Dorian Lynskey's Blog, page 5

The Burchill Ultimatum

In Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen (spoiler warning by the way), the messianic billionaire superhero known as Ozymandias decides on a drastic plan to bring the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. He arranges a fake alien invasion, in the form of a giant psychedelic squid which wipes out half of Manhattan, in order to unite the warring factions in mutual horror and make their own grievances seem petty in comparison. Yesterday Twitter was Manhattan, Julie Burchill was Ozymandias and her Observer column about transsexuals was the giant psychedelic squid.

OK, so that wasn’t Burchill’s intention but, when her column made landfall, it had a similar effect. To most outsiders last week’s Suzanne Moore Twitterstorm was just depressing and destructive, with inflammatory remarks and pigheaded defiance on both sides. But then, like Crocodile Dundee declaring “THIS is a knife”, Burchill’s column came along and left no room for ambiguity. Is it upsetting and dehumanising to call transsexuals “a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing” and compare them to black-and-white minstrels? Yes. Would the Observer have published similar slurs directed at black or gay people? No. Does Burchill’s point about the viciousness directed at Moore by certain individuals justify such language? No. On this, it seemed, most people could agree.

Perhaps it’s an excess of New Year optimism but I’d like to see Burchill’s column as what the Americans call a teachable moment, because the Mortal Kombat approach applied to issues of social justice on Twitter in recent months clearly isn’t working. The debate – and I use the term loosely – has been dominated by a few dozen scolds and shit-stirrers who spend a disproportionate amount of their time “calling out” left-wing newspaper columnists for minor transgressions, drawing ever-decreasing circles of puritanical rigour, answering any dissent with a stock phrase (“Check your privilege!”, “Intent isn’t magic!”, “Google tone argument!”) and framing their tussles, via rampant use of .@ and RT, as a kind of self-aggrandising theatre. I’m often reminded of 60s activist Tom Hayden’s opinion of the more militant Mark Rudd: “sarcastic and smugly dogmatic” with “an embyro of fanaticism”.

It’s no wonder that most people, even those sympathetic to the causes involved, find this constant screech of outrage alienating — the fanatics could hardly be less destructive if they were double agents trained by Richard Littlejohn — but the blowback can be just as unhelpful. I consider Moore a Twitter friend but I was surprised how many of her defenders refused to accept that some of her more intemperate tweets caused real offence. To categorise the whole range of negative responses as the howling of a mob makes things easy but it occludes important issues and benefits nobody. When I searched Twitter for responses to Burchill yesterday I found the usual suspects strutting the stage and grabbing the chance for cheap shots at other writers, but I also found many transgender people who were genuinely, justifiably upset and they deserve to be heard.

One encouraging development was the number of people sincerely interested in learning what terms such as “cis” meant. (I confess I’d never heard the word until last year.) Unfamiliar jargon can be offputting, especially when used as a weapon by the self-righteous, but it often expresses simple truths. If you are cisgender (ie not trans) and you realise that you don’t have to endure bigotry because of your gender identity then that’s called being aware of your privilege. If you think that it’s not acceptable for Burchill to champion one unprivileged group (working-class women) while treading on another (transsexuals) then you’re thinking about intersectionality. These aren’t complicated or abstruse concepts and you don’t need to be au fait with gender theory or the genealogy of long-running feuds to grasp them. You can see the words that Burchill used and know they’re wrong and understand the hostile assumptions underpinning them and wonder how you’d feel if they applied to you.

There’s a certain kind of liberal defensiveness which we should all resist. My dad grew up in multiracial Brixton after the war but he couldn’t accept that “coloured” had become an offensive term. Because he wasn’t racist, he argued, then the word he used wasn’t racist, but words change their meaning and it takes very little effort to adjust. I grew up understanding the word “tranny” as a harmless abbreviation of transvestite rather than transsexual. Now that I know it is considered transphobic I avoid it, without pouncing on anyone who still innocently uses it in the older sense. My suspicion, or at least my hope, is that this recent row will make a lot of other people think twice, just as my dad eventually did about “coloured”. Otherwise we will have learnt nothing.

