“It’s a way of taking what the other side criticizes about you and making it into a badge of honor.”Īnd in a world in which polarization driven by social media has equipped every smartphone-wielding American with a hammer, every political dispute looks like a nail. “I can envision a time where Matt Gaetz could pin a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his own crotch, and smash it with a ball-peen hammer, and he’ll think it’s a huge success if 100,000 liberals attack him as an idiot,” says Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the anti-Trump conservative outlet The Dispatch.
“‘The libs,’ as currently constituted, spend a lot of time denigrating and devaluing the dignity of Middle America and conservatives, so fighting back against that is healthy self-assertion any self-respecting human being would … Stunts, TikTok videos, they energize people, that’s what they’re intended to do.” “‘Owning the libs’ is a way of asserting dignity,” says Helen Andrews, senior editor of The American Conservative. Inasmuch as there was a coherent belief that explained his agenda, it was lib-owning - whether that meant hobbling NATO, declining to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory, floating the prospect of a fifth head on Mount Rushmore (his, naturally), or using federal resources to combat the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”īut in a post-Trump America, to “own the libs” is less an identifiable act or set of policy goals than an ethos, a way of life, even a civic religion. In one sense, this is the natural outgrowth of the Trump era.
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