Ryan Walters is the Future of Right Wing Politics and Governance

Ryan Walters, the head of public education in Oklahoma, is showing us the future of right wing politics and governance. This is what happens when fascists gather power. There are a lot of otherwise well meaning people who just write this stuff off and say, “Well, that’s what happens when you live in a red state.” It’s not an intentional meanness, it’s as much exhaustion and a sense of powerlessness, as it is the blindness of privilege. There are two primary problems with that sentiment though.

First is that for many people, living in red states is living in occupied territory. They don’t have the means to leave, and the conditions in those states undermine opportunities to develop the means. Many of them are considered expendable, politically and socially, no matter where they are, despite what the rest of us good leftists like to think of ourselves. Fascists are being explicit about what has always been implicit. Most of us have been raised and taught the norms and traditions which make this possible, and so much of what we see as normal, even as we try to break free and to see a better world, enables these classes of expendable people.

Second is that “moderates” will attempt to start “reaching” the base of people who support the likes of Ryan Walters, as a function of what’s touted as a kind of “real politik.” Eric Adams is the Democratic mayor of NYC, and that guy isn’t flirting with fascist ideas, he’s fully embracing a good many of them. It’s part of the way fascism comes to power over time. They break what does work, use every gain in power to blame some marginalized/targeted population, and then use the brokenness and previously existing failures of those same systems as points of manipulation to gain more support. Moderates play the same role, every time. Germany, Spain, Italy, Chile. They enable the mainstreaming of fascist ideas and ideology out of “practicality.” It’s always “strategically sound” at the moment. By doing so, they help give legitimacy to it, and help expand the base of people who start finding fascist ideas acceptable. They don’t realize what they’ve done, until it’s too late. Realistically, many of those people in power who came to have it through their appeal to moderation, are more interested in maintaining their power and status, even if fascism wins. They just keep appealing to that same idea in the people who support them, even as fascists take control.

It’s no coincidence that as the Satanic Panic was rolling through the country, it was Tipper Gore who was at the center of creating the PMRC. It wasn’t a coincidence that her husband sat on the committee whose hearings were essentially the result of the “moderate” left getting in on, and getting their share of the spoils, of what had become a politically useful moral panic started by Christian nationalists. It was no coincidence that Al Gore then went on to be Bill Clinton’s running mate and Vice President. Clinton just branded this instinct as “New Democrats,” following a “third way.”

Let’s be clear, I’m not calling Al Gore, Tipper Gore or Bill Clinton fascists. I’m calling them opportunists, whose ambitions and existing biases made them incapable of understanding what they were helping to empower.

During the Satanic Panic, it was a familiar refrain. “I may not agree with my colleagues across the aisle about everything, but I certainly think they’re questions about what is being done to our children (note, this could mean both the allegations of Satanic cults abusing children en masse or whatever the chosen hysteria about pop culture was, be it “Satanic imagery,” backmasking, sexuality in media etc.). The moral panic creates the sense of concern through disinformation and false allegations. The moderate further legitimizes it through opportunism, ambition and the blindness of privilege.

We see the very same mechanics at work right now, as it concerns the hysteria over the existence of trans people, LGBTQ+media and accurate representation of Black history in schools, etc. This is the right building on what has always been there. They have successfully prevented a genuine education, and free and easy access, to the history of the kinds of systematized bigotry and oppression that white Christian culture has profited and thrived on throughout US history. They’re not just attempting to prevent it this access and recognition from progressing, they’re trying to roll back what has come from the free access to those histories, and the responses to it from within those populations who’ve been targeted by it. The point is to preserve this blindness, this socially, culturally and politically constructed ignorance, for a few more generations. This is the same reason they focused on preventing research into gun violence from even being funded for so long. Today’s information is the garden for tomorrow’s imagination.

It is about oppressing the people who are targeted, because the culture of this country has been built and shaped through it, a culture they wish to not only preserve, but whose supremacy and hegemony they wish to see made total and complete, without coexistence, much less competition. It’s also about preserving the methods that have worked so successfully for them.

