Wait Til Daddy Gets Home: America's Sad, Craven, Masochistic Relationship with the Republican Party
America is an abused child trapped in its government's horrible household
I suppose the bright side of, well, every goddamned thing I’m about to say, is that people finally seem to be noticing that the media, whether mainstream/legacy media, or the squalid chaos-bins of TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, and Meta, or even the atomized, janky self-checkout counter of news and commentary and commentary-on-commentary the rest of us have nailed together out of the last eight years’ worth of absolute fuckshit, is nothing like the orgy of liberal bias we were always told it was.
Wait, who told us that? Oh, was it conservatives? Like literally the whole time? Whenever the nasty, festering, soul-rotting hypocrisies and crimes and corruption and oppression they were gleefully pulling got so out of control the media couldn’t find any more ways to not report on it, and apologetically crafted mild-mannered weasel-worded headlines out of some new utterly heinous, deliberate and multi-pronged sadism? And we all just meekly bent our heads and accepted that everyone should just try to be a little more conservative in the future, after all, the poor things have it so hard, it’s so unfair to them that people don’t want to be their subjects and the crimes they commit to make themselves kings (or just for funsies) keep getting discovered, underplayed in the press, perfunctorily investigated, weakly prosecuted, and hurriedly forgotten?
Did you think I was talking about the COVID response? January 6th? Emoluments? Stolen documents? Fake electors? Bribing SCOTUS? Colluding with Russia to swing an election and undermining NATO to prepare for an antagonistic nation’s new war of land acquisition? Opening the entire treasury to the President’s friends without oversight and handing out billions in pre-forgiven loans (by definition, not loans)? Refusing to help their own state’s citizens suffering and dying in multiple storms, even so much as taking a phone call or voting for aid, because they don’t like the current administration and want to blame them for not helping?
My siblings in Christ, I was talking about Iran Contra.
Because it’s always been this way. ALWAYS. I don’t know what kind of roving, sentient, ravenous Memory Hole has taken hold of this world, but it’s eating REAL GOOD these days. Oh, is CNN shining up the conservative candidate with generous tongue-baths, weasel words, and strategic silences while breathlessly pointing and screeching at the liberal’s slightest ill-timed fart? Is the Wall Street Journal reporting on a speech in which the Republican suggested literally the worst economic ideas of all time as “nuanced and bold”? Is the New York Times publishing a whole lot of op-eds like they’re objective news and then you open the op-ed and it was clearly written by fucking Ungoliant?
I mean…yeah. They do that. They’ve always done that. Conservatives do not change, by definition, except to get more authoritarian. It’s kind of their whole thing.
Hey, remember when the New York Times knowingly ran fabricated stories just to get a cute lil head-pat from the Bush Administration, except without the head-pat part? Remember how fucking excited every single cable news network was to get their photogenic reporters artfully smudged with dirt and “embedded” with actual combat troops, with whom they would definitely never form tight bonds and feel reluctant to publish anything critical of? Remember how everyone involved with the Clinton impeachment was fucking someone, or many someones, other than their wives, with gusto, in office, and literally nobody said anything about it until years later when it didn’t matter anymore? And Trump having five kids by three wives, countless affairs, and pretty openly fucking a right-wing grifter on the campaign trail is not even worth clutching one lonely pearl about? And how hard the media mocked Hillary for saying there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring down the President and then said nothing when George Conway went around laughing about absolutely running a vast right-wing conspiracy to bring down the President (aw, he says it was so annoying to have to do that with fax machines and copiers! Poor guy!) twenty years later, and in fact, presenting that fucking guy as some kind of liberal rebel against his wife Kelly Ann’s conservatism because HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE? Remember when they all helpfully didn’t report on Reagan’s dementia? And stopped talking about Iran Contra as soon as humanly possible? How Carter is still thought of as some kind of uniquely terrible President despite being preceded by Nixon/Ford and succeeded by the infected root of the poisoned tree whose fruit we’re all still choking on to this day?
