Marge Piercy’s 1991 novel He, She, and It isn’t exactly a post-apocalyptic novel; her future world doesn’t end, and doesn’t necessarily seem like it’s about to in the near term. Still, there are a lot of little apocalypses scattered around in it—small scale disasters, of perhaps mildly more intensity than those you can see anytime you turn on the news. The greenhouse effect has pushed temperatures up worldwide; the sky is no longer blue, and going out into daylight without protective gear is potentially fatal. Plagues, famine, and infertility caused by toxic waste and radiation has reduced the earth’s population by half. Most dramatically, a nuclear terrorist attack and subsequent war utterly destroyed Israel and most of the Middle East.

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In a post on The Hooded Utilitarian, Jimmy Johnson pointed out that most mainstream apocalyptic visions ignore the existence of indigenous people, and, therefore, the existence of prior apocalypses. From the perspective of Native Americans, the European invasion looks a lot like the end of the world—and not less so because that end, with all its violence and humiliations, has been grinding on for 500 years and counting. Fury Road, The Walking Dead, Y: The Last Man, and other big apocalyptic narratives often reference or nod to this colonial past—The War of the Worlds explicitly mentions England’s colonial adventures, for example. But indigenous peoples, or for that matter the oppression of marginalized peoples, is mostly ignored, erased by the giant whomp of one-size-fits-all-world’s-end. Everyone on earth is flattened in the same way; the earth becomes one, united in despair and disarray by an end that doesn’t play favorites, and so is unable to assimilate all those ends that did.

He and She and It‘s more heterogeneous apocalypse has a little more give. Most of the main characters are Jewish, and a parallel narrative links the city of Tikva, under siege from multinational corporations in the future, to the violence directed at Jewish ghettos in Europe in the past of the 1600s.

Less central to the story, but significant, is the fate of Israel itself. Though everyone assumes that the nation was utterly destroyed, it turns out a small group of people still live there. Nili, an assassin from the new Israel, explains:

We are a joint community of the descendants of Israeli and Palestinian women who survived. We each keep our religion, observe each other’s holidays and fast days .We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land. Soon we will begin rebuilding Yerushalaim.

In his essay, Johnson suggested that an apocalypse for the colonizers might look like salvation for the colonized. That seems to be exactly what Piercy has imagined. The old order of occupied and occupier was wiped from the earth, and in its place there is, not a two state solution, but a single feminist utopia, obliterating the distinctions between Jews and Muslims, and obliterating too the hoary trope of indigenous misogyny. The mistreated women in their burqas who the west supposedly must save? They’re cloning themselves without men now in vats, and coming back, perhaps, to save you. More, many of the surviving Jews are dark-skinned, since, as Malkah, a Jewish grandmother and cyberneticist explains “the black Jews from Ethiopia had a higher survival rate in the catastrophe than any other group. They remembered how to manage in utter disaster.”

Apocalypses are often about appropriation of indigenous experiences; the Martians invading England as England invaded America, the totalitarian nightmare of 1984, built, surely, from Orwell’s experiences being the totalitarian police in Burma. He and She and It, though, doesn’t appropriate other people’s experiences. Instead, it picks up the Jewish history of diaspora and oppression,and tries to imagine a future that honors that history rather than Israel’s current, ongoing colonial infliction of apocalypse.

Honoring the history of oppression means you have to remember the history as oppressor, too, though. Malkah talks about reading “a poem by Mara Shliemann that everybody but the Orthodox use these days, about the heritage we share now of having had a nation in our name as stupid and as violent as other nations: a lament for a lost chance, a botched redemption.” If the Holocaust was an apocalypse, echoing the pogroms in Prague, the Israeli occupation is another. Both are part of Jewish history now, the novel says, no matter what disaster befalls. And that means that any disaster for Jews has to be looked at in at least two ways, and any utopia does as well.

Malkeh journeys to Israel at the end of the novel in the hopes of having her sight restored; the Jewish/Palestinian Israel is behind the rest of the world in some things, but it has made great advancements in artificial enhancements, including eyes. After the apocalypse, we may see better what difference offers. One apocalypse is a disaster, but if you’ve got enough of them, some may be opportunities. As Karmia, a woman who may be Jewish or may be Palestinian, tells Malkeh, “If we can love a date palm or a puppy or a cyborg, perhaps we can love each other better also.”

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This first ran on the Hooded Utilitarian.

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Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel is generally viewed in the US as something like a secular saint. His memoir Night, is regularly assigned in high schools, and his personal courage and unwavering moral commitment to human rights in the face of unimaginable atrocity are cited as exemplars of (in the words of the Nobel committee) “peace, atonement, and dignity.” He is celebrated, not least, for his criticism of the US—criticism which seems to hold everyone, friend and foe, to the same moral standard.

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Yet, many of Wiesel’s moral choices were themselves compromised—not least in his criticism and questioning of the US. In Our American Israel, Amy Kaplan’s study of the American/Israel relationship, she focuses on one of Wiesel’s most famous indictments of America—a speech he gave at the opening of the US Holocaust Museum in 1993. Standing on the same stage as President Bill Clinton, Wiesel used the opportunity to excoriate the US for failing to do more to prevent the Holocaust.

“Why weren’t the railways leading to [Auschwitz-]Birkenau bombed by Allied bombers?” he asked. “As long as I live I will not understand that. And why was there no public outcry of indignation and outrage?”

Kaplan adds that the Holocaust Museum itself enshrined this question and this outrage. It includes a letter from Secretary of War John J. McCoy refusing a request to bomb Auschwitz. The caption says,

“although bombing Auschwitz would have killed many prisoners, it would also have halted the operation of the gas chambers and, ultimately, saved the lives of many more.”

Wiesel and the museum together appear to be bravely calling the US to account for its complicity in atrocity and fascism. This is an iconic and welcome example of America grappling honestly with its past and its failures in order to recommit itself to the fight for democracy and justice. Never again will we fail to bomb when bombing could right a wrong.

That seems inspirational. Unfortunately, it is not. The indictment of America represented by Wiesel is bad history and bad politics—not least because it suggests that bombing is always the answer, and papers over failures that are much logistically simpler to address, but much less politically popular, than war.

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Bombing the railways was not an answer

The historical debate about the plausibility of bombing railways or camps is contentious. But scholar Peter Novick in his 1999 The Holocaust in American Life, makes a vigorous case that Wiesel was talking nonsense. “The question of bombing the rail lines can be dismissed immediately,” he says.

“Massive experience had taught the Allies that bombing rail lines was hardly ever effective: the few hits scored could be quickly repaired. Railways might be bombed in support of tactical operations—to prevent the enemy from moving troops and materiel for several hours, perhaps a day or two. Beyond that, the method was nearly useless.”

Bombing the camps, and specifically the machinery of death, was similarly difficult. Despite Allied propaganda to the contrary, it was, Novick says, “often hard for Allied pilots to reliably hit anything smaller than a city.” Any bombing of the camps would probably have killed large numbers of inmates. Some survivors have said they would have welcomed death if the camps were destroyed. Others, though, have pointed out that by Fall 1944, when the US could reasonably have conducted such raids, people in the camps knew the war was moving towards a conclusion, and did in fact hope to survive it.

Novick also points out that destroying Auschwitz, or other camps, wouldn’t have necessarily stopped the killings. The Germans had crematoria that the Allies had not located, in the first place. In the second, the Nazis had earlier in the war killed Jews simply by shooting them. If Nazis didn’t have gas chambers, there was no lack of other efficient methods of murder.

The moral indictment of the US in this context, then, requires (a) the belief that the US had the capacity to accurately bomb the camps, (b) the belief that if the camps were bombed, the Germans wouldn’t be able to kill people as rapidly. Both of these beliefs are extremely tendentious. Maybe the US should have tried anyway. But again, there was a real chance of killing more people than were saved. Beyond that, the resources for a dubious bombing campaign could be used elsewhere to destroy military targets and bring the war to a quicker end, which was the only sure way to end the killing..

The focus on bombing the camps is especially wrong-headed because it distracts from the one way in which the US could have saved Jewish people—namely by offering them asylum, both during and after the war.

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Turning Jews away to die

As the Holocaust ramped up, Jewish refugees attempted to flee Germany for other countries. That included the US. America could have saved tens of thousands of lives at least. But instead Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration remorselessly and consistently turned Jews away to die.

America has a range of reasons for refusing refugees. FDR thought that accepting Jews would undermine the US patina of neutrality. His administration was also afraid that German spies might sneak in among the refugees.

But the bottom line was that America during the 30s and 40s was both antisemitic and xenophobic. Most Americans thought Jewish people were dirty and uncivilized and maybe associated with Communism; they feared that they would fail to assimilate to American values, would become criminals, would be a drain on the public purse. The same anti-immigrant nativism which has led Trump to refuse asylum to all refugees who aren’t white Nazis was in effect during World War II. As a result thousands and thousands of Jews who could have been saved died in the camps.

Nor did the antisemitic antipathy to refugees end with the war. Even as knowledge of Nazi antisemitic atrocities spread across the globe, Americans continued to resist Jewish immigration. After the end of the conflict, some 250,000 Jewish refugees landed in Displaced Persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy, fleeing from devastated communities and from ongoing antisemitism in the former Nazi occupied territory.