I’ve always been drawn to left-wing beliefs because I believe they prioritise empathy but that cuts both ways. If one person should accept that certain tweets sent in anger would be better off deleted or apologised for, then another should pause to consider that a Replies column full of vitriol looks like a mob even if some of the individual criticisms are civil and fair. And no, the “tone argument” is not an excuse for acting like an arsehole. I have no time for the kind of self-important social justice puritans who have decided, on the flimsiest of evidence, that Caitlin Moran is one of Britain’s most prolific bigots, but I don’t want their vindictiveness to distract me from issues that deserve consideration and respect, or the obvious truth that even the most well-meaning, socially conscious people have their blind spots.

Burchill’s column was a vivid illustration of what happens when you can’t be bothered with empathy anymore and you dehumanise the many in order to attack the abusive few. It’s horrendous. But if it makes people across the left-wing spectrum reconsider how they address and debate the issues that concern them, then it will have done some good.

Ten protest songs for 2012

After the promising upheavals of 2011, this year felt like a disappointment in many ways. Among other things, the fallout from the Arab Spring was messy and bloody, Occupy’s energy dissipated, Wikileaks shrivelled into the paranoid cult of Assange, and Russia cracked down hard on dissenting voices, most notably Pussy Riot’s. The Eurozone continues to wobble while austerity in Britain goes on and on. The most encouraging development, whatever reservations one might have about the Obama administration, was the defeat of Mitt Romney despite the efforts of the Tea Party, billionaire donors and a long, expensive, dirty campaign. I particularly enjoyed the fact that, having rubbished the feckless 47%, he ended up receiving just 47% of the vote himself.

Here, in no particular order, are nine songs which said something to me about the political mood of 2012. Apart from the ferocious White Trash Empire, who give all their songs away online, I haven’t come across many underground examples but I’m sure I’ve overlooked some and would welcome any suggestions in the comments.

The Rolling Stones, Doom and Gloom

OK, so it’s not strictly a protest song but then the Stones rarely make strict protest songs. Even in the late 60s they were better at creating Rorshach blots of dread in which listeners could discern whatever shapes they liked. I like the humour here, starting with its cranky title, which makes me think of someone’s dad watching the news and tutting. It’s not a sophisticated sentiment but it’s a common one during periods when all the news seems to be bad, and it’s expressed with wit and vigour if not precision. Jagger’s concerns are vague. There’s a verse about fracking, some hints at the economic crisis and a bit about “an overseas war”. Jagger has taken on this kind of subject before, in Highwire and Sweet Neo Con, but this is very much the view from Davos, where he was this year’s celebrity guest: “Lost all that treasure in an overseas war/It just goes to show you don’t get what you paid for.” Never mind the morality – he makes it sound like a bad investment. His mood is lifted in the chorus by dancing with a lady, while Keith’s guitar does most of the heavy lifting, as so often before. Subject matter aside, this is the best Stones single since Undercover of the Night almost 30 years ago, which really was a protest song.

Yeasayer, Reagan’s Skeleton

It may not be intentional but the Brooklynite’s creepy disco record feels like a conceptual sequel to REM’s Exhuming McCarthy. Like that song, it uses a revenant as a metaphor for the resurgence of conservative values, and deploys a suitably retro genre to get the message across. It’s dark and funny and fiendishly catchy. They released it in time for both Halloween and the presidential election, where the Reagan worshippers were thankfully defeated, as much by their own delusions (which I discussed in a recent post) as by President Obama.

