Culture Warriors

There's some high quality shade in this piece about Trump wanting Gone With The Wind to be lauded over Parasite.

Look, GWTW is an important part of film history, but it is itself bad history. The fact that Trump focused on a blatantly racist whitewashing of American history should surprise exactly no one.  Frankly, I'd be surprised if he sat through the whole four hour movie. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the point that the Right and Left in America each see themselves as powerless. The Left obviously looks at a country that it routinely governed by a minority party that wins fewer votes in national elections, yet leverages their special geographic advantages into controlling the levels of power. The Right looks at a country that is awash in the cultural influences of it coastal media and business centers.  The Left is losing at politics, whereas the Right is losing at culture.

Trump's throwback to Gone With The Fucking Wind is a great example of this ingrained cultural resentment from crotchety old white people who don't like the media that overwhelms Red America.  They don't like seeing married gay people in advertisements or rap music or atheistic depictions of life.  Political power is their only remaining lever, and so they have decided that basic democratic ideals are secondary to holding on against an onslaught of moral relativism that permeates the media landscape. Trump's White House is their Alamo against hordes of Latin Hip-Hop artists or lesbians kissing in a jewelry ad or the mosque that opened in the nearby city.

Conservatives are deeply afraid that they have lost, but Trump is - if nothing else - combative. That explains, as much as anything, why they simply will not abandon him.