The Right Will Always Fight Dirty

Going low and punching down works much better than taking the high road.

With the recent leak of a draft Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the country has been in an uproar lately. This is for good reason, to be sure — overturning this landmark case is the beginning of the right’s attempt to strip away fundamental rights for a lot of people — LGBTQIA+ folx, BIPOC, and women in general. This has been one of the major goals all along — to restore power to white men and white men only.

There are a lot of hot takes on this — everything from the fundamental power grab that it is to the right’s assertion that the “real issue here” is the unprecedented leak from the Supreme Court. I’m not going to give much of a take on the draft ruling, as I’m pretty sure that everyone has heard enough of all of that.

(Although I will offer a rebuttal to the whole “the real issue is the Supreme Court leak, not the ruling itself” argument by saying that it is disingenuous to compare a leak from a notably-cloistered institution to the stripping of fundamental rights from a whole group of people, and also we can be concerned about two things at the same time.)

Today, I want to talk instead about how the right has always fought using dirty tactics, and how those tactics are bearing fruit for them after quite a lot of effort. To be fair, when your political party is based on authoritarian principles, racial purity, white male supremacy, and an omnipotent sky daddy that will punish your enemies with hellfire, you’ll do just about anything to grab and hold power.

The history of the conservative right using dirty tactics goes way back, and I don’t have the time or space for a big history lesson, but suffice to say that the Confederacy is a big piece of that. After failing to secede so they could hold onto their slaves, right-wingers made every effort to keep nonwhite and non-male people from gaining any ground.

This took many forms — Jim Crow laws, separate but equal, “rebel pride,” and the notion of the Confederacy as about state’s rights and not slavery, among other things. Redlining became a way to keep the undesirables away from white communities, and the fact that the Civil Rights movement happened in my father’s lifetime seems to escape a lot of people. And, as time went on, the methods evolved and took different forms and tactics.

The “war on drugs” started by associating hippies with marijuana and black people with heroin and criminalizing both heavily. It evolved into different laws and punishments around powder cocaine and crack cocaine because powder cocaine was a “white people” drug while crack was a “black people” drug. Then there’s the fact that black people are arrested in much greater numbers for marijuana possession despite roughly equal usage statistics between black and white people.

Of course, these racially-biased laws (among others) encouraged the prison industrial complex to arrest and incarcerate black people at higher rates. Policies like “stop and frisk” and the broken windows theory of policing meant more black men for the legal slavery rings — I mean for-profit prisons.

And now that marijuana is becoming legal in more places, a lot of minorities that were vilified for using it have been locked out of its benefits. Since it’s now considered an “industry” under capitalism, a lot of white people are making boatloads of money from legal pot while lots of POC have to fight tooth and nail to get any kind of anything from it. The fact that there is any opposition to expunging criminal records for nonviolent marijuana possession boggles me, but again, it’s mostly black people who have those records.

This was all driven by the political right’s push to ensure that white men continue to pull the levers of society. The fact that gerrymandering is such a key piece of right-wing politics that they’re way better at it than the left speaks volumes to me. They built their 2010 platform on taking as many statehouses as possible so they could gerrymander their way to a near-perpetual House majority, and Trump did everything in his power to ensure that the 2020 Census benefited the right.

Speaking of Trump and Trumpism, we have reached the point where the right isn’t afraid to say what they’re doing anymore. Mitch McConnell has explicitly said that if Republicans take back the Senate, he will block any and every Supreme Court pick that Biden puts forth for the next two years. The right has made themselves the party of “my way or the highway,” and they will grind the gears of democracy to a halt if it means they get their way eventually.

And, what is incredibly sad to me is that their perpetual lie machine has taken over any form of reason in their party. If you’re not a far-right authoritarian who demands that Trump be crowned the Once and Future King of America, you’re a RINO. Republicans tell lies that are easily disproved, but they’ve spent so much time gaslighting their base into believing anything they say that many will just accept anything that comes out of Tucker Carlson’s mouth as fact.

The January 6 insurrection and attempted coup — for that is what it was — is being defended by the right as anything from “not as bad as it seemed” to “ a peaceful demonstration” to “a righteous attempt to defend democracy.” The right has been setting up the hostile takeover of America by cheating and playing dirty, and because they are good at the long game, this has been in the works for upwards of sixty years, if not more.

Between the constant gaslighting of their base, the race-baiting, and demonizing of the “others” who are coming to take their jobs and their livelihoods, the right has a stranglehold on their base’s motivations. All of this is reinforced from the pulpit, where the righteous Christians call it “god’s plan.” Because, despite being a country founded on religious freedom and even though 30% of the country isn’t Christian, apparently we are a Christian nation in god’s own image.

