Unserious People Are Dangerous Are The Most Dangerous Kind — The Apocalypse Cabaret newsletter for November 10

I think one of the most common assumptions liberals have been making has been holding back their political success, and it needs to be jettisoned — fast. It’s going to be painful, though.

For as long as I’ve been aware of political discourse in the United States, the left has been telling itself that a coming demographic shift was going to make conservative Republicans obsolete. The electorate would naturally tip leftward as a greater percentage of the population became “non-white,” and eventually a progressive wave would crash over the country, remaking everything in its path. A tsunami filled with health care.

We’ve been predicting this for decades. And, once again, it didn’t happen.

And the problem isn’t just that the theory that a more diverse country will mean a political shift to the left may be wrong for any number of reasons — though it may, and the degree to which Trump improved his performance among hispanic and black men ought to terrify us. No, the problem is that this theory has been an excuse for progressives to stop doing outreach.

We don’t have to do outreach to people we disagree with, the assumption goes, because eventually demographics will do our outreach for us. Nobody needs to be convinced about progressive policies today, because the constituents for these policies will eventually be overwhelming in a cycle or two.

In a few cases, this actually appears to be right: voters from coast to coast have shifted on legalizing pot, for example, and they want more government health care. But most of the time, this assumption of a coming demographic tidal wave has worked for progressives about as well as the assumption that the rapture is just around the corner has worked for evangelical Christianity.

Politics requires both mobilization and outreach. The assumption that a demographic shift will do our outreach for us — that eventually people will just see how right we are — has hobbled progressive politics for decades, and arguable made the job of Right Wing Media easier by making us easier to demonize.

The idea that we could beat Trump by shunning his supporters was always righteous but naive. You cannot shun half the country. Especially not when your margins in swing states are razor thin. Even now, too many people are acting as if refusing to connect with people who disagree with you is a virtue, because once the young people start voting the problem will take care of itself.

It hasn’t. It won’t. Progressives need to give up on the dream of a demographic shift that will take away their need to persuade, and find ways to connect with and convince people they disagree with. We can’t continue being lazy or self-righteous about this: convincing people is the work.

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Sacha Baron Cohen may have disproved the theory that eventually “Cancel Culture’ will come for us all. He is perhaps the most offensive and boundary pushing comedian active today, and yet — as this short essay points out — no one has even suggested “cancelling” him as his new movie, filled with incredibly offensive takes on women and Jews and everything else, has come out.

He’s not personally immune. The issue has come up before: his characters “Borat,” Bruno,” and “Ali G” have all been accused of perpetuating the very prejudice they satirize. Baron Cohen’s identity as a Jew provides him no more protection than his identity as a satirist.

It’s not about what he is — but it may be about what he does. Baron Cohen is unique among modern “offensive” comedians in the way he is always punching up. His material is incredibly offensive, yes, but he is doing it as a way of targeting the powerful, not making fun of the weak. He says terrible things about Jews and women and gays, but it’s in the service of going after the likes of Rudi Guilianni and Mike Pence.

I’m not sure this is true of most other “cancel culture” targets. My impression is that the many, many, gifted comedians who say they won’t play colleges anymore and can’t do TV because everybody’s to easily offended all want to do acts in which they make fun of marginalized people for the sake of making fun of marginalized people. Which is to say: they’re punching down They’re saying some version of “the existence of those people is still funny!” Which … is it though?

It’s no offense against free speech for a crowd to not like a comedian’s act. But Baron Cohen may demonstrate be demonstrating that the content of comedy may be less important in the age of social media than the use it is being put to: it might be both more helpful and more accurate if we were to look at “cancel culture” — at least in comedy — as a reaction against punching down, rather than as a decree that topics are forbidden.

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My new hero is the anonymous person at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, in Philadelphia, who when asked by the President’s legal team, replied: “Sure, we do events. We can absolutely get you a podium and microphone. Do you need any balloons?” Oh, what I would give for a tape of that conversation to emerge. I’ve seen tweets claiming that the landscaping business thought it was a prank until people showed up — but in the absence of credible information, it’s hard to know what’s true.

What we do know is that when something bizarre happened, they said “yes.” And more interesting things happen in your life when you say “yes.. To have said “this doesn’t sound right” to the bizarre request to hold a press conference there would have cheated everyone out of one of the most bizzare and entertaining spectacles of the Trump presidency.

By saying “yes,” I think they also did a notable public service. The pathetic absurdity of the spectacle seems to have diminished Trump, and his fight against the election results. He’s still dangerous — he remains the most powerful man on the planet — but he and his cause are diminished. Dictators don’t just need spectacle: in many ways they are spectacle. They are an aesthetic compulsion as much as they are anything else: a show of force is a show. The tanks Trump wanted to roll down the streets of our capital on the Fourth of July were to have been a kind of mystical invocation linking him to an abstract notion of strength. Such rituals of state are almost occult in their efforts — and they do summon malign beings. Heinrich Himmlers and Stephen Millers flock to them. There are ways in which Donald Trump would have been far more dangerous and effective if he had put on less of a show these past four years. But he was not wrong to think that he needed the show.

In the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle, his incompetence has produced its own counter-spell. Which is an extreme example of what has always been true: dictators are often the kind of people who need the a show of force by the state to demand that we take them seriously, because otherwise we never would.

That is the tyrant’s Achilles heel. The terrible weakness of serious people is to forget just how dangerous unserious people can be, and that when we stop taking enough people seriously they will turn on us.

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The question is now being asked: is the Republican refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of an election Trump lost a serious attempt at a coup, or one more cynical play to rake in money and not upset the base?

I think the question is a mistake: what we are seeing is that Trump and most Republicans will do whatever they can get away with. They are not “serious” in the way we usually mean it, but make no mistake: they are attempting a coup.

They are not serious people: they are grifters and opportunists. At this moment, they are all the more dangerous for it.

Democracy itself was on the ballot — and of course the enemies of democracy don’t want to respect an election.

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