Plan B, Ill Manors

After I wrote an early celebration of Plan B’s abrupt left-turn into politics this year, several responses followed. One blogger called him a condescending liberal for blaming society rather than the rioters themselves. Another one called him a condescending liberal for not blaming society enough and failing to call for the downfall of capitalism. This confirmed two things. Firstly, attacking condescending liberals is very popular. Secondly, a lot of people have a very strange way of assessing protest songs. I stand by my initial praise of the record precisely because it captured the ambivalence that many felt towards last summer’s rioters — unwilling to condemn them outright a la Cameron yet unable to agree with the anarchist left that they were mounting “a tentative insurrection”. I have increasingly little patience for kneejerk responses, especially when they take a deliberately complex and fluid song and berate it for not vindicating their own views. The history of protest songs is full of records with which I don’t wholly agree — many of them far more muddled than Ill Manors and no less great for it. Ball of Confusion, for one, has no coherent political position but it’s thrilling beyond belief. For me, the key here is the explosive breakbeat in the chorus, which comes in a few bars later than expected, as if Plan B doubts his own cathartically reductive response (“Oi!”) before he surrenders to it. The album and movie that followed were far more flawed, too prone to tip into grisly melodrama in order to make a point about moral autonomy versus external pressure — a point which this song already makes brilliantly and without coming to any simplistic conclusion.

Bruce Springsteen, We Take Care of Our Own

In the past decade Springsteen has reinvented, or at least clarified, himself as a broad-shouldered liberal superhero, framing his tales of working-class strife in an increasingly explicit left-wing context, and delivering the kind of inspiring rhetoric that the left would like to hear Obama employ more often. Only Rolling Stone editors think that Wrecking Ball is a classic Springsteen album but this is a deceptively clever anthem whose title cuts both ways: is it sincere or sarcastic? Is he singing about the America he wants or the one he fears? He could not have imagined how pertinent it would become when Hurricane Sandy smacked into his beloved New Jersey and the spectre of Katrina (“From the shotgun shack to the Superdome/We needed help but the cavalry stayed home”) was at least partially exorcised by the government’s response. To make the connection even stronger, Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor whose praise for Obama during the crisis outraged no-quarter Republicans, is a famously devoted Springsteen fanatic, and the singer had recently committed to campaigning for the President. The hurricane relief effort, though hardly flawless, blasted the sarcasm from the song’s chorus and suggested for a moment a country where politicians could cross party lines to do the right thing. Disappointingly, Springsteen didn’t play it at the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief but did play Wrecking Ball — a song which, as Roy Wilkinson wrote in the late, lamented The Word magazine, is the first stadium rock song ever written from the point of view of an actual stadium.

An aside: After years of agnosticism, I wrote a piece about the charm of Springsteen fandom, and went to see him in Hyde Park with the intention of surrendering to his hokey qualities rather than resisting them. I’ve rarely had so much fun suspending my disbelief.

Killer Mike, Reagan

Asked about this stomping beast of a track, Killer Mike revealed: “I threw a BBQ when Reagan died.” But it’s not just the target of the track who belongs to another era. This is enjoyably old-fashioned agit-rap to trigger waves of nostalgia in anyone who remembers the heyday of Public Enemy and Ice Cube: “Grandpa, tell us about Tipper Gore and Daryl Gates!” The Atlanta rapper is 37, which explains a lot. It opens with a sample of Reagan talking about Iran/Contra but Mike isn’t just interested in political controversies of yesteryear. He goes in hard on rappers’ empty consumerist boasts (“We should be indicted for bullshit we’re inciting/Hand the children death and pretend that it’s exciting”), unravels the consequences of the war on drugs, dips into a bit of blood-for-oil rhetoric and finishes up with some retro numerology (Ronald Wilson Reagan = 666, you see). The segue from powerfully clear analysis to fuzzy, borderline conspiracy-theorist thinking (amplified tenfold in the video) might be the most early 90s thing about a very early 90s track, despite the contemporary refit by producer El-P. I’m not someone who thinks that hip hop’s been going downhill since protest slid to the background — in fact it’s in rude health this year, and Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid mAAd City is a deeply moral record, if not a big-picture political one — but I’m not immune to a throwback when it’s done this well.

Muse, Animals

The main reason I was excited to be asked to interview Muse this year was the chance to take Matt Bellamy’s politics seriously. Black Holes and Revelations and The Resistance both had real political concerns at their heart but for most critics these messages got lost in the conspiracy theories and space-rock hoopla. With The 2nd Law, Bellamy’s outgrown his interest in David Icke and 9/11 Truthers and thought hard about the realities of capitalism and the fallacy of endless growth. He’s certainly the first musician I’ve ever heard cite 19th century US economist Henry George as an influence. I was delighted to get him to disown Glenn Beck and other Muse fans on the libertarian right, and even happier to prompt a response from Beck himself.

