Gamers borrowed the term from the nascent world of 1990s computer hacking<\/a>, using it to describe their conquered opponents: \u201cowned.\u201d To \u201cown the libs\u201d does not require victory so much as a commitment to infuriating, flummoxing or otherwise distressing liberals with one\u2019s awesomely uncompromising conservatism. And its pop-cultural roots and clipped snarkiness are perfectly aligned with a party that sees pouring fuel on the culture wars\u2019 fire as its best shot at surviving an era of Democratic control.<\/p>\n In just the past month, Sen. Ted Cruz self-consciously joked<\/a> at the Conservative Political Action Conference about his ill-timed jaunt to Cancun, decried mask-wearing as pro-statist virtue signaling, and closed his speech by screaming \u201cFreedom,\u201d a la William Wallace; House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted<\/a> a video of himself reading a Dr. Seuss book in protest of the supposed censorship of the children\u2019s author (whose estate decided to stop publishing six titles on account of stereotypes in their illustrations); Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene erected a sign outside her congressional office in Washington declaring<\/a> \u201cThere are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE\u201d across the hallway from the office of Democratic Rep. Marie Newman, whose daughter is transgender; even Rush Limbaugh, the late talk radio giant and progenitor of liberal \u201cownage,\u201d got in one last braggadocious slap<\/a> from beyond the grave: the occupation listed on his death certificate is \u201cgreatest radio host of all time.\u201d<\/p>\n In one sense, this is the natural outgrowth of the Trump era. Inasmuch as there was a coherent belief that explained his agenda, it was lib-owning \u2014 whether that meant hobbling NATO, declining to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory, floating the prospect of a fifth head on Mt. Rushmore (his, naturally), or using federal resources to combat the New York Times\u2019 <\/i>\u201c1619 Project.\u201d <\/p>\n But in a post-Trump America, to \u201cown the libs\u201d is less an identifiable act or set of policy goals than an ethos, a way of life, even a civic religion. <\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Owning the libs\u2019 is a way of asserting dignity,\u201d says Helen Andrews, senior editor of The<\/i> American Conservative<\/i>. \u201c\u2018The libs,\u2019 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\u2026 Stunts, TikTok videos, they energize people, that\u2019s what they\u2019re intended to do.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI can envision a time where [pro-Trump Florida Rep.] Matt Gaetz could pin a picture of [Democratic New York Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his own crotch, and smash it with a ball-peen hammer, and he\u2019ll think it\u2019s a huge success if 100,000 liberals attack him as an idiot,\u201d says Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the anti-Trump conservative outlet The<\/i> Dispatch<\/i>. \u201cIt\u2019s a way of taking what the other side criticizes about you and making it into a badge of honor.\u201d <\/p>\n And in a world where polarization driven by social media has equipped every smartphone-wielding American with a hammer, every political dispute looks like a nail. A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, viral videos of mask burnings<\/a> and other forms of lockdown protest proliferate. The arch-conservative, troll-friendly webmagazine The Federalist<\/i> more than doubles<\/a> its traffic each year. Pro-Trump students are bending<\/a> reformicon-minded College Republican groups to their will. In certain parts of the country, modified pickup trucks \u201croll coal,\u201d spewing jet-black exhaust fumes into the air as a middle finger to environmentalists. Popular bootleg Trump campaign merchandise read simply: \u201cFuck your feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n Randy Rigdon of Cincinnati wears a “TRUMP 2016 – FUCK YOUR FEELINGS” shirt at Trump’s rally at the US Bank Arena ==> pic.twitter.com\/HFDnuJYdHJ<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) October 14, 2016<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a spirit of rebellion against what people see as liberals who are overly sensitive, or are capable of being triggered, or hypocritical,\u201d says Marshall Kosloff, co-host of the podcast \u201cThe Realignment,\u201d which analyzes the shifting allegiances of and rise of populist politics. \u201cIt basically offers the party a way of resolving the contradictions within a realigning party, that increasingly is appealing to down-market white voters and certain working-class Black and Hispanic voters, but that also has a pretty plutocratic agenda at the policy level.\u201d In other words: Owning the libs offers bread and circuses for the pro-Trump right while Republicans quietly pursue a traditional program of deregulation and tax cuts at the policy level.