Trump Part Deux
And so the inevitable has occurred—what may we glean from it?
WHAT WERE YOU EXPECTING?
So Donald Trump is probably going to be the President of the United States. Surely this hasn’t caught you unawares. It certainly won’t have caught me unawares—and yeah, I mean “won’t” in future tense. Here’s the thing: I’m writing this article in October. This is a scheduled post. The election actually hasn’t happened yet. Check it out:
Trump’s victory was an inevitability, although it ironically could only possibly have been averted by an accident of the woo-woo math that is the American electoral college (and hey, maybe this happened, you’d know better than I, dear future reader), a system so stupid that the economist Gordon Tullock once aptly compared it to a haruspex trying to divine the will of the gods by studying a sheep’s liver. Why was it an inevitability? Well, do you really want to know? You could always take the copium and die a slow but peaceful death, like bleeding out in the bath.
If you’re already breathing heavily because I just posted what you think is “the racism frog” then you may be too far gone and copium may be your only way out. I will offer you this link to vox dot com where I’m sure you’ll find what you’re looking for. Know that I don’t blame you or hate you. But if you’re willing to stick around then we can talk first about why this happened, then why it never really mattered, and finally (and most importantly) what can happen next and why Trump was probably the better outcome in the long run for anyone who might consider themselves on “the left.”
Firstly, the question of the why. There’s two angles here: 1) why the Democrats failed, defined by their inherent impotence and disingenuousness, their purpose to fail, and 2) why the Republicans succeeded, defined in part (as I will specifically highlight) by the present crisis of masculinity in the western psyche at the death of empire. Let’s kick off with that first one.
THE DEMOCRATS SUCK LOL
Kamala’s late in the game attempt to so vaguely appeal to the Pro-Palestine camp was a laughable charade. Jayapal referred to Kamala as having “deep empathy” for Palestinian-Americans, explicitly contrasting Kamala with Joe, a vital misstep. Kamala is still part of the Biden White House. Even if these comments were true—they obviously aren’t, otherwise Kamala would shut the fuck up about “iSrAeL’s RiGhT tO dEfEnD iTsElF” (an “answer” that always begs its own question preemptively) and “MuH hOsTaGeS” (lady, they’re probably all already dead, the IDF probably blew them to Kingdom Come)—she would at the very best be an enabler sitting on the sidelines. Here’s the thing: if the President is the national patriarch then we can call Joe the American Daddy and Kamala the American Mommy, and the citizenry of America is their children, including Muslims and Arab-American citizens. The child may recoil from the abusive father, but the child also comes to resent the bystander mother, sometimes even more-so than the former. It doesn’t matter if Kamala has “deep empathy” with Palestinian-Americans, it does not matter because she will never step in to stop Daddy from hitting them. She is the enabler. She cannot be trusted. The child will not necessarily welcome the opportunity to pass power from Daddy to Mommy because the child does not trust Mommy. The Muslim and Arab voting blocs will not so easily come to Harris, and it will likely lose the Democrats Michigan, a vital swing state. This could have all just been avoided: embrace the position so greatly supported by your own key base. Take a stance against Israel. Only 16% of your base has a positive opinion of what Israel is doing.
But even at the time of writing this (here in October) it’s far too late. The damage has been done. A change of attitude at this point would (rightfully) be dismissed as disingenuous. It’s over.
The Democrats love to blame sectors of their own voting base rather than themselves when they lose (though they may borrow a Trump line this time and add insinuations of “fixing”). Ironically the logic here regards viability: you were supposed to support me but you didn’t understand that I was only doing what was viable and you’re just a purist. Well evidently it wasn’t viable, or else you’d have won. It’s tautological. Yes, obviously if you had more votes you would have won the election, that’s how elections work, generally it is the responsibility of the candidate to garner those votes by appealing to them. This attitude is also extremely antithetical to democracy. Voting blocs are supposed to have leverage over the party, not the other way around. It is explicitly not in the interests of the voting bloc to allow the party to have leverage over them. If a given bloc can be counted on to Vote Blue No Matter Who, if they can be considered a done deal no matter what you do, then there is no reason to take their concerns into account. If this sort of brow-beating is effective, then it is itself a threat to democracy. The constituent blocs lose all their power. The party determines its path autonomously, and the blocs fall in line to support it or be punished. We must protect democracy by forcing you to vote in line for something you don’t want to vote for, and if you fail to do this then you are bad at democracy.
Among other things, this plays into the Democrats’ general obsession with “technocracy,” with a Dictatorship of “Experts”—the party is filled with experts, and they know what is best, you’re stupid, so ignore your own feelings and put your trust in those who no better. It’s too complicated for you to understand, so you should vote how you are told to and just have faith1 that they know what they’re doing. Well, then so what if Donald Trump actually does suspend democracy like the Democrats like to say he will? What would it matter? What democracy is that in the first place? What is voting other than just a formality?