But anyway, Animals. It’s a cliché to compare Muse to a steroidal Radiohead but this really does sound like the older band, in the best possible way. It’s the kind of slow-burning, clear-cut protest song that might have appeared on OK Computer if Thom Yorke weren’t such an opaque lyricist. While Green Day, Bloc Party and Tom Morello all wrote songs for or about Occupy, Animals best conveys visceral disgust for the callousness of the one per-cent. Bellamy strips down capitalism to its Darwinian essence (“kill the competition”) and concludes by wishing death on the “animals”. Bellamy is well-aware of the contradiction inherent in a major rock band scorning capitalism (“I think for every finger you point there should be three pointing back at you,” he replied neatly) and this is what makes the whole album interesting to me: a band famed for their excess warning that “endless growth is unsustainable”. It’s morally simple to believe you are the solution but braver and more honest to accept that you’re part of the problem. As are we all. Bassist Chris Wolstenholme told me:

“You don’t have to drive a big car and be a billionaire to be an absolute arsehole. It’s not just these big businessen or the banks, it’s everybody. We’re all obsessed with money, we’re all obsessed with growth, and we’re all obsessed with using as much energy as we possibly can to entertain ourselves. People with money can do it, people without money can’t do it as much, but I think everybody’s guilty of the same pleasures – it’s just on a different scale.”

On first exposure I mistook the climactic clamour for a demonstration or a riot but it’s actually the final seconds of a day in the New York Stock Exchange. The howling and chattering makes perfect sense of the song’s title — the sound of macho capitalism with blood in its mouth.

Pussy Riot, Putin Lights up the Fires

In October I was chuffed to be asked by Kerry McCarthy MP to appear on a panel for an event about Pussy Riot at the House of Commons, alongside writer and musician John Robb, Independent columnist Joan Smith, Chris Bryant MP and Natalia Koliada, a Belarusian forced into exile because of her role in the underground Belarus Free Theatre. We talked about the Pussy Riot trial and the challenges faced by dissident artists in Russia and Belarus. We listened to actresses read the Pussy Riot trio’s extraordinary closing statements to the court. What we didn’t do was play any music.

Admittedly Pussy Riot are less a band than an activist collective who see their work as “modern art,” but they chose punk-rock for a reason and it does seem odd to remove music from the equation. The thorny question is whether or not their music is any good. When I was writing the book, I set myself a rule that I would only deal at length with songs that I loved for their music as well as their message, but Pussy Riot’s performances didn’t meet that standard for me. “You don’t have to sing very well,” a member called Garadzha told a Russian newspaper. “It’s punk. You just scream a lot.” Well OK, up to a point but if I didn’t know the back story would I want to play these songs? Honestly, no. But then came their post-trial release Putin Lights Up the Fires, which has the catchy, clenched-first urgency of one of their inspirations, Bikini Kill. Their importance certainly doesn’t depend on the opinion of music journalists but this terrific record was nonetheless welcome.

I’ve written at greater length about Pussy Riot in a forthcoming Guardian article and will post a link as soon as it’s online.

Ry Cooder, Brother Is Gone

In the centenary of Woody Guthrie’s birth, Cooder’s ornery Election Special was the album which best captured Woody’s blend of compassion and biting wit. “I have to find little storylines,” he told Uncut. “I have to have something I can play and sing, in some style or some instrumental point of view – a country tune or a blues tune – updating these things that I grew up listening to, these Depression-era songs and whatnot.” He explores a range of voices and styles but this is my favourite: a blues fable in which the Obama-hating billionaire Koch brothers shake hands with the Devil at the crossroads. There’s humour in the conceit but the music is bleakly affecting — a reminder of the bullet America just dodged.

