I'M NOT TRIGGERED, YOU'RE TRIGGERED!!
PART 4: Conservatism is cringe. MAGA is all "Head empty, just vibes." 🇺🇸 🤙 😎
One of the primary tensions fueling the Republican Party is the simultaneous loathing of mainstream pop culture and their relentless frothing thirst to be a part of it, which they fear has fallen permanently out of their grasp. These people are whiny cowards who had their feelings hurt by The Daily Show sometime in the mid-aughts and need to practice their therapeutic exercises by having every consumer brand and product contort to their whims.
Under the first two years of the Brandon administration, Roe v. Wade was overturned, 1,500 books featuring topics of race and LGBTQ issues have been banned in school districts across the U.S., Ron DeSantis outlawed Critical Race Theory in Florida, and the White House requested $37 billion in expanded police funding. Regardless of their disproportionate minoritarian influence, the right still hyperventilates over a boogeyman liberal agenda permeating into academia, the FBI, big tech, Wall Street, and the military. This is, of course, an elaborate conspiracy to silence conservative thought and round up god-fearing patriots into an open-air prison where AOC will surgically attach fleshlights to their forehead.
All this imagined oppression, all these perceived slights are largely in their heads as they confront feelings and internal monologues that they are ill-equipped to process. Then they get angry.
“YOUR DOORDASH DELIVERER IS ACTUALLY A DEEP-STATE AGENT FROM EPSTEIN ISLAND WHO PLANTED 5G MICROCHIPS IN YOUR CHEESY-STUFFED CRUST PIZZA TO MANIPULATE YOU INTO SLIPPING INTO DRAG AND EATING YOUR NEIGHBOR’S KIDS!! JESUS AND Q WANT YOU TO KILL HIM WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER BEFORE HE TEACHES YOUR DOG CRITICAL RACE THEORY!!”
In its current state, MAGA is entirely about feeling and fantasy. A society obsessed with consumption and marketing encourages us to want our preferences and personal attitudes reflected back to us in media. Since politics is just more consumable media, the ultimate MAGA avatar is a diffident, monstrous, short-fingered cube of ham who is both gaudy and gauche, with the same petty prejudices and the same absolute delusions of competence as they have, embodying their grotesque burbling visages. What conservatives sought in the Trumpenreich, ultimately, was a late-night show host to wield a power that is wholly negative, to scorn and mock and punish their enemies as they try to square their idyllic herrenvolk America with the more manifestly sordid reality they experience every day.
Life in Donald Trump’s America was reaction and counter-reaction, dudgeon and dread, an interminable string of cheesy chiseling gripes. This placed conservative social media into a Krebs cycle of spectacles, subsisting on libs mocking them or being triggered by them, another heaping of grist provided by skittering media goblins to make overbearing chuds feel both powerful and powerless.
In this restless and desperate and miserable present, the internet allows these people to imagine that somewhere, somebody is canceling or shadowbanning them. They convince themselves of their own oppression while they glory in their uniformity. It’s a perception of freedom that hinges on how unrestrained they are to bully others, their ability to enforce conformity of belief through unimpeded domination, all without the blowback of scolding or social consequences. What they share with the SJWs they claim to loathe is the same narc instinct of policing manners and reinforcing confines on what they deem to be unacceptable behavior. The internet has democratized this sense of entitlement, but it cannot be truly universal because it is incompatible with their desire to assert their own hermetic and hegemonic culture.
Their un-faved replies are the vat of acid that the Joker is dropped into. As right-wing social media is increasingly the province of shut-ins, kooks, quacks, grifters, and the dreaded Gun Uncle, they troll with the unassailable conviction that if they dress their unvarnished retrograde bigotry with enough cosmetic heft, it could pass as iconoclastic wit. They flub from one garbled punchline to the next, confusing controversy for subversion.
The MAGA movement has eroded the line between genuine cynicism and genuine stupidity. As its adherents stand defiant in their murky and misinformed ignorance, any attempt to reason with them is frustrating, and not in the typical way that comes with having vile reactionary shit and barstool-grade sophistry haphazardly shoved in your face. This feeling is weird and hopeless. They’re continuously affronted, existing in a virtualized state divorced from reality. But it’s also stubborn and dated. It escalates to a perpetually aggrieved nullity, a crystallized small-scale culture warring of people still downstream from Gamergate. The Redditors complaining about SJWs taking over their media years after the feminized Ghostbusters remake and Anita Sarkeesian’s “Tropes vs. Women” Kickstarter. The YouTube pedants still making “Libtard Snowflakes OWNED by Facts and Logic” videos. The abundance of garden variety Groyper accounts. Endless cycles of hypocrisy accusations. Spouting /pol/ buzzwords from a bygone era. Posting I identify as an attack helicopter memes as their infamous One Joke. Cackling through Louder with Crowder. It’s more bewildering than infuriating, like finding the last Japanese soldier hiding out for 20 years after World War II, convinced it never ended.
Even as the outragres and memes degrade in quality and remain perilously stuck in 2016, they post onward because it’s an empty-calorie facsimile of civic engagement, a Kong filled with peanut butter. The ultra-grating provocateur schtick is muddled and confused, an addiction to playing devil’s advocate. The institutions they despise may perpetuate and retroactively justify violence, but that is subsumed by their blowzy fixation on them being controlled by Democrat baby-eating reptiles; to them, they need to be purged so the FBI can be refashioned into the based Patriot Investigations Unit that will kick in your door if you’re caught cranking it to the “less sexy” green M&M.
