Republican grifters update Lovejoy’s Law for the internet age.
In 2022 the GOP has been enthusiastic in their reanimation of “Lovejoy’s Law,” that fallacious appeal to emotion which implores someone, somewhere to just pleasethink of the children.
This little bit of platitudiny—memorialized in The Simpsons episode “Much Apu About Nothing,” in which the townspeople of Springfield demand first a bear patrol, then relief from the tax hike brought about by increased caniform policing, and finally the magic elixir that is mass deportation of illegal immigrants—has been employed by political mobs demanding they get their way for as long as there has been politics.
The demagogic and simple-minded of all ideological stripes fall back on this argument because, frankly, it works. Children are vulnerable and lovable. Ingrained in our DNA is an instinct which calls us to protect and nurture them so that our species, our culture, our memory lives on. It’s much easier to prey on the public’s parental sentiments by claiming that your issue du jour will protect some hypothetical babe in the woods than it is to make grown-up arguments on said policy’s merits. Because that requires the audience to consider the various risks and rewards, costs and benefits, of a given proposal. And thinking is hard. We are not wired nearly so strictly for it.
Thus it should come as no surprise that Lovejoy’s Law has become the central animating feature of America’s nihilistic and demagogic political party.
Today Republicans claim that “the children” must be protected from all manner of things: groomer teachers, “critical race theory” making them feel bad about their whiteness, books featuring gay penguin daddies, revelations that some families might be different from theirs, and, most of all, a shadowy cabal of child predators who meet in the basement of a pizza joint, and frazzledrip the skin from babies faces so as to maintain a youthful visage for themselves.
None of these threats come anywhere near the importance the GOP places on them, of course. Many don’t exist at all. But they do confirm the prior worries of an audience who fears that they might. Which is the important part.
Lovejoy’s Law is so central to the GOP’s messaging these days that this week they updated it to meet the rhetorical demands of our idiocratic internet age.