January 6, 2021
TRUMPISM IS FEMINIZATION:
The right is hooked on a feeling (Bonnie Kristian, January 6, 2021, The Week)
How do President Trump's truest believers explain their certainty he won the 2020 election?They don't. It doesn't need explanation. They just know it. They feel it. And they have public figures -- pundit and politician alike -- willing to validate those feelings and channel them via political performance art into a perpetual motion machine of grievance, animosity, dreampolitik, and fundraising.The notion that populist variants of the American right run on feelings more than fact or reason is not new, of course (nor is it a phenomenon exclusive to the right). Stephen Colbert introduced "truthiness" the better part of two decades ago, and President Trump's whole political career is constructed on emotion. Many of his major policy "accomplishments" are barely connected to reality: The wall, what little of it has been built, will have minimal effect on border security. The trade war with China significantly consists of taxes paid by Americans. And Trump's ostensible record of ending "endless wars" includes zero concluded conflicts.Still, there's a new and remarkable purity of this politics of feeling where the 2020 election is concerned. The conservatives I was raised among saw themselves as the temperate, hardheaded counterweight to illogical, irresponsible "bleeding heart liberals." The right-wing slogan of recent years declared "facts don't care about your feelings." But the conviction that Trump won is wholly felt.
It's why facts don't matter to them.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 6, 2021 7:54 AM