{"id":44744,"date":"2018-09-04T03:00:39","date_gmt":"2018-09-04T07:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44744"},"modified":"2018-09-03T16:41:39","modified_gmt":"2018-09-03T20:41:39","slug":"so-now-we-know-what-the-resistance-really-is-its-the-establishment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/09\/04\/so-now-we-know-what-the-resistance-really-is-its-the-establishment\/","title":{"rendered":"“So now we know what \u2018the resistance\u2019 really is. It\u2019s the establishment”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill<\/a> on the funeral of “maverick” Republican senator John McCain:<\/p>\n

So now we know what \u2018the resistance\u2019 really is. It\u2019s the establishment. It\u2019s the old political order. It\u2019s that late 20th-century political set, those out-of-touch managerial elites, who still cannot believe the electorate rejected them. That is the take-home message of the bizarre political spectacle that was the burial of John McCain, where this neocon in life has been transformed into a resistance leader in death: that while the anti-Trump movement might doll itself up as rebellious, and even borrow its name from those who resisted fascism in Europe in the mid 20th-century, in truth it is primarily about restoring the apparently cool, expert-driven rule of the old elites over what is viewed as the chaos of the populist Trump \/ Brexit era.<\/p>\n

The response to McCain\u2019s death has bordered on the surreal. The strangest aspect has been the self-conscious rebranding of McCain as a searing rebel. In death, this key establishment figure in the Republican Party, this military officer, senator, presidential candidate and enthusiastic backer of the exercise of US military power overseas, has been reimagined as a plucky battler for all that is good against a wicked, overbearing political machine. \u2018John McCain\u2019s funeral was the biggest resistance meeting yet\u2019, said a headline in the New Yorker<\/em>, alongside a photo of George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and soldiers from the US Army, the most powerful military machine on Earth. This is \u2018the resistance\u2019 now: the former holders of extraordinary power, the invaders of foreign nations, the Washington establishment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

The New Yorker<\/em> piece, like so much of the McCain commentary, praises to the heavens the anti-Trump theme of McCain\u2019s funeral. McCain famously said Trump couldn\u2019t attend his funeral. And that in itself was enough to win him the posthumous love of a liberal commentariat that now views everything through the binary moral framework of pro-Trump (evil, ill-informed, occasionally fascistic) and anti-Trump (decent, moral, on a par with the warriors against Nazism). Even better, though, was the fact that orators at the funeral, including McCain\u2019s daughter Meghan and both Bush and Obama, used the church service to slam Trumpism, without explicitly mentioning it, and in the process to big-up what came before Trumpism, which of course was their rule, their politics, their establishment. The Washington political and media set might seem bitterly bipartisan, said the New Yorker<\/em> writer, but it is also \u2018more united\u2019 in one important sense \u2013 \u2018in its hatred of Donald Trump\u2019.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The religious allusions, the talk of vengeance against Trump, the misremembering of McCain\u2019s life so that it becomes a moral exemplar against the alleged crimes of Trumpism, exposes the infantile moralism of the so-called resistance. Albert Burneko, assessing some of the madder McCain commentary, says there is now a \u2018condition\u2019 that he calls \u2018Resistance Brain\u2019, where people display an \u2018urge to grab and cling on to anything that seems, even a little bit, like it might be the thing that Finally Defeats Donald Trump\u2019. Even if the thing they\u2019re grabbing on to is actually a bad thing. Like a seemingly endless FBI investigation into the elected presidency. Or George W Bush, whose moral rehabilitation on the back of Anti-Trumpism has been extraordinary. Or neoconservatism: this was the scourge of liberal activists a decade ago, yet now its architects are praised because they subscribe to the religion of Anti-Trumpism. Being against Trump washes away all sins.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill on the funeral of “maverick” Republican senator John McCain: So now we know what \u2018the resistance\u2019 really is. It\u2019s the establishment. It\u2019s the old political order. It\u2019s that late 20th-century political set, those out-of-touch managerial elites, who still cannot believe the electorate rejected them. That is the take-home message of the bizarre political […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,28,53,13],"tags":[509,1037,548,293],"class_list":["post-44744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-civilservice","tag-donaldtrump","tag-johnmccain","tag-obituary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bDG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44744"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44752,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44744\/revisions\/44752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}