It’s about preserving the avenues for this kind of manipulation, and making sure there are future generations who through no genuine disdain or deep seated hatred, believe they are being responsible by “taking seriously the concerns of people who I may not otherwise agree with.” They are using people they have previously erased from public life, or whom they have only allowed into public life that will present an example overall in service of the rest of their constrictive ideals, to create discomfort about those very people. It is exploiting the fact that people do want to be compassionate, decent and reasonable with others they may not share every identifier with. It’s about preserving their ability to weaponize what would otherwise be our good will.

The discomfort with the existence of trans people, and with the fullness of what living in the US as queer or Black or otherwise “outside” of white Christian culture, how it is to live with targeted oppression, is due to that erasure. We get uncomfortable with the thought of trans people being an equal part of American life, because they never have been. The same is true for the wide variety of a Black political though, queer resistance and existence. That discomfort is what they weaponize, through disinformation, and then the moderate helps to give it legitimacy by attempting to gain favor by treating it as legitimate. Trans people have always been here. Black political thought and realistic portrayal of racism has always been here. Queer resistance, thought and media has always been here. What it has been, until the advent of social media and the ability for us to communicate across the boundaries which have served this white Christian culture, has been pushed into the margins and the darkness. You previously had to purposely seek it out to find it. Now, it’s just there, in the open, amidst all of this other information, and the fact that people who’d previously not had access to it are recognizing it, and the people who are preserving and advancing those histories, as both legitimate and equally human, is a threat to those systems of exclusion.

A major part of why we are seeing this ascendance of fascism now is that for roughly two decades, the entire population was able to communicate across those lines, and what has been happening is the steady recognition of shared humanity, as well as political and cultural relevance. It is the recognition that these differences may be real, they may exist, but they have no moral weight, no moral value. There has been a growing recognition they are as much a contribution to, and an inherent part of our humanity, as those things which are universally the same about and within us, and that the resistance and political though that’s grown out of that combination of difference and sameness has both relevance and utility.

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging there may be genuine reasons fascists are able to make in roads and gain support through their willingness to raise the fact that there are systemic failures. It’s not untrue that things like economic insecurity contribute to their ability to gain support. It is wholly naive, and/or the product of cynical opportunism, to start to believe they do this out of good will, good faith “discussion” or a desire to address those failures effectively and for the betterment of the people those failures harm.

It is also about preventing the history of resistance from being recognized. When we talk about “the white working class and poor,” and I’d now add the middle class to this, what is most important to fascists, and for the preservation of the systems of exclusion which have been part of the foundation of US culture and society, is that these histories of resistance and political thought never be recognized or seen. If too many white people come to recognize their shared humanity with those who’ve engaged in that resistance, who’ve built that history of political thought, those systems of exclusion are doomed. If too many of the people who have been excluded, including the white poor, working class, and increasingly now, the middle class, come to see the utility of those histories of resistance and political thought, the methods of manipulation which have existed through the history of the nation will be rendered useless.

This is what they mean when they speak of “woke.” It’s anything which may directly or tangentially encourage these connections and realizations. It is about continuing the history of power to oppress for profit and status, but it is also about continuing to control the political imagination of the people who it claims to benefit.

An ideology based on selling mythological disinformation about a storied past whose real history made opporession necessary to achieve it, is most threatened by an imagination about the future which is broad in scope and depth, and full of possibilities. The imagination which recognizes the parameters and barriers as neither natural nor permanent is what they most fear.

Those of us experiencing different varieties of privilege will be best serve in the fight against fascism, if we learn the histories of resistance and political thought of people who don’t share our privilege. It’s fascism and white Christian culture share a deep sense of paternalism. They claim to be protecting us from these truths, from this history. What they are really doing is protecting themselves and their avenues to gaining more power, so people like Ryan Walters are given both in more state governments, in an ever growing portion of the federal government, and in our culture and society as a whole.