Establishment Politicos Keep Pretending They're Anti-Establishment.
The right and center are full of rebels with nothing to rebel about.
The past decade of American politics has given rise to a peculiar phenomenon. The people in the political establishment, by which I mean those that either have institutional power or share the politics favored by those with power, are obsessed with painting themselves as scrappy underdogs. Despite the undeniable fact that their desires for market capitalism and imperialism are well-represented in the American government — the most powerful apparatus in the known universe — both centrist and rightist politicians, oligarchs, media commentators, and even average citizens try to convince everyone (including themselves), that they’re the little guys, fighting a righteous ideological war against “the man.”
While self-victimization is nothing new and not exclusively American, this is its most extreme form. Broadly speaking, these folks have gotten everything they wanted out of the 21st century. America is the global hegemon with unparalleled military power, corporations are unrestrained, workers are disempowered, and major news outlets champion the AP History worldview on every TV in the country. However, as their desired politics have created undesirable outcomes for the masses, establishment forces must pretend they’re actually on the outs. If they admitted that their political beliefs were the dominant force in society, their constituents and audiences would turn elsewhere, looking for someone who could provide solutions to the problems they face. And, as history tells us, aristocrats will let nations crumble and populations perish before they ever consider taking a long look in the mirror.
The Tom Brady Effect
Through no fault of my own, I was raised a Boston sports fan. During my youth, the New England Patriots built the best dynasty in athletic history. Yet, we Patriots fans refused to accept this. Because the entire country hated the Patriots, a fair judgment given our six Super Bowl rings and loose regard for the rules, we indoctrinated ourselves into thinking the Patriots were underdogs. I call this “The Tom Brady Effect” — when a dominant force portrays itself as weak and victimized to gain an advantage.
The best example of the Tom Brady Effect in contemporary politics is the Republican Party. More specifically, its attempts to rebrand itself as the “anti-establishment” MAGA movement. Ever since Ronald Reagan put the nail in the coffin of the New Deal coalition, the GOP has gotten everything it ever wanted. Unionization rates are at an all-time low, hack-and-slash deregulation has skyrocketed corporate profits, Roe v. Wade has been repealed, and the Pentagon has treated the planet like its own Call of Duty game, overthrowing countries and assassinating leftist politicians everywhere from Chile to Iraq. The GOP has accrued so much power that even the Democrats are Republicans. Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy was to run as a Republican in the Democratic Party. Barrack “Hope and Change” Obama instituted The Heritage Foundation’s free-market healthcare plan and exploded the drone war to the point the only thing Fox News could criticize about him was a tan suit. The Overton Window is so far right that all Joe Biden had to do to become “the most progressive President in my lifetime” was end a two-decade failed war and walk one picket line. Sure, there was the occasional occasional social progressive victory over the years, but the political scoreboard of the last half-century is conclusive. The left has one point for legalized gay marriage, and the right maxed out the numbers by winning Literally Everything Else.
Despite his outsider branding, Donald Trump is nothing unique. He’s simply a Republican who says the conservative dog whistles into a bullhorn. Hell, even his trademark “Make America Great Again” slogan came from Regan. All Trump did was pull it (along with Reagan’s racism “social conservatism” and dementia) out of the RNC closet and blow the dust off.
And yet, the Republican Party continuously portrays itself as a political outsider. Before the election, The Columbus Dispatch even equated Trump to Rocky Balboa. If you think an impoverished boxer is akin to a billionaire former President, then you have the brain of a goldfish.
The false notion of Republicans as political underdogs extended far beyond traditional conservative channels. Seeing an opportunity to get back at the imaginary liberal women they’re mad at, “Trump is an outsider” has become the heart of the anti-anti-Trump industry here on Substack. Last March,
admitted he’d decided not to criticize Republicans, something many of his critiques long claimed. To quote his justification, Taibbi claimed that “Republicans have very little institutional power nationally.”
This is nonsense, of course. Over the last few years, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court has used institutional power to:
Prevent Biden from forgiving student debt,
End affirmative action in colleges,
Rule businesses can discriminate against queer people,
End the abortion rights (the first time the Supreme Court has ever revoked an established individual right), and
Ruled their Very Special Boy is above the law.
Taibbi’s debasement of himself isn’t an isolated occurrence, but the go-to marketing strategy of establishment-aligned media. By packaging widely-held political beliefs as secret forbidden truths, a cadre of media figures have successfully convinced conservative and centrist Americans that they’re soldiers in a rebel army, ideological guerillas who are willing to speak the Hard Truths* when no one else will.
*More often than not, the “hard truths” are the need to increase the military budget and bully trans kids.
I’m not joking about these people thinking they’re rebels. Not long after the election,
published the below article, equating standard neoliberal economics, specifically the fight for “low taxes and deregulation,” with Star Wars’ Rebel Alliance. Of course, the Rebel Alliance is based on the Viet Cong and the Evil Empire on America, so I don’t think the Princess Leia shares Noah’s desire to increase American military spending.
While on the topic of centrist Substackers, I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention the most egregious victim of the Tom Brady Effect,
. It is widely known that the Slow Boring author was closer to true institutional power than anyone else in independent media. According to Yglesias, Biden White House staffers read his work and used it to inform the Inflation Reduction Act, and he’s even admitted to having direct access to President Biden, speaking with him on the phone. His politics were perfectly represented in the Kamala Harris campaign, as evidenced by his August 2024 article stating his paramount concern about the candidate was that he liked her convention too much.