Ai Weiwei, Grass Mud Horse Style

I concede at this point that I need never hear Gangnam Style again as long as I live. What was once a song is know a brutally exhausted meme, but it was hard not to be charmed by Ai Weiwei’s version, tweaked to mock the Chinese regime. To quote the Guardian’s report: “Ai’s parody is titled Grass Mud Horse Style after an alpaca-like animal invented by China’s web users as a protest against internet censorship – its pronunciation in Chinese (Cao Ni Ma) sounds similar to a profane insult, forbidden on the country’s social networking sites.” Anish Kapoor followed it with his own version in solidarity with Ai Weiwei. In a way, these versions belong to the tradition of civil rights demonstrators or ban-the-bomb marchers humorously putting new protest lyrics to famous songs — the more obvious the melodies, the quicker they’d catch on. It’s freedom singing with a YouTube makeover. I still don’t want to hear the song again.

I was also overjoyed to discover PSY’s past as a hardcore protest singer, covering rock band NEXT’s Dear American: “Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives.” Obviously he apologized fulsomely after Fox News drummed it up into a pseudo-controversy, but what a surprising twist to the year’s biggest pop story.

Miguel, Candles in Sun

A nice bookend to Doom & Gloom. I’ve said before that the main obstacle to writing a protest song now isn’t so much fear of censorship and backlash as it is a fear of sounding naff. If the theme is of the broad, problems-of-the-world-today variety, a songwriter has to ask three questions: Has it been said before? Is it kind of obvious? Is it worth saying anyway? In the case of this song by Californian R&B singer Miguel, the answer to all three is yes. Miguel released an earlier version on his free Art Dealer Chic Vol.3 EP and when you listen to the two versions back to back you can actually hear him mustering his courage. The EP version makes its anxiety of influence transparent with the title Candles in the Sun, Blowin’ in the Wind and an interview sample of John Lennon sounding like one of those hokey inspirational quotes that people post on Facebook. Obviously the spiritual-political soul of Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye is in the mix too but Dylan and Lennon are unnecessary crutches used to prop up what Miguel is doing: a nervous plea to tradition. When he revisits the song on his brilliant Kaleidoscope Dream album, he shrugs them off. There are still shards of history embedded in the lyrics: the “diamond in the back” part of the chorus draws on William DeVaughn’s Be Thankful For What You’ve Got, “Sun goes down/heroes often get shot” paraphrases OutKast’s Aquemini, and there are probably other references I haven’t spotted yet. You could, for example, hear his plaintive questions, “Where are we going?/What are we doing?”, as deliberate riffs on What’s Goin’ On. But the completed song sounds so persuasive and heartfelt that Miguel certainly doesn’t need Lennon’s ghost anymore. It’s as if, during the song’s evolution, he realised that to sing about sociopolitical issues doesn’t make you a throwback as long as you do it well. That’s a valuable realisation.

Strictly Come Dancing About Architecture 2012

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Even though people of a certain vintage and temperament love to moan that music journalism ain’t what it used to be, I’ve read a lot of great essays, reviews and interviews this year, both in print and online. Here are some of my favourites from the latter category. The picture at the top is Philip Roth, who never wrote about music as far as I know but damn, he looks writerly.

Best Corrective to Bad Habits

“Are you essentially making shit up about the artist in order to sexualize her?”

How Not to Write About Female Musicians: A Handy Guide (Maura Johnston, Village Voice)

Best Analysis of How Critics Think

“The closer an album comes to Illmatic’s exact make and model of classic, the more likely it’ll be accepted on the same level.”

Classic Material (Andrew Nosnitsky, Pitchfork)

Most Touching Tribute

“Adam Yauch was a part of my childhood, an ambassador to America from our New York, which is now gone, as is he.”

Peace Adam (Sasha Frere-Jones, New Yorker )

Best Anatomy of a Pop Horrorshow

“A flashy presentation of a record label spreadsheet.”

A Sorry State: Pop Marketing & Rihanna’s Unapologetic (Jude Rogers, The Quietus)

Most Beautiful Web Feature (The Writing’s Good Too)

“Don’t look, it’s got three pubes in it!”

Bat for Lashes (Laura Snapes, Pitchfork)



Best Ending to a Profile

“She still thinks I control the rain.”

