The Next Reality Candidate

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, May 07, 2021

 

When Caitlyn Jenner said to Sean Hannity, “I love California,” I totally bought it. Despite my reservations and curled lip. The words were breathy, nostalgic, and weird, especially in that nerdy voice coming from behind that dishy hairdo. But I believed it in a way I’ve never believed anything that Sean Hannity has said. And if the Wheaties-box-Olympian-turned-reality-TV-star is going to upend California politics — a prospect about which I have my doubts and dreads — it is because, unlike the normal Republican pols, there is a real emotion behind the artificial appearance.

 

A normal Republican politician would say Malibu was awesome in the 1980s because of “affordability” or some other chartable metric. But with Jenner you get the sense that Malibu’s awesomeness was self-certifying. It was the smells, the sense of opportunity, the din — the way the sun shines into a convertible full of teased hair. With Jenner, the organs might have been misplaced, but the glands are still pumping hormones in there somewhere.

 

One of the reasons Jenner’s candidacy and campaign make for compelling television is just the sheer, brazen weirdness of it all. For Jenner the decline of California is told in a parable of a rich man leaving for Sedona in disgust at the homeless. Morally it should be off-putting, but it does get at a truth. The story Jenner tells about personal gender transformation is not the usual one of throwing off the burdensome expectations of society and religion. Instead, Jenner tells it as a conversion story, as God’s reward for being a good dad who completed his work. It begins with the counsel of a Christian pastor and ends with the hope of the “Pearly Gates,” and enjoying God’s affirmation for “being myself.”

 

To a small-o orthodox Christian, or maybe any non-Californian, Jenner’s testimony comes across as an inferno of narcissism and schmaltzy daytime-talk-show sentimentality. You hear it and think, “Is Jenner going to get away with this?” Will Republicans, Californians, or God stand for it?

 

Stay tuned and find out.

 

Ad Age called Jenner’s three-minute campaign ad “epic” and “substance free.” Wishful thinking on their part. Of course, it had no policy prescriptions. But it told a powerful and intuitive story. Jenner narrates: “California was once the envy of the world. We had what everyone else wanted. The American dream grew up here.” But “career politicians and their policies have destroyed that dream. It’s been locked away. Closed. Shuttered. Left in the dark. Burned down.” The dream was set to images of tidy middle-class homes and cars speeding along the beautiful California coastline. And then a smash-cut to present reality: filth in the streets, uncontrollable forest fires — and then Gavin Newsom dining at the world’s most elite restaurant while everything else in California is shuttered.

 

The story has the benefit of being true. The California that elected Ronald Reagan governor was the closest thing mid-century America had to a middle-class paradise. It had a public-school system and state-university system that were the envy of the world, together offering a decent shot at upward mobility. Now when people from the rest of the country visit California’s cities, they come back bearing tales of obscene wealth, contrasted with human excrement in the streets — and basically legalized theft. The tidy, middle-class homes of 1,800 square feet from the 1960s now cost over $1 million. The promise is that Jenner is going to Make California Great Again.

 

And you won’t be surprised that veterans of Trump World are attaching themselves to Jenner. A reality-TV millionaire running a populist campaign? Sure . . . that’s the sort of thing they could run.

 

My California friends — even the ones who find the transgender idea abominable — are resolving to have fun and enjoy the imminent and plentiful opportunities a Jenner campaign presents for owning the libs. We all tolerate some contradictions. I think Ronald Reagan was a successful president and believe that his wife should have been tried for practicing witchcraft.

 

But everyone should be absolutely clear about the consequences. American conservatives are strangely obsessed with celebrity and tend to grant it an authority it does not deserve. So Jenner’s candidacy, if it catches fire in the media, will have two effects. (1) It will blunt conservative objections to gender ideology at a time when “gender clinics” are opening across the country and engaging in a sustained legal and public-relations campaign to establish their place in the borderland between medicine and social activism, the same way Planned Parenthood did before them. (2) The Jenner campaign will effectively pioneer an ersatz “conservative way to be trans.” Jenner’s attitude toward people who object is relaxed or dismissive rather than paranoid and punitive. The campaign will define “conservative trans” as campy and fun, rather than crusading. Jenner’s transgenderism is branded in the same way conservative Evangelicals tried to rebrand: as winsome, and with it, not puritanical, or bent out of shape. Just roll with it.

 

In other words, Jenner’s candidacy is an authentic California reality-TV production. Great lighting, lots of makeup, guiltily riveting, and fundamentally corruptive to those who follow it.