The High-Octane Denialism Of The RNC - "Fabricated Panic Followed By Hoarse, Manic Panglossianism"
The problems in your life aren’t real; the real problems are the ones that nobody, except for everybody on this stage, has the courage to talk about. The media wants to brainwash you; the Marxists are massing outside your idyllic suburban lawn; if the enemy gets its way, small businesses will be decimated, Thomas Jefferson will be cancelled, and 911 will go straight to voice mail. The speakers at the Republican National Convention keep ringing the same notes: fabricated panic followed by hoarse, manic Panglossianism. Jobs were lost under past Democrats, and they would be lost under future Democrats, but with President Trump there is only milk and honey. Joe Biden is a stultifying agent of the status quo, too boring to mention by name; he is also an unprecedented break with tradition, a threat to all that we hold dear.
Climate change, of course, is waved away as mass hysteria; even the coronavirus pandemic is mentioned rarely and almost always in the past tense, as if the decision to deliver speeches in a cavernous, empty auditorium were merely the whim of a quirky location scout. Anyone watching from quarantine, during a once-in-a-century unemployment crisis, would not need a fact check to know that this is all a stretch, to say the least. Still, who doesn’t like a bit of flattering escapism now and then? A disaster movie is supposed to have a clean arc: hero nukes asteroid before it can collide with Earth. Who wants a muddled plotline about a real and intractable disaster—a hurricane supercharged by global warming, or the long struggle against police brutality, or a President who may or may not be on the verge of stealing an election and triggering a constitutional crisis? Sounds depressing. Besides, movie theatres are closed right now, for reasons it would be too much of a bummer to mention.
“America is not a racist country,” Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, said on Monday night, twenty seconds before referring to the “discrimination and hardship” she and her Indian-American family had faced. On Tuesday night, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, demonstrators chanted the name of Jacob Blake, an African-American father of six who had been shot in the back, on video, by a white police officer. Melania Trump, in her keynote address from the White House Rose Garden, said, “While debate rages on about issues of race, let’s focus on the strides we have made and work together for a better tomorrow for everyone.” Mistakes were made in the past; fewer mistakes should be made in the future; in the meantime, it would be unseemly to focus on anything so mundane as the present. The point was to stay positive.
Beyond that, no one seemed too hung up on the details. Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky, praised Trump for winding down foreign wars; Eric Trump, perhaps the dimmest star in the Trumpian firmament, praised his father for dropping “the mighty moab,” which stands for Mother of All Bombs. “Hello, folks,” President Trump’s top economic adviser said, employing the faux-familiar tone of a neighbor who can never quite remember your name. “You know me from TV and radio. I’m Larry Kudlow.” He declared the Trump Administration’s economic policies “a roaring success”—hopefulness repackaged as blithe, obstinate blindness—and asked, “Do you want economic health, prosperity, opportunity, and optimism, or do you want to turn back to the dark days of stagnation, recession, and pessimism?” A desire for both opportunity and reality—say, a nod toward the obvious fact that we’re currently in a recession, which would seem like a prerequisite for finding a way out—was not on offer. “Our enemies fear us because Americans fight for good,” Dan Crenshaw, a representative from Texas, said on Wednesday night. “The defeat of isis was the result of America believing in our heroes.” Then, before Vice-President Mike Pence’s acceptance speech, came a five-minute trailer, an orgy of white picket fences, amber waves of grain, and sun-drenched American flags billowing in slow motion.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-manic-denialism-of-the-republican-national-convention
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