The past few weeks of conservative politics have been jam-packed with demonstrations of fear and cowardice, poking holes in their facade as tough guys (and gals).
For instance, senior White House aide Stephen Miller took a break from creating policies meant to hurt immigrants and appeared in the Oval Office, alongside President Donald Trump, to inform the world how afraid he is of parks in Washington, D.C.
Praising Trump’s installation of federal law enforcement and National Guard members in the nation’s capital, Miller explained“For the first time in their lives, they can use the parks, they can walk on the streets. You have people who can walk freely at night without having to worry about being robbed or mugged. They are wearing their watches again.”
Every year, millions of people visit Washington and have no problem with the parks. Little babies are fine there. People wear watches.
Trump’s deployment to the city has been a serious affront to locals, particularly the city’s large Black population, but it has also exposed a falsehood at the center of Republican fearmongering. The National Guard on the ground is largely focusing on trash pickup and responding to traffic accidents, despite the administration’s apocalyptic rhetoric.
The most high-profile crime the deployment has handled so far is a sandwich thrower they couldn’t convince a grand jury to indict.
The right has a lot invested in their image as the strongest people in American politics. From MAGA red hats to George W. Bush fanboys wearing cowboy hats, the conservative movement has embraced “macho” as its aesthetic for decades.
But more often than not they have been utter cowards, displaying weakness on a host of issues facing Americans.
For instance, when the AIDS/HIV crisis began to haunt the country in the 1980s, then-President Ronald Reagan did not confront the problem directly. Because the disease first surfaced in the LGBTQ+ community, and that was where a majority of the deaths initially occurred, Reagan ignored the problem.
Behind closed doors, his team laughed at the tragedy. In public, he would barely say a wordrefusing to have the courage to exhibit basic compassion and humanity for his fellow Americans because they were gay.
The religious right also embraced homophobia, attacking LGBTQ+ people for the purported sin of their existence. One of the most prominent bigots in the movement was Rev. Jerry Falwell, a key ally of the Republican Party who whipped up a homophobic frenzy while pushing to deliver votes for the party.
But Falwell was a coward. In 1991, after being confronted by counterprotesters, Falwell whined to the Los Angeles Times“Everyone in the hotel was frightened. I think they intended to do me harm.” A decade later, Falwell (and fellow coward Pat Robertson) was busy blaming the 9/11 terrorist attacks on gay people, abortion, and feminists.
Former President George W. Bush, on whose watch 9/11 happened, loved to embrace the tough-guy aesthetic. He posed in a cowboy hat on his ranch and described al-Qaida terrorists as “evildoers.” But same-sex marriage terrified him.
Bush was so afraid of people entering into matrimony that, in 2004, he backed a constitutional amendment that would restrict marriage rights to opposite-sex couples. He described it as a “serious matter of national concern.” In right-wing media, Bill O’Reilly, then a host on Fox News, issued serious warnings to his viewers that legal same sex marriage would lead to weddings with dolphins, goats, turtles, and other animals.
Years later, when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, the only “serious matter” has been the size and scope of wedding cakes.
Bush was also at the forefront of sharing his fear with the public. His administration pushed a color-coded terrorism alert system. It was a manifestation of cowardice that permeated his administration, leaving the capture of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden to his successor, President Barack Obama.
Bush’s signature policy—the disastrous invasion of Iraq—was about fear of al-Qaida and their nonexistent alliance with the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.
The conservative National Rifle Association echoed Bush-style cowardice more than a decade later, telling their supporters in 2014 that they needed guns because militants from the Islamic State group, commonly known as ISIS, could be outside their homes.
Trump’s cowardice has been on display for his entire career as a political figure. He launched his first presidential campaign by talking about his fear of Mexican immigrants, citing the absurd need for a border wall to protect against them. There seems to be nothing Trump is more afraid of than brown-skinned people, especially if that person is former President Barack Obama. Trump still invokes Obama as a boogeyman more than eight years after the Democrat left office.
More recently, attempting to bolster Trump’s actions against D.C., Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee claimed he sleeps in his office because he’s so afraid of Washington residents. Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin bragged that he breaks local laws and doesn’t drive with a seatbelt in D.C., because he’s supposedly living in constant terror of being carjacked.
Conservatism is about tearing things down, not building them up. The movement would rather spread wild fantasies about American cities as urban hellscapes instead of admitting that cities have been at the forefront of American innovation on several community-oriented issues.
The right could look at these policies and leaders and come up with ways to implement them in rural and suburban areas, but they’re too afraid to admit that their ideas simply haven’t worked. This is a big reason why they embrace fear and cowardice.
Demonizing the other has always been the easy way out. Denigrating human beings, using the power of the state to shut down outside ideas and voices—that’s what cowards do.
And that’s what the conservative movement, from Trump at the top and all the way down, does every day of its existence.
