It's not about the Drag Queens.

Part 1: That's a D which rhymes with P and that stands for Pool!

Friend, either you're closing your eyes
To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge
Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated
By the presence of a pool table in your community.
Well, ya got trouble, my friend, right here,
I say, trouble right here in River City.

Meredith Wilson’s Music Man

Hi everyone,

This week’s Motley Cow begins a series reflecting on why Drag Queens, Freedumb, and Golden Toilets matter in the mooing of the Maga Herd.

• Part 1: It’s not about the Drag Queens, it’s about the Rule of law

• Part 2: Unmasking Freedumb (Freedom without responsibility)

• Part 3: Why Oligarchs love freedumb

• Part 4: Tyrants have always loved golden toilets

The best way to cope with what looks like the stampede of political destiny is to mix humor with irony and, as Camus so rightly notes, scorn. Here we go.

Part 1: It’s not about the Drag Queens, it’s about the Rule of Law

Hate groups White Lives Matter of Ohio, Patriot Front, Proud Boys and neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe traveled to Wadsworth Memorial Park to protest at an event in which a drag queen read a book on humanism written by a 9-year-old girl. (News2Share/Ford Fischer)

Have you seen the latest Culture-War-Panic™, the most recent infectious agent released from the GOP’s Wuhan lab of viral politics? This time, we’re told, America faces imminent disaster because of … Drag Queens.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Normally, I’d write this off as mere Maga Herd mooing, but one of the attendant headlines red-lined my spidey-senses. This one:

Neo-Nazis Chant and Salute Outside Drag Brunch in Columbus

Let’s just take a minute to let that settle in: Nazi groups are protesting Drag Queens.

On a whim, I Googled “Nazis and Drag Queens” and … sitting down?

I got 6,570,000 hits.

Six million Five hundred Seventy MILLION hits.

And Drag Queens are just the latest Panic-Squirrel rolled out to shake the branches of the Maga Herd’s social media networks. We’ve seen a lot of Culture-War-Panic-Squirrels over the past few years.

We’ve had the:

• Drag-Queens-Are-A-Threat-To-Our-Children! Panic™

• Transphobia-Because-the-Bathrooms! Panic™ (which included the Whatabout-Men-In-Womens’-Sports! Panic™ and other variations involving Bathrooms!)

• the LGBTQAI+-Supporters-are-Lizard-People! Panic™

• the Critical-Race-Theory-Boogeyman! Panic™

• the Diversity-Education-is-Cultural-Marxism! Panic™ and of course the

• Protecting-Children-From-Dangerous-Books! Panic™

To name but a few.

I started looking for a common thread and I kept coming back to the same thing: none of these Culture War panics are about anything real. They’re all nonsense and noise.

That’s when I started to wonder whether something else wasn’t going on here, something from which the Maga Herd’s noisy delirium tremens about Drag Queens (and parental rights and book banning and Hunter Biden’s laptop and the danger of “diversity programs” and CRT and and and), all this nonsense and noise, was distracting us.

And then I thought, “maybe the culture war isn’t about drag queens?”

Or, what about book banning? Desantis and Texas (and pick any Red state) have started banning books in schools. (Just as a note in passing: people who ban books? They’re never the good guys.) And they claim they’re doing this “to protect children”?

Nonsense and noise.

Maybe the culture war isn’t about banning books?

Or, last week the Wisconsin Legislature (among a swarm of other zombie legislatures) moved to vivisect the University of Wisconsin’s budget for diversity education. As Assembly Speaker and Popcorn Magnate Robin Vos told the AP, diversity programs “are clearly divisive and offer little public good.”

The fact that nothing he said is true — since (and I can’t believe I’d ever have to say something like this out loud) diversity programs actually ameliorate divisiveness and in that way are designed precisely to promote the public good — isn’t even relevant here.

Nonsense and noise.

Maybe the culture war isn’t about diversity programs after all?

I started to notice that none of these Panics have anything to do with serious legislation or, frankly, anything in the Preamble to the Constitution — in fact, most of them violate the Constitution in one way or the other. Nonetheless, they have taken over our politics … and so now our politics is no longer about serious legislation (or anything in the Preamble to the Constitution).

Hm.

Migrating our entire political narrative from wonky but useful legislation into wars about culture makes sense from a purely political point of view. It’s easier to manipulate people with fear and loathing than with, you know, carefully thinking things through . It has the advantage of pushing rational discourse to the side where it can’t meddle.

Sounds like politics as usual, but I suspect there’s something infinitely more corrosive afoot. Here’s my working hypothesis:

The people directing the Maga Herd are trying to eliminate the rule of law itself.

I know, not as sexy as Nazi’s protesting Drag Queens, but hang on for a minute. See what you think.

This is a bit philosophically geeky, but I keep coming back, again and again, to a remark Hegel makes about despotism.

… despotism means any state of affairs where law has disappeared and where the particular [individual] will as such, whether of a monarch or a mob (ochlocracy), counts as law; or rather takes the place of law…”.¹

In English, here’s what he’s saying: despotism is what happens when willfulness trumps the rule of law — or replaces it entirely. In other words, authoritarian types hate the rule of law; they don’t believe laws matter or, even better, that you have to follow them at all. Plus, willfulness is always more fun.

Now, we usually assume that despotic governments maintain their power by imposing draconian laws.

But this is wrong.

