Every Republican Accusation Is Actually A Confession

It's not accidental, it's not incidental, it's not superficial, it's not occasional.

When Republicans accuse you of racism for noticing the racism entailed by some claim they have made or of an outcome of some policy they advocate, their accusation that you are racist is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of their own racism that it weirdly feels like it is.

When Republicans accuse you of elitism for caring more about everyday people than billionaires, their accusation that you are elitist is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of their own elitism that it weirdly feels like it is.

When Republicans campaigning for a place in government accuse government as such of incompetence, corruption, profligacy, fraud, thuggery you can be sure that their accusation is precisely the confession of the assumptions that will guide their governance, and you can be sure that the incompetence, corruption, profligacy, fraud, and thuggery they author will further substantiate the accusation and confessional declaration of the next generation of Republicans to follow them into the slaughterhouse of their making.

When Republicans accuse you of pining for tyranny because you believe in good government of, by, and for the people, their accusation that you are a tyrant ready to unleash the jack-boots of police brutality is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of the promptings of their own authoritarian id, the one that dismantles civil liberties and lies us into endless wars and sends riot police into citizen assemblies literally every time they are in any position to do so.

When Republicans accuse you of thwarting their "Culture of Life" theirs is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of the hater of women who wants them to die in back alley abortions for daring to have pleasure in life, the hater of actually living children who wants them to die of starvation, abuse, ignorance, hopelessness, and should they survive long enough, eventually as cannon-fodder in their wars, the hater of laws regulating machine guns in our streets or poisons in our homes or the soundness of our children's educations or the safety of our food supply or the reliability of our infrastructure or protection against pandemic or catastrophic weather, they are instead the dread armies of a palpable Culture of Death, and their accusations stink of the death on their breath and in our their heartless hearts.

When Republicans accuse you of hating America their accusation is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of their hatred for the actual diversity of American lifeways in this secular, multicultural, continent-scaled scrum of collaboration and contestation and everyday people, and for the actual democratizing promise, never yet fulfilled but always breaking out anew, of our American ethos, our founding, immigrating, emancipating, progressing, unionizing, New Dealing, civil righting, war-protesting, secularizing, ecologizing, queering, browning, legacies into a presence pushing from and into elsewhere and other-wise, peer to peer.

When Republicans accuse you of meddling in private life, undermining individual choice, strangling innovation their accusation is precisely the displaced and perplexing confession of the wiretapping spy, the anti-intellectual who thinks his is the Party of Ideas, the hyperbolic huckster who thinks his wishes are assets, the bully and bore who mistakes self-promotion for creativity, the relentlessly conventional individualist, the mocker of difference, the pinched, puritanical, moralizing crusader against the happiness of gay folks and women who choose to end unwanted pregnancies or facilitate wanted ones against convention and kids in school with questions and single folks and slackers and pot smokers and poets and freethinkers and people with a cause or an idea or a creation or who care enough to do something the least bit unexpected.

It is not enough to declare these perplexing displacements self-deceptions, propaganda lies, or even the Big Lies of fascist mass-mediation (although a full accounting would testify to all these facets): This projection is the quintessential gesture of alienated moralizing oligarchs in a modern (if I may telescope this brutally briefly, I mean "modern" in the sense of the ongoing and in fact interminable re-enactment of the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes and, hence, yes, that "modern" includes late-moderns, post-moderns, a-moderns, and all the rest of that hoo-hah) that is to say, our whole secular/aestheticized ethical/democratizing sociocultural terrain. This confessional displacement into accusation is the very architecture of reaction that makes the politics of the Right what it is properly grasped as in its fundamentalism, in its moralism, in its hostility to democracy and worldiness -- in a word we seem all too readily and wrongly to have set aside -- Reactionary.