Jack Outside the Box: Jack White Is the Coolest, Weirdest, Savviest Rock Star of Our Time (Josh Eells, New York Times)

Funniest Confession of Thirtysomething Bewilderment

“PUMPS & TANK TOPS & HAIR GEL & HOUSE MUSIC”

Live: IDentity Festival Walks the Line Between Raving and Raging at Jones Beach (Michaelangelo Matos, Village Voice)

Best Reflection on the State of “Indie” (Whatever That Means These Days)

“There will never be another Nevermind, because there will never again be a predominant media narrative”

Animal Collective, People Alone: Centipede Hz and the solitude of indie rock (Steven Hyden, Grantland)

Best Insight Into the Grim Economics of “Indie” (Whatever That Means These Days)

“You’d better be doing it for the love of it, because nobody’s making real money.”

Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012? (Nitsuh Abebe, New York)

Best Writing About Bad Music

“Is there any cure for the song poisoned by its own success?”

Can ‘My Heart Will Go On’ Be Resuscitated? (Carl Wilson, The Atlantic)

Best Writing About the Terrible Legacy of a Good Band

“Drama students dressed up as policemen dancing to Thriller at Liverpool Street station”

The Awful Legacy of the Libertines (Clive Martin and Kev Kharas, Vice)

Best Conversation Between Critics

“You can’t outgrow this, you shouldn’t outgrow this, and you won’t outgrow this.”

Myths and Depths: Greil Marcus Talks to Simon Reynolds (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Best Generational Clash Over the Future of Music

“Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!”

Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered (David Lowery, Trichordist)

Best Pop Nostalgia

“It’s hard to imagine any freakish 11-year-olds in 2012 sharing Pop Scene’s excitement about STATISTICS!”

Reviewing the charts in 1981 – on stolen chip paper (Pete Paphides, The Guardian)

Best Behind-the-Music Study of a Classic Album

“A wonderment of wow”

Big Star’s Third: ‘It’s hard to nail the chaos’ (Michael Hann, The Guardian)



Best Interview in Which No Questions Were Asked

“I’ll talk myself and I’ll tell you the real deal.”

Bobby Womack: ‘I can sing my ass off, better than I could before’ (Alexis Petridis, The Guardian)

Most Unexpectedly Light-Hearted Interview

“Barry Manilow look out!”

Scott Walker: Brother Beyond (Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian)

Most Satisfyingly Epic Profile

“You are free of yourself for those hours; all the voices in your head are gone.”

We Are Alive: Bruce Springsteen at Sixty-Two (David Remnick, New Yorker)

Best Writing, Basically

“Who do you run to, who do you tell, when you realize you’ve built a prison out of the things you thought were liberations?”

Did He Feel Good? James Brown’s epic life and career (Ian Penman, City Journal)

Calling all New Yorkers

A music critic I know, Jody Rosen, is involved in organising a literary benefit to raise funds to rebuild Red Hook, Brooklyn after Hurricane Sandy. The line-up looks great – Kurt Andersen, Steve Earle, Chuck Klosterman, Mary Karr, Philip Gourevitch, Robert Sullivan, Sam Lipsyte, Phillip Lopate, Rivka Galchen, Stew, Joseph O’Neill, Ben Katchor, Meghan O’Rourke, Deborah Baker, Torrey Maldonado — and I’d go if I lived in New York. They need a packed house so if you live in NY please think about going and tell your friends.

The GOP Delusion: how conservatives were mugged by reality

Among the many things that made me happy about Barack Obama’s re-election was the thought of this guy’s face when he heard the news. He has yet to respond — presumably the editors of The Corner, the National Review’s online madhouse, are still trying to get him to come down off the ledge — but The Corner’s comment threads give a handy insight into the apocalyptic despair currently convulsing the conservative hardcore. Here are some selected highlights:

The America loved and defended by conservatives is over.

The great experiment is failed.

Like the Germans circa 1930s – they’ve voted for their own demise. And only when the fit hits the shan will some of them finally wake up and I’ll get the satisfaction of telling them “I told you so.”

This country deserves to be wrecked.