Yet, following the demise of the Yglesias Harris campaign, Yglesias has attempted to retcon Kamala Harris into a leftist, a poor effort to distance himself from an administration that lost after adopting his suggested policies. By his own admission, Ygelsias’ politics were ever-present in the 2024 Democratic Party, but after its embarrassing loss, he’s angling himself as a brave truth-teller who will say things others are too scared to. Yglesias is currently promoting his “Common Sense Democrat Manifesto,” which is existing Democratic policies branded as The Next Big Thing. Unsurprisingly, what he’s saying is already shared throughout the Democratic Establishment, which is why Congressmen Seth Moulton and Brian Schatz are lock step in agreement they need to be meaner to trans kids and end wokeness, as if the Democratic Party was the ultra-left Trotskyist contingent Fox News pretends it is.
Speaking of shadowboxing imaginary leftists, that brings us to the queen of the grift,
. Weiss’ publication, The Free Press, has accrued thousands of subscribers by marketing itself as the only publications willing to go where no one else will. With the inspiring tagline “Think For Yourself,” The Free Press has tackled the most important issues facing Americans, investigating:A trans clinic that provides gender-affirming care to minors,
Alleged anti-semitism at the Columbia pro-Palestine protest,
How elite billionaire Peter Thiel is actually “counter-elite",
Alleged anti-semitism at the Berkely pro-Palestine protest,
Alleged anti-semitism at the Toronto pro-Palestine protest,
Another trans clinic that provides gender-affirming care to minors.
Putting my chronic sarcasm aside, there’s nothing you’ll read in The Free Press that wouldn’t be published in mainstream publications such as The Atlantic or The Wall Street Journal. In fact, both Bari Weiss and The New York Times have spent the last few weeks running cover for the worm in RFK Jr.’s brain.
But what makes Weiss’ approach more appealing than the center-right publications she used to write for is the branding: by pretending to be the only one reporting on these “stories,” Weiss has convinced her reactionary audience that their far-right positions are actually the sensible, moderate takes other people are too scared to say. Bari Weiss’ entire business model is cosplaying as the daughter of aging boomers, who, unlike their real children, will “talk” to them and admit that their outdated and conservative politics are not only correct, but fun and exciting. All of it, the podcasts, blogs, and exposes are standard right wing politics wrapped in the language of self-victimization.
And that leads me to my final example, one all the aforementioned people and political projects like to pretend is the ultimate underdog: Israel.
Zionist propaganda, from both Israel and its American apologists, relies on the myth that Israel is a perpetually threatened state at constant risk for annihilation. Israeli politicians claim they’re “surrounded on all sides by enemies,” which sounds a lot like the kid in my high school who claimed “everyone is a hater” — He thought he was a victim, but really was just an asshole so he didn’t get invited to parties.
As a client state of the most powerful military on the planet, Israel has never once been the underdog. It has state-of-the-art fighter jets, assassinates civilians in foreign countries, is currently carrying out a genocide, and has a de facto U.N. veto through the United States. And yet, Zionism and its apologists will continuously claim that the imperialist nation is just a tiny, vulnerable baby “defending itself,” despite the literal bodies of evidence proving the contrary.
While one could chalk the Tom Brady Effect used be the aforementioned Substackers and politicians up to a minute tactic, the fact that this is the PR approach of a nation-state offers insight into the true nature of this phenomenon. While not everyone I mentioned above is contributing to the modern fascist project, the Tom Brady Effect is a strategy drawn from the reactionary playbook. In his renowned essay Ur-Fascism, anti-fascist scholar Umberto Eco outlined the fourteen characteristics that comprise fascism.1 Point #7 is "obsession with a plot,” which Eco explains as a need to make the followers “besieged.” In each of the above examples, those who are very-much in the political establishment are constructing a plot for their audiences to feel like they are on the outside and under attack — even when they’re not.
“To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.” — Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism.
Donald Trump claims seething immigrant hordes are literally besieging America (I’m sure that migrant caravan will arrive any day now), Israel pretends it’s forced to bomb Gazan hospitals to “defend itself,” Taibbi has built an alternative reality in which Lin Manuel has more power than Samuel Alito so that right wingers can feel like they’re “fighting the man,” and Yglesias and Smith pretend neoliberal economics are a revolutionary project, as opposed to the reason we’re in this mess in the Trump first place. While the details vary greatly between centrist writers and fascist nation states, it’s no coincidence that each of these “plots” are easily disprovable as fake. They are delusions, conjured by those who seek to gain influence while having nothing to say. And that’s the truth of it. If someone is selling you a grand narrative about how their ideas are “forbidden” when in reality they’re widely accepted in the halls of power, it’s because they have nothing of substance to offer. Their politics can’t raise your wages, end foreign wars, or help you make sense of the world. So, they distract you with a fantastic story about how they — and by extension, you — are the righteous crusader.
Some people employ this strategy because they seek power. Others, want subscribers and money. And I’ll bet some of them don’t even realize what they’re doing and think they actually are Luke Skywalker. But the central line through them all is ego. By positioning themselves as underdogs while either having or being close to actual power, they get the best of both worlds — every win, which the American state hands them frequently, feels like a miracle fit for a Hollywood movie. But in reality, even if they do escape their self victimization and get yet-another chance to implement their politics, nothing will change. Neoliberalism can’t help American workers, Donald Trump sure is shit isn’t going to “drain the swamp,” and the only actual victim of speech suppression is pro-Palestine voices, not right wing grandpas who think it’s against the 1st Amendment to not like their Facebook post. So, when you have nothing exciting to offer except the status quo, it’s beneficial to pretend you’re an underdog, blissfully ignoring the fact you have six Super Bowl rings and/or control of the United States government.
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In Solidarity — Joe
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
Every sentence is better than the last. This was such a good read. I snorted at shadow boxing leftists