gay themselves, as we see in cases like Larry Craig and that guy who gives blow jobs because of how scared he is of black men).
Because modern conservatives can't decide if they agree with Coulter and Limbaugh or if they think they are horrible, they have created a compromise solution: they treat them as humorists. This is also because conservatism mixes very poorly with humor, and as such there are very few actual humorists who use conservative politics in their work. Of course, in their respective ways Coulter and Limbaugh really do have humorous aspects to them. Limbaugh uses a fair amount of attempts at humor in his programs, usually in a style that is aggressively bigoted or misogynist (surely we have not forgotten "Barack the Magic Negro"). Coulter is a little trickier, because while everything she says is delivered as if it were a joke, and indeed she says things that are so ridiculous that they really ought to be jokes, she has never given any confirmation that she is joking (unless she gets in trouble; see John Edwards = faggot).
In both cases, for those on the mainstream right, it is much more comfortable to assume, since they feel strangely drawn to these people, that they are joking. Conservatives need to think of reasons to label these zealots as their spokespeople without openly embracing their ideologies, so they add a subtext of joking to their messages (in the case of Coulter, it could also be argued that they are adding the subtext of "See, conservative women can also be 'hot'"). Granted, this is entirely hypothetical, but I feel like there isn't much else that explains people who seem reasonable on the surface even sort of embracing Coulter and Limbaugh.
*I know that people on the right often say much the same thing about far-left people like Michael Moore, but they also say it about such "radical" liberals as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, so this piece will take as a given that they are wrong.
It's always struck me as pretty strange that mainstream conservatives don't at least publicly disavow people as completely unhinged as Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.* But, I think I might have figured out why it is.
Modern Conservatism is a very conflicted ideology. It relies upon reactionary fundamentalist Christians for political power, but it does not necessarily embrace fundamentalist Christianity. And yet, vestiges of older conservative ideas (usually bigotry against women, minorities, gays) rest in their head, and sometimes peak out through their chosen mouthpieces (this conflicts very directly, of course, with those members of the movement who are gay themselves, as we see in cases like Larry Craig and that guy who gives blow jobs because of how scared he is of black men).
Because modern conservatives can't decide if they agree with Coulter and Limbaugh or if they think they are horrible, they have created a compromise solution: they treat them as humorists. This is also because conservatism mixes very poorly with humor, and as such there are very few actual humorists who use conservative politics in their work. Of course, in their respective ways Coulter and Limbaugh really do have humorous aspects to them. Limbaugh uses a fair amount of attempts at humor in his programs, usually in a style that is aggressively bigoted or misogynist (surely we have not forgotten "Barack the Magic Negro"). Coulter is a little trickier, because while everything she says is delivered as if it were a joke, and indeed she says things that are so ridiculous that they really ought to be jokes, she has never given any confirmation that she is joking (unless she gets in trouble; see John Edwards = faggot).
In both cases, for those on the mainstream right, it is much more comfortable to assume, since they feel strangely drawn to these people, that they are joking. Conservatives need to think of reasons to label these zealots as their spokespeople without openly embracing their ideologies, so they add a subtext of joking to their messages (in the case of Coulter, it could also be argued that they are adding the subtext of "See, conservative women can also be 'hot'"). Granted, this is entirely hypothetical, but I feel like there isn't much else that explains people who seem reasonable on the surface even sort of embracing Coulter and Limbaugh.
*I know that people on the right often say much the same thing about far-left people like Michael Moore, but they also say it about such "radical" liberals as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, so this piece will take as a given that they are wrong.
posted by Mephisto at 8:20 AM
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