Eventually most of these refugees were received in Israel. This was not because the US and Britain were enthusiastic about the idea of a Jewish state—they generally were not at that point. Rather, it was because the British and US populace was wildly antisemitic and rejected any effort to welcome Jewish people. As Kaplan writes:

Public sympathy for the DPs did not translate into welcoming them to the shores of America. When a Gallup Poll conducted in December 1945 asked whether more persons from Europe should be permitted into the country than before the war, only 5 percent agreed. In reaction to a 1947 congressional bill proposing to admit four hundred thousand DPs into the United States over four years, citizens bombarded their representatives with demands to keep out the “riffraff” and “scum of Southern and Eastern Europe.” In favor of the bill, Eleanor Roosevelt warned that “every representative in Congress” told her that “the general feeling is that they wish to stop all immigration.” In letters and congressional hearings, the threat of foreigners to “our way of life” merged with fears of communist infiltration. There was a widespread belief that most of the DPs were Jews, and that most of these Jews were communists. (my emphasis)

The idea that Jews and Communists were interchangeable was, of course, a staple of Nazi propaganda, elaborated obsessively and endlessly in Mein Kampf. It served as a major justification for the Holocaust. Americans had just defeated the Nazis, and in theory deplored their genocide of Jews. But when push came to shove, they didn’t want to live near Jews either, and for the same prejudiced, paranoid, bigoted reasons as the Nazis.

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Why bombs but not immigrants

The case for American complicity for failing to bomb Auschwitz is weak and tenuous. The case for American complicity for failing to admit refugees is clear and iron clad. Why, then, did Wiesel focus on the first rather than the second.

I think Wiesel focused on the first rather than the second because he was a right wing Zionist.

Wiesel’s Zionist politics are well known, and well-documented in Kaplan’s book. She doesn’t directly tease out the implications for his Holocaust Museum speech, but I don’t think the links are too obscure.

Zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish) have long argued that the way to prevent another Holocaust is an ethnonationalist Jewish state with a strong, overpowering military. When Wiesel criticizes the US for failing to bomb Auschwitz, he is arguing that force of arms wielded with righteous intent can prevent Jewish genocide. America did not have the will to wield force; Israel will. Therefore the US has a moral obligation to provide Israel with the arms and firepower to prevent Jewish slaughter. QED.

You’d think that the refugee crisis would have a similar valence; if no one will take in refugees, then Israel must exist so it can provide safety. But from a Zionist perspective, there are problems with making this argument. First of all, Zionists did not want America or Britain to take in Jewish refugees after the war. They wanted Jewish refugees to go to Palestine, where they could help build Jewish numbers in order to gain power over Arab people.

More, while Israel took in Jewish refugees, it also exiled and refused to readmit some 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba. A principled demand that all nations accept all refugees, no matter their ethnicity, is a dicey argument for a Zionist to make.

Zionists can unabashedly support the use of force to protect Jewish people. But an ethnonationalist state is going to have a lot or reservations about an argument for unrestricted admission of refugees no matter their ethnicity. Zionism is based on the idea of strict control of borders and on the belief that ethnicity should determine where you live. Wiesel is happy to criticize the US for not dropping enough bombs. He is less willing to criticize the US for an ethnonationalist border policy.

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Never again

Elie Wiesel often insisted that “never again” was a moral call to prevent a repetition of the Holocaust. But Kaplan points out that the very phrase “never again” in reference to the Holocaust was coined by right-wing Jewish fascist asshole Meir Kahane, who famously advocated ethnic cleansing and whose Israeli political party was banned for being “Nazi-like.”

“Never again” can be deployed in the name of a wide range of policies. One can say, for example, “never again will we fail to bomb expeditiously.” Or one can say, “never again will we refuse to open our country to refugees.” The first is I’d argue justly deployed as an argument to aid Ukraine, but has also been an attractive excuse for illegal attacks on a range of countries, from Iraq to Iran. The second has never been seriously proposed by any American administration. Who can say which is more congenial to power, or which is the better way to save lives?

The Holocaust, Kaplan argues, has become a central event in American history; it is seen as a guarantor of American virtue (we fought on the right side!) and as an iconic moment of American guilt which calls us to be better (we were complicit…never again!) It can be used to praise America or critique America.

But, unfortunately, both the praise and the critique can be used, and have been used, for dubious ends—not least because the lesson of the Holocaust in the hands of Wiesel and the American presidents he cultivated so often seems to be that America can only be more moral by being more martial. The possibility that America might be more moral by being more welcoming, or by confronting its own racism rather than someone else’s, is rarely bruited. But if we want to be less antisemitic and less fascist, the best start, contra Elie Wiesel, is not finding someone to bomb. It’s letting in some huddled masses yearning to breathe free—whether they’re Haitian, Somali, or Jewish.

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“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” former President Barack Obama joked on the campaign stump, giving a much-deserved backhand to Trump’s tacky-gold-shit-on-the-walls approach to redecorating the Oval Office.

It’s a solid line, and it hit a nerve. Republicans were outraged—outraged!—that Barack Obama would dare to criticize…the Cheesecake Factory?

Yes, apparently, the GOP loves the Cheesecake Factory and they refuse to see its name besmirched. CNN host and slime-ridden goosestepper Scott Jennings declared that the Cheesecake factory was beloved by normal salt-of-the-earth Americans and that Obama was “Undefeated at condescending to regular folks.” Some conservative dodo named Matt Whitlock burbled similar populist boilerplate. “Classic Obama snobbery.” he fulminated. “Cheesecake Factory is a great option for people who can’t afford a private chef at their Martha’s Vineyard estate.”

It’s possible I am inordinately skeptical, but I somehow doubt that last week Scott Jennings and Matt Whitlock believed in their hearts and nether parts that the Cheesecake Factory was a central symbol of American working-class authenticity.

And in fact Trump—who is always slow to get the memo—didn’t defend the Cheesecake Factory from Obama’s elitism. On the contrary, he whined about how the White House is a “symbol of America” and that he needed to maintain it properly by pasting tacky gold shit all over it. Obama, he said, was stupid and didn’t understand cleanliness.

He’s not a smart guy…he’s not smart at all….Guys like Obama, he doesn’t see dirt. He doesn’t see filth…For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory that just shows why you were a lousy president!

So, Scott Jennings loves the Cheesecake Factory and thinks Obama is a snobby elitist. Trump sneers at the Cheesecake Factory and thinks Obama is dirty scum. These seem like contradictory responses. Shouldn’t there be some dissonance there, or at least some shuffling to try to get the messaging coordinated?

But no coordination is needed. Trump and Jennings are really saying the same thing; it’s just that Jennings is slightly oilier and Trump is slightly more rabid. They are both indulging in what scholar Koritha Mitchell refers to as “know-your-place aggression.” Jennings calls Obama an elitist; Trump calls him dirty riff-raff. They both mean that Obama’s true place is as a subordinate, and he dare not, therefore, criticize the décor of the big house.

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Elites are those who do not know their place.

Mitchell explains that know-your-place aggression constitutes

The flexible, dynamic array of forces that answer the achievements of marginalized groups such that their success brings aggression as often as praise. Any progress by those who are not straight, white, and male is answered by a backlash of violence—both literal and symbolic, both physical and discursive—that essentially says, know your place!

It’s easy to see know-your-place aggression in Trump’s foam-flecked response. He says, flat out, that Obama is too stupid and dirty to understand beauty or patriotism. Black people are low, disgusting, uncultured, unintelligent. They cannot criticize the actions of elevated white people like Trump, because they are naturally debased and inferior.

MAGA is powered by resentment that a Black man dared to inhabit the White House; Trump’s spluttering rage at being called out as a shit interior decorator as well as a shit president and shit human being is also spluttering rage that a Black man is doing the call out, and more that the Black man in question was President. That’s straightforward know-your-place aggression; Obama’s success triggers, not admiration or respect, but anger, bullying, and violence.

Jennings and Whitlock’s version of know-your-place aggression is slightly more distanced. They accuse Obama of being a snob and of looking down on everyday Americans. This was, of course, a common right-wing attack on Obama—and is in general a common attack on Jews, queer people, and for that matter on Democrats, who are associated with marginalized people. All are, supposedly, elite snobs who look down on the authentic working-class Americans who live in the real America of manly factories, manly diners, and, apparently, manly Cheesecake Factories.

Mainstream commentators take these sort of accusations seriously, or at least don’t connect them immediately to racism or know-your-place aggression. But the mechanics behind them are much the same as Trump claiming Obama is filthy. Whitlock says Obama is a snob not because Obama actually insults poor people or passes policies to hurt working class people. He calls Obama a snob because Obama is a successful leader, and any Black person who is a successful leader is presumptuous and getting above themselves. Black people are supposed to be subordinate; if they are not they are elitists, because they dare to have any status at all.

