Offender: I said I’m sorry.
Offended: Sometimes sorry doesn’t fix it.
It’s a well-worn exchange, one that may apply to Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republican lawmaker from Georgia apologized earlier this week for statements she made comparing mask rules on Capitol Hill to the Holocaust.
Following a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Greene acknowledged the offensiveness of her comments. “I made a mistake,” she said.
The apology was immediately criticized by many as insincere and insufficient. Admittedly, it is hard to view this particular event in isolation. Greene, after all, rose to political prominence on the wings of unfounded QAnon theories. She has supported, at various times and in various ways, beliefs in white supremacism and Pizzagate.
Prior to her election, she or a member of her team (she claims that diverse hands have handled her social media) liked Facebook comments calling for the assassination of Democratic politicians and branding the Parkland school shooting of 2018 a “false flag” operation.
Given this track record, Greene’s comparison of a mask mandate to the systematic extermination of some six million people is all in a day’s work. She appears to thrive on the continued publicity garnered from fomenting outrage. Some would call this “owning the libs.” Others would call it squandering an opportunity.
Greene’s penchant for repeatedly stepping in self-generated controversy has cost her all committee assignments, which were stripped from her in February. Eleven Republican House members joined the majority for the 230-199 vote.
But, to mangle Shakespeare, I come to praise Greene, or at least not to bury her as much as others are. Maybe the best I’ll end up doing, however, is applying another expression by the Bard and damning her with faint praise.
Like child actors in Hollywood, Greene is growing up in the public eye. She has distanced herself from much of the incendiary QAnon content, although she still firmly supports former President Donald Trump, who himself traffics in all manner of fringe theories to explain how he couldn’t have lost November’s election. (Even though he did.)
Despite, or maybe because of, this cognitive dissonance, Greene represents a not-insubstantial minority of Americans who have adopted a contrarian stance toward almost everything, even when such stubbornness is at cross purposes with their own best interests.
David French, writing about vaccine skeptics in the June 21/28 issue of Time magazine, notes that it is “difficult to fact-check partisans out of vaccine rejection” because their skepticism “has become a part of who they are.”
The same could be applied to Greene et al.’s anti-fact positions on so many issues. The bullheaded refusal to listen to reason and to view any expression of empathy as weakness are central to their identities. Any reversal is tantamount to denying their core truths and allowing the forces of godless liberalism, as they see it, to win.
And yet, here is Greene, apologizing for a gross and unfair comparison, perhaps having truly learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust. Sure, a 40-something might be reasonably expected to know this already, but we all have to start somewhere.
More importantly, perhaps Greene is modeling a stance that her supporters both within and outside her Georgia district will mirror – recognizing an untenable position, reversing course in the face of facts, apologizing.
Don’t get me wrong – and here comes the damning with faint praise part – Greene has a long way to go before she can claim to be anything close to a fully self-actualized individual. If past performance is indicative of future results, she may never get there. And politically, she may not want to, as it could cost her votes.
But everybody is on a journey in this life, and we all deserve to be given another chance. Greene may be apologizing only as a matter of self-preservation, but there is always a chance that she is sincere, able to lead other former or wavering QAnon believers (and those who are unwilling to claim membership in this club but nonetheless subscribe to many of its tenets) to more sensible positions. And these people desperately need to be led – re: deprogrammed – for the sake of the nation and democracy.
That makes Greene important in ways she may not recognize. It is incumbent, then, on progressives to be cautiously optimistic (but wary), keeping the focus on her and not on their response to her.
“Sorry” may not fix it, but at least it applies some much-needed duct tape to one of the cracks.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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