The Dilemma of Horny Bro Conservativism

Plus: Defining "wokeness"

Charlie Sykes

Mar 16

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Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump autographs a Playboy Magazine for a supporter after his rally at the Pensacola Bay Center on September 9, 2016 in Pensacola, Florida. (Photo by Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images)

Irony is dead, Chapter 897,453: Trump Super Pac hits DeSantis With Ethics Complaint.

Because we know how much Trump values… ethics.

Make America Great Again Inc. is filing a 15-page complaint Wednesday with the Florida Commission on Ethics, a draft of which was obtained exclusively by NBC News.

It asks the commission to probe whether pro-DeSantis super PACs, his "personally lucrative book tour" and a continued wave of state-level campaign contributions, among other things, "are unlawful because they serve his personal political objectives, are in furtherance of his personal financial gain at the expense of Florida taxpayers, and are intended to influence his official decision to resign from office."

Speaking of ethics, here’s man-of-the-people Steve Bannon, and his buddies:

An exiled Chinese billionaire with links to Steve Bannon has been arrested by the FBI in New York over allegations he masterminded a $1 billion fraud then splashed the cash on a yacht, mansion and other outrageous luxuries.
Guo Wengui was detained by agents on Wednesday morning over an elaborate scam to defraud his legion of online followers through sham investments. He's expected to appear in court today on 12 charges.

FLASHBACK:

WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, a sunburned Steve Bannon, holding a lit cigar and wearing a blue polo shirt with the collar turned up, stood in front of a camera on a yacht owned by his friend Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire.
A YouTube video shows Wengui putting his arm around Bannon as the former Trump campaign chairman denounces the Chinese government and extols the alleged benefits of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. The vessel's lavish interior gleams in the background.
On Thursday, Bannon was arrested by federal agents on that same yacht off Westbrook, Connecticut, and booked into jail on fraud charges. Though the charges appear to have nothing to do with the Chinese businessman, the arrest puts a new spotlight on Bannon's relationship with Guo, a controversial figure with his own history of legal entanglements.

Bonus: Apparently, there was a lot of hugging.

Denver Riggleman @RepRiggleman

Are you surprised? Hugs all around between Guo and Rudy. Intimate. 手足

The New York Times @nytimes

Breaking News: Federal prosecutors charged the exiled Chinese tycoon Guo Wengui, a Steve Bannon ally, with a $1 billion fraud scheme. https://t.co/5dFLOWA4sr

Happy Thursday!

Fox is losing the PR war

A new poll finds that two-thirds of Americans — including 2 in 5 Republicans — think that Fox News should be held accountable for its election lies.

Horny bro conservatism meets the Church Lady

What we have here is a severe case of cognitive dissonance.

In a new column, “The Debate Hugh Hefner Won and William Buckley Lost,” Jane Coaston describes one of the remarkable flexes in modern conservatism: Even as the GOP has embraced hard core social conservatism, it has also tried to win over a whole new constituency — what she calls the “hornier conservatism movement.”

Some conservatives seem to have decided that winning over a new constituency — one that hates rules and ordinances and loves hot people and cool ideas and sex, sex and ideally more sex — is worth changing what it means to be a conservative in the first place.
Pursuing these voters is a perilous shift for conservatism, because the ethos relies not on a political ideology but on the lack of one: simply doing whatever one wants.

This is, of course, is part of the appeal of a post-shame Donald Trump to voters who want to give a middle finger to established norms. But it has also meant that the “Barstool conservative” is now part of the GOP coalition.

This could prove tricky.

Coaston quotes Matthew Walther, who notes that the barstool conservative “isn’t opposed to abortion; he’s opposed to political correctness.”

They are “people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever Gamergate was about.”

But what they do not accept, ever, is being told what to do, whether by “hectoring, schoolmarmish” politicians and media or by the federal government.
This kind of conservative might not vote, or at least not vote on a consistent basis. But he does adhere to this specific, attitudinal type of politics. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote in 2014, “This attitude is ‘liberal’ in that it regards sexual license as an unalloyed good, and treats any kind of social or religious conservatism as a dead letter. But at the same time it wants to rebel and lash out against the strictures it feels that feminism and political correctness have placed on male liberty, male rights.”

What could possibly go wrong here? Especially, as the GOP tries to reconcile the demands and impulses of the horny right, with the Church Lady Right that wants to use the power of the state to search out drag queen shows and other displays of ‘prurient content”?

