How the American Hard Right 'BrownGirls' the rest of America

I just read this story in Mother Jones on Apple News.

It’s about the two fearless fighters of the American Hard Right, both disgraced, demagogic, dishonest: Steve Bannon and Milo Yannopoulis. If you have been alive, at least in America, in the last ten years, you might know them by name.

By their bad name.

The story is about how How Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and other militant right-wing activists are hellbent on transforming the Catholic Church—starting with the pope.

It details Bannon and Yiannopouols’ sickening partisan machinations to inflame the already inflamed hard righters in the American Catholic church who believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket because the American President is pro-choice and has not yet been assassinated for it by the moderate Pope Francis’ Vatican. Leading, as always, to what the Hard Right does best: calling for heads.

Pictures tell a thousand words. Every day must be a bad hair day for these fellows.

Of course, our ex-president, the Hair Force Man Who Will Make America Great Again,

has supported their cause out of unerring self-interestedness.

As the Mother Jones piece says: “Conservative and right-wing Catholics are highly represented in the US judiciary, and dominate the Supreme Court—seven current Supreme Court justices, including all three of Trump’s SCOTUS picks, were raised Catholic, and six of those seven represent right-wing Catholic ideology.”

Kill, Kill, Kill, is the message of the constituency that shores up these highest judges of our nation. So what’s new.

But my concern today isn’t really with POLITICS. Rather, it is with RHETORIC. About this fracturing of the Catholic Church of America, Church historian Dr. Massimo Faggioli at Villanova University said to Mother Jones, “There are bishops whose language is more diplomatic, but they express the same contempt for Francis, the same fascination for the neo-nationalist project…intellectuals blowing on this fire because they think the liberal, cosmopolitan international order must be burned down. That’s their very dangerous plan…and sadly, liberal Catholics have no plan.”

It’s that last sentence about liberal Catholics having NO PLAN that catches my ear as suggesting hapless BrownGirl status for Democrats in America.

• Alway damsels in distress, poor natives colonized by an unscrupulous and violent West.

• Always in need of rescue by a hardline position, a competing plan, incendiary, or at least rabble-rousing rhetoric, to match and surpass the Hard Right of Trump, Bannon, Mitch McConnell…you name it.

My objection to that line of peroration is as follows: Why should the liberals be charged with articulating yet another PLAN, when they already have one?

That PLAN is what stands at the heart of at least the theory of modern democracy (though not of ancient Greece, mind you, where apparently the ‘demos’ was basically a disunited mob of commoners, the disruptors, one might say of ‘real’ politics.) It’s that plan called participatory democracy, which means equal rights, equal opportunities, right-to-vote, a legitimately elected executive, and reasoned debate to build consensus.

When that PLAN is already there, why put pressure on the liberals to become adept at matching the Right in its lunatic rhetoric? Are Americans such cretins that we cannot see that that IS a PLAN, already in place, sometimes working well, and that Liberals are not required to come up with a better message about a better plan, because that is, all things considered, still our best PLAN?

I often ask the same question when I hear the media also often lamenting that the democrats have no spine, no guts, no push-back against the wily, sociopathic Republican party power-brokerage. I want to ask the talking heads on MSNBC and CNN if they could please stop saying that, thereby demoralizing or agitating an already confused public, and say instead that the PLAN the Liberals, the Democrats have is already the best one. I do want the Democrats to insist on rebuttals and rebuffs, public and resonant, against the garbage the Kevins, Mitches and Teds spew out. But not to apologize for their PLAN, their ‘message.’

Because that’s being BrownGirled. That’s like being told as a person of color that it’s your disunity, your disorganization, your inarticulacy (in English, French, German, or whatever) that explains your plight, your crisis.

That’s like being asked in a class by a student why they have to read so much about women, BIPOC, and colonized people, because that’s making that student feel excluded, marginalized, etc.

That’s like cause for the rational rebuttal that we’ve already had enough of the history of the (male, white) West, and that this plan to teach alternative histories is the better PLAN. Which this BrownGirl has indeed delivered as that teacher in that classroom.

Such demands, provocative and demagogic, must not be entertained. In the end, the government and politics that sustain free speech, debate, and the right to protest non-violently must be held up again and again as the better PLAN. The demands on ‘Presumed Incompetent” people of color to prove themselves, again and again, to retake the ‘good enough’ test again and again, and to explain why Women’s and Black history must be taught in the classroom, again and again, are hideous and transparent rhetorical weapons. These demands are BrownGirling techniques.

They’ve got to be denied, ignored, and mocked. They are to be tossed out like the garbage they are. With the other garbage.

Nandini Bhattacharya