This post was submitted by Andrew Fogle

Dear The American Right,

I know you’re busy these days, and I don’t expect a response anytime soon. The past couple weeks have been tough, I know: having the dirty underbelly of one’s K street machinations exposed to the world isn’t pleasant, I imagine, and it must be doubly frustrating to see the working class you thought you’d killed off making anti-authoritarian waves from the Middle East to the American Midwest. I sympathize. Trust me when I tell you that the 21^st century hasn’t been easy on any of us: what with the End of History and all my side, too, has had to work hard to get anyone fired up about anything bigger than a badly-produced Lady Gaga song.

I want to be clear out of the gate: I still hate you, The American Right. Passionately, intimately, and with a force that gives me meaning, I hate you. During the weeks I can’t pay my gas bill thanks to your systematic eradication of decent middle-class jobs, the thought of your lackeys toiling on collectivized farms somewhere in the Dakotas is the only thing that keeps me warm. Rest assured I’m not going to abandon you, T.A.R., so there’s no need to panic – but there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.

In the time I’ve known you, I’ve learned to expect a lot. Indignation is a weekly occurrence. Shock comes less often these days than it used to, but there’s enough to get me by. The anger is plentiful and regular, thank you. But there’s a feeling that’s caught me off guard of late, one that I thought would be much more satisfying than it turned out to be: I’m disappointed in you, The American Right, and I think you should know why.

You just don’t stack up, T.A.R. Against the rich and varied spectrum of modern political history, you’re as bland, commonplace, and uninspiring as a Newt Gingrich blowjob. I’m used to you making me feel disgusted as a moral creature interested in justice, old friend; I never thought you’d make me feel embarrassed as an American interested in greatness.

Take the religion thing. Candidly, The American Right… Jesus was kind of a pussy. Of all the deities you could pick to fire the imaginations of American conscripts as they heave themselves over trenches in some third-world hellhole, a nebbish Jewish hipster seems a poor choice (although Judd Apatow has made me want to kill myself often enough, it’s never been in a guns-blazing spasm of martial valor.) Odin or Mars or Indra – you know, the kinds of gods who smote people instead of hanging out with slacker friends, throwing occasional public hissy fits, and committing suicide-by-cop when their bipolar cycles hit a low– I might be able to sing battle hymns to those guys. Heck, even Moses managed to off that Egyptian slave driver without magic or anything, and the IDF does pretty well for itself.

And while we’re on the topic: what’s with this “Kingdom of God” crap, really? You’ve got a perfectly good hyperpowered nation-state with the most powerful military known to history up for grabs, and you always seem to waver between gung-ho imperialism and this gutless “in this world but not of it,” “render unto Caesar” hippie-speak. To paraphrase your bearded, anorexic, peacenik mascot: grow ye a pair and take ye a fucking side, please. I know courage isn’t the cardinal virtue of a political coalition that cowers in terror at the mere thought of grown men kissing, but frankly, you might earn yourself some credibility if you could decide whether or not you’re pledging your blood honor to the Bible or the American Constitution. No one likes a fence-sitter, especially the kind that is heretical and treasonous at the same time.

There’s no way to bring up this next point delicately, T.A.R, as close as it is to your heart:  you really don’t get this war stuff, either. Sending poor kids off to die protecting reserves of oil and lithium isn’t war; it’s an especially bloody and well-paying form of investment banking. Time was when a competent demagogue could ask a hall full of ordinary people straight-out if they wanted Total War, and if he knew how to play his cards those people would light up like a herd of undersexed middle-school Baptist girls at a Justin Bieber concert.  Not because they were working to “spread democracy” or “improve national security” or line the pockets of banksters, but because they really wanted war, because they really were bloodthirsty animals willing to pillage entire continents in the name of national greatness. When’s the last time you ever thought in those terms, T.A.R.?  War not as an extension of diplomacy or commerce, but as a glorious fucking blood-cult meant to baptize a chosen people’s world-historical calling? The best you can do is drag a few GIs to a Christian Rock concert. That’s what you call militarism, The American Right? Do you have any idea what the Syrians are doing? They are on parade grounds, in front of their generals, biting the heads off of fucking snakes and eating fucking puppies (seriously click this link).

I can put up with a lot in the way of political error if a person manages to have character in spite of it, or because of it. Again you fail me, T.A.R. Have you ever heard of a guy named Gabriel D’Annunzio? He was an Italian fascist who, after writing some bang-up poetry and a few good plays, decided to steal a handful of Italian warships and set up his own country in Croatia. His own country. That takes moxie, and balls. And what do you have, T.A.R.? Porcine careerist hacks like Glenn Beck who in a given week are much more likely to annex four double cheeseburgers than a part of the Balkans? It shames me as an American that the best you can do by way of a New Man archetype is the ill-tempered Tea Party petite-bourgeois demographic median who passes out every night from the combined strain of sexual frustration, alcoholism, and the deadening effect of Ayn Rand’s prose. At least give me a human ideal I could plausibly want to have forced post-conquest sex with.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s been holding you back, T.A.R. Maybe right-wing politics is something that, like car design, the Germans and Italians will always beat us at. I’d like to think the country that won two world wars and defined the 20^th century could do better, but maybe not.  At any rate you can’t be sure until you try, you know?

And if it’s really too late, if this country is really doomed – at least give us a run for our money, like any dictatorial crisis regime worth its salt. Don’t let us peter out stupidly and anticlimactically like the Russians, to be lorded over by a bunch of goofy douchebag kleptocrats while the beautiful panoply of roboticized death-machinery we’ve built for ourselves rusts in bases, harbors, and silos across the globe. Let me die in an infantry charge on the Canadian tundra, or a tank assault on Mexico City, or an F-16 dogfight over North Korea, but please god not in some shitty rationed post-imperial hospice state. I can deal with an empty stomach every few days in the false scarcity economy wrought by your neoliberalism, T.A.R., but god damn if you expect me to put up with slow spiritual starvation.

It’s not a happy time to be an American. Everything from the size of our average incomes to our health to our annual education spending and pretty much every other indicator of national greatness is in decline because of things you’ve done. A great nation deserves a great Right Wing, and if you’re not willing to deliver, then – in the words of the Richard Nixon who did a lot to ruin your prestige – it’s time to shit or get off the pot. There are plenty of us willing to pick up the slack. Until then I can’t help but think you’re just in it for the money.

Warmly,

AGF

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