Trumpism’s most fundamental attribute is that it is incapable of change. As it exists up and down the culture, as a hair-trigger fan community and a deliriously servile online cult, MAGA is a metonym for a suite of musty grievances and a gaudily gilded aesthetic of Maximum America.
It is identity instead of politics, a long spate of complaints and a certain sour cast of mind, a relentless and unappeasable grievance, a bottomless demand for more, a total incoherent hash of bullshit. These people were mad for eight years because Obama wore a khaki blazer once, then they applaud a president who’s basically Master Shake getting KFC grease fingerprints all over the Constitution. Conservatives complain about political correctness creating a culture of permissiveness that lacks intellectual rigor, but they have built a rubric for themselves to indulge in their own galaxy-brain geniusness because of the sole fact that they’re Republican, full of selective skepticism and smug dismissals only destined to encourage soft-brain idiocy. These Mucinex monsters proclaim to deal in Tough Love and Hard Truths, but they support a bill banning businesses and schools from teaching about racism in a way that makes anyone feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” Right-wing rhetoric is a staccato burst of energetic verbal diarrhea, seething with venomous contempt for the way America is currently composed, disgusted with the evil and unpatriotic beliefs of anyone outside of their voting bloc—but it’s actually the Demonrats who hate America.
Outside of the perspective of the most venal scumbags America is capable of producing, this proudly idiotic crudity can hardly pass as a coherent worldview. These people are at the Old Country Buffet picking whatever entrée they please, piling them high on their plates while lib-brained fact humpers insist they eat their vegetables. “Says who,” Republicans respond. “Some asshole in a lab coat?” They seek out greasy and blaringly worthless articles that Raise Some Questions while carefully stopping short of answering them. They all fume over the same things, with the same urgency, as their cognitive functioning stagnates into a half-empty glass of tap water. The outrage du jour is posted with a hectoring and ultra-fervid tone that’s pure Trump, right down to the idiosyncratic punctuation and bizarre capitalization choices.
Post by post and provocation by provocation, the point and principle of the MAGA lifestyle is to believe every titillating or toxic falsehood, to hold these beliefs tightest where they are most tenuous, to reject consensus reality with a relentlessly signifying intensity and fury. Everything wrong with America is the workings of the dark cosmic perfidy of the deep state and shadowy globalist enemies. A pink-haired Starbucks barista is more of an elite than an oil baron driving a $100,000 pickup truck. As America is sinking, degrading, or generally on fire, the very existence of these problems is either qualified or outright dismissed with a sincerity and self-serving disposition that reflects Trump’s own. Hordes of hogs and QAnon freaks thirsting to revel in Trump’s glorious permanent presidency barreled through Capitol Hill in a feral fury, believing they were carrying out their patriotic duty or at least their own unenlightened self-interest. Though, it is a core tenant of Trumpism to make no distinction between the two.
With ambitions both vague and vast, the dizzying righteousness of their derangement is the point, committing hate crimes and appraising killers like Kyle Rittenhouse in the name of their janky shared delusion. Zealous acolytes were brought to the brink of a quarter-baked coup, and they channeled this faux-1776 sentiment into lazy, self-incriminatory livestreams. Neither abject ignorance nor personal judgment can prevent this relentlessly aggrieved incoherence from blasting everyone else with corrosive bullshit nonstop. These transgressions against the timeline are as poignantly oafish as it looks, ominous and sociopathic in the deeply corny ways to be expected from a horde of pink and puffy homunculi in MAGA hats.
Despite its disproportionate institutional power, conservatism is, in a sense, in a horrible death rattle, a totalizing poison that consumes everything before devolving into unbridled mental illness. The GOP’s Libs of Tik Tok strategy may have flopped in the midterms, but their rampant election denialism is unfolding as a stealth legal coup attempt. The “good old days” of the Republican Party were euphemized double-banked expressions of the more overt fits of spite and sudden blistering sadism that Trump proffered, stripping away the vestigial veneer layered over the original rot. The fundamental nihilism and deep sense of entitlement remain intact: It is the divine right for Real Americans to take and keep everything they want, to dish and take offense with impunity, and everyone else must deal with it without complaint or recourse. Where the fake noble conservatism of the past dutifully nuanced this subtext, Trump made these demands at gunpoint.
The spirit of Trump is alive in all the Americans who are not just blinkered and baffled enough to compare wearing a mask inside a supermarket to the Literal Holocaust, but also vain enough to believe their conniption fits with Trader Joe’s employees must be streamed somewhere. Online MAGA politics is the perfect vehicle for every rancid revanchist American impulse, the coming out party for the debased servility and rank fascism that was previously allowed to remain latent in Republican political appeals. Social media is intoxicating and deranging to these people in the same way that it’s bad for everyone, and the belief system that emerged from this is defined by lurid stubbornness and curdled hedonism. The incentive is to post and share what’s intriguing and what centers them most, unfurling in a breathless, schizoaffective, nearly unintelligible torrent. From there, the grift, the hero’s journey, is to keep finding more elaborate and extravagant and enraging ways to profess this belief. They need to feel like this all the time, because they can’t imagine any other way to feel. This is the conclusion of this annihilating and wildly metastatic politics: It can’t stop.