America will now become a failed fascist state, much like greece, except there will be no one to bail us out

What’s going on in Greece will look like a spring festival compared to what’s coming our way.

Due to the results tonight, my wife and I had to decide that we will not start a family. It will be just us two from here on out. This country is over.

This was another Phiippi, and once again, a republic has died.

Now, there is no hope for America, and the World.

The voters have spoken, God help us and this country. This is the end as American as we have known it.

America blew it.

Get ready for Armageddon.

Where is John Galt?

Other than that, I think they’re taking it pretty well.

The late conservative intellectual Irving Kristol famously remarked: “A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” It was never true but now it is bitterly ironic because it is modern conservatives who attempt to deny reality until it clobbers them over the head, as it did on Tuesday night. Reading The Corner or watching Fox News, it’s easy to assume that they know they’re lying and their fantasies are a strategy to influence public opinion, or, in the case of characters like Glenn Beck, a lucrative showbiz gimmick. The truth is more terrifying: they really believe this horseshit.

As the first results came in on Tuesday night, Fox News could have won a Peabody Award for denial. When the network finally called Ohio, and thus the election, for Obama, poor Karl Rove, the strategist once known as “Bush’s brain”, was reduced to a gibbering, pleading wreck, insisting against all the evidence that Romney may still have a chance. In the Telegraph Janet Daley first predicted a win for Romney based on nothing more than gut instinct, and then, at the last minute, clung to the idea that he would at least win the popular vote. Finally conceding defeat, she griped that “The figures do, on the face of it, seem rather spectacularly unfair.” Those pesky figures, eh?

This is what happens when you spend the entire election cycle ignoring the facts in front of you. At every turn conservatives have blamed “skewed” polls, and a biased mainstream media for Romney’s problems, never taking seriously the idea that the electorate might have a pro-Obama bias. Look at Slate’s pundit dartboard. Apart from CNBC’s Jim Cramer, all of the outliers are conservative ideologues, predicting a Romney victory with between 273 and 325 electoral college votes. Faced with data to the contrary, they attempted to smear conscientious number-crunchers like FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver. On the night, the result was exactly as Silver had predicted.

Conservatism has became a faith-based ecosystem, resistant to any facts that complicate its version of reality. It is driven by apocalyptic terrors. The future of the republic itself is always in danger. The Constitution is destined for the shredder. The American eagle hangs its head. Ironically, the two issues that come closest to a real existential threat — climate change and the 2008 banking crisis — don’t trigger any anxiety in conservatives, while the phantasm of a socialist dictatorship has them trembling with fear and rage.

As Richard Hofstadter argued as long ago as 1964, the appeal of such life-or-death rhetoric is that it justifies an extreme response: block, sabotage, destroy, crush them. If you convince yourself that a centrist like Obama (who has disappointed his liberal base on several issues) is actually a Manchurian Candidate president out to destroy America from within than any lie about his beliefs, his religion, even his country of birth, is justified. Hofstadter:

The paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish. Nothing but complete victory will do.

This is how you build a fun-packed, self-sustaining echo chamber. It is not how you run a party, let alone a country. There are, of course, people on the left who harbour paranoid delusions, from the 9/11 Truthers to the hardcore Assangists, but they have no sway over the Democrats. Conservative fanatics, however, have commandeered the GOP.

Helped by the Tea Party insurgency, the Republicans’ mid-term gains in 2010 appeared to vindicate, and intensify, the party’s obstructionist tendencies. It was during that campaign that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell notoriously said: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” When you make your top priority fucking up the other guy and then fail, you have to ask yourselves what the hell you’re playing at.

The insanity of the current GOP position is threefold. Firstly, it rules out the bipartisan collaboration on which the efficacy of the US political system depends, and means that Washington wastes its time with fruitless and costly battles like the one over the debt ceilingin summer 2011. Conservatives then have the nerve to complain that it is Obama, whose attempts at consensus have been militantly rebuffed from day one, who has divided the nation. According to two scholars who have been studying Washington for over 40 years:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

Secondly, it punishes the moderates. By the standards of the modern GOP Reagan would never have won the nomination, Romney’s father George would most likely have been a Democrat and a British Conservative like David Cameron wouldn’t last five minutes. Romney was forced into the impossible position of having to pander to the hardliners in the primaries and then trying to pull a last-minute moderate switcheroo in the debates, which was the first time the American public actually warmed to him.