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Elites vs. capitalist pigs

This rhetorical and ideological trick is everywhere. J.K. Rowling, a billionaire who has waged an endless campaign to drive trans people from public life, accuses trans people of being “elitist”—by which she means that trans people dare to exist and ask to be treated humanely, when by rights they should be subordinate, silent, and ideally erased. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, claims that Ukraine’s leaders are “elites”—by which he means that they dare presume to continue to defend their country, rather than kowtowing to Musk’s fascist allies in Russia as they should. College students are always sneering elites because young people are supposed to know their place; the powerful donors ordering the students be arrested or expelled, on the other hand, are the salt of the earth, because old white guys holding power is natural, normal, and righteous.

The (not very) subtext is always that certain people who should be subordinate are lording it over their betters. This is why the term populist right loves to talk about “elites” and is much less interested in talking about rich people, or billionaires, or capitalist pigs—the people who actually control the country and who actually have outsized power. But (virtually) all those billionaires are straight white guys like Trump and Musk, whose position at the top of the world is divinely ordained.

The accusation of elitism, then, is not generally about class or wealth. Rather it is an exercise in know-your-place aggression—a way to signal to bigots that the wrong people over there have dared to succeed, or speak, or exist. An elitist is someone who is occupying the place rightfully held by powerful white men, or who threatens to challenge the hegemony of powerful white men. That’s why “elitist” is so often used to target people who are seen as challenging or integrating traditional hierarchies. It’s why Obama can be attacked simultaneously for being too debased and too snooty to understand Trump’s aesthetic. Those seemingly opposite accusations are the same accusation—you don’t know your place.

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Don’t believe the populist hype

The Nazis called themselves socialists because they hoped to co-opt left movements. Scott Jennings and Elon Musk and their ilk use the term “elitists” for similar reasons; calling your enemies elitists sounds like you are launching some kind of left critique of power. Sometimes you can fool the media. Sometimes you can fool leftists who, for instance, believe the Democratic party is too much in hock to big donors.

The Democrat party does do much too much kowtowing to big donors. But the GOP does even more. If anyone singles out the Democrats for being too conciliatory to the rich but fails to note that the GOP is all in on grotesque corruption for billionaires, then probably what really irritates them about Democrats is not the kowtowing to the rich, but the fact that Democrats (however ambivalently) are the party of the first Black president, and of Black and LGBT and women voters in general. Democrats are “elitist” because they are the venue for political action by the marginalized, and the marginalized are presumptuous when they take political action of any sort.

Personally, I’d like to see the term “elitist” excised from the vocabulary of people of good will. If you want to attack billionaires and capitalist pigs, call them “billionaires and capitalist pigs.” But at the very least, we should all pay attention to who uses “elitist” and why.

Because very often, people who use “elitist” don’t use it to mean, “we should all be equal and eat together at the Cheesecake Factory.” They use it to mean, “certain people should be subordinate to the king of MAGA, and should genuflect to his ugly gold shit.”

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Amy Kaplan’s 2018 book Our American Israel is a penetrating, and depressing, examination of the power of Zionism in the US since World War II. Kaplan explains that over the decades, and in a range of ways, Americans have seen Israel as a reflection of the US, which supposedly embodies core aspects of American identity.

From Leon Uris 1958 novel Exodus, which presented Israelis as bold anticolonial fighters against the British a la patriots in the American revolution; to 90s films like Schindler’s List which framed American support for Israel as a kind of continuation of US virtue in liberating the camps; to The Left Behind series which fuses the US and Israel into the protagonists of God’s apocalyptic end times plan; to post 9/11 propaganda linking America and Israel as embattled allies fighting against Islamic terrorism—America has seen Israel in different ways, but it has always seen it primarily as itself.—

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“We have projected images of American exceptionalism onto our visions of Israel, as exceptionally modern, humane, powerful, and threatened,” Kaplan writes. To be Zionist is to be American, to be American is to be Zionist—which is why American anti-Zionist protestors and speakers are treated as if they are traitors to America itself.

One of the core claims of Kaplan’s book is that the romance of Israel appeals to American exceptionalism—exceptional virtue, exceptional power, and exceptional vulnerability. As she writes.

The belief that America is an “exceptional” nation of moral force and military power underwrote and strengthened its special bond with Israel. The United States would protect and secure Israel, a moral community of both concentration camp survivors and heroic warriors. At the same time, Israel was seen as unique in its own right—a state that is both vulnerable and indomitable, an invincible victim. [emphasis mine]

The concept of “invincible victim” is one that Kaplan returns to often in the book. She identifies it as an ugly dynamic. But she doesn’t quite make the connection that struck me at once—the idea of an “invincible victim” is not unique to Israel. On the contrary, invincible victims are central to the definition of fascist thought.

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America and Israel: invincible victims together

Kaplan argues that the idea of Israel as an invincible victim first took hold during the Six Day War in 1967. After its preemptive, devastating attack on Syria, Egypt ,and Jordan, Kaplan says. “Israel came to appear both vulnerable and invincible at the same time, at risk of destruction yet militarily indomitable.” The Arab states, in contrast, were viewed as an existential threat to Israel and yet as unable to contend with its high-tech military superiority.

Kaplan points out that the idea that Israel faced annihilation in the Six Day War was largely “retrospective.” During the build-up to the war, few commentators believed that the Arab nations could seriously threaten Israel’s existence; most analysts and reporting suggested instead that Israel’s superior military would in fact win in a conflict. It was only after Israel’s victory that outlets declared it had faced extermination and managed a miraculous victory.

The view that Israel was always under terrible threat became more and more entrenched in American Zionism over the years. Kaplan points out that only after Carter did American presidents regularly bring up the Holocaust as a reason to support Israel. That’s because it was only in the 80s and 90s that the US began to view the Holocaust as central to its own story of virtue and righteousness. As Holocaust memory became more important, the Holocaust became seen as the ever-present alternative to Israel—a transhistorical truth and the only possibility for Jewish people other than an ethnonationalist Jewish enclave. Or as Kaplan puts it, “Seeing Israel as the legacy of the Holocaust contributed to the sense of its vulnerability as a perpetual victim of Arab aggression.”

This appeal of Israel as invincible victim was heightened further after 2001, when 9/11 led to many comparisons between America’s supposedly besieged state of vulnerability to terror and Israel’s besieged state of vulnerability. Israel’s imagined extermination becomes the United States’ imagined extermination (not least in the millenarian fever dreams of the Christian right.) Israel’s indomitable and inevitably victorious fight against overwhelming odds becomes America’s indomitable and inevitably victorious fight against overwhelming odds.

The final, nightmarish upshot of this joint Israeli/US paranoid fantasy of vulnerability and vaunting fantasy of power is the Iran war. Trump and Netanyahu insisted that Iran’s nuclear program was likely to lead to the destruction of Israel, the US, and the world. They also insisted that US and Israeli power was unstoppable, and that, without allies or much explanation, they could immediately bring Iran to heal.

Of course, the Iranian threat was overstated, as were Israel and US power, and the result has been a pointless, protracted war which the US and Israel have lost even if they refuse to admit it.

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Invincible victims of fascism

It’s not surprising that fantasizing about yourself as invincible victims, detached as it must be from reality, inevitably leads to poor outcomes on the international stage. Nor is it surprising that it leads to expansionist and endless foreign war—especially when you recognize that the trope of invincible victims is core to fascist ideology.

Umberto Eco provided the most famous description of the role of invincible victims in fascism. In his essay “Eternal Fascism” he explained:

The followers [of fascism] must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.

When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

Scholar Robert O. Paxton doesn’t put it quite so succinctly, but he too emphasizes that fascism involves seemingly contradictory fantasies of weakness and power. He writes that fascism is, “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity.” In other words, fascists imagine themselves as weak victims and then imagine themselves overcoming that victimhood through unity and power, leading to orgies of “redemptive violence” directed at both internal and external enemies.

The American vision of Israel as “invincible victim”, then, is a kind of surrogate, vicarious fantasy of fascism. By identifying with Israel, American Zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish) can see themselves as humiliated and in danger of existential extermination, which in turn justifies massive gouts of redemptive, apocalyptic violence. Israel functions as a screen much like the film Birth of a Nation, in which the rape of (weak, vulnerable) white women justifies and brings forth the cleansing, irresistible white wave of the Klan.

The fantasized Neo-Confederate temporal past is marshaled against different groups, and in different ways than the fantasized Israeli spatial other. One led to lynchings and anti-Black pogroms; the other motivates violent reprisals against pro Palestinian protestors, support for genocide in Gaza, and bombing school-children in Iran. One in the American context mainly activates domestic policy; the other foreign policy. And so forth. These differences are important.

But the similarities are important as well, not least in a political landscape where many people still believe that Zionism can be consistent with a liberal politics. The very fact that Zionists regularly demand that critics of Israel state that they support Israel’s existence—as if Israel is in imminent danger of disappearing—is itself part of the constructed identity of invincible victim, in which Israel’s eternal vulnerability justifies any excess of violent reprisal: by Israel against Palestinians, by American Zionists against Israel’s critics.

The Zionist obsession with invincible victims also creates familiar pathways of imagining and narrative in which fascist policies and stories are shorn up and normalized. It encourages us not to try to honestly assess our own weaknesses and strengths, but to instead use weakness and strength as rhetorical cudgels in the name of stigmatizing some and justifying others. It builds a rhetoric and a constituency for conspiratorial explanations and extreme violence.

