Here's a headline on the front page of the Washington Post today:
I'm not interested in the story itself. It's just the usual glop. But when I saw this headline it suddenly occurred to me how common it is—but only among Republicans. Every few months or so there seems to be a new "rising star" of the conservative movement, and it's always someone just a little more right wing than the previous rising star.
This doesn't seem to be a thing among liberals. There are profiles here and there of ambitious young Democrats, but hardly ever a breakout star who's gathered a huge fan following seemingly overnight.
I don't have anything particularly insightful to offer about this. I just happened to notice it and began wondering what it means. Ideas?
UPDATE: I have been offered a couple of counterexamples on the left: AOC and Beto O'Rourke. Fair enough, though I'm not sure I'd count O'Rourke. There are always people on both sides who get their 15 minutes during a presidential primary. It's not really the same thing as a "rising star of progressivism."
"conservatism" has devolved into a cult of personalities. i use the quotes because conservatives have long ceased being conservative in any meaningful sense. it's been like that since the days of st. ronnie.
There are people who call themselves "conservatives" who are almost all actually reactionaries. Then there are people who are conservatives, almost all of whom call themselves "centrists" or "moderates"; this includes people like the Joes, Biden and Manchin, and most of the rest of the Democratic Congressional caucus.
I am not even sure I would characterize these people as reactionaries. Lotsa them are just ambitious opportunists trying to take advantage of their 10 minutes of fame. Mad Cawthorn reminds me of Sarah Palin, a minor league talent who was too lazy and not smart enough to last long in the big leagues.
Unlike The Squad or other Dems who “rise”, Greene, Cawthorn, Boeboert and other wingers tend to be even crazier and less educated than other Republicans. While the Dems become known for actual political policy positions, the Republicans are not expected by the media to have intelligent positions. Even the educated ones, like Cruz or Hawley, are stars because of their outrageousness rather than because of any actual ideas.
Uhm, AOC?
And the rest of The Squad. Each more kooky leftist than the next.
AOC and the squad represent a fairly limited fraction on the left, although some of the ideas that they champion are in fact very popular. The wackos on the right have taken over the whole Republican party. Trump is the leader of the wackos and of the party and the one they are trying to emulate and maybe replace eventually. Some more established Republican politicians are trying to do the same thing, but they don't have the novelty of Cawthorn or Greene and the base is looking for people who are ostensibly non-establishment.
They aren't wacko's, but dialectical Yuri's. The wacko's are the ones that think they are the "answer". I bet Greene and Cawthorn are laughing their backsides off.
When AOC defeats Chuck Schumer in the next senatorial primary, then I presume skeptonomist will say that being senator from New York isn't really a leadership position or anything.
AOC really isn't "leftist". I would say only one is of that group and she is the anti-semitic Muslim lol.
More specific, please.
You mean the moderate, centrist Squad? You need to remember that American politics has NO LEFT WING.
Jacobin erasure.
Absolutely. Her beating of Crowley shocked people and they have not let up since. Funny thing is, New York is trying to get rid of her seat lol.
Between Barry Hussein Osama at the 2004 Democrat Convention & Agent of Chaos turning KS2 Red in 2018, who is the Democrat equivalent of the seasonal GOP flavor? Is there even one, let alone at least one per year?
For the Republicans it is more like one a week. Each worse than the last.
Marco Rubio: still thirsty.
aoc regardless of whether you like 'em actually has policy positions. you have heard of the green new deal.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/socialist-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-a-lot-like-the-men-who-tore-down-the-iron-curtain?ref=author
And Irving was around to see the rise and fall of everyone he names. The fact that he can compare her to that generation indicates that she is a person of political substance, even if you reject her politics.
Whereas Cawthorn is another poser of the eternal GOP question: idiot or charlatan? And who defines the voters who elected him as idiots.
When discussing Republicans, idot or charlatan is a false dichotomy.
Well you could consider a comment by Guy Rundle in Australia's Crikey:
"The right falls for one after the other because their politics is a cult of the imaginary. They are afflicted by something that Peterson himself identifies — the slippage of meaning in modern life and the false path of going to war in the name of a single simple truth to restore it."
Would that include AOC d'you reckon ?
Such a shame that the WaPo headline writers are still banned from using the word "lies".
Prolly afraid of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act if they call Annapolis reject Madison Cawthorn a liar.
George H.W. Bush was playing a long game there. Same as the Clarence Thomas Supremes appointment.
Liar? Every biographical piece I've read about him paints him as a moral cripple.
I hope you are, like me, ready to see your Kevin Drum blog comments used to indict the Radical Left as hateful.
Wapo needs to stock the dialectical nonsense. Democrats have them all the time. AOC from posters above, but I would put others like Bernie Sanders, Joe Manchin to Gov. Whitmer all on this watch. They have celebrity for different reasons.
