In professional-wrestling slang, a bad guy is a “heel,” and in a Tuesday piece, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik likened Republican politicians to heel wrestlers who aren’t completely up-front about how nasty they are: “You’re supposed to be maximally crazy, but you’re supposed to pretend to pay attention to the referee…You’re supposed to hit your opponent over the head with a chair, but you’re supposed to pretend to hide the chair you are about to hit him with.”
Gopnik hinted that another similarity between GOPers and grapplers is that both groups routinely engage in hype and theatrics. As for Republicans specifically, he wrote, “We know that even the most passionate believers in forced birth don’t actually believe that abortion is really like murder, and have no real desire to treat it as such; they just want to do all they can to make abortion once again difficult, dangerous, and heavily stigmatized. They are for torture, but they are ashamed of it, too, and would rather it were done far away and in secret.”
From Gopnik’s post (bolding added):
The actual position of the Republican Party since the Bush Administration…has been to violate Reagan-era treaties, reject the Geneva Conventions, and torture people—but you’re not supposed to say you favor torturing people. You’re supposed to say that you are opposed to torture, but what you’re in favor of isn’t really torture and anyway you would only do it when you had to… To actually state the position plainly—that you would order soldiers to commit war crimes and fire them if they didn’t—is like showing the referee the chair and then hitting someone with it. It’s the same act but the wrong decorum. And so being in favor of open carry and the Second Amendment guarantee to unlimited private gun-flaunting is fine—but actually encouraging people to bring guns to [the GOP convention in] Cleveland? Not so much.
It’s the same with abortion and big government. The actual position of the Republican platform, where abortion equals murder, would demand the creation of a government bureaucracy, a full-time pregnancy police, with cops who spend all of their hours tracking pregnant women to those now-illegal clinics and district attorneys who specialize in prosecuting doctors and can, of course, only do so by intimidating women to get them to testify—you cannot have a law making something a serious crime and not have the police pursue it. But to state this plainly is to make the actual consequences of the position clear. All but the most extreme know that the choice is and always will be between limited, legal abortion and unsafe, illegal abortion. They just want to make it as difficult and intrusive for women to exercise their rights as they can. So when [Donald] Trump said that there should be consequences for women who have illegal abortions, no one acted more outraged than the people who had been arguing for decades that those women were complicit in murder.
