David French continues the trend of displacing onto Trump the misdeeds and malformations that have been the dominant position in US conservatism for decades.

The Unmanning of Conservatism

He’s a bully, and his fans love him for it.

Yes, let’s pretend this is new as opposed to an ongoing part of the consumer culture of conservatism since Nixon.

Of all the disorienting and disturbing cultural effects of Trump’s ascension to the presidency, few are as disorienting and disturbing as the redefinition of ideal masculinity in the hearts of many of his biggest fans. The sheepdog has been replaced by the wolf.

And here is the real bullshit: the “sheep, sheepdog, wolf” invocation.

If you want to understand why conservative masculinity leans on cruelty, is fragile as a digestive biscuit, and attracts deep, violent misogyny, well…there you go.

When used by Lev Grossman in “On Killing” the metaphor refers to men trained to be combatants and thus acclimating to tasks abhorrent to civilians: this is necessary but not heroic, and potentially tragic since the serviceman is set apart, even injured, by their exercise of violence.

What is the metaphor to David French? Conservative men are sheepdogs? Who are the sheep? Everyone else? Built into this usage is a unexamined conceit that conservative positions protect people, and that the sheep/sheepdog distinction means that conservative policy is a select group making choices to govern a majority. Given how often conservative leaders serve up the notion that non-whites and the “wrong” kind of women are fundamentally unserious—the vaunted Reagan being especially skilled at hand-wave dismissals—this idea that they are tending a flock is more about power and contempt than care.

Performative cruelty is part of the culture such that there’s an entire genre of shows, and performers competing for eyes, and they have consistently punched down and used exactly the kind of language French is attributing to Trump: nicknames, accusing men of being feminine, cheap shots. It is a multi-billion dollar business. Aggression against ones putative charges is embroidered into the conservative understanding of “family” and parenting; that masculinity specifically entails the domination of wife and kids, to teach them proper order, arises over and over in their religious values.

It’s not just a No True Scotsman—everyone’s a good sheepdog until they’re a wolf—it’s a continuing resolution to ignore bad behavior in the in-group, until such time as it can’t be concealed…at which point it’s denied that the “wolf” was ever part of the community of putative “sheepdogs.” Nothing will change as long as this kind of shallowness—the invocation of a heroic manly ethos, with no reflection about how that system has and is operating, how it fails—is presented as critique.