This is a minor sampling. You’d think people would at least remember 2016, when every NYT cover story was a sweaty, heavy-breathed, puff piece pretending to be Woodward & Bernstein “exposing” Hillary’s scandals while CNN just went ahead with the actual headline “Does Trump Transcend Truth?” while showing a live feed of his empty podium for hours, waiting for their bestest boyfriend to show up. Or how happily they all parroted the “migrant caravan” story and said nothing about how quickly it seemed to vanish after the election. Or any of the dozens of recent stories about Trump’s “resurfaced” background that didn’t resurface at all, the media just stopped talking about it and everyone forgot.
But I guess it’s more fun to pretend this bizarre eagerness to turn down the sheets of democracy for conservatives is brand new and everything before was somehow honest and fair—biased toward the left, if anything! Those sneaky leftists! Always maintaining a multi-generational united front to enact subtle, patient, incremental long-term plans to slowly win America to their side with the loyal cooperation of major corporations and without interference by systemic structures! YEAH THAT SOUNDS LIKE THE LEFT.
And it’s not about a “horse race,” either. That’s become the newest excuse for so many outlets sanewashing the fact that every time Trump opens his mouth what comes out is the elevator-blood from The Shining with some gobs of electrified shark and the fucking shards of Kristallnacht floating in it.
But it’s bullshit of the highest degree. Incredibly effective bullshit that allows people to acknowledge the problem and immediately shrug it off. It sounds right. It’s just cynical enough. It feels like it makes sense and fits with all our frustrations about capitalism and the media’s complicity in the rise of the new fascism. We can comfortably repeat it while still appearing cool and unfooled and smarter than everyone else. It appeals to our basic assumption that profit is the only motive for entities as vast as media conglomerates.
Still bullshit.
Honestly, I’m not even sure how the idea is believable to anyone for more than a minute or two. First of all, exposing Trump and honestly reporting on his enshittification of the modern world would bring in a whole lot of clicks, as would, you know, defeating the new fascism. That’s the kind of thing you break out the Big Boy Fonts for. Most of the country was literally dancing in the streets when Biden won—there would be zero loss of profit in uncovering Trump’s malfeasance and downfall. Not to mention, actual investigative digging would turn up some truly incredible stories. There is no reason not to investigate the ways the GOP has tried to set up cheating in this election, but it barely makes a blip in the headlines when yet another scheme turns up and is promptly not dealt with.
Second, when Biden was floundering in the polls, did the media go hard on Trump to maintain a close race and all those thirsty terrified eyeballs on their content? Fucking no. I was there. You were there. They ignored every insane thing Trump said during the debate and came together in an almost unprecedented unity to thump Biden out of the race and convince everyone he had Parkinson’s. Aaron Sorkin, of all over-blessed people on this dumbass rock, published an op-ed saying if the Democrats were actually serious about the threat of Trump, they’d completely non-democratically nominate Mitt Dog-on-a-Hot-Car-Roof Romney as their candidate the day before Biden dropped out. The media landscape was so unified that that was the creator of The West Wing’s solution: Well, if EVERYONE was conservative, we wouldn’t have all this division! Don’t like the new Hitler? Go with Himmler! See? All fixed!
Did the media go hard on Trump when Biden trailed him in 2020? No, they argued over who got to blow him first by cleaning up daddy’s messy speeches (oh those strategic broken quotation marks and ellipses have so much to answer for) and telling us all Biden couldn’t possibly win so get used to it. When the Butler shooting happened, did they finally start reporting on all the good Biden has actually done for the country to balance out the narrative that this clinched the whole thing for the party promising a new civil war? Not for one fucking second! You could feel the absolute thrill behind every outlet running that “epic!1!” photo as it suddenly became the only photo that had ever been taken in the history of the world, then the disappointment when the shooter turned out not to be the blue-haired trans immigrant communist abortion activist of the legacy media’s dreams. And every cable news outlet spent 2016-2020 swoonily reciting one now he’s finally becoming America’s President tone-poem after another, as though by the purity of their yearning they can make it so. I do not ever remember once seeing a pundit with moist eyes stare longingly at a Democrat and moan with pleasure that he had finally become our President, least of all because he managed to complete a State of the Union speech without ritualistically sacrificing a migrant worker on the floor of the House or dropped a giant fuck-off bomb on Afghanistan hoping it it would make him feel a big boy.
