UNELECTED, UNAPPOINTED SUPERVILLAINS WHO KNOW HOW TO USE POWER

I'm an old guy, and one of my political frustrations throughout my life is that there have been so many right-wingers who seem to have massive amounts of power even though no one elected them to any office and no elected official ever appointed them -- it seems that they just hang out a shingle and then the next thing you know, they're remaking the country.

In my youth it was Phyllis Schlafly, who stopped the Equal Rights Amendment in its tracks. Later it was Grover Norquist, who swore nearly every Republican member of Congress and congressional candidate to a no-tax-increase pledge, and then Leonard Leo, who remade the federal bench in his own right-wing Opus Dei image. And now we have Chris Rufo, who gave us the "critical race theory" moral panic, has been a leading demonizer of trans people, and now has led the successful movement to depose Harvard president Claudine Gay.

I know that Leo gets right-wing billionaire cash not because the billionaires necessarily care about restricting abortion or expanding gun rights, but because the judges Leo picks are invariably pro-plutocrat. I know that Rufo gets right-wing billionaire cash because getting conservative and right-centrist voters worked up about cultural issues is a surefire way of getting them to vote for Republicans, who will then reliably vote to cut the taxes and regulations the billionaires hate. I get it, but it's frustrating. Conservative supervillains don't just stir the pot -- they actually change Americans' lives. Right-wingers use the power they have, even when they don't hold the White House or have congressional majorities. Democrats are much more timid about using power, even when they've won it from voters.

Who on the left might be considered an unelected, unappointed, highly successful change agent/gadfly/scourge of the opposition? George Soros? The right demonizes him. But when you do this from the right, the "liberal media" will embrace you, not demonize you.

In 2021, Rufo tweeted:

As Jamison Foser notes, the Times responded not by saying, "How dare you try to manipulate us this way!," but by giving Rufo op-ed space:

Foser wrote this in July:

The most perverse thing about all of this is that describing himself as a propagandist and announcing his intent to deceive didn’t hurt Christopher Rufo at all — to the contrary, news companies like The New York Times take him more seriously because of it. Describing himself as untrustworthy was a marketing ploy, and it worked on his intended audience: The nation’s leading journalists and editors. If Rufo was just some run-of-the-mill right-winger, the Times (probably) wouldn’t have published him. But because Rufo announced a grand strategy behind his lies, the Times views him as an important voice and hands him the world’s most valuable op-ed space.

Now Rufo always announces his intent to manipulate in advance, like a comic-book villain whose signature is leaving a characteristic note that declares his intentions before he commits a shocking crime, as a way to demonstrate that the authorities can't stop him. In the case of Claudine Gay, Rufo tweeted:

The response at the Times? Wall-to-wall coverage of the Gay story.

Foser writes:

Christopher Rufo and [Representative] Elise Stefanik understand that the New York Times wants to behave this way. They want to inflate academic jaywalking by Harvard’s president into a massive scandal worthy of weeks of wall-to-wall coverage. But it obviously isn’t, and so they need an excuse, both for their readers and for themselves. Rufo and Stefanik provide that excuse: Influential conservatives are talking about this, so we have to cover it. And that’s where Rufo’s public announcements of his dishonest propaganda campaigns helps. If he kept his mouth shut about his plans, nobody would ever have heard of him. By announcing himself a successful propagandist, he gave the news media an excuse to make him one.

I don't think this is exactly right -- I think the Times is obsessed with both the Ivy League and the (futile) hope of demonstrating to right-wing readers that it's not liberal, so the paper might have tried to sink Gay on its own if its reporters had been the first to find the passages in her writings that she's been charged with plagiarizing. But getting right-wing buy-in made the pursuit of Gay seem so much more necessary to the Times. (Also, the righties did all the digging, then spoon-fed the results to the non-conservative media, which made the work of the Times much easier.)

The Times accepts right-wing framing on many issues -- trans youth, COVID school closures, the notion that being opposed to Israel's treatment of Gaza is anti-Semitic by definition. But even when it doesn't embrace right-wing frames, it takes them -- and their purveyors -- very, very seriously, as long as the purveyors act like semi-serious people and not like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Rufo is seen as serious, as are Leo and Norquist, so they and their ideas are treated respectfully -- and are often treated as correct. By contrast, the right-wing media demonizes liberals and leftists precisely when they seem serious, effective, and potentially dangerous to the right. That's one big reason our politics has a supervillain gap.