Enabling Criminality and Depravity: Ronna McDaniel, MTG, and The Zone of Interest

Women in authoritarian patriarchy keep the system going

Liz Cheney clapped back when Ronna McDaniel said she “took one for the team,” as RNC chair.

“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot & his effort to pressure MI officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” she wrote. “She spread his lies & called 1/6 ‘legitimate political discourse.’ That’s not ‘taking one for the team.’ It’s enabling criminality & depravity.”

Enable: give (someone or something) the authority or means to do something.

In the context of abuse, enablers allow or cover for the abuser's bad behavior while flying monkeys perpetrate bad behavior to a third party on their behalf.

Flying monkeys refer to people who carry out the work of a narcissist or an abusive person. The phrase comes from The Wizard of Oz, in which the Wicked Witch of the West puts flying monkeys under her spell.

Patriarchal, submissive women charged with perpetuating the top-down authority structure, carry out essential work for the narcissistic abuser, who can’t be everywhere at once, or all things to all people. Flying monkeys and enablers

• run operations

• prop the reputation of the leader

• spread rumors and fear-inducing lies

• gaslight and manipulate underlings

• dismiss, trivialize, and bypass concerns and feelings to deflect from the root causes

• help the narcissist harass dissidents and exiles

Behind every narcissistic authoritarian dictator on stage is a flutter of support roles, mothers, beta males, and Subject Matter Experts helping him get things done.

When I think about enablers and flying monkeys, they have names. In my fundamentalist past, these are the pastors’ wives, the theobros lauding the religious guru leading the way, the coaxing women using their “fundie baby voice,” the women spanking their babies to keep order at home. Sometimes it’s my own face in the mirror. I enabled the patriarchs for years. I was groomed my whole life to become a good little wifey, a cheerfully submissive flying monkey, a perpetrator of patriarchy. And I was punished when I failed.

Read: What It’s Really Like to Be a Trad Wife

When you live within the patriarchy, enabling criminality, depravity, and abuse comes with the job. It means compensating for severe imbalances of power, rights, health, and agency. There’s no space for personal scruples or morals. You will always take one for the team.

In the Meet the Press interview that preceded Liz Cheney’s pushback, Ronna McDaniel said of her views after stepping down as RNC chair, “Now I get to be a little bit more myself, right?” 

But anyone taking one for the team for long doesn’t have much of a self. Enablers have no life or views of their own.

Read: Fundamentalism Made Us Complicit

I recently watched the Zone of Interest. And it is as brilliant and calmly horrifying as I’d heard—the glare of the sun and fly-on-the-wall filming stripped away excuses and filtered agendas. Here was an ordinary family doing ordinary family things. Having a family day by the river. Debriefing and laughing before bed. Giving Daddy a birthday present.

Heddy, Mrs. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, is like so many evangelicals I know—family-oriented citizens who love their children, whose husbands go to work each day. Rudolf is disturbingly relatable as he lays on the sofa stressed from work, like any professional devoted to career success, performing with diligence, and earning promotions for doing their job well. The cracks show in the children—but isn’t that true for all of us?

Humanizing Nazis to see how they love their children and go to work and live what became ordinary lives truly clarified how it can happen here, anywhere, all over again. The dissonance is what stayed with me, gave me nightmares, and kept me nauseous. I know them. They’re here now, in this election.

In ‘An Unquiet House’

Garth Greenwell

wrote, “The whole conceit of Glazer’s film is to reverse foreground and background, to place the horrors of Auschwitz at the edge of our perception while inhabiting, with the kind of density and patience typical of art meant to reveal the luminous in unremarkable moments, the privileged banal domesticity of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz.”

It’s not as simple as “evil is as evil does,” and yet it is. Culturally, we’ve simplified our villains, casting them as dark bastions of destruction while a superhero of light swoops in and saves the day. This fundamentalist polarity doesn’t serve us. The Zone of Interest shows us how subtly complicity creeps in, how humanity can be othered as livestock or “the problem” or simply “them.” In the maternal image of Heddy holding her baby in one of the film’s iconic scenes, she’s deliberately directing her child’s focus while demonstrating dissonance and denial of what’s footsteps away in broad daylight. That’s how evil deflects and gaslights us into believing we aren’t seeing what we’re seeing.

In his letters from a Nazi prison, Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote,

“The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts…” (p 4).

“We will not and must not be either outraged critics or opportunists, but must take our share of responsibility for the moulding of history in every situation and at every moment, whether we are the victors or the vanquished” (p 7)

“If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in the large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others” (p 8)

The Supreme Court is set to rule on January 6. They’ll address what consequences belie the flying monkeys who enabled criminality and depravity that day by interpreting a statute regarding obstruction. As Vox explains:

To understand the two competing interpretations of the obstruction statute, it’s helpful to be familiar with its full text. It provides that:

(c) Whoever corruptly—

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Much of the disagreement between judges who read the statute broadly and Trump-appointee judges like Nichols and Katsas turns on the proper meaning of the word “otherwise.” When I read that, my stomach clenched. Words not meaning what you know they mean is a favorite trick of the narcissist. They love a long, intricate argument over something simple, which will feel like a dizzying circle, without accountability, apology, or resolution. Arguments make excellent, paralyzing deflections. Meanwhile, other actions are taking place.

Otherwise: Or else. If not. In circumstances different from those present or considered.

Katsas interprets “otherwise” to mean “in a manner similar to.” Similar, not different. The argument turns the world upside down. Shakes us like a snow globe. Reverses the foreground and background. The court will also examine how to interpret the word “corruptly.”

In other words, what are we calling evil? What’s considered taking one for the team and when does that become enabling criminality and depravity?

Read more of my personal experiences as a trad wife here.

Book Office Hours with me here.

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