One half of our political establishment (and it’s not just the bleached Gibbering Mouther from Georgia) is openly discussing and disseminating the talking point that Democrats have a weather control machine that can create hurricanes (which they have not used to fix climate change because reasons) and direct them at conservatives. That, and I cannot stress this enough, is fucking crazy-ass wibbly-wobbly shit. Anyone who actually believes it is profoundly in need of powerful medication. Yet reporting on these completely out to lunch fans of radical science fiction, such as it is, has at best acted like this is funny, just another thing a Republican said and not completely disqualifying from anything but an in-patient treatment program, or reported it with wan, disinfected headlines like “Yes, They Can Control the Weather, Says Marjorie Taylor-Greene” while barely addressing multiple Republican governors refusing to save their own people as they drown and flee. We are now expected to just deal with pure moon-howling madness as a serious part of our national discourse.
Now, of course the media criticises Trump. They made billions doing just that. It’s the journalistic Eden they want back, so that they can copy/paste someone’s misspelled tweet and plaster Democracy Dies In Darkness above it. But they also carry water for him while offering nothing but scorn to any Democratic move or action, and super-gluing a megaphone to the lips of anyone with a grievance against them not fixing every problem instantly with a deadlocked Congress so that both sides look equally wretched. They insist on detailed policy from Harris while asking how Trump’s tummy is feeling today. Constantly ask how a Democrat is going to pay for programs to actually help people while never bothering to ask how a Republican plans to pay for infinite tax cuts, absurd tariff plans, and orgiastic military spending. Or if they do manage to squeak out a real question, most outlets turn right around and pretend Trump didn’t answer by rambling about nailing Haitian swans to lawnmowers or pledge to nominate Clarice Starling as Attorney General.
I’ve gone on and on, I know, and I could keep going until this is a 9-part series. This is where I’m going with it: what’s going on in the media is simply not about creating a horse-race, not only because it’s always been a race between a normal fucking horse and a geriatric centaur huffing that rage-drug from Firefly, but because no one seems to care what kind of race it is as long as the Democrat stays behind. Imagining it’s about money or ratings or both is just a lot easier to believe. That this craven, groveling behavior, not just from the media, but from a very uncomfortable percentage of this country, is about capitalism and profit and not genuinely preferring conservatives and putting their giant meat-paws on the scale for the daddies they never had.
America just likes conservatives more than it likes liberals. Over and over, time and again, this country bends itself into tesseracts trying to give Republican candidates a chance not to be the absolute fucking worst all the fucking time forever. They always are the absolute fucking worst they can get away with, and then everyone trips over their own children to forget and imagines that there was some kind of mythical “traditional Republican Party” that wasn’t like this and may one day return at our greatest hour of need like King Arthur with one divine hand in a hedge fund and the other in a meth lab.
I feel like I’ve spent most of my life hearing dyed-in-the-wool Democrats say they’d absolutely vote for a Republican who threw this or that sad little bone to the idea that maybe we shouldn’t all live in Gilead, only without the massive social programs, free food, clothing, and housing, or employment guarantees the actual clownshit evil Gilead had. I rarely see any Democrat not happy to say they liked McCain (don’t google the Keating Five, kids!) or whoever the new “welcome to the resistance” Republican is this month (before they inevitably yank off their fucking face and cackle that they were Old Man Fascism the whole time)
These days, I hear quite a few leftists saying Trump would be better because it would teach Democrats a lesson or accelerate the Rapture revolution or whatever idea was definitively proven to be a nihilistic mind-pit of wrong by the fact that the walking carcass was already President and all that happened was they got to hurt us and smile.
