• discussions >
• Political Discourse

2020: The Middle Finger Election

he Middle Finger Election Charlie Sykes The Bulwark

If Trump wins, explains Rich Lowry, editor of the journal founded by William F. Buckley Jr., it will be because he is “The Only Middle Finger Available.”

Voters will back Trump not because he stands athwart history, yelling “Stop,” or because he offers a compelling vision of a Trumpian Morning in America, writes Lowry, but because he is a giant opportunity to say F*ck You to the media, academia, Hollywood, professional athletes, and entire world of woke culture.

He’s not wrong.

Lowry’s argument is part description and part rationalization. He notes that the middle finger “may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration.” But, he explains, “Trump is, for better or worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide.” He has become the anointed vessel “for registering opposition to everything from the 1619 Project to social media’s attempted suppression of the Hunter Biden story.”

To put it in blunt terms, for many people, he’s the only middle finger available — to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American culture.

The tweets, the insults, the bullying aren’t the bugs; they are just different versions of the middle finger — and his people love it. Conservative ideas are just the gloss. [ie, Convenient references to past conservative principles no longer relevant to Trumpers, used primarily to distract from baser motives related to resentment fueled by aggrieved entitlement - joker]

I suspect that Buckley himself would’ve had a different word for this: nihilism.

[...]

As Ben Shapiro explained, his most important reason for backing Trump this time around was that “Democrats have lost their fucking minds." [ Pure Projection, Shapiro - joker 😄 ]

Four years ago, Shapiro had posted a six minute video on YouTube titled “Donald Trump is a Liar.” The next month, he wrote, “I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump: Here’s Why.”

But, like Lowry and National Review, he has evolved. [ dare we say 'got woked' LMFAS joker]

Shapiro explains his reversal by pointing to what he sees as Trump’s record as a conservative, but he strains to rationalize Trump’s mendacity, which he acknowledges. So he’s left to argue that however bad Trump is, the “damage that President Trump has done to the country, on a character and rhetorical level, has already been done and cannot be undone. I don’t see it as getting worse day by day. That is the new status quo unfortunately.”

In a recent endorsement video, Shapiro insisted that "I have been very clear on my feelings about Donald Trump's character. I have serious reservations to say the least...” He worried about “the soul sucking of the Republican Party to approve Trump’s bad behavior; people nodding and grinning at bad stuff Trump did….”

But, he insisted, “Trump has some good qualities.”

“He’s a hammer in search of a nail. Sometimes he hits a nail and it is super satisfying and sometimes he hits a baby and it is far less satisfying….” Apparently, you have to smash some babies to make an omelet, or something.

Shapiro dismisses all of this because, he says, “whatever damage he was going to do has already been done.”

But this is a Vesuvius of wrongness.

With Trump, it can always get worse, because there is no bottom. In just four years, Trump has already made the conservative movement, dumber, crueler, more dishonest, and more extreme. Rationalization has turned to acceptance. As the toll rises from the pandemic the pro-life party increasingly behaves like a death cult.