Some Observations About the GOP Primary, Pt. 4
Responding to the response to the State of the Union and what passes for a presidential nominee in 2024.
Throughout the Dubya era, the right was known for being proudly and profoundly anti-intellectual. But in recent years and with the backing of Peter Thiel, there seem to be a few—and only a few—people on the right willing to read old books and generate new ideas and engage with the world and consider principles other than the senseless churning of the market. I don’t think highly of their politics, but I had hedged hopes that there would be something or someone worth disagreeing with. Instead, we have Jordan Peterson. The vast majority of these ostensible conservative thought leaders have built lucrative careers pretending to care about a whole clownish suite of pseudo-ideologies and mastering the respectable kinds of rhetorical smarm they demand. But they are on the same intellectual level as a thrice-divorced Ohio guy scarfing down corndogs while shouting BUILD THAT WALL at a Trump rally. They think that referring to the people they disagree with as “the deep state” constitutes a coherent political analysis.
This is not a movement, it is cosplay. Anyone who freaks out about how dangerous and scary these idiots are is doing cosplay with them. They are only dangerous and scary because American politics works to ensure that the people funding it and their interests are never offended or inconvenienced, so the incoherent ramblings of these internet-addled MAGA donuts act as the intermediary between the rich people and the systems that protect and flatter them. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of these idiots.
The partisan liberal media gave Joe Biden’s State of the Union address high marks because he managed to not die in public, but among the many jarring and bleakly hilarious ways in which the Republican Party responded to this speech, Marjorie stood as an oafish monument to the ways in which Trumpism is currently shrinking and demeaning American life. As Republican elected officials follow their leader into strident kookery and clammy influencer-style grifting, Marjorie made a defiant stand to interrupt Joe Biden’s speech, albeit dressed like a mattress salesman who only sells to whites.
She was perfectly unhinged. Next stop: Gilead.
If this image is unpleasant to behold, it’s partially because of what it reveals. The aesthetics of various strains of reactionary politics are by now easy enough to parse, an ongoing effort to sell the dustiest loathsomeness as somehow transgressive and counter-cultural. This is a movement that, deep down, knows it has no real lineage of presenting itself as dignified and traditional; instead, it is just the marriage of the worst American ideas and some glossy branding.
In response to the State of the Union, Alabama Senator Katie Britt sat in what is presumably her kitchen to deliver a rebuttal in a way that gave off heavy Stepford Wife vibes. It was difficult to describe her retort without sounding like someone who is speaking increasingly and dismayingly quickly, but it seemed like the director told her to drop her speaking voice to a whisper and to space her cadence so she would come across as someone who is paranoid that her kitchen was bugged. It wasn’t a speech as much as it was an audition for Big Little Lies. It is very telling that the most subversive worldview imaginable to conservatives is that of a dull suburban bigot from 1972; so it was pretty bold of the Republican Party to trot out a woman to respond to the State of the Union, because if we’ve learned anything from Nikki Haley’s campaign, not a lot of Republican voters hear a woman speak her mind and think, I like this.
And now that Trump’s final opponent has officially bowed out of the primary without ever putting up much of a fight, it all feels and looks like the end of something. If this primary was a depiction of what the Republican Party is fundamentally about, it is an image that our political media is built to miss. Primary results thus far would suggest that Trump’s grip on GOP primary voters is more tenuous than what is being widely reported, but he still has a powerful halo effect. It’s bracing to know there isn’t some secret, respectable, intellectually honest, and compelling version of conservative politics that would serve as a viable bulwark against Trump’s hothouse, degenerating babbling. This is all more or less a fraud—ideas without much merit or constituency, advanced by people whose sole distinguishable attributes are their wealth and shamelessness, imposed on American public life through the perverse and cynical instrumentalization of political institutions.
In the same way that the garish Trump thumbs-up photos portray the all-devouring hustle of Trumpism, the images of him looking increasingly sweaty and like a pile of congealed bacon grease also project what now passes for a presidential candidate. Dan Quayle once misspelled “potato” and he basically had to enter the witness protection program; Howard Dean trashed his political ambitions because he cheered too loudly. Conservatives thoroughly illustrated their pretensions and vacuity when they sneered at Barack Obama for eating Gery Poupon in public or when he wore a tan suit, but have since embraced a man who is essentially Master Shake getting KFC-greased fingerprints all over the Constitution. This face-value hypocrisy is wildly banal and grandiosely inane, but it is telling. Distasteful and disgraceful though he is, Trump is the GOP’s best bet to win them power, and since that is all they really want, they have rolled over to his fascistic ambitions. Conservative politics in general and the Republican Party in particular have always been a blatant pyramid scheme; in his atavistic sadism and greed, Trump represents more of an apotheosis than a reckoning.
Mainstream media is full of pundits who fall somewhere between mediocre and actively vile, so it is also bleakly funny to see affectively centrist doofuses try to stake a moderate position on what Trump really means when he says something like, “I want to be a dictator on day one.” This is a man who is facing 91 felony charges—most of them from trying to overthrow an election—which is arguably 90 more than a disqualifying amount. Picking this guy to run the government is like hiring a school shooter to be a principal.