What makes the loss extra special this time vs. say 2016 is that the Dems may well wind up blaming Black people and Muslims and Arabs. Obama has already been going around calling Black men misogynists for not supporting Kamala. A secondary candidate for blame will likely go to “hypocritical” queer people for supporting “bigoted” Palestine enough to not vote Blue, even as the Democrats are clearly writing trans people off as a political “liability” this election and effectively leaving them to the wolves after having fuelled their further persecution with empty partisan posturing to begin with. Considering the degree to which the Dems have been dedicated to posturing on immaterial idpol and “recognition” (the quotations here implying the Hegelian sense as critiqued in the Fanon sense) to mask their lack of political substance, it will be interesting to see how, if they go this route, resentment for the aforementioned groups within the defeated party changes its idioms. Most optimistically, this result could lead to the party tearing itself apart from within, with Gaza becoming a Missouri-Compromise-tier contradiction spelling the party’s own doom.
Democrats are incapable of understanding their own flaws, which is why the Republicans will always be a more competent political party. But this is of course principally because the Democrats do not want to understand their flaws—they are a bourgeois party that, like the Republicans, exists for the benefit of bourgeois interests. The Democrats are often called out for their “ratchet effect” on political expression, preventing movement to the left, a moderating influence meant to curb radical behaviour. Another of their purposes, however, is to launder the consciences of the liberal bourgeoisie, those who must suppress the nagging guilt of their exploitation of the masses by supporting programs that can offload a share of their tax dollars onto programs for the miserable poor, effectively a kind of secular “indulgences” system while also attempting to keep some degree of contentment among the lower classes and keep them from revolting. But the acceleration of this late stage of capitalism, of the hypermodern epoch, is a culture on cocaine. Everything is pure id. The superego of the “nanny state” is pulled back; the economy is given an adult circumcision revealing its swollen, throbbing, purple head. The Democrats no longer serve any purpose. The “conscionable” bourgeoisie dies more and more by the day, less and less susceptible to the nagging Godly voice at the back of its head as it chases the dragon of exponential returns, salivating. It’s far easier to instead support private DEI initiatives anyway—you, the capitalist, no longer have to pay any of your money into any system of social support, you merely hire the same workers you had to hire anyway, only you hire tokenized minorities this time (generally ones who reaffirm your own liberal biases and expectations of those same groups, often choosing them from those the upper class strata to begin with) and pat yourself on the back for your charity in having done so. As for the risk of revolt… I feel there’s a lot of quiet and content faith within these people in the power of drones. But don’t take my word for it. The plans are already drawn up and on full display.
THE MASCULINITY CRISIS & HOW TO SOLVE IT
Masculinity in America is in a fraught position at this point in history, so it’s fitting that the figurehead of that masculinity in America is presently the desiccated corpse that is Daddy America Joe Biden. In the poet shadow of the figurative father’s decay, masculinity is contested over by a feud between two over-compensating maladaptive forces amongst cis men—the ostentatious self-flagellating cultural eunuch who resents his own accident of birth and is consumed by self-loathing neurosis about something about himself that he can’t change, and the self-dubbed “neo-masculinist” who endlessly chases an illusion of hyper-masculinity (emphasizing its most noxious attributes) that he can never attain while lashing out (sometimes with literal violence) at what he sees as the “feminizing” direction of the modern world. Both sides are propelled by fear and disgust at their counterpart, driving them each further and further into themselves because, in spite of everything, they nevertheless identify with each other, whether they’d like to or not. The cultural eunuch obsesses over the neo-man and feels guilty by association, while the neo-man feels feminized by the existence of the cultural eunuch and less manly by association. Both hate one another and yet both have a Christ-like need to sacrifice themselves for the sins of their counterpart, both have internalized a need for self-annihilation (the neo-man wants to be replaced by a phallus, the cultural eunuch wants to be replaced by a void), and both often forsake their own desires—sometimes neglecting the very same desires by ways of divergent logics. The cultural eunuch, when heterosexual, often feels ashamed of his own lust as a misogynistic perversion, sometimes transgressing into a nefarious “sex pest” as an expression of his own repression. The neo-man, on the other hand, may, like Andrew Tate, disavow sexual pleasure as decadence and weakness (sometimes as a rationalization of the neo-man’s shadow, the incel), which may itself manifest in the development of a shameful “gooner” persona in private.
What has brought about this crisis of masculinity? There are a plethora of factors. Let me identify one pertinent and particularly relevant one.
In Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the character of Percival, the only principle character whose interiority is never represented, is idealized by all of the other characters ever since they were small children. All of their values seem to rest on Percival’s shoulders, he is an avatar for all of their own collective goodness, and he can also be seen as standing in for the British Empire. His superiority and grandness makes the children feel safe and his greatness is internalized by them in their admiration of him; when he’s around them they all feel connected not only with him but with one another, his presence eases their tensions and their personal concerns. The character of Neville even falls romantically in love with Percival—not necessarily with Percival the man really but everything he represents and as something to aspire to (to quote Barbara Streisand in Prince of Tides, “you don’t love me, you love the idea of me,” although that may have just been the Family Guy spoof); Percival, the British Empire, is itself his masculine role model and what he wishes to attain. When he (Percival) dies by falling off his horse in India in a pathetic accident, not unlike the pathetically-crumbling British Empire at the time of the book’s writing, the characters are deeply shaken, unmoored, and one character eventually kills herself.
Think, for example, of Edward Gibbon, whose first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published just one year after the outbreak of the American Revolution. Infamously, Gibbon attaches a lot of importance to decadence as a key factor in the Roman Empire’s fall, a key to why fascists (and Fallout villains) love his work so much—he writes of the Roman triumph over “the effeminate natives of Asia” and “the effeminate Indians”2 implicitly attributing these victories to superior masculinity, whereas the empire’s low points are characterized by “effeminate luxuries” such a silks and jewels and men wearing makeup and tiaras rather than “ineffeminate luxuries” described elsewhere such as armour and big-ass thrones and cool swords. Gibbon identifies masculinity as a core value of the Romans because he receives his sense of masculinity from his identification with the empire that he himself lives under, and challenges to that empire provoke anxieties over said masculinity via the spectre of a symbolic castration by proxy, and this castration anxiety is projected out onto the Romans. It is an anxiety so pronounced in Gibbon that he can’t even be happy about the Byzantine Justinian I, inarguably one of the most successful and impactful Eastern Emperors, because Justinian shared some power with his wife Theodora, whose depiction Gibbon paints with “unwomanly” anecdotes. How much does this mirror the neo-man’s projected anxieties?
Wilhelm Reich correctly identified sexual neurosis as key to fascist psychology, writing pertinently about the way that “sexual freedom” comes to be seen as “sexual chaos” and “sexual dissipation,” extending eventually of course to demographic anxieties, as revealed in the writings of Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg demeaning the decadence of the Ancient Greeks: “limitless sexual gratification means uninhibited racial interbreeding between Greeks and Asiatics of all tribes and varieties.” Jordan Peterson is not necessarily a “fascist” but he provides an example of at the very least a pre-fascist neurosis that makes him agreeable to fascism—Peterson too explicitly associates the feminine in his theories with the embodiment of chaos, something which must be held in check by order, an anxiety heightened by the perceived atrophy of a higher order, of the comfort American Empire provides the West. The German Empire was deeply emasculated by its defeat in the Firs World War (Italy was “victorious” but humiliated, and also coming out of its loss to Ethiopia, marking it as the first colonial European power to lose such a war), a defeat which could only encourage a psychosexual identification on the part of German men that expressed itself in terms of neurotic sexual frustration, so of course its relationship to a shattered masculinity mirrors our own. This is further and perhaps most importantly propelled by material deprivation, the worsening off of our situation, a male population blinded to the salvation of a class-analysis of their station and the exploitation of this confusion by an anxious and fascistic elite.
Returning to Germany for a moment—people usually get pissed off at insinuations about “gay Nazis,” often claiming the association is a myth and you can see why: the association has, historically, been used pretty homophobically. But we can approach this subject without being reactionary and find that there isn’t nothing to this association, and then maybe we can think about what that tells us. Ernest Röhm, the gay leader of the Nazi’s brownshirts and for a time the second most powerful man in the Nazi Party, could very well have wound up leader of the country had a historical coin flip or two turned out differently. Röhm’s second-in-command, Edmund Heines, was also allegedly gay, and it doesn’t feel like a stretch to imagine that these weren’t the only examples throughout the SA. But it only makes sense—of course repressed, self-hating gay men, feeling like castrates because of a society which pegs them as inherently unmasculine (there was even a theory put forward at the time that gay men constituted a third sex and not men at all) would identify with such an ideology. Röhm was himself completely obsessed with masculinity and wrote widely about the “threat” posed to Germany by femininity, which he associated with disloyalty, lack of discipline, and chaos (traits he also tied to Bolshevism). He conceived of the Nazi movement as “orderly, disciplined, and based on authority—masculine and soldierly.” Is it any surprise? Think of American cryptofascists like J. Edgar Hoover or Roy Cohn, both gay and both deeply committed, with frothing obsession, to upholding austere orders of social repression, and we’ve written before on this very blog about the abundance of secret gay shit in the Republican Party. Of course that kind of repression and anxiety about your queerness “negating” your masculinity could lead to fascist neuroses. How could it not?