Zionism is far from the only foothold of fascism in the United States. But it is one that has credence among audiences and constituencies which oppose other forms of bigotry and discrimination. As a result, it’s become a particularly corrosive force in our politics. If we want to defeat fascism, we need to understand there are no invincible victims—not in the US, and not in Israel either.

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“And what does Hollow Man give us apart from a gripping genre exercise? Moviegoing as leering and chortling over crushed mice.” Jonathan Rosenbaum

On first glance (not glance?) Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man works more or less the way Jonathan Rosenbaum says. Scientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) figures out a way to make himself invisible, and then uses said invisibility to realize his sadistic rape fantasies while the viewer simultaneously enjoys said fantasies and wags his (it is presumed to be his) finger at them.

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The emblematic moment here is the scene (cut from the theatrical release, but restored on DVD) where Rhona Mitra acts out being raped while the viewer fills in the invisible Sebastian. Shot POV, it’s movie-viewer-as-rapist analogy couldn’t be much clearer. Mitra thrashes and shrieks for nobody but the camera. With the rapist transparent, the point of the exercise becomes all too visible. It’s not Sebastian, but the director who is raping her for our elucidation and enjoyment. When the camera lingers on her confused whimpering form following the rape, the answer to her unstated question, “Who?” is obviously supposed to be “Us.”

So Hollow Man is all about implicating the viewer, as the-lack-that-is-not-there provides the excuse for stripping Elizabeth Shue, for playing with Kim Dickens’ nipple, for bloodily killing a mouse, a dog, and assorted humans. The hollow man is the absent body hollowed out of everything except desire; the full-body-castrati who has exchanged the penis for the phallus/power. The “phase shift” the scientists all gobbledygook about is not just a transformation from seen to un; it’s a move across the plane of the screen — a transformation from movie actor to movie watcher.

All of which is to say that the metaphor is clever. Unfortunately, clever only takes you so far. Hollow Man is willing to show the transparent voyeurism of its pulp narrative — but it never actually questions that narrative itself. As a result, all the “implicating the viewer” seems more like hand-waving than actual moral commitment — just a way for Verhoeven and his viewers to have their genre cake while feeling smugly self-aware of it.

The main problem is that, while the movie’s visuals and set pieces raise questions about viewer investment, the narrative itself is much more conventional. In particular, Sebastian is a really predictable power-crazed mad scientist. Even before his transformation, he’s an egocentric leering bastard who refers to himself as God and leches after his neighbor and his ex. Turning invisible doesn’t change him so much as it allows him to release his inner megalomaniac. His final shift to unstoppable insane slasher villain is unbelievable only because unstoppable insane slasher villains aren’t believable. There’s nothing in his character that would make you doubt it.

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The point here is that while viewers may occasionally have a stake in Sebastian’s voyeurism, they never have a stake in Sebastian himself. Rape fantasies are not actually rape. One of the differences is that lots of people have rape fantasies while only rapists commit rape. That’s certainly what we tell ourselves, anyway, and Hollow Man is happy to go along, providing lots of entertaining voyeurism for the fans while gruesomely punishing the creepy rapist who, we are assured, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Jonathan Rosenbaum thinks the film dings the viewer for “leering and chortling” — but he rather passes over the fact that the most cathartic violence in the film is directed not against mice, but against Sebastian himself, who is lit on fire as Elizabeth Shue triumphantly tells him he’s not God.

In contrast, consider something like John Carpenter’s Christine. In that film, we initially pity and identify with Arnie Cunningham, the nerdy protagonist. Because we like Arnie, we want him to succeed — to get his act together, get the girl, and get revenge on his enemies. True to our wishes, the film supplies him with all he wants, with the caveat that he simultaneously turns into a monster. Our narrative investment and desires make Arnie what he is, which raises questions about what our narrative investments and desires make of us.

There are other films that work this way too — Cronenberg’s The Fly, for example, where the likable Jeff Goldblum becomes a subhuman insect. But Hollow Man takes a much easier route. Sebastian is never the vulnerable kid or quirky nerdy scientist whose striving is our striving; we never see him as weak and hope for him to get strong. He’s always already the evil daddy-thing; the smug sadistic overlord we want to destroy. And destroying him is just what we get to do, cheering Elizabeth Shue on as she outsmarts and then satisfyingly slaughters him. His death is a straightforward triumph, untrammeled by any considerations of his possible humanity. In Hollow Man, when you look at the bad guy, you don’t see yourself.

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This first ran on the Hooded Utilitarian.

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Here’s what I published this week.

Politics

The ugly rise and ugly but amusing fall of Katie Zacharia. (Public Notice)

Bigotry is a GOP strategy and a GOP goal. (EIH)

Trump sees the patriarchy in Jon Husted’s ass. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Class, race, and Jewishness in Dirty Dancing. (EIH)

Wuthering Heighs: House of the Damned is another terrible Bronte adaptation. (Splice Today)

Total Recall as antifascist/fascist propaganda. (EIH)

Who is more manly, Superman or Spider-Man? (EIH)

Poetry

Short poems by me. (Five Fleas)

Dream
of an eye in an eye
in a pocket. Reach in
and where did it go?

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you read books to find
more books to read
the goal is to never catch up

From the archive

Track of the week

Since I watched Dirty Dancing this week… (remember if you want to get past the paywall there’s a sale today!)

Read more

Of Paul Verhoeven’s three classic big-budget sci-fi features, Total Recall (1990) is the least concerned with fascism. Robocop (1987) is about a crime riddled future and the supercop who cleanses it; Starship Troopers (1997) is about a militaristic human race which engages in destructive space battle with frightened and doomed alien bugs. In both films, Verhoeven puts you on the side of the authoritarians crushing the resistance. He sneeringly, or winkingly, makes you the fascist.—

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Total Recall seems, initially, to be much less tricky. The hero in this case, Douglas Qaid, played with surprisingly convincing naivete by Arnold Schwarzenegger, isn’t a fascist. He’s a construction worker who fights for the rights of marginalized mutants and sex workers on Mars. The bad guy is Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), the authoritarian dictator of Mars, who cheerfully murders in the name of preserving his control over the planet’s extractive industries. You aren’t supposed to identify with the fascist in Total Recall; you’re suppossed to identify with the lone out-gunned dude fighting fascism. “Fascism is bad and good people like you, dear viewer hate it”; that’s the straightforward message of a good percentage of mindless action films, and it’s the message of Total Recall as well.

Or at least, it’s one message. There are other possible ones, if you squint a little. Douglas Quaid, is not, after all, really Douglas Quaid. Quaid thinks he’s a boring grunt who married his blonde, sexy, saccharinely supportive wife Lori (Sharon Stone) eight years back or so. Quaid’s only distinguishing characteristic is an odd fascination with Mars. He goes to futuristic corporation Rekall to have memories of a trip to Mars implanted…but discovers he’s already had his mind messed with. Quaid was formerly a man named Hauser, who worked as security for Cohaagen on Mars. Hauser betrayed Cohaagen and joined the resistance, so Cohaagen had his memory wiped. Quaid needs to get back to Mars, find the resistance, and defeat Cohaagan.

Except it turns out Hauser was always working for Cohaagan, and wiped his own mind to infiltrate and destroy the resistance. So Quaid is not a freedom fighter battling the dictator. He’s an authoritarian asshole, a cheerful Gestapo spy. Quaid’s a fascist without knowing it. Which means that, just as in Robocop and Starship Troopers, in identifying with the Verhoeven protagonist, you become a fascist too.

Total Recall, like all of Verhoeven’s trilogy, is obsessed with its own status as propaganda. Quaid watches advertisements for trips to Mars, staring at giant, wall sized screen which assure viewers that the resistance on Mars is trivial, and excuse Cohaagan’s use of draconian violence against…well, everybody. Media visions of Mars prompt the wide-eyed Quaid to alter his mind. Or, in other words, propaganda causes Quaid to embrace propaganda. He literally enters a dream prepared for him.

That dream is one of violent masculinity. Before Rekall gives him the Mars memories, they ask him what type of woman he prefers; he responds that he wants one who is demure and slutty. Sure enough, his adventure leads him to a sex worker/resistance fighter named Melina (Rachel Ticotin). It also gives him a chance to murder his perfect, carefully-calibrated-to-be-boring wife, Lori. Quaid early on whines to Lori about how he wants to do something purposeful and meaningful with his life; he’s restless and finds his marriage unfulfilling. The miracle of propaganda allows him (and you!) to imagine himself as a man of action, stabbing effete scientists in the head and shooting his blah wife through the temple. Rekall promises that it will let Quaid be someone else, and so he becomes someone else—just as Hollywood films promise their viewers the chance to be someone more muscular, more violent, more viciously, virtuously manly.

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Again, the vicious, virtuous manliness is in the name of anti-fascism—supposedly. But how different are Hauser and Quaid, really? Quaid kills numerous innocent people on his quest; in one particularly memorable sequence he blows a hole through a dome on Mars while trying to get through customs, and a bunch of unwitting travelers get sucked out to die horribly of asphyxiation. Cohaagan promises to brainwash Melina and make her soft and supportive, “like a woman should be,” as a kind of gift to Hauser. But Melina is, in the film, explicitly presented as a gift for Quaid; she’s his dream girl, in part because she’s demure and defers to him. What Hauser wants is what Quaid wants—control, mastery, power.

The point here isn’t that fighting fascism makes you a fascist. The point is that, in Hollywood, dreams of fighting fascism are often uncomfortably couched in fascist idioms of unrestrained violence and vaunting Aryan masculinity. As just one recent example, Captain America: Civil War, presents its blonde protagonist (Chris Evans) with a choice—submit to the one world authority of the UN or go it alone as a battling vigilante. Cap is supposed to stand for freedom and liberty. But standing for freedom and liberty in this case means forswearing the administrative shilly-shallying and democratic process of the international order. The lone hero fighting for justice casually picks up populist right-wing tropes about effete ineffectuality and corruption of democratic norms and institutions. Is that Quaid under the Captain America cowl, or is it Hauser? How can you tell the difference?

“You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory,” a mutant seer tells Quaid. It’s boilerplate Hollywood guru gibberish, and also, in the context of the story, completely untrue, since Quaid is completely different depending on what he remembers. But the pro forma philosophical privileging of action and doing is notably a hallmark of fascist propaganda, which presents the bored, restless volk with dreams of power, energy, motion, and death. When you’re fantasizing about action, you can be made to do anything. The anti-fascist part of Total Recall, then, isn’t the pro-forma anti-authoritarian plot, but uneasiness about the true self, and the crawling suspicion that there might not be one. Quaid doesn’t know what he’s capable of. Fascists rely on the fact that no one does, given the right story.

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This first ran on Splice Today.

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On the campaign trail, Donald Trump has repeatedly praised the rear end and physique of Ohio Senator Jon Husted. Even in North Carolina, he couldn’t stop talking about the glutes he had left away off there in the Midwest. He burbled:

I looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs, and my — I said, “His ass is like, it’s like a pile of muscle.” Then I looked at his legs, and I said, “Man, his feet are big.” Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. It was like a piece of steel. I said, “This guy’s a monster.”

Weeks earlier, in Ohio, Trump insisted, “I’m studying his body. I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it, of course. But it’s never been my thing.” Then he did his ass riff again.

Trump’s blatantly sexual obsession with Husted’s build has led some commentators, pro and anti Trump, to suggest that the president may be homosexual. Jesse Waters of Fox News joked that Trump sounded “a little gay.” Political media advisor Marty Taylor asked, “Is Donald Trump America’s first gay president?”

The answer to that question is “no,” first because James Buchanan was gay, and second because Trump is not. Trump sexualizes other men, and obsesses about their appearance, because he is extremely invested in a eugenic patriarchy which sees masculine fitness as a key attribute of power. His sexual, and more-than-borderline abusive, remarks about Husted are consistent with—not some sort of ironic contradiction to— his administration’s virulent homophobia. Failing to understand that only helps Trump.

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Patriarchy is obsessed with male-male bonds

Because of homophobia and because of the way sexual desire and sexual identity are collapsed in contemporary discourse, any expression of male-male desire, or even affection, is often framed as homosexual (and of course as deviant.) But as pioneering queer scholar Eve Sedgwick argued in her classic Between Men, homosocial desire is in fact part and parcel of a patriarchal heterosexual culture in which powerful bonds between men establish and provide access to power.

Often we separate homosexual and homosocial patriarchal bonds by arguing that the first is sexual and that the second is not. But (as Sedgwick points out) this is too simplistic. As one ugly, obvious example, Jeffrey Epstein and Trump bonded over the pursuit of young women, some of whom were likely children. Patriarchy is cemented by (misogynist, abusive) sexual competition, which means that the bonds between men are suffused with sexual desire.

Another example is Trump’s relationship with Marco Rubio. In the 2016 primary campaign, Trump referred to Rubio as “Little Marco”—mocking his stature, infantilizing him, and also, pretty clearly, implying that his penis was small.

Rubio responded in a debate with a prepared insult riff.

Let me tell you something: Last night in the debate during one of the breaks... [Trump] went backstage, he was having a meltdown. First, he had this little makeup thing applying, like makeup around his mustache, because he had one of those sweat mustaches. Then he asked for a full-length mirror. I don’t know why... Maybe to make sure his pants weren’t wet. I don’t know.”

These comments are clearly meant to feminize Trump (he wears makeup; he is frightened) and to infantilize him (he does not have control of his bowels.) And they also, in part through feminization, sexualize Trump, not least by drawing attention to his genitals.

The fact that Rubio is talking about Trump’s genitals does not mean that Rubio is gay. Rather, it means that Rubio is attempting to sexually humiliate Trump in order to establish dominance, just as Trump called Rubio “Little Marco” in order to sexually humiliate and dominate him. But because we live in a frequently nightmarish and abusive patriarchy, people often do not recognize or draw the distinction between sexual interest and sexual violence, or for that matter between sex and abuse.

Epstein was a friendly competitor; Rubio was a rival; Husted is an ally who Trump sees as a subordinate—and he is not the first male ally/subordinate whose appearance Trump has praised. Trump often boasts that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth looks like a Hollywood military leader from “central casting” prompting Senator Tammy Duckworth to suggest (probably correctly) that Trump only hired Hegseth because “he looks good on TV.” Hegseth, in turn, has been obsessed with the appearance of his troops, banning beards, attacking “fat troops,” mandating testosterone testing —as well as trying to force trans soldiers out of the service.

Male-male relationships in patriarchy are about sexualized competition, sexualized humiliation and dominance, and sexualized policing of appearance to advance some and assert control over others. In patriarchy, sexual potency and privilege are inseparable from authority and power, and so the negotiation of power between men always involves asserting, denigrating, and/or appreciating the relative sexual merits of other men vis-à-vis one’s own. Controlling or humiliating other men is a sign of (sexual) dominance; allying with other (powerful, sexual) men is a sign of status.

This is what is happening with Husted. Trump is fawning over Husted’s ass because he thinks that masculine assfulness is a sign of power. Trump believes pointing out the power will attract voters (everyone loves patriarchy!) and he also believes it redounds to his own assfulness, inasmuch as he is the ass in charge of all the other asses.

It’s also worth noting, though, that Trump’s comments sexualize Husted and are effectively sexual harassment. Trump is someone who loves to humiliate and assert dominance over everyone, and that absolutely includes his allies. Talking about Husted’s ass on stage is a way for Trump to declare that he can do anything to the men around him. Husted is a big powerful manly man, but Trump can sexualize and thereby feminize him, because he’s the president and the patriarch. That’s how patriarchy works.

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Why calling Trump gay is wrong and harmful

Patriarchy, in short, generates sexualized male-male bonds and sexualized male-male public discourse regardless of the sexual identities of the men involved. Sexualizing other men, noticing and policing the appearance of other men, joining in sexual pursuits with other men—all are a completely normalized part of public heterosexual male identity. When Trump elevates men he perceives as good looking, or sexually harasses or insults other men, or sexually bonds with other men, it does not mean he is gay. It means that he is steeped in and deeply invested in patriarchal power.

The distinction matters for a number of reasons. First of all, using “gay” as an insult, or suggesting that being gay is funny, or abnormal, or weird, harms gay people—just as using racial slurs to refer to Clarence Thomas harms all Black people. It may feel empowering or like just desserts to leverage stigma against someone as despicable as Trump. But ultimately the stigma harms the stigmatized, not the most powerful guy in the world.

Or, as political analyst Jared Yates Sexton put it:

For the love of fucking god, stop fucking attacking Donald Trump with blatant and repulsive homophobia. If you think going after fascists by calling them gay or producing AI slop of them in dresses or making out, you’re part of the fucking problem.

In particular, it’s important to recognize that the abusive sexualized rhetoric Trump uses around men, and the obsession with abusive sexualized dominance that is so central to his monstrous life, is part of standard patriarchy.

Patriarchy itself loves to link sexual abuse to marginalized sexual identities. But it is patriarchy which insists that the patriarch owns women and children and is entitled to sexually assault and terrorize them. Trump’s sexual harassment of Husted is best contextualized not by speculating that Trump is gay, but by pointing out that he has been held liable for a horrific sexual assault, has been credibly accused of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape by more than twenty women, and has been credibly accused of sexually harassing children.

Patriarchy compulsively conflates power, masculinity, sex, and dominance. That affects the way those committed to patriarchy treat men. It affects the way they treat children. It affects the way they treat queer and gender nonconforming people. And it affects the way they treat other men, heterosexual or otherwise. We need to put the blame for that where it belongs—not on gay people, but on people like Trump, who believe they are entitled to abuse everyone, and on people like Jon Husted, who refuse to stop them, or else join in.

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Republicans this election—as every election now—have gone all in on genocidal exterminationist propaganda against trans people. Some Democrats like the openly bigoted Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur, have responded, disgracefully, by throwing trans people under the bus and openly using anti-trans slurs.

Other Democrats, though, have defended trans people by saying that attacks on them are a distraction from real issues. As one elegant example, Democrat Sam Forstag, running in a competitive seat in Montana, answered a fusillade of bigoted transphobic crap from his opponent Aaron Flint on trans participation in sports and trans medical care by saying:

Government has no business sticking its nose into our personal lives, whether that’s a gun safe, whether that’s a doctor’s office. I don’t want a politician anywhere near it. So, well, let’s leave sports to the leagues that actually run them. Let’s let people live their lives with dignity and make their own private personal decisions, and let’s keep politics the heck out of it. Because what I see with that kind of anger and rhetoric is a lot of singing and dancing, and they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets. I won’t stand for that.

Forstag frames GOP anti trans bigotry as government overreach designed to distract people from issues that really matter, like corruption and cost of living. It’s “singing and dancing”—a way to keep people’s focus over there to prevent you seeing what they’re doing right here.

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Bigotry is not just an electoral gambit

Forstag isn’t wrong; GOP bigotry against trans people, against Muslims, against immigrants, is an electoral strategy. The GOP does not want people thinking about runaway inflation or Trump’s horrifically unpopular war in Iran, or about the horrifically unpopular president at all. So they try to shift the conversation to what Forstag refers to as “lies and anger” in the hopes that voters will focus, not on how miserable the government has made them, but on how miserable they would like the government to make other people.

At the same time, though, bigotry isn’t just a strategy. Republicans don’t just advocate for the extermination of trans people because they want to distract voters from high gas prices. They also advocate for the extermination of trans people (and Muslims, and immigrants) because they genuinely, as a high priority, want to exterminate those people. Trump has set up concentration camps for immigrants; he’s withholding federal funds from hospitals that provide gender affirming health care to trans young people; he’s launched an illegal war of aggression on a Muslim nation.

Trump is putting real muscle, real money, real effort behind terrorizing and ultimately behind exterminating designated marginalized people. He wants to hurt them. Violence against marginalized people is not just an electoral strategy to conceal Trump’s real goals of self-enrichment. It is a goal in itself.

This is obvious when you look at other fascist regimes which inspired MAGA. Hitler used anti-Jewish propaganda to justify and build authoritarian fascist power. And then he used that fascist power to exterminate Jews. The KKK used racist propaganda and racist terror to seize power for white Democrats in the South. And then they used that power to terrorize, lynch, and murder Black people.

For fascists, racism is both strategy and goal. Racism is core to fascism and massively overdetermined. That’s why even when Republicans admit that anti-trans ads aren’t especially effective at shifting votes, they can’t let them go. Anti-trans ads hurt and terrorize trans people, and so for Republicans they are a good in themselves, even if they don’t actually move the electorate at the ballot box.

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Nationalizing bigotry

This is not a hidden agenda. Everyone—both Trump’s allies and his critics—knows that he does in fact want to destroy trans people, immigrants, Muslims, and other marginalized people. So why don’t Democrats say so? Why frame bigotry as a distraction when it’s obvious that it’s also the point?

Political scientist Julia Azari explains the disconnect as an issue of nationalization. Political parties try to poison each other’s brands; individual politicians in close races often respond by distancing themselves from that brand or focusing on local issues. Politicians try to staple their opponents to the national brand while slithering away from the negative connotations of their own national brand (without alienating their base.)

This cycle (as Azari notes) Republicans are up a creek because (a) Trump is incredibly unpopular; (b) Trump is absolutely ubiquitous on all media all the time, and (c) Trump is a uncontrollable narcissistic rage demon who tries to destroy any politician (like, say, Texas Senator John Cornyn) who attempts to distance from him. As a result, even experts at independent branding, like Maine Senator Susan Collins, are struggling as the massive blue tsunami backlash to Trump gathers momentum.

For the most part, then, Republicans are trying to de-nationalize the election while Democrats are trying to nationalize it. But there is an exception. The Republicans have attempted to nationalize races involving Muslim Democrats—particularly the Michigan Senate race with Abdul El-Sayed, and Ilhan Omar’s Minnesota House district. Azari explains, referencing the unprecedented, grotesque late election federal raid on Omar’s home:

if we understand the raid against her as political, we should also understand it as an effort to nationalize the midterms for Democrats. That is, to make all national Democrats have to answer for her and be identified with her. This doesn’t necessarily seem to have succeeded, but the strategy seems clear: raise the profile of Muslim Democrats, and attempt to tie all Democrats to them and to Islamophobic claims about them.

To put it another way, while Democrats’ goal is to associate the Republicans with Trump, Republicans’ goal is to racialize (and feminize) the entire Democratic party by associating them with members of their party who are viewed as racial (or gendered) others.

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Fear of a non-white party

The GOP’s effort to racialize Democrats is hardly new. Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out that Republicans compulsively framed President Bill Clinton through tropes associated with Blackness to delegitimize him. Since the CRM, Democrats have been the party of Black voters, which means both Black and white Democrats have faced racist attacks (they’ve also been the party of women, and so male and female Democrats have faced sexist attacks.) George HW Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ad didn’t just paint Dukakis as soft on crime; it associated him with racist stereotypes of violent, criminal Blackness.

Republicans have tried to link Democrats to Black and marginalized people; Democrats have tried just as assiduously to disassociate themselves. As I discussed last week, Bill Clinton’s denunciation of Sister Souljah, Barack Obama’s denunciation of his pastor Jeremiah Wright, and Bernie Sanders’ insistence that Democrats should be ashamed to lose the white working class, all are part of a history of Democrats trying to avoid being linked too closely to Blackness and marginalization. This is also why Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer embraced his inner cringing coward and failed to issue a statement denouncing the raid on Omar’s home. He does not want the national party to be associated with a Black Muslim woman, so he withheld elementary solidarity.

The conventional wisdom, shared by both parties, is that being linked to marginalized people is electoral death. This is why Democrats are so leery of saying what is obvious—that the GOP is a fascist party which views violent extermination of marginalized people as its core reason for being. Democrats do not cite Martin Niemöller’s poem and tell their voters that we all need to stand up for those who are most vulnerable, because they do not believe that their voters will stand up for the most vulnerable. Instead, they say that the attacks on the vulnerable are a distraction, and that we should focus on real issues, like inflation, rather than on fake issues, like concentration camps, pogroms, and genocide.

There are some signs that things are changing. Again, as I recently discussed, El-Sayed and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff have been willing to outright call the GOP bigots in a way that is historically quite rare—which means they are acknowledging that Republicans have as an explicit goal the subjugation of marginalized people. Forstag, too, when he says he wants government out of people’s personal lives, points towards the ways in which transphobia is a deliberate evil in itself, even if he ends up by framing it as a distraction.

And progressive groups of course are willing to be much more blunt than the candidates themselves.

These are all hopeful signs, and if the more aggressive stance leads to (or at least doesn’t blunt) a massive blue wave, it’s possible Democrats will be even more willing to push back against, and identify, bigotry in future cycles.

But there’s no doubt that overall Democrats continue to believe that a national party brand associated with marginalized people is dangerous, and that to win elections they need to shift the conversation to inflation, to affordability, to corruption, to war, to anything and everything except the vital need to fight against fascism and for multi-racial democracy. And it is, unfortunately, hard to fight fascism while convinced in your heart and soul that fighting fascism will harm your national brand.

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Dirty Dancing (1987) opens to the classic Ronettes track, “Be My Baby.” It’s sung by Ronnie Spector—who was Black—and produced by Phil Spector, Ronnie’s brutally abusive Jewish husband. The song is a metaphor and a soundtrack for the film itself, embodying the exhilaration and hope of cross-cultural and interracial collaboration and the queasy, potentially exploitive and unequal aspects of those collaborations.

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The film is most famous for the exhilaration and hope—which it puts across with sweeping, winning verve. The plot (as you almost certainly know) follows Frances, aka “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey) as she and her well-to-do family vacation at the Kellerman’s, a Catskills resort. There she becomes friendly with some of the staff, and discovers that one of the dance instructors, Penny (Cynthia Rhodes) is pregnant. To help Penny get an abortion, Baby borrows money from her father and agrees to take her place at a dancing gig with partner Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze). Soon she and Johnny fall in love, to the horror of her nice guy doctor father Jake (Jerry Orbach.)

The film is generally presented as a story about upstairs/downstairs class barriers and prejudice. Baby’s father wants her to marry a doctor or lawyer; her dreams of joining the Peace Corps are acceptable as a prelude, but he balks at her actually marrying a non-college-educated working-class guy. Baby is attracted to the sweaty, hip-shimmying realness of the lower decks, but she is also (and this is what elevated the film above John Hughes’ contemporaneous efforts) genuinely outraged at injustice, and courageous in standing up to it. She is determined to help Penny, and when Johnny is falsely accused of stealing, she admits to her father that she was in his room rather than letting him take the fall.

In return for her decision to apply her father’s ethics more thoroughly than he would himself, Baby gets, not just Johnny, but the chance to join him on the dance floor. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” he insists, pulling her on stage; her reward for treating others as human is broader friendship and a broader, more brilliant sense of her own humanity.

Baby confronts her father directly about his class prejudice. But she doesn’t mention the other big-as-the-nose-on-her-face (or on mine) issue. The Hellerman’s are Jewish, as is the resort. This is not exactly a hidden truth—Sandy Koufax, rabbis, and Yiddish are all mentioned in passing. But the relevance to the central romance is tip-toed around. The resort-owner says that he hires waitstaff from Harvard and Yale to set up patrons’ daughters with acceptable romantic partners; he says that the entertainment staff, like Johnny, are to keep their hands off the same. But this again is framed as class, even though the issue is clearly also that the entertainment staff are not Jewish.

The class taboo is open; the Jewish/gentile taboo is half hidden. But racial taboos are more carefully erased.

There are a couple of Black dancers in the ensemble and the leader of the resort band is played by legendary tap dancer Honi Coles. But the main Black presence in the film (as in many films of the period, from The Big Chill to Beetlejuice) is on the soundtrack. Hits by the Drifters, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Merry Clayton, Maurice Williams, The Contours, and others provide the pelvis-grinding throb for dance numbers and emotional highs. In one telling scene, Johnny and Baby lip sync the flirtatious “Love Is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, a Black duo. In the long tradition of American pop culture, white people channel and appropriate Black style, Black music, and Black voices to associate themselves with love, passion, sex, and authenticity.

In the long tradition of American pop culture too, Black culture is welcome, but Black people less so. Johnny’s cool, his sexiness, and his outcast status are all signaled through his connection to Black music, Black dance, and (over on the side of the screen) Black people. But while class differences can be very legible, and ethnic/religious ones mildly so, the film in 1987 was absolutely not going to have Baby date a Black man. She tearfully and righteously tells her father that his class-based prejudices violate his own universal liberal platitudes. But neither she, nor the film is willing to extend those universal platitudes to the people whose music everyone is dancing to.

The point here isn’t that you shouldn’t like Dirty Dancing; I like Dirty Dancing quite a bit. But I think it’s a telling summary of where Hollywood liberal humanism was and was not willing to go in the 1980s, and to some extent still. It’s a political shibboleth that “culture war issues”—Black rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights—are a “distraction” from the class issues that really divide us. But it’s hard to miss the fact that in the 80s, Hollywood had no problem with forthright denunciation of class prejudice, tiptoed around ethnic difference, and studiously erased race and queerness. (Is Baby’s admiration of Penny just wanting to be her? Is there no element of wanting to be with her?)

In fact, in Dirty Dancing, it’s fair to say that class serves as a distraction from what the movie is saying about Jewishness, and that Jewishness serves as a distraction from what the movie is (trying not to be) saying about race. The film is dedicated to denying the extent to which, in the US, as Stuart Hall says, “race is the modality in which class is lived.” Johnny’s lower-class status is signaled through the “dirty”—that is to say, Black—music he dances to, but he can’t actually be Black, or the film would actually be defying social norms. “Be My Baby” in that context, means both that love triumphs over all and that, sometimes, unfortunately, it does not.

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Action Comics Vol 1 #504
“The Power and the Choice!”
Cary Bates/Curt Swan
February 1980

If you’re a comics fan, the title “The Power and the Choice!” instantly calls to mind one of the most famous Stan Lee aphorisms, “With great power comes great responsibility!” And, sure enough, this Curt Swan era Superman story is a meditation on the responsibilities of power—though a meditation with an odd lack of urgency. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original Spider-Man comic was suffused with angst and guilt and a neurotic terror of failing at manliness. “The Power and the Choice!” in contrast is about how Superman will take care of everything, as long as you stay away from brunettes in slit skirts.

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The plot, such as it is, starts with Superman investigating a break in at a jewel expo (supervillains tended to go after money rather than world domination back then. It was a simpler time.) The perpetrator is a figure in a lead-lined suit with some sort of energy blast power. The supervillain escapes, but later on the street Clark Kent is saved from falling masonry by a guy named Toby Williams, who has energy powers similar to those of the jewel thief. Clark is oddly oblivious to the possibility that this could be the bad guy, but luckily for the continued forward movement of the narrative, Toby phones him later and asks to speak to his buddy Superman.

Toby then confesses that he was given superpowers by the spirit of his father, who crash-landed years ago in Tibet and was taken in by super-monks, just like Dr. Strange and Iron Fist and all those other Westerners traveling to the East for fame and fortune and Prana Power.

Toby didn’t want the powers, though, so he was thrilled to meet Sheila, a skilled hypnotist who made him forget he could blast masonry to pieces. But! Sheila wears sexy slit skirts and is therefore evil; she has actually been hypnotizing Toby to give her Prana Power so she can rob banks. She made Toby lie to Superman, but Superman knows all and sees all and figures it out and foils her schemes. Superman then uses super-hypnotism to make Toby forget he has superpowers forever. “Now, hopefully, Toby Williams will get the normal life he’s been deprived lately—something a Superman can never have—no matter how much he might sometimes desperately want it!” our hero thinks as he whooshes up into the air.

Toby, then, is a superhero who doesn’t want to superhero—and, predictably, the superhero comic is uncertain how to deal with him. In terms of the action of the comic, his refusal to become Super Prana is both disastrous and emasculating. Toby wants to get married and have kids rather than run around and have adventures, he says—a wimpy, shirking stance that quickly leads to him becoming the literal “slave” to a scheming femme fatale. If you’re not the heroic in-control hero wielding your patriarchal Prana for good, then you’re a feminized dupe, in thrall to some black widow who literally vacuums up your eldritch energies.

Castrated Toby’s fate would be dire—if it weren’t for Superman! Interestingly, Toby’s one superfeat, rescuing Clark Kent from falling masonry, is completely unnecessary, since Clark as Superman was going to prevent the masonry from hurting anyone. As typical of the Silver Age, Superman’s powers in the comic are preposterous in their proliferating omnipotence; he can stop his own heartbeat, blow masonry around with superbreath, and trace telephone calls through the phone lines. He can break Toby out of a hypnotic fugue and then put him under again by using superhypnotism and a super-rotating ash tray. Why do you need some other new superhero when Superman is already there? Even if he decided to take up his father’s mantle and fight jewels thieves, Toby would be super-fluous.

The resolution of the comic has Toby granting Superman (temporary) Prana powers. Then Superman hypnotizes Toby to forget his powers, just as Sheila had hypnotized him before. Superman, in short, doesn’t just defeat the evil Sheila; he takes her place. The Prana powers from Toby’s father are swiped from the evil feminine adversary and returned to a rightful masculine heir, while Toby’s mind, formerly overthrown by a woman, is righted by a Superman. The nasty noir, in which the hero is undone by a woman, has a happy ending because Superman is there to put every masculine thing back in its place.

Toby can go off and be a medical researcher and have a family because Superman is on the ramparts, doing the lonely work of busting jewel thieves and punching controlling women. Spider-Man, created by objectivist individualist libertarian Steve Ditko, insists that every man must man up and be responsible for law and order himself. This random Superman story from 1980, though, has more faith in the structure of patriarchy. The authorities know all and see all; Superman traces phone calls, sneaks X-ray vision peeks at Toby’s wallet, and tracks Sheils by her heart beat. Then he literally erases Toby’s memory for his own good. He’s a superspy who magically controls public perception. It’s like he’s J. Edgar Hoover wearing long johns.

Some superhero stories promise you the chance to become the big daddy saving everyone. But “The Power and The Choice!” is for all those kids who don’t want to have adventures and superpowers. Don’t worry, the comic says. Someone is out there to protect the banks and discipline the women. Even if you don’t want to be a masculine patriarch, you can rest well in the knowledge that the masculine patriarchy is nonetheless grinding on for you.

—

This first ran in Splice Today.

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Everything is horrible but the dog and the cat can be friends.

Here’s what I published this week.

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Politics

Streamed executions as fascist spectacle. (Public Notice)

Democrats are suddenly willing to call Nazis by name. (EIH)

Empathizing with AI for fun and profit. (EIH)

The raid on Ilhan Omar’s home is election interference. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

An interview with pioneering queer curator Jonathan D. Katz. (Observer.com)

The Sweet Smell of Success enjoys the bad despite itself. (Splice Today)

Applachian hardcore band Vile Mind screams at big pharma. (Chicago Reader)

On American identity and the romance novellas of Hamilton’s Batallion. (EIH)

Poetry

Couple of kitty snuggle poems. (Five Fleas)

a cat on your chest
keeps the sleep in

Kitty would rather scratch me
than sit on me. Poetry
is for scratching wounds.

From the archive

Track of the week

Old school hip hop throwback.

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“You should be terrified that people who like Hamilton run our country” blared a headline at Current Affairs. The author, Alex Nichols, hits all the anti-Hamilton talking points common in certain sections of left twitter. Hamilton is expensive to see and therefore elitist. Hamilton‘s diversity is “forced,” and it’s offensive to portray slave-holders like Jefferson as black. And most damning of all, the musical is “upbeat”, presenting the Founding Fathers, and America itself, as noble and sympathetic, rather than engaging with the bleak reality of slavery, or of indigenous genocide, or of class snobbery and oppression.

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Nichols isn’t exactly wrong. Hamilton, the musical, is far to kind to Hamilton, the historical figure and authoritarian jerk. But are the folks who love the musical and/or the soundtrack simply dupes? Are the queer people of color who created the musical simply bourgeois shills? Is it always, in every way, politically retrograde to see something hopeful in America?

