Originally a comment by Artymorty on Focus.
At the conference, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said leftists were driven by “envy and hatred” and derided antifa demonstrators as “all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism”.
“Why is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred,” Miller said.
This is the most classic of the conservative/liberal divides, isn’t it? Straight out of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s television. Postcard-perfect Leave it to Beaver and Andy Griffith on the one hand; Maynard G. Krebs and those perverse, long-haired hippies on the other. “Not one normal-looking person among them” sounds like something Archie Bunker might have whined while watching the news in 1971.
Of course, the point of “abnormal” dress/appearance, and of body piercings and tattoos and scars and all the other stuff that by the 1990s had become more-or-less mainstream fashion, is that it emerged from all the people conservatives refused to include in their vision of “proper” society: the sailors, the dockworkers, the bikers, the ex-cons, the hippies, the inner-city punks, the BDSM fetishists, the carnies, the gays and lesbians, the traumatized war veterans…
“Freaky” dress (including gender-bending), and minor body modifications like piercings and tattoos, symbolized a liberal worldview because these things rejected narrow ideas of what constitutes “normal-looking” and they synthesized the cultural practices of the marginalized into a new idea of “normal”.
It’s sadly true that, as the culture war has plodded on and become entrenched, some young people have taken the idea of challenging norms to extremes, and it’s morphed into “queer theory” and a new set of ideas about children being born in “wrong bodies” (etc) that doesn’t merely challenge some narrow-minded, outdated social norms, but many sensible, principled ones, too — and even the biological facts of the human species. And these extremists have become aggressive and intolerant, to boot. It’s beyond irritating that the gender ideologues have ended up handing the far right a big win on this front, by taking a reasonable liberal idea and stretching it to such extremes that, to some people’s ears, Stephen Miller’s fascist garbage starts to sound almost sensible in response…
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