Remember the rules, liberals: Only the right gets to mock America

One can always expect a coward to utter clichés and reinforce conventional banalities. So was the case when Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, took a knee to kiss the ring on Donald Trump’s miniature digit.

“Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon implored Americans without a hint of self-consciousness, during a Jan. 17 interview with CNBC from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Trump was kind of right about NATO," he continued, "kind of right about immigration. Tax reform worked.”

With no follow-up questions from his sycophantic hosts, Dimon failed to explain how Trump was "kind of right" about NATO, given that in previous remarks Dimon had described NATO as one of the world’s most important alliances, and urged the U.S. to take a “stronger stance” against Russia. He also did not clarify his views on immigration: Was Trump correct to separate children from their families at the border, threaten mass deportation, call nations with predominantly Black or Latino populations “shithole countries” or suggest that Border Patrol officers shoot migrants on sight? Does Dimon think that employees and customers of Chase who are immigrants, or the children of immigrants themselves, are, to use Trump’s words, "poisoning the blood of our country"?

Admittedly, statistical evidence suggests that Trump’s tax reform did indeed “work” — at least for people like Dimon. The Republican tax bill of 2017, which was more the work of then-Speaker Paul Ryan than Trump, benefited households in the top 1 percent more than twice as much as the bottom 60 percent.

What is most interesting about Dimon’s complicity with the authoritarian right, at a moment when some recent polls have moved in Trump’s favor, is his enforcement of the rules of U.S. political discourse. Since the 1980s, with few exceptions, political leaders, mainstream media commentators and influential private-sector figures like Dimon have dictated these laws, whose fundamental premise is simple: The right can attack, ridicule and even question the humanity of the majority of the American population whenever it wants. Leftists and liberals are not allowed to respond.

Dimon warned Democrats that “criticizing MAGA people” will “hurt your campaign.” When one of the CNBC hosts suggested that any aspersion cast against Trump’s autocratic cult “demonizes half the country," Dimon replied with the greatest hits of right-wing whining and victimhood: “The Democrats have done a good job with the 'deplorables,' hugging their Bibles and their beer and their guns. I mean, really? Can we stop that stuff and actually grow up and treat other people respectfully and listen to them a little bit?”

Judging by the abundant of references to Hillary Clinton’s notorious but largely correct 2016 assessment that roughly half of Trump supporters represented the “basket of deplorables,” thanks to their "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic" views, that was the worst trauma visited on the American public since Pearl Harbor. Not far behind comes Barack Obama’s 2008 comment, which Dimon also mentioned, that some voters in economically barren regions “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The tears and panic over these two impolitic remarks never seem to end. Although there's no evidence to support this, some pundits claim to this day that Clinton lost the 2016 election thanks to the “deplorables” gaffe. The word itself has even been transformed into political code, with figures such as Dimon using it to represent “liberal elitism” — an everlasting and fearsome threat that is maddeningly difficult to identify. Trump supporters have adopted "deplorables' as a badge of honor, and with no hint of shame or self-reflection on why Clinton deployed the term in the first place, display it on T-shirts, baseball caps and bumper stickers,. 

Media Matters recently conducted a study comparing press coverage of Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” statement to Donald Trump’s Nazi-like lambasting of political critics and opponents as “vermin.” It found that “The Big Three broadcast TV networks provided 18 times more coverage of Clinton’s 2016 'deplorables' comment than Trump’s 'vermin' remark on their combined nationally syndicated morning news, evening news, and Sunday morning political talk shows.”

On cable news the situation was slightly better, but still irresponsibly lopsided: “CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC mentioned Clinton’s remarks nine times more than Trump’s." 

Print media was actually the worst culprit in this trivialization of a leading presidential candidate's use of "eliminationist" rhetoric recalling the worst excesses of 20th-century fascism: “Print reports that mentioned Clinton's statement outnumbered those that mentioned Trump’s 29-to-1 across the five highest-circulating U.S. newspapers.”

Mere days after Dimon broke out the world’s smallest violin on behalf of those who openly plot to end American democracy, Trump referred to Biden supporters, before a cheering and laughing crowd, as “liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps and other quite nice people.”

The world breathlessly awaits the outrage that will occupy the media’s attention for years over Trump’s slander of 81 million American voters. Obama made his infamous “cling to guns” comment 16 years ago. Will Republicans be forced to answer for Trump’s hatred of the American majority in 2040?

