Sartorial faux scandals filled the moral vacuum of conservative-pressured Obama-era politics

Evidence

“There’s no way, I don’t think,” Long Island Republican representative Peter King groused, “any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday.” King was outraged because Obama had delivered a speech on the rise of ISIS in Syria—while wearing a tan suit. For liberals, the Obama era began with high hopes of sweeping change and ended with eight years of conservative obstruction and faux scandals about sartorial choices. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 409

Categorization

• XREF: The tan-suit episode crystallizes Marx’s broader point that fashion-inflected culture wars substitute for substantive political contestation. — connects to: Pseudo-historical fall narratives let conservative politics masquerade as ethics — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 663