The End of Politics

In journalism covering the ultra-right, you can find the term “eliminationism,” sometimes paired with “Christian dominionism” (CD). David Niewert has written a lot about this. I was going to say the CD crowd is “underground,” but it’s very much out in the open now. It pre-dates Trump, and even Obama. Tim McVey was a good example. Trump rode its wave for a while, but I’m afraid it will continue without him.

What is new about this is the mass popularity of QAnon. QAnon’s business model is the blood libel. It alleges that its political demons are guilty of the most heinous crime imaginable – the sexual abuse of children. The special thing about the blood libel, besides its total fictitiousness and utter lack of evidence, is that it relies on claims that are impossible to refute, since one cannot prove a negative.

It is a device for shutting down debate, since the factual claims are never supported, and the targets of the libel are implicitly beneath dialog. In fact, they are criminals who deserve violent retribution. The advantage of pedophilia accusations is that unlike murder, there is no pile-up of dead bodies. The story is that it is all done in secret basements.

The practitioners are the usual mix of cynics, entrepreneurs, and idiots. The latter typically are unable to formulate rational political arguments, so they rely on fictions that lack the usual components of substantive discourse – evidence and logic.

Of course, blood libels are ancient, going back to anti-Judaism through the centuries, and graduating to the big lie practices in Nazi propaganda. What we are seeing now is the mainstreaming of blood libels, pointing to the eliminationist politics noted above.

Trump deserves a good share of the credit for this trend, avidly participating in it himself, and fostering the same approach in one of our two major political parties. U.S. politicians have twisted the truth for a long time. There is nothing new about that. I would argue that Trump raised it to a higher level, logically leading to outright advocacy of anti-democratic revolution.

At the grassroots, the most active examples are the agitators attacking local school boards, on the basis of outlandish lies about critical race theory and policies pertaining to gender, diversity, equity, and inclusion. The new, up-and-coming organization is “Moms for Liberty.”

The other, related phenomenon is the craze about “grooming,” applied indiscriminately to any discussion of gender held in schools. Any positive reference to LGBTQ is equated to incipient sexual assault of children. The homophobia here is obvious

How important are the school boards? Besides having the potential to corrupt public education, the better to drive families into the arms of Christian academies and outfits promoting home schooling, school boards are the seedbed of candidates for state legislatures. State legislatures draw the boundaries of Congressional districts and write election laws. You can see where this is going.

In public debate, the common reflex is to give advocates the benefit of the doubt, when it comes to basic factual claims. This convention is no longer tenable. People have settled into the habit of outrageous lies. There is no talking to them for the most part. It remains for sensible people to exert themselves to debunk false claims and mobilize to block the poison seeping the grassroots of our political system.