Trumpism’s most fundamental appeal is that it cannot ever change; if anything, its gaudily gilded aesthetic can only grow more deranged and obnoxious. As it exists up and down the culture, Trumpism is not complicated. It is a graceless, gloating, recursive celebration of power. Outside the MAGA hair-trigger fan community and deliriously servile online cult, Americans may wonder, in tones of either concern or studied awe, how Republicans continue to defend a convicted con man who is liable for sexual assault. At best, their response is a slurry of canned half-truths, right-for-the-wrong-reasons gibberish, or half-remembered whataboutist Hannity talking points about Ukraine and an unsecured border and a migrant crisis and an epidemic of crime and high gas prices and mandated vaccines and Biden committing treason and Hunter’s laptop and woke corporations and leftist censorship.
The academic answer, here, is that these people are caught in a phantasm. Philosophers like Derrida, Lacan, and Laplance have described it as a way of mentally organizing feelings, selective observations, and misrepresentations, like looking at the world through a prism. While Trump himself governed in fits of spite and sudden blistering sadism and skeins of wild self-pity, the fundamental nihilism at his core is a liberation movement of sorts. His bottomless demand for more has empowered an untold number of similarly unappeasable Americans who consider themselves entitled to the same service. If you speak to any vengeful godhead who has spent too much time wading in the sludge canals of right-wing media, their politics consists of a long spate of complaints and a certain sour cast of mind, a versatile but otherwise useless resentment that cosplays as free-thinking patriotism. It exists only to blame and punish and deny whenever it brushes up with anything that would undermine their curdled understanding of who they are and what they deserve.
According to literature professor Darin Tenev, phantasms allow a person to stand on both sides of a contradiction and protect themselves against cognitive dissonance. The contradiction is emancipatory, it is a power to contain all the disparate thoughts and realities that would otherwise threaten their subjectivity and their relationship to the world. Phantasms are a false sense of mastery over whatever they refuse to understand; there is no introspection, so there is no risk of an identity crisis. Anyone who considers themselves to be a based patriot cannot allow themselves to understand that the movement they support is about anything other than white injury and white power. They are all free thinkers who think the same thing. They are free-speech absolutists, but back a party that will use the machinery of the state to censor CRT and ban thousands of books. They are libertarians who love freedom but accept their party outlawing drag shows. They are champions of the free market, but if it gets too woke, then it must be punished and restrained. They despise cancel culture while trying to cancel democracy itself.
In a Republican Party built to service the vinegary whims and furies of America’s business tyrants and their awful adult children, Trump fits as sort of an aspirational figure. In his wild, vicious, all-cancelling selfishness, Trump is outsized and cartoonish, a slave to vanity shoved haphazardly into an expensive suit. It is what he represents that cements his grim aspirational appeal. Taken one shabby scam or one crude grift at a time, Trump is just a dopey bog orangutang who raves about the same old musty grievances and whatever he just saw on Fox News. Through the worshipful regard that American culture and media place on billionaires and through the perspective of venal people who wish to be unencumbered by the surly bonds of broader responsibility, then Trump’s self-interested scummery and defiant ignorance and all his proudly idiotic crudity can pass as a worldview. It’s not a coherent politics by any stretch, because Trump is fundamentally not much interested in coherence. But the big man was never selling that.
The ideology that has assumed Trump’s image—and, in the process, effectively replaced the euphemized double-banked expressions of what was once understood as conservative politics—is grounded in a very specific and very deep sense of entitlement. Where Republican establishment types formerly wrapped that entitlement in layers of facile meritocratic rhetoric and free-market mysticism, Trumpism more aptly made his demands at gunpoint. It is the divine right for “Real Americans” to snatch and hoard everything they want and it is the demand that everyone else deal with it without complaint or recourse. Trump didn’t invent this worldview, but he does inhabit it more honestly and hilariously than any of the self-important debate club prigs like Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley. He succeeded in coopting the GOP by hammering away at the text instead of dutifully nuancing the subtext.
Maybe the phantasm here lies in a group of people who claim to love America but hate all the Americans and aspects of American culture that undermine their nostalgic herrenvolk Leave it to Beaver idyll; they say fuck your feelings but are desperate for liberals to give them attention and approval; they mock SJWs for sharing their same narc instinct of policing manners and reinforcing boundaries of behavior. Their sense of entitlement, emboldened and enabled by their God Emperor, justifies the dissonance between their actions and beliefs. Trump has long seen himself as the main character of American life, and his acolytes just want to be an important supporting character in his broader seething story.
Whatever the case, the density of Trump’s crudity and the planetary scale of his vanity has pulled a wobbling system entirely out of alignment. It is axiomatic that Trump doesn’t give a shit about anything beyond whatever gets and keeps him on television. If his presidency has any ideology beyond the expression of his various lifelong bigotries and the pursuit of his personal feuds, it is the perpetuating and justifying the centrality of one man. Joe Biden spent this recent State of the Union defending his accomplishments and many liberals will keep sounding the fire alarm about the imminent threats to American democracy and January 6, but this election isn’t about all that. The election also won’t be about the many unresolved issues stemming from unchecked capitalism hollowing out public life, many of which continue to degrade women and people of color and working Americans. Instead, the defining question in this upcoming election will be nothing more complex than Do you love or hate Donald Trump?
But how do you really feel? hahaa
I'm going to look through the long lens for a moment and say this race (between two bobble heads) is nothing more than a place holder for when the military takes over and rounds up the deep-state criminals (I know there's that word again). Or we can for once in our sorry lives elect an "oh so scary" third party candidate aka RFK Jr. and upend the whole damn apparatus.
I got far too much out of that Big Little Liars line. Quality insight all around. It’s hard to process a chapter in history written in webdings.