As Coaston notes:

A hornier conservative movement might be more electorally successful, but it will run headfirst into a wall of longstanding conservative policy commitments — to end abortion, eliminate pornography and reinforce the “nuclear family.” Goals that are, at the very least, not very horny….

The temporary answer to this dilemma has been the rise of “horny bro conservatism” that celebrates hot women, money, anti-feminism, and, occasionally, raging misogyny like this guy.

Writes Coaston:

The life span of horny-bro conservatism is inherently limited by the very nature of what it means to be either a horny bro or a conservative — at a certain point, one viewpoint may overpower the other.
But it seems as if attracting the horny bro to the Republican Party is increasingly more important than sating the conservative, particularly when it comes to getting voters.
When the Bang Girls (of Bang Energy drinks) threw cash at conservative teenagers at a Turning Point USA youth conference in 2020, some elders argued that it was embarrassing and deplorable, far removed from “conservatism.”
But one Twitter user responded to the Republican political strategist Alec Sears’s denunciation of the event, saying that perhaps the message was actually incredibly effective: “hot women and money. Being conservative will help you achieve those things. that’s what it has to do with it, that is the implication. Join us and get those things.”
William F. Buckley would be horrified. Hugh Hefner would be proud.

Exit take: Maybe, just maybe, this coalition is less stable that it looks at the moment?

Having trouble defining wokeness?

As you undoubtedly know by now, anti-woke scold Bethany Mandel had some difficulties defining wokeness the other day. David French wants to help her out:

David French @DavidAFrench

Woke, defined: Positive definition-increased awareness of very real historical and existing systemic injustice. Negative definition-illiberal progressivism centered around race/gender. Bad faith right-wing definition-anything even one millimeter to the tweeter's left.

Also: Freddie deBoer (very much a man of the left himself) is offering a guide to the apparently perplexed.

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life.
It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s.
“Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are.
Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people.
Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish.
Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

He’s got a lot more, which you can read here.

Pence’s warning

On Wednesday’s podcast, I talked with Tom Nichols about Mandel’s meltdown, Fox’s confused talking points, Ron DeSantis’s failure to launch, and Tom’s piece in the Atlantic about Mike Pence.

Listen to our whole conversation here.

Quick Hits

1. Could the GOP Divide Over Ukraine Become a Lasting Split?

Amanda Carpenter in today’s Bulwark:

The GOP primary may turn out to be a long and painful exercise in proving that anyone who genuinely believes the ideals of democracy, freedom, and the rule of law are higher political priorities than shutting down drag queen brunches has no place in the party.
Even so, that doesn’t leave the Pence, Haley, and McConnell types without choices.
DeSantis has shown himself willing to disregard both the real geopolitical stakes and the sheer human cost of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to strike a pose for MAGA. If he keeps it up, the split with him should be more than temporary.

Bonus: Today’s lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal, “Ron DeSantis’s First Big Mistake.”

Ron DeSantis is sketching out a presidential campaign based on his manifest governing success in Florida and as a fearless fighter for principle who ignores the polls. Then how to explain his puzzling surrender this week to the Trumpian temptation of American retreat?
That’s not too strong a way to describe his decision to call the war in Ukraine a “territorial dispute” that isn’t a vital U.S. interest. He told Fox News that giving the Ukrainians long-range weapons and fighter jets ought to be “off the table,” invoking the prospect of nuclear war with Russia. And he called for “peace,” albeit without explaining how to avoid making it a peace of the grave for Ukrainians if the West withdraws its support while Vladimir Putin advances.

2. A Russian Jet Hit an American Drone. It Probably Won’t Be the Last Time.

Ralph Clem and Ray Finch write in today’s Bulwark:

Two days ago, a Russian fighter jet brought down an American long-range reconnaissance drone while both were operating in international airspace over the Black Sea. An event such as this involving the actual destruction of a Russian or NATO aircraft has not happened in decades. But given the frequency with which encounters between aircraft from both sides take place and the tendency of Russian pilots to act irresponsibly, it is nothing short of a miracle that such dangerous incidents have not resulted in loss of life. While these incidents are always (or almost always) explainable as accidents, they nonetheless present the potential for escalation to armed conflict between two nuclear-armed states in an already confrontational posture.

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