<\/p>\n To supercharge those distractions, however, was the great innovation of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency: He used the highest platform in the land to play shock jock 24\/7, trading the radio booth for his Twitter account<\/a> \u2014 thrilling his supporters by dismaying his foes. And despite Trump\u2019s defeat in the 2020 presidential election \u2014 and the Republican Party\u2019s loss of control of both the House and the Senate under Trump\u2019s leadership \u2014 the GOP has largely chosen to take his strategy and run with it, betting on a hard-charging, antagonistic rhetorical approach to deliver it back into power in Washington.<\/p>\n That\u2019s led to predictable tensions, as the party\u2019s diminishing cadre of wonky reformists lament a form of politics that seems more focused on racking up retweets and YouTube views than achieving policy goals. Even so, Trump-inspired stunt work is, for the moment, the Republican Party\u2019s go-to political tool. \u201cOwning the libs\u201d is no longer the domain of its rowdy, ragged edges, it\u2019s the party line, with the insufficiently combative seen as inherently suspect and outside the 45th president\u2019s trusted circle of \u201cfighters.\u201d <\/p>\n But despite its hyper-modern verbiage and social media-assisted dominance, the rhetorical approach deployed by Trump and his allies has roots that go back to the beginning of the conservative movement, with a party, much as it is now, fearful of a liberal status quo it saw as hell-bent on making it obsolete.<\/p>\n In 1952, the political mainstream<\/b> was inflamed by the boorishness and recklessness of another conservative demagogue: Wisconsin\u2019s Sen. Joseph McCarthy, then at the height of his infamous communist \u201cwitch hunt\u201d within the federal government. McCarthy would eventually overreach to the extent that he was overwhelmingly censured by the Senate, including roughly half of its members from his own party. <\/p>\n One prominent conservative willing to defend McCarthy, much to the chagrin of nearly everybody to the left of the John Birch Society, was Irving Kristol. The godfather of neoconservatism wrote contemporaneously in Commentary<\/i> that \u201cthere is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.\u201d <\/p>\n To Kristol, the certainty McCarthy signaled was worth commending, despite his argument\u2019s lack of substance or his corrosive rhetorical style. McCarthy was a staunch anti-communist, but that was almost secondary to how thoroughly he infuriated his opponents, leaving no question as to where he stood. <\/b>And given the incentives<\/a> presented by social media toward ever more extreme political positions, it\u2019s no wonder such stark, if reductive, contrasts are even more appealing today, to the extent that a spiritual heir of McCarthy\u2019s could even win the White House. <\/p>\n \u201cIrving [Kristol] wasn\u2019t a McCarthyite, but the point is a good one,\u201d says Goldberg. \u201cWhen both sides are encouraged to take ever more extreme positions, I think for the average voter that sort of moves the Overton window<\/a> a little bit where they say, \u2018Look, I think Trump\u2019s a jerk, and I don\u2019t like what he says about immigrants, and blah, blah, blah, but at least he\u2019s not for defunding the police, or at least he likes the American flag.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Kristol\u2019s willingness to walk on the wire for such a reviled figure as McCarthy reveals another crucial element of lib-owning, beyond just its galvanizing moral clarity: its place as a tool of redoubt for those in the political and cultural minority. Take, for example, Kristol\u2019s contemporary who perfected the art for the conservative movement\u2019s long, dark years in the post-Goldwater wilderness \u2014 William F. Buckley, the National Review <\/i>founder who relished making his foes look foolish on his long-running program \u201cFiring Line,\u201d and who, when asked why Robert F. Kennedy refused to appear on the program, famously responded with an impeccably troll-ish query of his own: \u201cWhy does bologna refuse the grinder?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBuckley had his version of \u2018owning the libs,\u2019 which was being more erudite and articulate than his interlocutors,\u201d Goldberg says. \u201cYou take a certain satisfaction, sort of the \u2018your tears are delicious<\/a>\u2019 kind of satisfaction.\u201d<\/p>\n Buckley\u2019s program lost some of its countercultural punch as the Reagan Revolution took hold in Washington, and almost inevitably, his successor George H.W. Bush\u2019s \u201ckinder, gentler\u201d conservatism created an opening for those who craved redder meat. <\/p>\n Enter, if you will, the John the Baptist to former President Trump\u2019s all-ownage-all-the-time messianic leadership: Rush Limbaugh.<\/p>\n When Limbaugh died in February after a lengthy battle with cancer, his transgressions against liberal good manners, to put it mildly, were widely noted. Limbaugh regularly filled the three daily hours of his program with invective against women, people of color, LGBTQ people and any number of other groups that didn\u2019t include Rush Limbaugh, to the point where even he, the quintessentially self-confident blowhard, occasionally felt the need to admit he\u2019d gone too far and apologize. But to his millions of devoted listeners, no remark was too inflammatory to be brushed aside in light of his peerless talent for owning the libs.