And, despite Jesus being a brown hippie who said things like “love thy neighbor” and washed the feet of prostitutes and sinners, apparently the best form of Christian love is a vile hatred of anyone who isn’t like you. And, according to the right, that means hating immigrants, black people, and anyone who believes that people other than white men deserve rights.

So, what is a rational person on the left (or a RINO who hates the direction that the Republican party has gone) to do?

One of the most apt descriptions I’ve seen of the political situation in America recently is that the left is a patchwork while the right is a monolith, and that is reflected well in how things are going. When Trump was president, the right lined up in support of him totally and completely. Now that Biden is president, the left is not particularly supportive of him and they have to fight to demonstrate the things he has done (which is a lot, by the way).

Even still, lots of people are quick to point out Biden’s failings: stalled legislation in the Senate, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and inflation. This is despite the fact that the Senate holdup is being caused by exactly two Democrats and supported by the monolith of Republicans, while the Afghanistan withdrawal was laid out by Trump (who predictably criticized the failure of his own plan). And, while it is tempting to blame things like inflation and gas prices on the president, he just doesn’t have that kind of power, especially when not supported by the legislature (coughcoughJoeManchincoughcough).

And so, because the left is a patchwork of coalitions and interest groups that all have their own agendas and desires, the right is a monolith of mostly white “Christians” who move and act mostly as one. Because they are such a monolith that will fall into lockstep, they will support anything that keeps them in power. Generally speaking, they don’t care if they have to lie, cheat, or steal to get what they want — as long as their base thinks that they have a righteous cause, the ends justify the means.

And, right now, the right is using their monolith to push for an authoritarian theocracy led by the Supreme Ruler King Trump. Stripping abortion rights is just the beginning of what they want to do, and it has been facilitated by decades of lying, cheating, and stealing.

McConnell blocking Merrick Garland’s confirmation for almost a year, pushing Kavanaugh through despite numerous red flags, and ramming Amy Coney Barrett through in a month just before the election gained the right a Supreme Court majority. Never mind the double standard between the Garland block and the Barrett shove, never mind the perception of impropriety around all of it, the act netted them three seats on the highest court in the land, and that’s what mattered.

All of this is being done in the guise of making America great again, which generally means going back to a time when women and black people weren’t so uppity with their demanding of rights and whatnot. If you support this, you’re a true patriot and Christian, and if you are against it, you’re a devil-worshiping socialist. To paraphrase the saying, fascism has come to America, and it’s wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.

And, because their base is gaslit and brainwashed into believing that the ends justify the means no matter how dirty the means may be, they will continue to support the liars and insurrectionists. They are “god’s chosen,” after all, doing the godly work of oppressing women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ folx, and the godless heathens that make up the left in the name of Jesus.

So, how the heck do we fight back against this? I think the best way I’ve seen it put is “when they punch down, we punch back.” We cannot negotiate in good faith with a group that doesn’t fight fair, will not respect us as people, and makes every attempt to strip away our rights. This, I think, is why there is so much hay made over AOC and the Squad — they have decided that fighting fair is taking us backward, so they raise hell and punch back.

Young liberals have come to see that standard-issue Democrats are considered center-right in Europe and standard-issue Republicans are considered far-right; Trumpism is, at most, a half-step removed from straight-up Nazis as far as a lot of Europeans are concerned. If we are still at the point of debating whether people deserve fundamental rights or not, then we need drastic progress now.

America is not a fascist state, it is not a Christian theocracy, and it is not a place for only white people to thrive. We are a nation of many stripes and types, and we cannot let the right continue to fight dirty and drag us through the mud in an attempt to institute a fascist theocracy run by white men. If we want to stop this march toward oppression, we have to fight back and fight on their terms.

We need to learn how to gerrymander just as well as they do until it is outlawed (and we need to outlaw it). We need to push our message in better, punchier ways. While we should avoid gaslighting and lying, we need to start calling a spade a spade when it comes to the right’s gaslighting and lying. Fox News and the various other right-wing lie machines need to be regulated or shut down. While we’re at it, all the alt-right militia nutjobs, racist organizations, misogynist groups, and Nazis need to be shoved back under the rocks from whence they came.

We cannot tolerate intolerance in this country. Trying to justify racism, sexism, bigotry, and anti-queer messaging as “part of the debate” only serves to legitimize it. It is not legitimate discourse — it is hatred, pure and simple, and needs to be called out and shut down within public debates immediately.

Ultimately, trying to fight fair has only taken us backward because our opponents won’t follow the rules. At this point, we need to punch back hard and beat the far-right nutjobs back under the slimy rocks they crawled out from. If they won’t respect us (and make no bones about it, they don’t), we need to meet them on their terms.

At this point, if we don’t take action hard, fast, and immediately to defend America from fascism, we won’t have a country left to defend.

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