Me and My #FilthyMouthedWife

Chrissy Teigen

When I awoke to find #filthymouthedwife trending on Twitter yesterday, it initially had the feel of lonesome inevitability. Ho-hum, the President found another recipient for his legendary trademark vitriol, another private citizen somehow responsible for public democracy's continued breakdown. And a woman, which surprised nobody; he couldn't even say Chrissy Teigen's name. We can consult the Washington speechwriter's mandatory beat sheet to see how this is destined to end.

The longer I marinated in this stew, however, the less satisfying I found this explanation. While this track is familiar during this administration, it's also unique to this President. The dumpster fire happening in the Executive Branch represents a break in history from vocal conservatives of generations past. Despite all my dislike of our Ronald W. Nixon heritage, America's historic right wing has not descended to the depths currently plumbed. Why the change?

CUNY political science professor Corey Robin, who studies American and international conservatism, identifies a common thread in right wing thinking. Despite their long association with nostalgia and lost glory, conservatives, at least since Edmund Burke, have frequently strayed from loving the ancien régìme. We might want to bring back King and Country, or make America great again, but we don't actually want to revive the past.

Instead, in Robin's figuration, conservatives believe society has a natural hierarchy. This structure is both inevitable and just, because it sorts people into standings of wealth and authority which correspond to their innate merits: the weak, lazy, and stupid get flushed to the bottom, where they work in accordance with their ethics and ability. The meritorious rise to the top, where they plan, coordinate, and govern the lesser. Because they deserve to.

Thus conservatism, at least the historically principled conservatism my generation grew up watching, doesn't seek to conserve history like a fly in amber. Instead, it desires to conserve this natural hierarchy. History has changed how we construct this hierarchy, so that, for example, it's no longer acceptable to suppress Black Americans from higher achievement simply because they're Black. But the poor, weak, and dependent still deserve their lower place in the scale.

This hierarchy, however, has always been oppositional, at least in living memory. The epoch bookended by the World Wars defined Western small-d democracy contra the dying European aristocracy. Once autocrats and fascists were defeated (temporarily), the enemy became Soviet hegemony. The end of the Cold War left the hierarchy flailing for a while before the Global War on Terror gave everyone a concrete enemy to rally against, under the umbrella of institutional authority.

Now, even that enemy has receded to historic insignificance. Without an enemy to unite against, the hierarchy stands exposed as flimsy, artificial, and transitory. For the first time since the Great Depression, America's pharaohs face the possibility of meaningful numbers unwilling to accept the pyramid. In order to keep the largest number invested in the system, the aristocracy needs an enemy to keep everyone unified.

And they just don't have one.

This President's id-fueled rages have attempted to create an enemy. Whether outside adversaries like the EU and China, or internal ones like athletes who kneel and women who cuss, this administration keeps looking for that magic antagonist whose malignant machinations appear so awful that the anonymous masses will unify against them. Unlike other conservative administrations of the last century, this one keeps fumbling.

The #filthymouthedwife moment reflects multiple opportunities to distinguish an enemy: a woman, a person of color, a wife who doesn’t submit to her husband. Because it still offends many men to discover that women cuss, fart, and talk about sex. It’s also a callback to the arguments against second-wave feminism, a movement that struck during the President’s childhood and, probably, helped make America less great.

Except that, among everything else this President has said just this week, it becomes another piece of noise. Admittedly, I’ve amplified this noise by even talking about it, because I believe it makes a good indicator about his need for a clearly identifiable enemy, and his inability to find one. It mostly serves to unify those who already dislike him for a day, before it retreats under onslaught of his consistently awful policies.

The clutter of distractions that is news today indicates both sides largely lack direction. But the visible meltdown at the apex of American conservatism indicates they lack moral direction and clear guidance. Our debate system will only get worse if one side continues lashing out without some obvious mission, and for them, that will mean finding and naming an enemy.