They Hate You Because They Know You Know They Are Losers
By 
I’ve long believed that the real reason for the right of fascism in America is that they know that the people don’t support their ideas and so you have to fix the game by moving ever farther toward authoritarianism in order to win. It usually works too, but you do have to deal with the fact that the rest of us think these people are pathetic losers. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out last week, the assassination of Charlie Kirk has made zero difference in public support for Trump or the far right and the pathetic use of music at the Kirk funeral shows us why–they have nothing but their own circular draining toilet to feed on.
The musicians who performed at Kirk’s memorial hailed exclusively from the niche worlds of contemporary Christian music (CCM) and worship music. CCM, while lucrative for musicians, is mostly the domain of artists who don’t have enough juice to cross over into the more desirable secular market. Traditionally, those artists who do manage to transition — think Creed or Evanescence — drop the “Christian” moniker and will even insist that they never intended to be categorized as such. Worship music, a genre that was popularized in the late 1990s and early 2000s by groups like Hillsong — a band affiliated with a controversial church in Sydney, Australia — and singer-songwriters like Chris Tomlin, who performed at the memorial, bills itself as producing modern hymns built around simple choruses.
The prominence of these Christian genres, which are almost exclusively associated with white evangelical culture, worried some progressive commentators who feared their propaganda value. Poet David Gate compared MAGA’s use of worship music to the Nazis attaching themselves to Richard Wagner, worrying it represented the “seduction of fascism.” On the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, which is billed as “a leftist’s guide to the conservative movement,” the hosts complained that the left doesn’t offer artistic transcendence like what was offered from a bunch of musicians playing B-rate adult contemporary tunes in a football stadium.
Look, we’re all very worried here about rising fascism. But it’s time to take a deep breath and remember this: If Christian music appealed to anyone outside the white evangelical world, we’d have seen evidence of it by now. CCM has been around for decades, and yet it remains what it always was — watered down versions of sounds that were popular on the radio years ago. Gate attempted to equate the popularity of CCM in white evangelical circles with the way Wagner was synonymous with German cultural pride. But they are categorically different. Despite his rancid politics, Wagner was a true genius who remains popular nearly 150 years after his death. Both CCM and worship music are subpar forms that white evangelicals settle for because they think you can catch demons from the real stuff.
Popular music may not be satanic, but MAGA is right to see it as mostly liberal. That’s why they fear it. Far from avoiding transcendent artistic experiences, the left can lay claim to most of them. Most everything from Taylor Swift to the grittiest punk music is made by people on the left. That’s why evangelicals want their kids to avoid it. They rightly believe that it’s hard to go back to mediocrity after you’ve tasted excellence.
It’s hard to make it work, which is probably the best hope we have. Of course the indifference or simple disbelief of most Americans to what is going on around us doesn’t help the situation.