I have never heard a hardcore Republican say they’d give a Democratic candidate a chance under any circumstances whatsoever. Let alone a far-right Christian nationalist. In fact, the one thing the far right and far left seem to be able to agree on is that the absolute most disgusting and reprehensible, any, demonic thing to be in the history of the world is a regular old well-meaning liberal. Which definitely doesn’t come from having grown up listening to the entire media slowly morph liberal into a curse word no one even wants to say anymore and just sucking that shit down with mother’s milk.
There is just something dark and awful here, deep down, that wants a mean daddy.
America’s entire relationship with its two political parties (not to mention the “third parties” that only ever exist to carve off votes from Democrats and somehow never seem to harm Republican performance at the polls) is the grotesque acting out of an abused child, writ large. Generations have grown up with distant, authoritarian, or absent fathers as a romanticized ideal from Hollywood to the church pulpit, if not flat-out reality in so many cases. (Not all, tons of Dads are wonderful, tons of Moms suck and vice versa. This is about abusive patriarchal and maternal archetypes, don’t get upset, it’s a metaphor. This isn’t a gender thing, either, substitute Mean Mommy and Cringe Dad if you like.)
So America just keeps playing out this sick but classic pathology. Suck up to stern, angry, distant, uncontrolled yet controlling Dad, give him every chance to just stop being an asshole for five seconds; lash out at Mom because she’s safe and boring and will keep trying to help no matter what we do. If only she were better, if only she behaved perfectly, if only she loved him more, if only she gave him more, if only she gave us more, if only she weren’t so fucking annoying all the time!
But Dad? Dad is cool and strong! He’s a provider! He doesn’t need any of our shit! Cool Dad lets us do whatever we want! He’s not even here half the time because he’s so important and has so much on his shoulders! I mean, we can’t do anything Cool Dad doesn’t like, and he takes our lunch money every day and punches us in the stomach if he thinks the boys seem suspiciously gay today or the girls speak up or anyone asks where he was last night, he really seems to hate our foster-siblings and starts fights with our neighbors for no reason, and he thinks it’s Mom’s fault every time it rains, but we can play with guns and not pay for stuff and beat up other kids! Dad says school is stupid and we shouldn’t have to go! He lets us eat candy every day! He always gets his way and we want to always get OUR way too! He’s sooooo rad and funny and strong!
But Loser Mom can’t stop yammering about dumb crap like rules and decency and thinking of future consequences. She’s always making compromises and telling us we have to do stuff and be nice to others and get along and be patient and like, not drink from the awesome rusty fire hose because Dad takes a shit in the well every morning and use the filter pitcher instead. Or we hate her because she’s always cleaning up his mess and trying to placate him instead of (somehow) kicking him out in a superhero cape when Dad’s buddies run half the town and a whole bunch of the kids told her they’d go with him if she tried. IT’S SO CRINGEY AND WEAK. Ugh, Mom sucks so much. I wish we had a new Mom! But not a new Dad, because Cool Dad rules and he only beats us because Mom makes him so mad. And hey, it’s Mom’s job to take care of us, not Dad’s! She’s the one that’ll be judged if we fall apart; Dad doesn’t even want a family in the first place.
Americans love Cool Dad because he does not love them and never will, so we beg for crumbs, and hates Uncool Mom because she neither burns the house down with both of them in it nor will she ever stop allowing his abuse to seem less horrible by working to fix the problems he creates before they take us all down, so we can just call her a bitch and know she’ll still probably make dinner out of whatever Dad left after his last rampage.
Or if you’re a libertarian, I guess Dad going for a pack of cigarettes and never coming back is the goal.
