F**king Mondays: RIP Jimmy Carter, MAGA Civil War, and the Woke Right!

The last F**king Monday column of 2024!

President Jimmy Carter. image via Unsplash

Welcome to the last F**king Monday column of 2024!

For the first time in many months I took an entire week off work. With two small children it wasn’t particularly relaxing, but after a truly brutal schedule of election coverage I needed some time away from the news. For the past few weeks I noticed that I would write a paragraph, look at it, and not understand what I had just written. When you’re a professional writer this isn’t a good place to be, so it was either subjecting Banter readers to incomprehensible nonsense, or taking time off. I chose the latter and thankfully seem to be able to construct basic sentences again.

I can’t say I’m looking forward to covering the year ahead, but there are some big changes happening at The Banter that are very exciting. I’ll be announcing more in the New Year, so please stay tuned. We’ll be publishing sporadically this week but will be back full force next Monday. Anyway, in the news this week!:

RIP Jimmy Carter .

While Jimmy Carter was a one-term president, he is widely regarded as having a bigger impact on politics outside of office than any other president in US history.

This isn’t totally fair despite being voted out in a landslide in 1980. Carter was besieged by problems that he had either inherited or were largely out of his control. From runaway inflation caused by huge spikes in oil prices to the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter’s presidency was strangled much in the same way President Biden’s was. A primary challenge from Ted Kennedy didn’t help, and Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in one-sided drubbing. But Carter achieved a lot from 1976-1980 and it shouldn’t be forgotten. As Stuart E. Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser writes in the Washington Post:

Carter dramatically expanded all major education programs, established the departments of Education and Energy, put the United States on the path to greater energy security from OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), deregulated and transformed our entire air and ground transportation system and communications industries, placed consumer advocates in major regulatory agencies, and added more land to the national park system than all presidents together since Theodore Roosevelt. This first president from the Deep South since Reconstruction championed civil rights and appointed more women, Black Americans and Jews to senior administration positions and judgeships than all 38 of his predecessors combined.

Eizenstat also argues that Carter his most significant accomplishments were actually in foreign affairs:

Carter’s signature achievement, reached over 13 agonizing days and nights, was the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. They led to a peace treaty he personally negotiated, which provided security to Israel after five wars with Egypt, anchored America’s Middle East policy for 40 years and formed the basis for his Nobel Peace Prize….He concluded a nuclear arms treaty with Moscow that, while never ratified by the Senate, significantly decreased the number of nuclear weapons on both sides and was nevertheless honored by President Ronald Reagan and the Soviets

After his presidency, Carter embarked on a truly remarkable career defined by his humanitarian efforts. He founded The Carter Center with is wife, Rosalynn Carter in 1982 that has done extraordinary work promoting peace initiatives, mediation, and the promotion of democracy and human rights around the world. A devout Christian and former peanut farmer, Carter was one of the few politicians to actually behave in a Christ-like manner. He was notoriously humble, decried materialism, and spent much of his life working to end conflicts.

Carter’s presidency and life’s work is a testament to America’s kinder, gentler side, and a reminder that politicians aren’t always terrible human beings.

Jimmy Carter died peacefully on December 29th. He was 100 years old.

MAGA civil war

Well that was quick! Before Trump has set foot in the White House, MAGA world is already ripping itself apart. The latest conflict is between the nationalist MAGA base and the MAGA tech bro contingent over H-1B visas. Unsurprisingly, Elon Musk is at the center of the fighting after he called those opposed to the visa that allows high skilled workers to enter the country on a temporary basis “contemptible fools”.

This has not gone down well with Trump’s base with many prominent MAGA voices going public with their displeasure. Musk’s reaction (again, unsurprisingly) was to throw more gasoline on the fire:

The nationalist MAGAs have long believed that Trump was against all immigration, so were shocked to see the president-elect come out on Musk’s side.

“I have always been in favor of the visas,” Trump told the New York Post after days of observing the fighting. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

More than anything, the civil war exposes where the real power lies in MAGAland. The tech bros financed Donald Trump’s election campaign and they control much of the social media landscape. Their grip on the economy and ability to influence public opinion is so far reaching that it would be political suicide for Trump to make enemies of them — particularly so early on. Trump owes them and they know it, so Musk and the other Silicon Valley oligarchs aren’t going to take orders from the plebs.

Silicon Valley has a very dim view of Donald Trump and the MAGA base, and despite their public support, regard them mostly as useful idiots. From the tech industry’s perspective, Trump’s election was a major investment and they are expecting a hefty return. This means the wholesale gutting of regulation, huge tax cuts, and preserving immigration laws that benefits them. Highly skilled immigrants give America a huge advantage over other nations, particularly in the tech sector. So don’t expect the H-1B visa to go anywhere soon, even under Mr. Anti-Immigration himself.

The Woke Right

Because of the H-1B debacle, the term “Woke Right” has been trending on and off on X for the past few days. This is an interesting development in America’s culture wars, and potentially a positive one.

The term appears to have originated in 2022 with GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw attacking hard right ideologues claiming victimhood and dismissing anyone who disagrees with them as “establishment” or “globalist”. Here’s provocateur Konstantin Kisin’s more recent definition of the term:

For years I’ve been decrying identity (or “woke”) politics on the left while going after what I regard as their mirror opposite on the right. I’ve been attacked by liberals and conservatives over this, but I won’t stop talking about it given I see it as the major problem in American politics.

To its credit, the left does appear to acknowledge that their side has gone too far they have tried to pull in the reins. Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign deliberately shifted away from her identity focused efforts in 2020, Democrats have mercifully stopped using terms like “Latinx”, and there are far more liberals willing to speak out about it than ever before.

Dan Crenshaw aside, almost no one on the right wants to acknowledge that their side engages in an even more toxic form of identity politics. The right has been enormously effective in smearing Democrats for being “woke”, so it is high time they got a dose of their own medicine. If Republicans want to claim that Kamala Harris was a “DEI” pick, then they must also acknowledge Donald Trump was too. If they want to claim that non-white minorities play the victim card, then they must accept that white people play it too. In academic circles, this kind of grievance politics is called “ethno-nationalism”. Unfortunately, it’s not a very catchy term so it never really caught on. “Woke Right” is far more succinct and therefore potentially far more impactful. Time to start using it.

Have a great week!