<\/p>\n After Limbaugh\u2019s death, libertarian writer Conor Friersdorf teed off<\/a> on the late radio host in the pages of The Atlantic<\/i>, not least as a wanting successor to Buckley: \u201cLimbaugh advanced the smug hatred of liberals and feminists, took pleasure in mocking the left, fueled the ugliest impulses of his audience more often than he sought to elevate national discourse\u2026 He will likely be remembered more for the worst things he said than the best things he said, because unlike Buckley, who said his share of awful things, no Limbaugh quote stands out as especially witty or brilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe to readers of The Atlantic<\/i>. On the right, it was far more common to laud Limbaugh, as the \u201chappy warrior\u201d who validated the act of sticking one\u2019s thumb in the liberals\u2019 eye to a cadre of once-timid Chamber of Commerce rats. <\/p>\n \u201cLiberals who didn\u2019t listen to Rush, and just read the Media Matters accounts, never understood how *funny* he was,\u201d National Review<\/i> editor-in-chief Rich Lowry\u2014himself a Buckley prot\u00e9g\u00e9 (and POLITICO Magazine contributing editor)\u2014wrote on Twitter<\/a>. \u201cWhat set him off from his many imitators was how wildly entertaining he was, and the absolutely unbreakable bond he formed with his listeners.\u201d <\/p>\n Goldberg\u2014who, by his own account, is no fan of Limbaugh\u2014noted that despite the radio host\u2019s self-confident bluster, his appeal was ultimately in providing a form of aggro-catharsis for listeners who felt embattled by the media\u2019s pre-internet status quo.<\/p>\n \u201cThere really was a much more monolithic mainstream media, and what Limbaugh was doing back then was sort of giving equal time, as it were, to the other perspective,\u201d Goldberg says. \u201cAs the country\u2019s become more polarized, and we reward the outrageous beyond its worst, you get this race-to-the-bottom competitiveness, where people want to get noticed and have to be even more outrageous than the next person.\u201d<\/p>\n And where, of course, for things to get more outrageous than social media?<\/p>\n \u201cMy entire life right now is about owning the libs.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n Thus the zeitgeist <\/i>was spoke into existence in 2018 by Dan Bongino, on the NRA\u2019s now-defunct web video channel. Bongino \u2014 a successful right-wing podcast host, who was tapped this week by radio giant Westwood One to fill Limbaugh\u2019s now-vacant airtime<\/a> in some markets \u2014 was ostensibly incensed by the treatment of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings. But the subject of his outrage was hardly a material issue. <\/p>\n Take the man at his word: Bongino\u2019s preoccupation, then and now, is owning the libs more than securing any kind of policy outcome or vote in the Senate. He\u2019s continued to do so even despite quitting Twitter in protest after his account was restricted amid the January 6 riots; his content is consistently among the most shared<\/a> on all of Facebook.<\/p>\n But in October 2018, <\/b>Bongino\u2019s declaration was revealing. Until then, the phrase \u201cowning the libs\u201d was mostly deployed by those seeking to mock conservatives<\/i> for quixotically pursuing cheap applause from their base at the expense of a true political win (or, simply, their dignity). The phrase is barely apparent in the public record before 2015, when its usage on Twitter began to slowly ramp up; the \u201cOwn The Libs Bot,\u201d a popular account which affixes<\/a> the phrase \u201cown the libs\u201d as a non-sequitur<\/a> to various random clauses, seemingly to highlight the perceived absurdity and desperation of Bongino-like figures, wasn\u2019t even launched until November 2017. Perhaps the best example of this original, ironic deployment of the phrase just a month earlier described one particularly ill-conceived stunt by a campus Republican group: \u201cowning the libs by wearing diapers in public<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n In those early days, even some name-brand Republicans got in on the fun, albeit with more of the tone of a concerned parent. Then-United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley made headlines when in the summer of 2018 she addressed<\/a> a group of high schoolers attending a youth leadership summit George Washington University. \u201cRaise your hand if you\u2019ve ever posted anything online to quote-unquote \u2018own the libs,\u2019\u201d Haley requested, leading many students to do so and burst into applause. <\/p>\n With the patience of a Nancy Reagan \u201cjust say no\u201d speech, the ambassador admonished them that owning the libs is \u201cfun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you\u2019re accomplishing