The masculinity crisis is difficult to solve. The cultural eunuch and the neo-man are chained together under the auspices of masculinity and they cannot escape it. The cultural eunuch is unwilling or else unable to see masculinity’s positives and wants to destroy it (something he cannot do, as a cis man), and the neo-man is blinded by masculinity’s negatives to the point that he may even suicidally construe its positives as inherently feminine. We cannot “abolish” the category of masculinity from their minds—even it were possibly to wholly “abolish gender” the mental damage that would result from such attempted reprogramming of men who have already so deeply identified with this label would probably be akin to the damage done to gay man undergoing conversion therapy—but there are positive attributes socially-conferred onto masculinity which go beyond its “toxic” elements we could steer them toward: bravery, loyalty, camaraderie, commitment, strength, hard work, protection of others, etc. What’s more is that these may be married to an acceptance of one’s own anima, the positive socially-conferred feminine attributes (though there are oft ignored toxic attributes as well, just as there are to masculinity): care, compassion, empathy, encouragement, sensitivity, etc., none of which should be seen to threaten the masculinity of their cis male holder but instead make it more robust and complex. The problem is that in order to shift these perceptions there needs to be a societal project to rally them just as it required a societal crisis to foment the present problems. Revolutionary action may be the frame necessary to make this positive shift. Where can that action arise from?
IS THERE HOPE?
Well? Is there hope? I would say that yes. I would go so far as to, as I hinted earlier, suggest that the outcome of this election—if it really does come to pass, if Donald Trump is really going to be the President of the United States—is the better of the two options.
The most deleterious political force in America is not the Republicans, it’s not Trump, it’s not the remaining Koch gremlin, it’s not Mitch McConnell the chinless wonder, it is the Democratic Party. If the Democrats win, then they would exonerate themselves. It would smugly solidify to them the notion that their constituency’s approval is irrelevant, they’ll vote anyway because they’re being held hostage. Nothing will change, it will only get worse. The public, beaten down, would sink into resignation, and the fascist wound would continue to fester, and the Democrats would continue to let it go untreated, if not simply rub it in shit.
This loss may prove to be so traumatic that the party tears itself apart. The fall of the Democratic Party may be helped along. If there are actions which target and harangue the beleaguered Democrats, especially along anti-Zionist lines, then the possibility increases of their lashing out from stress, allowing the snowball to gather together. As I have said: Palestine may become a Missouri-Compromise-level rift that is irreconcilable. Out of its ashes, there may emerge real organizations primed to take real action against capitalism’s insidious machinations. Trump is an easier figure to rally people against: he says the quiet part loud, he keeps it simple, he makes it easier to identify him as the enemy than “polite” Kamala. Perhaps 2016 was an anomaly, perhaps the anticlimactic end of Trump’s first term will have sapped the novelty from action against Trump, and the American public will simply shrug. Perhaps, too, the Democrats truly are that invulnerable, will truck on regardless, and the MKUltra-ified pliable minds of the American public will simply stare into their own navels, drooling.
But there is possibilities here in Trump’s victory, as slim as those may be. That’s a lot more than I could have said about Kamala’s victory, through which I could imagine very little.
[Click here to read the follow-up: “An infection of the common web: an obituary for the culture war as we knew it”]
If the technocratic democracy model relies on voters to accept their ignorance and vote on faith, then one also questions how you can even then blame voters at all. If a voter really is that ignorant, then there’s no reason to not put equal faith in the Republicans instead, why not? These are equally valid decisions made on a basis of pure faith.
Enemies of Rome that Gibbons clearly considers “masculine”—the Scythians, the Germans, the Tatars, the Irish, the Thracians—he instead refers to throughout with the Freudian euphemism of “wild.” This is part of a long tradition of cope among those who prize masculinity in that they abhor those who are less masculine than themselves but ultimately write off those that they fear to be more masculine as merely barbaric. Their “masculinity” is negated by a lack of humanity upon which to ground that value. See also: American anxieties about Black masculinity processed as the inherent “danger” of Black men as wild animals. It is for this same reason that interracial pornography often frames itself through a barely-concealed lens of bestiality, the fetish is focused on the degradation of the white female whose depraved lust is expressed via the fucking of an “animal.” These anxieties, once cultivated, may be further stoked and manipulated for nefarious political purposes.