Cawthorn is just another zionist shill "virtue signaling" his zionism, trying to package it in race. Per jargon. The real Nazis hated his type. Social Nationalism is ready for war against the Israelites including all that take its name.
Bernie isn't a Democrat, Manchin is an apostate not a hot shot debut, & Whitmer was a comet.
The comparison only applies if the Squad as a whole got the Cantor-Mc Carthy-Ryan "Yung Guns" treatment, including book deal, while the likes of Spanberger, Davids, Grijalva, Wyden, etc., got as much pub as Will Hurd, the Downton Abbey cosplayer from Illinois, Marco Rubio, Mitt Rmoney, etc.
Those rightwing evangelicals whose ostensible support for Israel are NOT Zionists in any real sense; they want Israel to remain in existence only to fulfill their "prophecy" of The Rapture, when their kind of Christians will be received by the heavenly host - & all "heathens," including Jews, will be condemned to die.
They are just another kind of antisemitic Christians.
Certainly the bigoted young man who obviously thought that the truth wouldn't be discovered about his past - or that it wouldn't matter to his Republican followers- is no friend to actual Jews, any more than Greene is.
+++
I want to strongly urge everyone to read the article. It's some scary you know what. The guy outtrumps Trump in lying and being a sociopath and a sexual predator. He didn't even last one semester in Patrick Henry College and was home schooled, 150 alumni signed an open letter warning North Carolinia about the guy and to not elect him to Congress.
He is just the type of person who will go far in the current Trumpian party.
He thinks that he is not only younger & better-looking than trump but that he'll get the sympathy vote.
But his provable lie about the friend who saved him from the burning car is likely to turn off a few people, or at least. I fervently hope so.
If he becomes president, we can rebrand the March of Dimes as March of Slime.
The key points being it's always someone new and they're always a little more nuts, seemingly, than the previous guy.
As soon as they're around a bit they'll have said one thing or another that's not the most idiotic and aggressive and insulting and vulgar possible thing and the baboon colony loses interest and needs to find someone who is still disoriented and mindlessly lashing out, like he's still experiencing that first ever wingnut boner and he's never gonna lose it!
It's trying to keep up with this that's made Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham such laughingstocks. At this point they've obviously been faking their boners all along, just for the polite applause.
Sometimes they just kind of blend into the furniture like Louie Gohmert or get hoist by their own petard like Steve King or Helen Chenoweth.
I kind of feel both Cawthorn & Marjorie Taylor-Greene are looking at a Chenoweth (mixed with George Nethercutt?) career arc.
Also, a large part of the extremist base of wingnutism are people who reject nearly any information outright because it either provides some kind of context, that they did not know and thereby leaves them feeling inferior, or lessens their extremism, which leaves them disoriented.
So whenever new topics come up, as they always do, and their new fave says something about it that doesn't jibe with their preconceived idea about anything, (destroy it or use it as justification to destroy), they start losing interest because the guy is now starting to sound like just another deep state operative out to deceive them.
It's a major though silent part of their mantra d'etre that ADA has killed America cos all those loser dweebs are now our eqwuls. (Just ask Rush-- oh, golly, oops, my bad.) But of course somehow this one is not.
Greg Abbott popped the cork on the GOP exception to the tyranny of special parking rights for the physically inferior.
It might be faithful themselves that are to blame for this steady flow of new stars. Fans, or fanatics, are generally extreme in their behavior and are used to and only satisfied by large doses of dopamine. Once attenuated, the craving must still be met. Only new stimulus can provide this rush.
There have been addicts in the Progressive Wing as well, but the Cult has seemingly been the most prolific in recent history. It's not just the poor quality of the offerings, but the insane appetite for them.
To answer Kevins Q-The wingers have been using ooda loop strategy born from think tanks in an info ecosphere echo chamber to shift the Overton window rightward for so long now that its automatic.
A new crazier cult leader wannabe emerges like virtual particles, timed to surf the short waves of cultists’ attentional spans.
The "right" has now become essentially the captive arm of the profit driven propaganda peddlers like faux, who seek to maximize their revenue stream by continually dialing up exactly what motivates their viewers- i.e. hate & fear. They are the ones that now setting the agenda and writing the playbook. The Republican party has ceased to have any independence from the bile spilling blowhards on the T.V. screen and have become totally subservient to whatever lie of the day the billionaires who own the right wing noise machine think will serve their interests.
What do you expect? "Conservatism can not fail, it can only be failed". Of course it is a failure, so one must constantly push the extreme even further out because success must be out there somewhere if we were just conservative enough.
So, as a registered voter here in NC - Cawthorne's home state I have to ask this question:
How does a paraplegic who worked at Bojangles afford this type of firepower?
https://images.app.goo.gl/Sf3NmCL1Z6ANSNYe6
Meth or moonshine.
Photographer rents out the gun and the dog for children's birthday parties.
You can't compare him AOC on the left. She is a break out star. She just has that star quality that you know it when you see it.