Pretending to believe in the Imaginary Liberal

I snapped a picture of this bumper-sticker in a parking lot down the Shore:

This guy is proud to proclaim that he is “EVERYTHING A LIBERAL HATES.”

That’s a weird thing to be proud of — even without mentioning anything specifically political or partisan.

I am a liberal. Or, at least, I am very much the sort of person that this guy would almost certainly regard as “A LIBERAL.” But if he and I were each asked to spend an hour preparing lists of things we hate, I’m pretty sure there’d be considerable overlap between our lists. Like, just quickly, here are few items that would be on mine:

• The KARS-for-KIDS jingle.
• Starting extra innings with a Manfred runner on second base.
• School shootings.
• When they put so many of those plastic T-tags into a pack of socks that you wind up stepping on a piece of sharp, invisible plastic the first time you wear your new socks.
• Line-jumping.
• Ruining brussels sprouts by boiling them into mush instead of roasting them with olive oil.
• Hidden fees.
• Pop-up ads
• When a bad call by an umpire or ref changes the outcome of a game.
• Spam.
• Robo-calls from telemarketers.
• Bullying.
• That gross gummy residue left on a paperback book after you peel off the bookstore’s sticker.
• Cancer.

Even if our emphatically NOT A LIBERAL friend hadn’t thought to list any of those himself, I’d bet he’d agree with me on many of them. Just because I, a liberal, hate these things does not mean that I imagine conservatives are sitting around, singing “1-877-Kars for Kids …” with their mouths full of mushy, flavorless brussels sprouts as they cheerfully read through every e-mail in their spam folder.

And I’m pretty sure — or, at least, I am hopeful — that our friend was not trying to tell us that he is “PROUD TO BE CANCER” or “PROUD TO BE TELEMARKETING SPAM.”

Yes, that’s what he’s saying. He is literally saying that he’s “PROUD TO BE EVERYTHING” a liberal hates and no matter how you construct this median or archetypal representative “LIBERAL,” that person is going to be a person who hates most of the things that most people rightfully hate. So this guy is literally out here proclaiming that he’s proud to “BE” (identify as? endorse? embody?) a host of hateful things hated by most people — liberal or conservative — because those things are hateful.

But I’m pretty sure our friend wasn’t thinking about anything like that when he slapped this bumper sticker on his Jeep. That’s what he’s saying, but I don’t think it’s what he means.

He wasn’t thinking about anything that real people really hate because he was too busy trying as hard as he could to avoid thinking about real people at all.

You can’t let yourself think about real people if you’re trying to flatter yourself by contrasting your own relative virtue with that of monstrous, inhuman, imaginary liberals. If you’re trying to believe in imaginary liberals, you can’t allow yourself to think about real people at all, not even a little bit.

And that is what this bumper sticker is about: Imaginary Liberals.

Imaginary Liberals are very important to the kind of white-resentment/Fox News/MAGA “conservative” identity of 21st-century America. Imaginary Liberals provide these conservatives with an identity and a purpose and a soteriology. This makes belief in Imaginary Liberals more like a religion than a form of politics.

Who am I? I am the opposite of an Imaginary Liberal.

Why am I here? To oppose Imaginary Liberals.

Am I a good person? Can I be proud of myself and my life and my choices? Yes, of course you can, because look at how much better you are than all of those awful, horrible, no-good Imaginary Liberals.

The main flaw in this religion is that, alas, Imaginary Liberals are imaginary.

They don’t really exist. The cartoon of an America-hating, Mom-and-apple-pie-despising, Satanic baby-killing Imaginary Liberal is not sustainable for anyone who encounters real human people in the course of real human living. The construct of the Imaginary Liberal and all the assumptions it requires about Those People crumbles whenever you actually meet any of Those People.

Some people are liberals — quite a lot of people, actually. But almost no one, anywhere, is anything like the Imaginary Liberals of this bumper sticker.

That sticker and its desperate attempt to pretend to believe in Imaginary Liberals reminded me of the first time I really started thinking about this, thanks to an extravagantly weird scene in the Rapture-fantasy novel Left Behind. In this scene, the soon-to-be-Antichrist announces that he plans to instate One World Government with One World Religion and One World Language.

In the novel, this plan — impossibly — is met with universal, unanimous joy and celebration. No one stops to ask which language they will be required to learn after they’re prohibited from speaking their own. No one stops to say that they already have a religion that they’re rather attached to, thank you very much. No one hesitates, even for a moment, to insist that they like the country they already have and don’t want it to be abolished. Apart from the small band of Real, True Christians in the novel, every human on earth is overjoyed to be relieved of their language, culture, religion, and nationality.

It’s a dazzingly bizarre scene. It requires every person on earth to behave like no person has ever behaved — like no person would ever behave. But that’s what happens in Left Behind because it is telling a story that has no people as characters in it. Instead of people, it has Imaginary Liberals:

Imaginary Liberals are awful people. They hate America and they hate God.

Even the ones who claim to believe in some other religion hate the Real True Christian God specifically, they’ve just pretended to latch onto that other religion, which they know isn’t real, as a convenient vehicle for expressing that hatred. Thus the abolition of all religion, seeing it subsumed it into one ill-defined, featureless global porridge is exactly what they’re hoping for. …

The ones who claim to love some other country really just hate America, specifically, and they’ve just pretended to latch onto that other nationalism, which they know isn’t real, as a convenient vehicle for expressing that hatred too. Thus the abolition of all nations — including the delicious elimination of America itself — is also exactly what they’re hoping for.

Awful, awful people those Imaginary Liberals.

And the authors think you’re one of them. Those ridiculous reporters swooning and gushing over [the Antichrist’s] moist and thick tyranny are the authors’ stand-ins for you and me. This is how they imagine we would respond if we heard just such an announcement. This is what they imagine we want to see happen. The authors don’t realize that the Imaginary Liberal is imaginary. They think they’re real and they’re everywhere.

… Believing in the Imaginary Liberal, like believing in anything else that is demonstrably unreal, requires a great deal of effort. That effort, again, can never be wholly unconscious. Some part of the self must always be vigilantly attempting to explain why the abundant evidence against that belief doesn’t matter while also attempting to explain why the utter lack of evidence for that belief doesn’t matter. Thus, again, the lie must constantly be reinforced or reconstructed. And thus, again, this active effort to persuade oneself inevitably persists as a nagging reminder that oneself still needs persuading.

Which brings us back to the tortured grammar of trying to convey this multi-layered self-deception: The Imaginary Liberal is something in which the authors have “chosen to pretend to believe.” That’s not quite the same thing as actually believing, mind you, but it’s close enough for them to not-quite-comfortably convince themselves that this passage provides an accurate portrayal of [the Antichrist’s] rise to power and the enthusiastic reception they have chosen to pretend to believe it would receive.