Thirdly, it is based on the fantasy that the American public deep down wants paranoid movement conservatism. Already you can hear the voices crying that the GOP would have won if Romney weren’t such a moderate wimp. Extreme progressives don’t really believe that their values are shared by the nation at large but their conservative counterparts, insanely, do.

What we’re seeing now is the explosion that occurs when the conservatives’ alternate reality collides with the actual reality of the ballot box. It’s not just Obama’s victory. Same-sex marriage referenda passed by significant margins in Maryland, Maine and Washington. Colorado and Washington voted to legalise marijuana. Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, whose “gaffes” about rape and abortion were merely stating the party’s platform position, lost Senate races they might otherwise have won. There are now more female senators, including the passionately liberal Elizabeth Warren and the openly gay Tammy Baldwin, than ever before. Demographic changes favour the Democrats, who lead among African-Americans, Latinos, young people, college graduates and women, while a massive 88% of Romney’s support came from white people. Conservatives assumed those groups either wouldn’t turn out or somehow don’t represent the real America and therefore don’t constitute a mandate. As Tom Scocca wrote in Slate:

White people don’t like to believe that they practice identity politics. The defining part of being white in America is the assumption that, as a white person, you are a regular, individual human being. Other demographic groups set themselves apart, to pursue their distinctive identities and interests and agendas. Whiteness, to white people, is the American default.

Well they were wrong about that. They were wrong about everything in this election cycle. All the fantasies they so diligently fed and watered have melted into the air. All that time they were insisting the mainstream media was lying to them, they didn’t realise they were lying to themselves.

During one of the debates Romney teased Obama with a version of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous rebuke: “You are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts.” But it’s the conservatives who have spent so long moulding the facts to suit their opinions, and in the safe haven of The Corner or the Fox News studio they could do so without fear of contradiction. Now the balloon has popped. Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The only way the Republicans can reverse that trend is by resisting the delusions of the paranoid bullies, dropping the bigotry, detoxifying the party and nominating a genuine moderate — in short, coming to terms with how America is rather than how they believe it to be. I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Meanwhile, the true believers try to console themselves with new delusions. In one comment thread on The Corner, someone wailed, accurately, that conservatism had failed. Another responded: “Naw the American people failed… Conservatism has always succeeded. America is now unworthy of it.”

It’s reminiscent of one of Oscar Wilde’s quips: “The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure.” The difference is that Wilde was trying to be funny.

 

UPDATE: I just came across two illuminating pieces by Grist’s David Roberts. In this one, from 2010, he discusses climate denialism as a symptom of conservative factphobia and quotes Rush Limbaugh babbling about “The Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media,” which doesn’t leave much untainted except, presumably, the Rush Limbaugh show. And in this July post he examines polarisation. When pundits talk about a divided America they tend to present it as symmetrical problem: six of one, half a dozen of the other. However the stats show a dramatic imbalance. Between 1974-2004 the average Republican congressman moved almost four times as far to the right as the average Democrat did to the left; 70% of Republican voters define themselves as conservative while only 40% of Democrat voters think of themselves as liberals. Says Roberts:

Today, the national Democratic Party contains everything from the center-right to the far-left. Economically its proposals tend to be center to center-right. Socially, its proposals tend to be center to center-left. The national Republican Party, by contrast, has now been almost entirely absorbed by the far right. It rejects the basic social consensus among post-war democracies and seeks to return to a pre-New Deal form of governance. It is hostile to social and economic equality. It remains committed to fossil fuels and sprawl and opposed to all sustainable alternatives. And it has built an epistemological cocoon around itself within which loopy misinformation spreads unchecked. It has, in short, gone loony.

Good morning America

RIP Terry Callier 1945-2012

Two songs about missing people when they’re gone. One protest song…

And one straight-up masterpiece…

And a freedom song which makes my heart melt: