The banality of paranoia
A Harper's piece blames Trumpism on a collapse of coherent political narratives. This is somewhat true, but incoherent paranoia is hardly the sole province of conservatives.
Last month, Harper’s ran an unexpectedly sympathetic profile of Jacob Angeli-Chansley—AKA the “QAnon shaman” who was recently released from prison after storming the Capitol. The author, Frederick Kaufman, found that Angeli-Chansley wasn’t motivated by the sort of desires center-left media usually attributes to Trump supporters. He is, rather, a certified paranoiac whose mental unwellness manifests as a synthesis of conservative talking points and conspiracy-minded mysticism:
Jacob believes that people like me are the tools of the Mockingbird operation, of the deep state, international bankers, pharmaceutical cartels, and corporate monarchies that control the world. People like me believe in medicines that are addictive drugs, in food that is poison, in environmentalism that is ecocide, in education that is ignorance, in money that is debt, in objective science that is not objective.
Some quick notes, here: money is indeed debt, and scientific consensuses are indeed constructed through discoursal negotiations. These beliefs may not be mainstream, but they were both heavily associated with left-wing thinkers until very recently. Alfred Mitchell-Innes, John Maynard Keynes, Bruno Latour, and Michel Foucault might not have been full-on commies, but few would have reasonably regarded them as right wing—especially in comparison with contemporary American conservatism.
And, uhh, isn’t a suspicion toward corporations and financial institutions kind of the foundation of left-wing American thought? Isn’t it rather anti-free market to criticize the fact that our food manufacturers are allowed to feed us chemicals that have been banned in most other first-world countries? Before COVID, vaccine skeptics were just as likely to be found peddling their wares in hippy dippy farmers markets as they were to explain their medical trepidations as the result of Obama being from Kenya or whatever.
I could keep going.
In the pre-Trump days (and exempting maybe the environmentalism claim), none of the paranoid beliefs listed in this introduction to Mr. Angeli-Chansley would have qualified a person as a conservative. They certainly would have no conceptual association with something as extreme as fascism. They weren’t the sort of thing you’d hear covered on NPR or coming from the mouth of an establishment Democrat, but they would not have raised any eyebrows had they been uttered at and Occupy rally, or within the walls of a humanities graduate seminar.
What the hell happened?
Kaufman pins blame on the manner in which masculinity in understood within those corners of discourse where it is not outright disdained. Male consciousness raising was hippy dippy-ish in the late 20th century, but has now taken on a more reactionary tone:
Jacob, who was born in 1987, came of age in the wake of Robert Bly’s Iron John, a book published in 1990 about modern man’s alienation from heroic male archetypes that spent sixty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a seminal work of the mythopoetic men’s movement. Like Jacob, Bly served in the Navy. Like Jacob, Bly’s father was an alcoholic. Like Jacob, Bly was interested in Old Norse mythology—in particular, the epic tales of the principal Norse god Odin, who, in order to gain mystical knowledge, subjected himself to nine days and nights of torture. He lanced himself with a spear and hung upside down from Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree that connects the nine realms of the universe, a tattoo of which lies over Jacob’s heart.
In the era of Iron John, “manosphere” membership required bongos, sweat lodges, hugging, weeping, and throwing spears at boars. Today, it’s about getting buff, buying liver-enzyme pills online, and keeping a paleo diet. Still, Bly resonates throughout the language and philosophy of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Tony Robbins, Andrew Tate, Josh Hawley, and other prophets of the modern men’s-rights movement.
The men listed here do not form a coherent ideological coalition. Hawley is standard-issue Republican save for a tiny bit of a (mostly insincere) civil liberties streak. Rogan is unwoke and has committed the crime of providing a platform to cancelled men, but the majority of his politics fall solidly to the left of, say, Barack Obama. Peterson is an academic charlatan, but, again, the bulk of his politics are no more conservative than those of the Clintons, and I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s a Men’s Rights Advocate so much as he expresses antipathy toward the routinized demonization of young men. Andrew Tate is a cultish sex trafficker who has never had a single unique or interesting thought—basically like if the NXIVM people marketed themselves as TikTok meatheads, rather than as supersmart Ted Talkers. His reprehensibility stems much more from this actions than from his politics.
Kaufman doesn’t outright criticize the Shaman so much as he trusts his reader to marvel at the contradictions of his worldview. That’s fair, I suppose, but also severely one-sided. These contradictions are found in equal measure among today’s left.
The woo of the late 20th century wasn’t just aesthetically more liberal. Much of it stemmed directly from left wing social movements. The late 90’s ascendance of Wicca and other forms of spiritualism were very much an outgrowth of feminism. “Conspiracy theories” on topics as wide-ranging as the Kennedy Assassinations and the true motivations for the Iraq war were foundational to left analysis of domestic and foreign policy. From the 90s to the early 2010’s, the “schizoanalysis” of Deleuze and Guattari was probably the most-discussed analytical frame within left-leaning humanities departments, premised on the notion that coherence leads inevitably to fascist terror. Even today, it’s customary for linear thinking and empiricism to be denounced as manifestations of oppressive whiteness, with astrology and tarot readings being proffered as equally valid methods for adjudicating truth and morality.
It is flat-out dishonest to suggest that only fringe conservatives have fallen off the deep end and abandoned the shared ways of knowing that allow modern societies to function. Conservatives are late to the party, and their embrace of incoherence is more aesthetically displeasing, but these tendencies have become nearly universal among those who are connected to political discourse, regardless of their partisan affiliations.
If nothing else, the Trump movement demonstrated that American politics are empty and fake. Contemporary left-liberal analysis is premised on adducing secret ideological motivations from cultural affinities, and this cannot be productively grafted on to a post-Trump America. Everyone is too disaffected to speak coherently. Everyone knows that the official lines on nearly every issue should not be trusted and that our social systems are being held together by a paper-thin strand of scotch tape.
Trump supporters honest-to-god thought they found a way out. If we just put a different breed of asshole into the halls of power, we could bring about substantial change, stop the bleeding before total collapse arrives. That didn’t work, and it couldn’t work, because the function of our government is utterly unaccountable to the mechanisms of electoral politics. We cannot save ourselves, and no one is coming to save us.
Having suffered the failure of their savior and lost the 2020 election, conservatives are now much more distrustful of established systems of power. Liberals, and many leftists, are now absolutely in thrall of such systems. This hasn't resulted in any structural changes, however, because it cannot.
The advent of Trumpism has rendered the work of historical and cultural study incoherent to the point of worthlessness. "The systems that create expertise are inherently racist and sexist and oppressive. Nevertheless, expert narratives must be trusted! The alternative is the orange man!!" Shunted from the mainstream, people who want more plausible (let alone truthful) explanations for how and why the world is what it is have to turn to alternative venues of publication, strange means of adjudicating fact from fiction.
This would all be less frustrating if the left weren't hanging on to vestigial claims along nearly identical lines to those espoused by batshit conservatives. For fuck’s sake, they’re convinced Scientific method is whiteness and that sexual dimorphism is a projection born of colonialism! They want to demonize modernity while demonizing those who reject modernity, and everyone is so blinded by self-certainty they cannot see how much they have in common with those they hate.