Grievance, Conspiracism and the California GOP
With less than two weeks to go in the California recall campaign, the ex-fiancée of the leading Republican candidate, Larry Elder, accused him of waving a gun at her while high on marijuana in 2015, after which she broke off an 18-month engagement. “For a minute there … I thought it was a Phil Spector moment,’’ Alexandra Datig told Politico, referencing the famed record producer who shot and killed actress Lana Clarkson in 2003.
Elder denies it ever happened, of course. But it was eerily reminiscent of the last recall election, when the GOP front-runner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, faced a slew of accusations over his misogynist behavior — most of which were completely ignored until the Los Angeles Times published a last-minute round-up investigation. And it came on the heels of multiple misogynistic remarks surfacing from Elder’s past — denigrating women’s knowledge “about political issues, economics and current events,” defending discrimination against women who might become pregnant, and chiding “hypersensitivity” to sexist conduct in the workplace — all of which drew sharp criticism from other GOP candidates, most notably, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer.
“When I saw those comments directed about women, directed about pregnancy discrimination, that’s not right,” Faulconer said. “That’s not right for anybody of any political party or background. That’s not what you want to have your governor doing or talking about.”
But the differences between the two races are much bigger than the similarities, in at least four ways. First is the difference in how misogynistic behavior is viewed: The #MeToo movement has finally changed how seriously such accusations are taken, reflected in the fact that the Los Angeles Police Department is now investigating the incident. But thanks to Donald Trump, GOP voters are virtually immune to those long overdue changes, when one of their cherished heroes is involved.
Second is the difference in the candidates: Schwarzenegger was a much better-known, more mainstream, and popular figure, who went on to win a majority of votes. Elder is a niche-audience celebrity, a rightwing talk radio host who’ll be lucky to get half the votes that Gov. Gavin Newsom gets — but, leading a badly fragmented field, he’ll still be elected if Newsom fails to get more that 50% on the question of whether he should be recalled. As Politico put it, “A motivated GOP electorate and an indifferent Democratic base could be all it takes to force Newsom out.”
Third is what’s driving the recall: The 2003 recall was fueled by economic concerns — a budget crisis fueled by the dot-com bubble bursting and the Enron-manipulated electricity crisis and the California budget crisis that followed the dot-com bubble burst. This recall effort was framed largely in terms of xenophobic lies, even though it’s the pandemic that’s kept it alive.
The first specific charge in the recall petition was the false claim that “Laws he endorsed favor foreign nationals, in our country illegally, over that of our own citizens.” Some California laws remove barriers against undocumented immigrants, but none give them more favored status. Next, it falsely claimed causality: “People in this state suffer the highest taxes in the nation, the highest homelessness rates, and the lowest quality of life as a result,” none of which is true. For example, California’s top 1% do pay the highest taxes overall, but no one else does, and the bottom 80% all pay lower taxes than the national average. There’s no hard-and-fast measure of quality of life, but U.S. News and World Report ranks California 19th in the nation — above average, higher than any of its neighbors, far from dead last, and well above red states like Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas.
The next charge, “He has imposed sanctuary state status and fails to enforce immigration laws,” simply means that Newsom, along with California as a whole, has not cooperated with Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant agenda. The only other specific charge about what Newsom has already done was, “He unilaterally over-ruled the will of the people regarding the death penalty,” meaning his institution of a moratorium. But recent polls show Californians now support abolishing it altogether. In short, anti-immigrant sentiment was the driving force motivating the recall effort, based entirely on lies.
Grievance, conspiracism and the great replacement
This brings us to the fourth difference: the difference in the GOP’s underlying culture and ideology — a change centered on grievance as the primary motivation and conspiracism as a way of making sense of the world, with a blank check for any politician who’ll identify and attack the right people in revenge, and knee-jerk discounting of any counter-evidence or expertise. The focus on grievance and reliance on conspiracism means that reality is far less important than ever before. If evidence is lacking, the conspirators are hiding it. If evidence is contradictory, it’s a “false flag.” If grievance-spouting leaders are attacked for spreading false information, that only proves how much the conspirators fear what they are saying.
The most sweeping conspiracy has several different versions, the most relevant for California being “the Great Replacement,” which “is very simple,” its originator, French conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus has said. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people,” thus equating immigration not just to invasion, but to genocide, and requiring genocidal violence in response. Camus argued that this was because elites were weak-willed, but others see them as actively malevolent — a direct descendant of the Nazi myth of Jews plotting the destruction of Christendom. Either way, the story goes, they are to blame for allowing a people to be destroyed. Camus was French, writing for a European audience fearful of Muslim immigration from Northern Africa and the Middle East, but the same logic works perfectly in America, with a much broader range of threatening immigrants — from Latin America, the Middle East, China, you name it.
In April, the Anti-Defamation League called for Fox News host Tucker Carlson to be fired following his on-air promotion of “the Great Replacement.” Fox, of course, refused. Carlson has doubled down repeatedly since, most recently attacking the welcoming of Afghan refugees as an evil elite Trojan Horse: “Let’s try to save our loyal Afghan interpreters,” we tell them. “Perfect,” they [evil elites] think. “We’ll open the borders and change the demographic balance of the country.”
The “Great Replacement” integrates different rightwing factions more tightly than ever before. If “invading hordes of immigrants’’ are the enemy, and falling white birth rates are key to the problem, then the right’s xenophobia and misogyny become tightly fused, along with its Christian nationalism, which “draws its roots from ‘Old Testament’ parallels between America and Israel, who was commanded to maintain cultural and blood purity, often through war, conquest, and separatism,” according to the 2018 paper, “Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.”
In short, the “Great Replacement” may be a despicable lie about the nature of the world, but it’s an apt description of itself — a great replacement of the conservative ideas preceding it, ideas that ultimately failed to deliver what they had promised. But what the “Great Replacement” promises instead is nothing short of genocidal war. If what’s being threatened is the very existence of your people (however conceived), there’s no limit to the violence that’s justified. That’s why multiple terrorist mass-murderers have cited it or alternative expressions of it, sometimes woven into lengthy manifestos. It’s why we’re seeing rising levels of violence at political demonstrations, and open threats against officeholders promoting mask and vaccine requirements.
None of this has anything to do with Larry Elder, he will tell you. Even though, as Jean Guerrero reported in her LA Times column, Elder was the formative mentor for Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, the central policy expression of the “Great Replacement” worldview during Trump’s four years in office. Even though, as Guerror noted in another column, “Newsom has been one of the most pro-Latino governors in California history,” while “Elder wants to reverse sanctuary laws, healthcare for undocumented people and even birthright citizenship” (the last of which is embedded in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, far outside of Elder’s reach). And even though he’s made a career of denying reality on a whole host of topics — from climate change to systemic racism and sexism, to basic matters of public health, such as the deadly impacts of second-hand smoke.
Oh no, Elder will tell you. He’s a “common sense” kind of guy, with “common sense” solutions — such as a zero-dollar minimum wage.
“Why two people who are adults can’t determine what the price of labor ought to be, is beyond me,” Elder told the editorial boards of California’s McClatchy-owned newspapers. “And why a third party feels it is his or her business to interfere with that is also beyond me.”
Common sense, indeed… for Charles Dickens’ 19th century London, where workers regularly died of starvation. But for 21st century California? It’s the exact opposite of common sense. It’s a separate reality, a conspiracists’ otherworld where no contradictory facts are allowed. Certainly not 83 years of common history since the federal minimum wage first went into effect. On Sept. 14, whether they realize it or not, Californians will vote on whether to enter that delusional otherworld, where Larry Elder feels so at home. We will vote on whether to replace our reality with his.