Opinion | Conservative Delusion and the Business of Politics

The conservative state of mind is both a laughable and deadly paradox of entitlement and victimization, and that’s never been more abundantly clear than in the past few weeks. Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing a mask reading “CENSORED” in bold block letters while speaking, televised nationwide, into a microphone on the floor of the House of Representatives encapsulates the conservative state of being perfectly.

Greene is an open QAnon conspiracy theorist who’s now been given one of the greatest platforms a politician can get, status as an elected official in the federal government. Yet her rhetoric remains that she is the target of a massive, illusive scheme to silence the far-right -- it’s a smart tactic, even given its obvious self-contradiction. She, the silenced defender of traditional American values whom woke urban Democrats want shutted up for she dare defy them and bless the sheeple of the states with truth, who’s now infiltrated the devils’ ranks and will bring them down from the inside. It’s a narrative “stop the steal” conservatives love to be sold, because it tells them in a country in which they (by and large white and Christian) hold the most socioeconomic power, that they are victims. She knows her market and their delusion. That those who stand in support of a president who is a moronic white nationalist sympathizer on a good day are at once both the silent majority and the most marginalized group in the United States.

And I am being quite deliberate when I call conservatives a market. OAN, The Ben Shapiro Show, InfoWars: they all make a killing by selling themselves as the guys reporting the real news, discussing the hard-hitting facts that don’t care about your feelings -- nevermind that they actively use language specifically chosen to appeal to conservatives’ feelings and coddle the feelings of a president constantly throwing tantrums. Recently elected Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn’s first tweet after his election, an unprofessional “cry more, libs,” is something he says he now regrets -- which is well and good, but personally I’d like it if Mr. Cawthorn could then explain why he’s still selling shirts with the phrase slapped on it on his website. The conservative delusion is both an oppression and power fantasy; silenced and hunted while simultaneously taking aim at the other side’s trivial feelings, and right-wing media personalities mirror and exploit that ideology to sell their media. Trump University’s playbook lays out this pathos-driven business strategy perfectly: “You don’t sell products, benefits or solutions — you sell feelings.” Conservative contempt is a gold mine for political and corporate advancement.

The truth of it is that while President Trump has never been a particularly good businessman, he’s one of the best marketing ploys the conservative party’s ever gotten. As Michelle Wolf put it in her White House Correspondents' Dinner back in 2018, “[Trump] couldn't sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He's helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you're profiting off him.” Air Force veteran Ashli Babbit, an insurrectionist shot fatally at the Capitol riot, was actually an Obama voter, but since then was radicalized by MAGA rhetoric into Trumpism -- and it is all to do with the fact that her social media pages were full of reposts of Tucker Carlson, Meghan McCain, Rand Paul, and Candace Owens. Don’t pretend you are being censored when popular media personalities with a large platform, and who purposefully market themselves as “outspoken” are the ones, besides the president himself (who unprofessionally lauds them), most avidly spreading and selling your message. Surely you recognize the hypocrisy in viewing left-wing media showing bias as a cover-up scheme, but right-wing media showing bias as a simple matter of free speech.

That’s not to say that the left aren’t just as avid consumers. Trump’s presidency has actually upped CNN’s viewership. The praise companies receive from the liberal side of Twitter for pink and rainbow capitalism and other forms of performative inclusivity is nothing if not eyeroll-worthy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has consistently pushed a dangerous inter-party divide between moderate Democrats and liberals by insulting her colleagues and refusing to properly endorse Joe Biden -- which is highly objectionable given that while the Democratic party is a mix of moderatism and liberalism, the GOP is overwhelmingly conservative -- but just look how snappy her single-phrase tweets are, and how fun and relatable it is to watch her play Among Us; AOC merch sells. When it comes to outspokenness, many young liberals on social media seem to care more about the thrill they get out of saying “defund the police” than convincing anyone who disagrees of the merit of redistributing city and county funding to other areas of the budget and that implementing such a policy is worthwhile on several fronts -- probably because the latter doesn’t really fit on a pin or in a text box on a viral TikTok.

None of us are exempt from the privatization of information, grabby headlines that will garner clicks. I will say though that one of the two kinds of marketed virtue politics conservatives and liberals buy into respectively, two opposite versions of “fighting the good fight”, has not caused a rioting mob to beat officers with American flags, march to the Speaker of the House’s office with guns and zipties in hand, and urinate on the Capitol building while insisting they’re being patriotic.

Now, I don’t mean to be nihilistic about politics, and I’m anything but a centrist, though I’m not yet old enough to vote. I think generally speaking, despite my grievances with capitalism, that big, positive changes can be brought about through politics within our current system, and despite the gripes I’ve laid out in this piece, I’m in no way pessimistic about journalism. What does irritate me, however, is the notion that the media, which in this country is privately owned, is trying to silence your political incorrectness because it interferes with some agenda, and that your fondness for outspokenness makes you exempt from anything, meanwhile it’s exactly how certain companies want you to think so they can profit off of it. Far-right news sources and political commentators, organizations like the NRA, and right-wing politicians like Cruz, Hawley, and the like foster, spread, and commodify conservative delusions of marginalization by telling you they are being censored and that you are avoiding herd mentality by supporting them -- but that doesn’t explain why a herd of insurrectionists, further radicalized by those right-wing media sources, stormed the United States Capitol.