And we just keep acting like this, over and over, forgetting what every cycle of Republican fuckup/Democratic damage control (conveniently leaving little time or funds for actual Democratic policy progress) should teach us: Lucy isn’t ever gonna let anyone kick that ball, and on the off chance someone managed to get a punt in, she’s filled it with catshit and TNT on the sly.
The media is made of people, it’s not a great eldritch beast of many eyes and mouths. And people have biases. They have fucked-up shit they’re working through. A lot of older people had Dads exactly like that because that was more or less how Dads were supposed to be until very recently: authoritarian, disciplinarian, distant, uninvolved in day-to-day household affairs, and primarily concerned with enriching himself, which riches would then trickle down to the rest of the family. Parental figures and the entire structure and cosmology of dominant Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions which have God as literally an absentee or punishing Father at their core, scald ideas about authority and its use into our tiny baby brains. The planet is still being run by very old people whose baby brains learned that fathers knew best, and the biggest, strongest, most authoritarian ones got to dole out the hurt and not get hurt themselves, or any consequences for acting that way—and quite a few rewards. It just hasn’t been that long since, minus actually beating his wife and children (and sometimes even then), this was considered the order of the natural world and the hereafter.
And then there’s something darker and uglier down there in the mess: choice and agency and the modern world are hard and scary. Being an adult is weird and crazy different than it’s ever been and living in the future isn’t exactly super fun. When people are scared, they retreat behind walls, behind whatever they perceive as strong, even if it’s cruelty, and jam their heads directly into the sand. I think a lot of people just kind of want to give up, give in, say fuck it, why try to be responsible for each other and accept those who aren’t like us and mind our stupid manners all the time and work together to keep this house standing when it needs so much repair? Why not just take a wrecking ball to it, or let that businessman with a briefcase who definitely has normal teeth and not fangs and super definitely isn’t drooling with anticipation, take charge so we don’t have to think about what’s right anymore?
There is this strange nihilism floating around about how close Trump is to winning. A this might as well happen apathy I cannot comprehend. None of this is inevitable. Even the reddest states have massive blue voter bases that still vote, and more that don’t turn out. We do not have to descend into this madness. It will be worse, not better, than anyone is imagining. We do not have to accept Garbage Daddy (and Trump is LITERALLY that Dad to his own kids and us) just because the neighborhood gossips would rather seriously discuss weather control, translate Dad’s drunken rambling like the priests at the Oracle of Delphi, and fume about how Mom hasn’t gotten the neighbors down the road to stop setting each other’s houses on fire while getting kicked in the head in her own kitchen all day every day, all the while some guy plasters every house with flyers saying weather control is totally real, but vaccines aren’t, and Terrible Mom is an Atlantean hell-dolphin hungering to eat us all (while hiding the tell-tale hump of a fiery fin on his own back under a techbro-casual bomber jacket).
IT’S FUCKING NUTS AROUND HERE. And we’ve just gotten numb and learned to live with it for nine years.
I don’t want to do this anymore. That’s always the downfall of the liberal voter base: we just want to go about our lives, so we do, and the shadows close in while we’re not paying attention. But we will keep doing it, even if Harris wins, and may the Atlantean hell-dolphins help us if she doesn’t, America (and wouldn’t it be nice if it were only America) will go right back to pawing at the trouser-leg of the patriarch who doesn’t love them in 2028 and 2032 and so on. People want to believe in the Good Conservative. They’ll grasp at any straw that lets them. The fight is never over, because it’s with the broken psyche of this nation, which is not actually that preciously unique in any of this, and that healing is measured in centuries, if it’s even possible.
Conservatism and progress have been at war since Uruk and Jericho—this one is our battle, it sucks beyond the telling, but we can’t just give up, no matter how determined the legacy media and the new online political ecosystem are to coddle full theocratic fascism into life—the truth isn’t that hard to figure out.
Democrats don’t control the weather.
And Republicans don’t control our fate.
Thee most fabulous fact rant I’ve ever read, and I’m am Old who remembers Iran-Contra. Thank you.
this may just be one of the best damned things I have ever read!