It is worth noting that Clinton and Obama have both apologized, on multiple occasions, for their controversial remarks. No one imagines that Trump will do anything but ramp up the derogatory rhetoric

Mike Johnson, a right-wing religious fanatic and duly elected speaker of the House, has said that American culture is so “dark and depraved” that it is “almost irredeemable.” It is tempting to recall the popular bumper sticker of the 1960s: “Love it or Leave It.” If Johnson is sincere, why would he wish to stay in the United States, much less occupy one of its most powerful positions of government?

Of course, the evangelical Christian hatred of America is neither new nor terribly surprising. It was only days after the 9/11 attack in 2001 that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson asserted that the terrorist murder of nearly 3,000 Americans was God’s vengeance — wrought on a sinful nation of legal abortion, LGBTQ rights, feminism and secular education.

Ronald Reagan was largely responsible for ushering the likes of Falwell and Robertson into national discourse. As president, he routinely derided poor Black people as "welfare queens," and likened left-of-center Americans to perverts when he suggested that they concealed their ideology with “trenchcoats and sunglasses” only to occasionally flash the public.

Throughout the 1990s, it was not only acceptable but politically and financially profitable to insult, mock and openly despise even the most moderate Democrats. Newt Gingrich, as speaker of the House, instructed Republican members of Congress to refer to their political opponents as “crooks, traitors and thugs.” Simultaneous with Gingrich’s flatulent rise to power came Rush Limbaugh's ascension as the right's first true media superstar. He built a talk radio empire by calling women who used birth control "sluts," telling a Black caller to "take the bone out of his nose" and reading the names of men who had died of AIDS with songs like “Kiss Him Goodbye” and “Back in the Saddle Again” playing in the background.

In 2020, shortly before Limbaugh’s death, Donald Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Overt contempt for hundreds of millions of Americans — especially feminist women, LGBTQ people, religious minorities and immigrants of color — continues at Trump rallies, on Fox News and all over the right-wing internet. Even Republicans who are more bashful about proclaiming their loathing for other Americans signal their hostility in code, often referring, with an evident sneer, to "San Francisco values" or even "California values," as if an immensely diverse state of roughly 40 million people could be summarized with an insult.

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The long and ugly history of right-wing cruelty directed at the American public provokes almost no mainstream admonishment, even as Republican officials boast of their patriotism or, as in Trump’s case, fondle the flag with quasi-sexual longing while questioning the patriotism of anyone who denounces their reactionary agenda.

It is taken as an immutable and almost neutral law of nature that Republicans will speak of the American people with disgust, while Democrats must react only with civility, polite rebuttal and promises to “work across the aisle.” If a prominent Democrat goes off the script, such as Clinton did in 2016 or Obama did in 2008, and responds in kind to right-wing hatred, an enormous moral panic ensues, followed by mawkish bromides about “division” and “coming together as Americans.”

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned against “defining deviancy down.” Tolerance for deviant behavior, under this argument, will inevitably lead to more harmful vices, and even crimes. Granting Republicans blanket permission to utter contemptuous slanders against anyone and everyone who doesn’t fit Sarah Palin’s definition of “real American” — essentially, white Christian heterosexuals who live outside major metropolitan areas — has created an increasingly dangerous public culture where Donald Trump faces no real consequences for using Hitler-style language to call for the elimination of his enemies.

Jamie Dimon, like the generation of mainstream journalists who obsessed over “basket of deplorables,” is an enabler in the classic sense. While shedding mock tears over Joe Biden’s scathing references to “MAGA Republicans,” he ignores or tolerates widespread hate speech against everyone from Latino immigrants to registered Democrats.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a leading Holocaust scholar, coined the above-mentioned term “eliminationist” to describe the Nazi rhetoric that preceded the death camps, expressing the belief that political opponents are “a cancer on the body politic that must be excised.” In other words, “vermin” that should be “rooted out.”

Asserting that some right-wing voters are “deplorable,” or that their choices are the consequence of bitterness, is not eliminationist. But describing Democrats as subhuman creatures who are intent on destroying all that is good in the world absolutely is. With hate crimes on the rise and hundreds of elected officials, school board members, election workers and even library trustees receiving constant death threats from Trump's MAGA followers, it is no exaggeration to say that those who fail to see the difference between sardonic mockery and overt hatred, or between calls to vote and calls for violence, already have blood on their hands and will surely have more.