Friday, August 6, 2021

Signs (Lost Highway Series)

I recently returned to my road trip out to Nebraska, where my whole family was together for the first time in two years. It was restorative as well as a lot of fun. We got to innertube on the Niobrara River, catch fish with my dad, and enjoy time at a friend's lake cabin.

On this journey I kept my eyes peeled for signs, both physical and metaphorical. I was trying to gauge the mood in Trump Country, or at least its rural Midwestern marches. I saw about a dozen Trump signs/flags/bumper stickers on this trip. Honestly, that's a lot less than I expected. I also however saw two large homemade QAnon signs, one at a farm in Illinois, the other outside Valentine, Nebraska. One was merged with Trump, the latter just read in huge letters "Who is Q?" These for some reason I was not expecting, but should have been. 

This is just anecdotal evidence, of course, but other anecdotal evidence supports my growing thesis that Donald Trump's importance to conservatives is shrinking but the politics he embodies have a stronger hold on conservatism than ever. For example, I went to 7:30 Mass with my parents, and outside of the doors where was a whole table of pamphlets, something I had never seen before. I didn't want to ruin my time with my folks by hectoring them about the stuff people leave at the church, so I only quickly managed to grab a flyer that caught my eye instead of multiple pamphlets, including one discussing the "Luciferian" Masonic ideology. 

Here's the flyer I grabbed:

It caught my eye because I had been reading the local newspaper and the firestorm over proposed changes to the state's sex education curriculum. Lots of things are striking about it. This man is no mere former Marine, but a failed Republican candidate for the Senate. Seeing an event at an evangelical church is something that never would have been promoted in a million years at my Catholic church growing up. Most of all, I was struck how there were claims of the presence of "critical race theory" in sex education, where it didn't seem applicable. Like the ubiquity of "communism" in reactionary rhetoric in the 50s and 60s, "critical race theory" is a free-floating signifier for the conservative fear that nefarious and shadowy forces are out to destroy their way of life. (You could argue this dates back to the discourse around abolition in the 1800s.)

The sex education standards were opposed by school boards and officials around the state, evidently for the crime of teaching children that gender identity, transgender people, and same sex marriages exist. They basically won the battle and the standards have mostly been dropped. This kind of cultural politics is red-meat for post-Trump conservatives. It's not about doing anything to change anyone's material circumstances, only to assure the MAGA majority in these red areas that their cultural values will remain hegemonic and that people they don't like will suffer.

Another way of formulating it is "Don't you dare tell me what to do, but I get to force "those people" what to do." This is how you get people who refuse to comply with masking ordinances and avoid paying their taxes waving the blue line flag, ostensibly showing their support for the state that they otherwise excoriate. They love the police because the police keep "those people" down, and are seen as a force that will always be on their side. Schools and public health officials and anyone with expertise is to be feared and knocked a peg. "Freedom" is not paying taxes and not being beholden to the most basic public health restrictions like masking. Criminalizing abortion and cannabis is not anti-freedom because those thrown in jail are "those people." (Speaking of I did see about a half dozen anti-abortion signs, including one saying "Life begins at conception" but showing a one year old and not a zygote.)

The whole mentality is a frightful combination of consumer capitalism and Herrenvolk nationalism, and it's pretty much become the common sense of forty percent of the country, but in "the Heartland" that proportion gets a lot higher. I enjoyed visiting my hometown and I am proud to call myself a son of Nebraska but every time I go back it feels less and less like the place that made me.

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