3 minute read
The Incision
NEWS & VIEWS
No Exceptions. Except for Herschel.
The Incision
PUBLIC DOMAIN
What the GOP’s embrace of Herschel Walker says about the state of our political culture
thing?” asked D ana Loes ch, the form er rebrand spokeswoman for the ation al ifle ssociation, on her radio show after T he D aily Beast published proof that erschel alker had reimbursed a form er girlfrien d — and m other of his child for an abortion after pressuring her to get it. ot a damn thing, she answered. ow many times have I said these four words these four very important words inning. Is. . irtue.
It s not ust conservative political commentators who rallied around W alker . Sen s. Tom C otton and R ick Scott announced that they ll be oining the football-has-been-turned-candi date on the campaign trail in eorgia. ou might think that the self-styled party of family values might care if one of their candidates paid in their own formulation to have his m istress m urder their child . Indeed, in the pre-Trump era, political careers were destroyed over less. ut in 0 ope. hat does this say about the state of our politics Of the state of the OP
Donald Trump never succeeded in building his wall the one at the
By A bdul El-Sayed
southern border, at least. ut that doesn t mean he didn t build any walls. ather than a wall of metal and con crete separating the .S. from exico, he built an ineffable wall in the minds of voters that separates a person from thei r persona . is wall allows them to maintain an indelible cognitive dissonance about the politicians they support. It renders those politicians immune to charges of hypocrisy. hat the person does is unimportant it s the persona they re supporting, anyway. politicians can recklessly and completely violate the very standards they campaign on and face little to no conse uences.
Donald Trump laid down the rst bricks before he even got to o ce. emember the A ccess H ollyw ood tapes, in which then-candidate Trump said that he could sexually assault women on account of his celebrity e was elected president ust one month later. e spent the next four years building that wall ever higher through his antics. It s why he remains the most popular epub lican in merica despite being impeached twice and investigated for corruption three times. It s why his endorsees can get away with murdering their own babies.
That wall wouldn t even have been possible without the new cultural bricks with which it s built. ven a decade ago, candidates campaigned in words and policies. Today, they campaign in memes and hashtags. In his seminal work A m using O urselves to D eath cultural critic eil Postman ar gued that the medium is the message. riting in a time before the internet, he documented how the uxtaposition of facts and entertainment on television rendered it all as entertainm ent. H e would have been horri ed by TikTok an online altar to the entertaining.
Trump is the ultimate meme and he rendered our politics into an end less meme war. nd meme wars aren t about facts, policies, or a record of ac complishment. They re about vibes. search for the next dopamine hit.
The meme war of our politics has di vorced a politician from their personal choices. It s why a man like erschel alker with zero credibility as a se rious politician can campaign on an abortion ban with zero exceptions except for, well, erschel alker. It s why he can so flagrantly violate the policies on which he campaigns and not only maintain the support of his party, but count on them to rally to his aide.
It all comes back to power. fter all, erschel alker is instrumental to OP control of the Senate. nd without Senate control, epublicans can t keep passing policies that they themselves are immune from. hich should highlight the cruelty of the whole enterprise. It was never about values. It s about con trol. illions of people have lost access to their own bodily autonomy because of this politics of control. ut its purvey ors can t even control themselves.
O riginally published O ct. 11 in T he Incision. G et m ore at abdulelsayed. substack.com .