when you do this \u2014 are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading? \u2026 We\u2019ve all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn\u2019t leadership \u2014 it\u2019s the exact opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately for Haley, a fairly prominent figure in the conservative world happened to disagree: her boss, the president of the United States. And while Haley has had her own very public reckoning<\/a> with the tension between her ideal of leadership and Trump\u2019s, it\u2019s clear which has won out in the Republican Party. <\/p>\n Conservative social media is dominated by controversy-chasing attack dogs like Bongino. Donald Trump Jr. \u2014 a social media star in his own right who titled his first book simply \u201cTriggered\u201d \u2014 is considered a formidable candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination should he choose to run, based on little more than his dynastic pedigree and talent for lib-owning. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who\u2019s embraced Trump\u2019s thirst for conflict more than maybe any other viable Republican presidential candidate, handily topped the 2021 CPAC straw poll of \u201924 contenders \u2014 the one, of course, that didn\u2019t include Trump himself<\/a>.<\/p>\n Despite both the invited scorn of liberals and the quieter resentment of conservatives who worry their policy dreams might be tanked by a movement that turns off the moderate suburbanites who elected President Joe Biden, \u201cowning the libs\u201d is at the center of today\u2019s Republican Party because, well, it works. Behind Bongino\u2019s astronomical Facebook engagement numbers are millions of real people, ready to show up at voting booths in GOP primaries. In 2020, after four years of non-stop ownage, more people voted for Donald Trump than any other presidential candidate in history \u2014 save for, of course, Joe Biden. <\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t even count the number of times that people on the realignment side of conservatism, populist-minded conservatives, have said to me, \u2018If only we had a candidate who believed all the right things and didn\u2019t have Trump\u2019s baggage,\u2019\u201d says Andrews. \u201cI think that point of view is idiotic. Trump\u2019s attitude had a lot to do with his success. You can\u2019t have unapologetic populism without Trump\u2019s personality. \u2026 \u2018Owning the libs\u2019 is something you do when you feel insecure in your social position, and Trump is the opposite of that. He\u2019s confident, he owned the libs like a winner, and that\u2019s what made him so special.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, even many conservatives are skeptical that Trump\u2019s particular genius at infuriating liberals and thereby rallying new voters to his side is transferrable to an heir. He might be one of one: the arch-conservative Sen. Tom Cotton notably stumbled<\/a> in his own Trump-like attempt to whip up the base at this year\u2019s CPAC, and his peers did little better, a few notable exceptions aside. Sen. Josh Hawley has a unique talent for infuriating liberals through his support of Trump\u2019s conspiracy-mongering around voter fraud, but he\u2019s a famously uncharismatic speaker. And, by now, Ted Cruz\u2019s act is quite simply stale, lacking any real capacity for transgression.<\/p>\n \u201cRon DeSantis was incredibly aggressive towards the media, and a lot of people on the right that I know cite him as an example of someone knowing how to play to the base,\u201d says Kosloff. \u201cBut how much is \u2018own the libs\u2019 just then a commodity product which all GOP politicians are expected to produce? Unless there are large levels of Trumpian ability, I doubt it\u2019s going to be a breakout feature.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump occupied a sui generis<\/i> place in popular culture\u2014he wasn\u2019t just a lib-owner par excellence, but was seen as a businessman-outsider in the mold of Ross Perot; one of the first reality television stars; a cultural fixture referenced by everybody from Robert Zemeckis<\/a> to Redman<\/a>. \u201cOwning the libs\u201d might be a necessary condition for those who would seek to claim his mantle, but it alone is insufficient for general election success. <\/p>\n Even so, it\u2019s difficult to imagine any serious Republican presidential contender, at least in the near future, winning a primary with a conciliatory platform akin to Jeb Bush or John Kasich\u2019s from 2016. Trump has repeatedly professed his desire for a party of \u201cfighters\u201d\u2014that is to say, inveterate lib-owners\u2014and the fact that he\u2019s still the most popular Republican politician of the past decade ensures he\u2019ll have his way. It may be on a foundation laid by McCarthy, Buckley, Limbaugh and their followers, but today\u2019s ownage-obsessed Republican Party is ultimately the house that Trump built.<\/p>\n![\"Top:](\"https:\/\/static.politico.com\/39\/8c\/592dbc1e44e7ba8f20508476e971\/grid1.jpg\")
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