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LIVE: President Trump's Poorly Attended Festival of Hate and Disease

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The Ghost of a Flea6/20/2020 8:36:46 pm PDT

This is an excellent example of the general bullshit trend in which media commentators are poetry critics discussing aesthetics, but only a specific kind of aesthetic they find gratifying and thus deign to present as Truth.

Is “Rosie” more passionate than the people who stood in line nearly a whole day to vote, specifically trying to use their franchise as their adversaries close polling stations to game the system? So why is she emblematic of something and they’re not?

She isn’t.

The far more likely way this woman matters is that she has full franchise and representation where she lives, so her “passion” is not stymied by being cheated by a variety of systems designed to render her vote insignificant or simply keep her from ever voting.

But the project of Project Lincoln isn’t to accurately describe how fucked up the country is, or how long it’s been fucked up. It’s project is to sell how effective Project Lincoln’s messaging is and how ineffective anything done by liberals and leftists is. The individual agoniste of Rosie can be turned into a little ding about “passion”—a meaningless aestheticized framing of what’s basically a sick person voting against their own best interest because of fears fostered by a pervasive and malicious culture that preceded Trump but created the loam in which he grows.

Trump is embarrassing to conservatism because he demonstrates what conservatism relies on to get elected. He is being attacked because he is an authentic expression of the culture conservatism is built on; he says things outright and performs only the most perfunctory of disavowals, breaking with a style of coded language and careful prevarication built over half a century. For that he must be attacked.

…but Trump is a creature of optics and empty symbols just as his conservative predecessors were, and they can’t help but admiring his ability to stir people up over nothing, to no end, because that’s what their jobs were until their conservative fanfiction was overrun by Trumpian fanfiction. If there was no empty emotionality, if politicians were judged by functional competence and not by grand narratives, they’d have no jobs because they’re just advertising agents that turn shitty people into brands.

Bear all that in mind when they say something like this: