Conservatives Are Degeneracy Hypocrites
“You’re against gambling, gummies, alcohol, strip clubs… Are you kind of low-key for Sharia law?”
Tim Miller posed this question to conservative pundit Saager Enjeti on a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast. While Saager might reasonably have been annoyed or even insulted by the question, he took it as a complement.
“I live my life more consistent with Sharia law than [with] the American degenerates, minus prayer five times a day and some other stuff,” he replied. “Listen, those laws and traditions, they come from good practice, I think.”
This response brings to mind the Trump supporters flaunting the t-shirt, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” Democrats are so bad, and liberal values are so destructive, that anything is better—even hyper-oppressive regimes.
To be fair to Saager, he actually makes good points when attacking vices like gambling and weed. He’s against online gambling but is fine with in-person gambling so that you’re forced to “see all the other degenerates inside the casino.” Meanwhile, he says, weed gummies are “ten times worse” than gambling, because it impacts more people.
We have 20 million [people in America] who are using high-potency THC on a daily basis. It’s destroying your testosterone, destroying sleep, it’s bad for pregnant women, it smells like shit when people smoke it everywhere, it dramatically lowers IQ in the developing brain, makes you slow, makes you lazy. It’s just bad.
The problem isn’t Saager’s analysis, but his conclusion. The fact that vices like gambling and gummies lead to some bad consequences shouldn’t lead to a longing (however vague) for Sharia law. Rather, it should lead to a coolheaded conversation about how to mitigate risk factors through policy.
The fact is that conservatives love degeneracy at least as much as liberals. They’re just selective about it. They only like degeneracy that’s, frankly, meathead-coded. Football? Fuck yeah! MMA? Let’s go, bro! Guns, big trucks, beer, fast food, Kid Rock lyrics…all awesome!
Look up the societal harms of American football. Aside from glorifying violence and aggression, it is associated with high rates of brain trauma, which leads to long-term cognitive decline, mental health issues, and premature death among players.
Should we ban football? Good luck finding a conservative saying we should! It’s not that conservatives don’t understand the harms, they’re just predisposed to ignore them because they like football. That’s it.
Or consider fast food. Every year, unhealthy diets cause 11 million preventable deaths around the globe—more than cigarettes. Compare this to the number of people who die from weed—which is zero.
But again, being against fast food doesn’t neatly align with a conservative agenda, while being against weed does.
Speaking of food, beef production takes up something like 50% of agricultural land to produce 3% of our calories. This is horribly destructive to our planet with any number of downstream consequences. Yet, just imagine trying to convince conservatives to give up on the vice (gluttony) of beef consumption!
I won’t belabor the point, but I could easily make the case that conservative-aligned vices are far more destructive to society than liberal-aligned vices. But you won’t see liberals clamoring for some equivalent of Sharia to tamp down conservative-coded vices. Liberals tend to understand that vices are a core feature of a small-L liberal society. If only conservatives could understand this as well!
That’s my appeal to conservatives like Saager: Learn to embrace a little degeneracy. Don’t be a low-key Sharia advocate. Instead, accept the fact that you already are a low-key vice-loving degenerate, just like the liberals. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s great!
Meanwhile, as we in the liberal West flit from one mostly harmless vice to the next, ironically, the true degenerates are the devotees of strict Sharia. Imagine if you knew a guy who married his 14-year-old cousin, who approves of sentencing gay people to death, and who also finds “forced labor” (i.e. slavery) to be an acceptable practice. What would you call this person if not a degenerate?
If you are conflating injuries from a sport with degeneracy or the effects of mass consumption of meat with degeneracy I'm not sure you understand what the word degeneracy means.
You make a good point. Conservatives are against "moral degeneracy," and yet promote environmental degradation, beggar thy neighbor foreign policy and immigration policy, and corporatist degradation of our cultural and social lives.