There's a more chilling way to understand the authoritarian impulse and one that makes more sense in the current fear-soaked, Cartmanesque I-Do-What-I-Want scarecrow politics we've been seeing lately.

We think of Hitler and the Nazis as imposing an iron-fisted set of laws to maintain power and control, but that’s not what happened. They did precisely the opposite. Nazi power was based on ignoring laws altogether. Doing whatever they wanted regardless of the law. Stalin, Mao, Franco, Mussolini, take your pick. Same thing.

The secret, in other words, is that despotic governments aren’t interested in despotic laws. They don't believe in the rule of law at all.

Laws are a problem for despots because they constrain the very passions and appetites — desire, fear, resentment, envy, greed, etc. — that despots have set up on the thrones of their souls, to quote Plato. Oh yeah, and hate. They like hate a lot. As one of my mentors used to say, “Want to understand politics? Hate plus greed equals power.”

And so, you can start to look at all these whacky, socially disruptive, and largely un-Constitutional “laws,” anything imposed under the umbrella of the Culture-War-Panic™, as attempts to circumvent the rule of law, to assert that they (that is, the Maga Herd) shouldn’t be bound by laws at all: that the laws don’t apply to them.

It’s possible to understand that the culture war, then, isn’t a war on drag queens or diversity programs or critical race theory. The culture was is a war against the kind of culture that thinks the rule of law matters.

See it now?

Anyway, this is what I see everywhere these days. It describes exactly the kind of authoritarianism we've been watching crawl out from under a rock and into the brainstems of what used to be the GOP. You can see it clearly in Trump and DeSantis and their apologists and acolytes: what Tom Nichols called the “intoxicating call of performative irresponsibility.” Here are a few examples:

• Look at the transition of all the GOP big shots who were Trump haters in 2016 and who spun on a dime to become disciples. Cruz, Graham, all of ‘em. Trump’s personality couldn’t convert them by itself, but they’ve become hopelessly addicted to what J.D. Vance (before he was converted) once called Trump’s “cultural heroin.” Trump gave them permission to act the way he did, a dark eucharist he distributed to all of this followers: permission to ignore the rule of law. Seriously, think of the rush. It’s gotta be personally and politically liberating in ways the Constitution would never allow. Create laws to empower the better angels of our nature? “No way!” I-Do-What-I-Want

• Or consider the recent Supreme Court appointees, all of whom lied to get the job when they swore, before Congress, that abortion was an established precedent — then tossed it aside without blushing. “Precedent? Stare Decisis? Doesn’t apply to us!” I-Do-What-I-Want

• Mr. Trump himself, of course, is a perfect example. He never submitted an iota of real legislation (that is, legislation responsibly engaged with the list provided of things to do by the Preamble to the Constitution, say) except in the form of bills designed specifically to hacksaw through the legal, economic, and administrative safety locks holding back the appetites of his oligarchic friends. His response to the current indictment (regarding his theft of and lying about his theft of sensitive national security documents) is an indication not simply of hubris but of his disregard, disinterest, and disavowal of the rule of law. “Laws? They don’t apply to me!” I-Do-What-I-Want

• Governor DeSantis has been signing book banning legislation that ignores constitutional guarantees. Why is that? Because of the rule of law doesn't matter to him. What matters is pandering, as a Trump wannabe, to his followers — who are now also given permission to dismiss both civility and the rule of law. I-Do-What-I-Want!

And everywhere we go our fellow citizens who have come under the sway of this, let’s call it, trickle-down-cultural-heroin are equally disinterested in the rule of law. Consider the visceral reaction to questions about wearing masks as a public health concern, school prayer, book banning, demanding school curriculum oversight they already have, and all the ways they use to avoid questions about the rule of law: screaming about their freedom, screaming about parental rights, screaming about about stolen elections in the absence of evidence. Etcetera etcetera etcetera.

How is this a good thing for a political party?

Should be obvious at this point: the MagaGOP wants to eliminate a government of laws entirely in favor of the chaos of an ungoverned, economic system of state management — and, ironically, not a free market but a market controlled by economic elites: an oligarchy.

Anyway, it’s a working hypothesis.

But honestly Meredith Wilson said all of this much better than I could hope to.

Here’s a refresher.

Next week? Freedom vs Freedumb.

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Recent Pool Halls.

• December 2022: Protesters display Nazi flags outside Lakeland charity event featuring drag shows

• In March 2023: Neo-Nazis Shout 'There Will Be Blood' at Ohio Drag Event for Children

• DeSantis' administration moved to pull the Hyatt Regency Miami's liquor license after one of its partner facilities hosted a drag queen Christmas show where some children were in attendance.

• April 2023: Member of pro-Nazi group used Molotov cocktails in attempt to burn down Ohio church planning to host a drag event, FBI says

• May 2023: Neo-Nazis Chant and Salute Outside Drag Brunch in Columbus

• June 2023: Tennessee's first-in-the-nation law designed to place strict limits on drag shows is unconstitutional, a federal judge says. [surely the lawmakers knew this, but didn’t care]

• April 2023: Judge orders books removed from Texas public libraries due to LGBTQ and racial content must be returned within 24 hours

• June 2023: Republican attacks on diversity programs in government and at UW because a bunch of popcorn magnates and used car salesmen understand university education better than the people who, you know, do university education. But again, this is not about diversity programs.

1. The Philosophy of Right §278 Remark