By Jeffrey Blehar
This
post is in response to Has Contrived
Coarseness Jumped the Shark?
For those unaware, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines is a famous maxim of media
interpretation that posits that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can
be answered by the word no.” It’s a pretty useful heuristic, and I’ll
confess it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw my colleague Noah
Rothman ask “Has Contrived Coarseness Jumped the Shark?” Answer:
No! Of course not! In fact, we’ll only get more of it as primary season heats
up (and beyond that, as we head into 2028). Why, contrived hysteria is
practically the coin of the realm by this point.
Noah is referring in this specific case to the
appallingly vulgar primary advertisement that dropped today from Illinois
Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, running for Senate to replace the
retiring Dick Durbin — so this touches on me quite personally, as I get to
observe the form of the destructor Illinois is about to choose. Anyway, her big
ad is literally just a parade of people shouting “F***
Trump!” That’s it. That’s the ad. No particular arguments — though slogans
like “ABOLISH ICE” flash on-screen silently as a legion of Chicagoans all
incant the same slogan. (On Twitter, her account writes “someone had to say it”
— okay, but this many people, all in a row?)
Noah rather reasonably asks: Are we not better than this?
Aren’t people tired of this ridiculous pantomime of anger and vulgarity? Absolutely
not. Your average working stiff doesn’t care about any of this rhetoric;
then again your average working stiff isn’t surfing the internet for Juliana
Stratton campaign ads. This is directed at the base, and in the context of a
primary.
And it will work. This is what the left wants to hear
right now, especially in ultra-blue Illinois, where the only defense that
Democrats have left for their own disastrous mismanagement of every level of
state government is to point to Trump as a shiny distraction. However dishonest
a strategy that might be, it works in Illinois. Stratton is running on a
predictably ultra-left platform (“ABOLISH ICE” is right there in the
advertisement) with the explicit endorsement of Governor JB Pritzker and the
Illinois Democratic establishment. And she will win. Both of her races — the
primary and the general alike — might as well be over already, in fact. (Forget
it, Jake — it’s Chinatown.)
So no, contrived coarseness has not hit its sell-by date
just yet. In fact, I predict we will see new lows in the months to come, as we
head toward November.
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