Related to Joe’s post yesterday about HCR’s inability to call out lies about supposed voting irregularity, I thought this was a good video:
Normally I would create a transcript of this using Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude, but none of them would do it. It would “violate copyright”. I guess now that they’ve violated copyright for years, they’re going to stop?
Anyway, the gist of the video is that MAGA feels free to shit on everyone using awful language, but when they’re criticized, they get very sensitive. Psychologists call this “asymmetric norm enforcement.” Colloquially, it’s “Mom, mom, he hit me back!” In MAGA world, norms bind their opposition, but they should feel free to do whatever they want. They’re the übermenschen, after all, the white master race. Who dares to question them?
This is a big problem. The media has clearly bought into it, because MAGA exploits the pre-existing condition of media trying to be “fair” and quote “both sides”. This falls down when one side is saying that perhaps, just maybe, MAGA shouldn’t have murder goons on the streets shooting innocents in the face, while MAGA tells lies that makes it sound like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and hundreds of others, had it coming. The media is simply unequipped to deal with this much asymmetry.
I’d argue that the reason that mostly mild-mannered centrists like Jon Ossof, as well as more left Democrats like AOC are so popular with the base is that they’re able to string together simple, declarative sentences that call bullshit on MAGA tropes. They do not accept that their opponents “have a point” — they just call nonsense by its proper name.
There’s another side to “asymmetric norm enforcement”, something I’d normally call “mau mauing1” — loudly proclaiming that certain sensible behavior is for some reason awful, and intimidating reasonable people from doing that thing. I’ll use a recent example:
Claudia Sheinbaum had the flu and cancelled one day of work (which, for her, means she was pretty damn sick). After that, she appeared in public, but she wore a mask so she wouldn’t give everyone else the flu.
After the disgusting, perverse response of MAGA to sensible COVID masking precautions, can you imagine if President AOC wore a mask in 2029? This is another side of the asymmetry that pervades our public discourse. It’s not the same as “mom, mom he hit me back!” but it comes from a similar place — keeping us on our back feet by policing our minor statements or actions while doing whatever the fuck they want.
1 Per Merriam-Webster: “The term mau-mau comes from the name of the Mau Mau, a militant African nationalist movement formed among the Kikuyu people of Kenya in the 1950s to advocate violent resistance to British rule. The English term reflects the historical British version of the actions of the Mau Mau, a version that does not acknowledge the grievances of the Kikuyu or the atrocities committed against them. In current English, mau-mau is used to suggest that a person's efforts and actions stem only from a desire to commit violent acts, or in milder use, to cause disruption or achieve some petty aim. When the term is used of a Black person it is especially likely to be considered offensive.” I’m not using this about a Black person, so I guess it isn’t offensive, I hope.
