i smoked a cigar and all i got is this stupid blog
I've been recovering from a flu I picked up in Florida for the past several days, and thus failed to subject you all to the usual self-promotional rounds. But I have a new piece out in The Baffler on a real diehard in the MAGA world, Jack Posobiec. I read his book Unhumans, which, despite being co-bylined with a professional ghost writer, had the writing chops of a pile of trash bags baking in the New York City heat in July. I tried to do a really deep dive into its intellectual arguments.
What I came away with is identifying some unnerving parallels to the works of a white nationalist author from the 1920s; confusion about why the authors included Plato's Republic in a citation, even though they were clearly drawing from Aristotle's critiques of Plato; and at least several laughs with friends over a pair of anti-Communist authors using Sheila Fitzpatrick as their preferred Soviet historian on multiple occasions. When I started the piece, Trump's return to office was still a "maybe." Today, it's clear where we are. Even though MAGA is on a victory lap, Trump's return has only strengthened my feeling that despite some authors praising the right's current "intellectual vitalism," their case is overstated.
Zachariah Webb
This isn't to say there aren't right-wing intellectuals, including ones worth reading or otherwise. There are. Nor, for that matter, is it to say that there aren't smart people on the right, including ones that are smarter than me. Again, there are.
The Trump world's focus on loyalty and spectacle make it ultimately antithetical to any genuine intellectual project. To the extent that new magazines and publications have gained traction and headway with the right, it's because powerful, monied parties took interest. It's true that arts and culture have been long dependent on monied benefactors with their own self-interests at heart, but a movement that's talking about "loyalty tests" and has defined itself around causing pain to the "libs" is a step further. You can't think, dream, hope, or imagine with "loyalty tests." The only "golden age," as the Trump world has taken to calling whatever chaos awaits us in the next four years, that arises out of a world with "loyalty tests" is a spiritually bankrupt one.
That hasn't stopped Trump from taking over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But to the above point, it's telling that his statements have offered no vision on what the future of the Kennedy Center will look like — just that it "Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth . . . WILL STOP."
Perhaps more to the point, it's hard to see a movement that's so rooted in 2015-16 as a source of "intellectual vitalism" in the first place. There is nothing new about the intellectual milieu surrounding the new Trump administration. The foremost change is that a 25-year-old guy worried about getting fired from his Daily Caller job for following racists on Twitter or for his 4chan habit is now 34-years-old and a mid-career staffer with significantly more access to power in a movement that turns a blind eye to that sort of thing now. The Passage Publishing inaugural weekend ball that media fell head-over-heels for was a swankier version of "Deploraball," a gathering featuring many of the same figures on inauguration weekend in January 2017. (I was denied a press pass back then and ended up having more fun getting drunk at a friend's house party instead.) Some of the main actors have changed, and people like Curtis Yarvin might have more reach. But on the whole, we're living in the remnants of 2016 because someone, somewhere, somehow decided that we should.
When my friend Mike Hayden was out in Washington, D.C., for inauguration, we spent a few hours away from the cold at a cigar bar talking about, among other things, MAGA's cultural ascendency and the need for a robust counterculture to respond. I drank scotch, smoked a cigar, and tried to understand the elation that everyone else downtown seemed to be feeling.
Michael Edison Hayden
For many people in America now, MAGA is the entire culture. It’s not that Trump’s fans don’t have their favorite Netflix shows and sports teams. They obviously do. But if you’re MAGA, everything is ultimately filtered through this vast, seemingly all encompassing “culture war” lens. It colors the way they see music, entertainers, and routine medical care. Trump is now the president not only of the country, but of many people’s minds.
Three weeks into the Trump administration, we're stuck with a mess of executive orders, a president who seems keen on leveling Gaza for a resort, forthcoming talks on the Ukraine-Russia war that will undoubtedly work in Russia's favor, people nonsensically babbling about the John F. Kennedy assassination, and a stock market freak out over tariffs that haven't happened yet. Egg prices haven't dropped. It's chaos, but the "cultural warriors" want that. Who said the "golden age" had to be good for you?
*Does this image work? No. Are you stuck with it? Yes.