Hamilton’s Battalion, a new collection of romance novellas, answers this question very differently from Nichols. Three established romance novelists—Rose Lerner, Courtney Milan and Alyssa Cole—each contribute Revolutionary war romances in which Alexander Hamilton, and his widow Elizabeth, serve as a bit players.

The book isn’t just making a cheap bid for the expansive Hamilton fandom, though. Rather, the authors use their stories, and the Revolutionary war setting, as a way to riff on, and think about, the issues raised in the musical. Those issues being, specifically, who gets to claim American history? Does this country belong to marginalized people, or as Trump would have it, are black people and queer people, and Jews outsiders to be mocked, deported, and subjugated? “Would Americans ever accept as one of them a Jew who didn’t leave his Jewishness behind an adopt their ways? Would they accept him even if he did?” Nathan, an American spy, muses in Rose Lerner’s “Promised Land.”

The answer in all three novels is, at least provisionally, “yes.” Alexander Hamilton not only accepts Jews in his regiment at Yorktown, but he doesn’t kick our heroine, Rachel, out of the army when he discovers that she’s a woman disguised as a man. Hamilton may even be Jewish himself, the novella suggests—he did learn Hebrew as a child in the Caribbean, and no one is sure who his father was. Similarly, in Courtney Milan’s “The Pursuit Of…”, Elizabeth Hamilton barely blinks when she encounters John and Henry, a mixed race homosexual couple who meet with her to relay stories of their time with Hamilton.

This isn’t to say that Milan presents the Revolutionary colonies as an enlightened utopia. In her novel, John, an escaped slave who served in the Rhode Island militia, and Henry Laurens, a British deserter, journey from Yorktown north on foot, and they encounter plenty of prejudice as they go about the business of falling in love. John is accosted and threatened because he’s black. More, he explains with some force to Henry that the American definition of freedom was never meant to include him. Henry is swept away by the eloquence of the Declaration of Independence, in part, it’s suggested, because “all men are created equal” speaks to him as a gay man. But John disabuses him. “Thomas Jefferson owns people. He no more thinks that all men are equal than the King of England does. It’s all just words.” As with Hamilton the musical (according to Nichols), the vision of an egalitarian Founding is just smoke and mirrors and pretty stagecraft. It’s meant to bamboozle, not to bring about justice.

At the same time, though, Milan suggests that the vision can have unexpected power. “An ideal set in motion is a dangerous thing. You can’t control who believes it, or whether they take it to heart,” Henry says. Jefferson may not have meant black people to be equal, but his words provide a springboard for Henry, at least, to reconsider his prejudices and presuppositions.

Hamilton’s Battalion is intended, in a similar way, to get readers to rethink their own assumptions about who owns and who gets to use, American history. In her novella, “That Could Be Enough,” Alyssa Cole tells the story of Andromeda Stiel, a black, lesbian dressmaker with a successful business. Elizabeth Hamilton’s eagerness to help her own black servant, Mercy, find happiness with Andromeda seems a little hard to believe, perhaps. But in her end note, Cole warns against the assumption that prejudice in the past was either universal or determinative. “Mercy and Andromeda are queer, and they live together and are accepted by their community,” Cole writes. “I wanted to make it clear that this is not anachronism in the name of happily ever after: queer people have always existed, and though society has generally excelled at making their lives difficult and dangerous, there were people who lived as openly as they could and were accepted within their communities.”

Cole’s mention of “happily ever after” is pointed. Romance novels are often denigrated for their happy endings; joy and optimism are seen as politically unserious and as reinforcing the status quo. To promote change, supposedly, we have to all agree that the current moment is a dismal dystopia. To suggest that anyone is happy, or to intimate that anything about America is good, is to erase the real suffering of others and to apologize for the status quo. The left must embrace misery all day every day or betray itself.

Lerner, Milan, and Cole reject that analysis. All of them are very aware of the position of marginalized people in a post-Trump (and for that matter pre-Trump) world. All of them are aware of the (catastrophic) failings of the Founding Fathers. But they also respond to Hamilton‘s hope. Yes, the Founding Fathers were not black. But perhaps there is part of their vision, or part of America, that black people, and queer people, and Jewish people can claim. People like Nichols seem to think that righteous anger is the only force for change. But Hamilton’s Battalion shows that hope, joy, love and romance are revolutionary, too.

—

This first ran on Splice Today.

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A couple weeks ago I wrote a post noting that Trump had tried to steal the election in numerous ways, but that they had all (mostly) failed. Gerrymandering has not been enough to win the House for Republicans; the SAVE act couldn’t pass the Senate; the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s efforts to muck with mail-in voting. Trump has no steal-the-election button on his desk; he has to use particular tactics to try to cheat, and those tactics often fail.

I also said, though, that Trump would keep trying, and that his efforts damage democracy even if they don’t swing the election. Unfortunately, both of those points have been depressingly illustrated this week by a federal raid on Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar’s home.

—

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Fascists do racist authoritarian targeting of the opposition

Trump hates Omar because she is an outspoken Black, Muslim, Somali-American naturalized citizen. He has attacked her repeatedly and viciously over the last decade; earlier this year he said she “should be in jail” and, with his usual explicit racism, that she “should be sent back to Somalia.” Now, 22 days before the election, federal immigration agents raided her home, reportedly because her father misfiled immigration paperwork when Omar was a child.

Election analysts and former federal prosecutors pointed out that the raid violates DOJ norms against high-profile raids in the 60 days before an election if the matter is not urgent or time sensitive. It is hard to see how misfiled paperwork from when Omar was a child is suddenly an urgent issue for the federal government. Given Trump’s constant attacks on Omar, and his smug reaction to the raid, (“I think she’s a terrible person. I think she’s a terrible congresswoman. I don’t think she loves our country at all, but I don’t take a position,” he burbled) it seems quite clear either Trump himself or some Trump toady who knew the boss would be pleased ordered the raid in an effort to poison her district against her and her state against Democrats.

Democrats have said as much; House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries denounced the
continued corrupt weaponization of the federal government against [the president’s] adversaries “rogue abuse of power.” The head of the House Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, called it “a disgusting abuse of power from an out of control president.”

Ideally, you would hope that Republicans would also balk at the federal government raiding the homes of Representatives on thin pretexts before an election, if only because they do not want it to happen to them when Democrats are in charge.

But such hopes are, inevitably, in vain. Speaker of the House and evil squirming douche nozzle Mike Johnson lieed shamelessly in claiming that the raid was a normal part of federal functioning. “Maybe the timing’s unfortunate for her or others, but this is the legal system, and it operates independently of the political system,” he smarmed.

In Minnesota, some Republicans dodged and weaved rather than take a stand against the obvious authoritarian election interference; Gubernatorial candidate Lisa Demuth mumbled, “We obviously have no more information than that. And so we’ll watch to see what takes place … and what is found there.”

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Trump’s schemes often backfire

Demuth’s unwillingness to commit reflects a pretty obvious political calculus. Donald Trump is extremely unpopular; fiftyplusone has him bobbing around in the mid-30s and he’s a stunning 27 points underwater. Republican candidates do not want to be closely associated with Trump in blueish Minnesota. And now Trump has inserted himself in Omar’s election, enraging voters in her district and quite possibly throughout the state. Demuth is trying to tamp down the damage, but the best case result for Trump is that it doesn’t move the needle at all. The worst case is that he’s made an already bad year in MN for the GOP significantly worse.

This is a familiar dynamic for Trump. Remember that in 2020 Trump’s election denial and attacks on the Georgia state party are widely believed to have helped Democrats win two Senate seats in Georgia in a run-off election, giving Biden control of the Senate. Trump’s grotesque gerrymandering in his second termseems to have created a backlash among Black voters, who are going to the polls in elevated numbers. That could well effect statewide races in places like North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina.

Flagrant abuse of power and cheating energizes your opponents and can dishearten your allies ——especially if you are telling them that elections are fake or rigged. This is one reason that most presidents and politicians do not engage in the kind of desperate, scattershot, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-with-little-or-no-pretext kind of cheating that we’ve seen from Trump. The chances of success are low; the chances that you will actually harm your own party are high. Better to stick to those once every ten years gerrymanders and a list of the usual disenfranchisement tools. These are recognized safe racist methods that the GOP has been using for decades and which they trust to give them an edge without cutting their own knees out from under them.

Trump stabbing himself in the knees is satisfying to some degree. Unfortunately, when you slash around wildly with your stubby fat fingers, you are likely to do a lot of damage even when you don’t hit your target. Trump’s election denial lost him the Senate in 2021—but it also led to a violent insurrection in which people died. The raid on Omar’s house will probably benefit her reelection efforts. But it harmed her and her family and it sets a dangerous precedent, especially within the GOP which is getting itself comfortable with criminalizing the opposition in real time.

This is why it’s important to recognize that Trump does not in fact have a secret infallible election cheat code. Attributing to him a nebulous unstoppable plan can distract from the the actual, concrete, fallible ways he is attempting (clumsily) to manipulate elections. And worse, it can lead us to believe that the only danger we face is that Trump will steal the election. Stealing elections is in fact very difficult. Harming democracy, though, is something Trump does every day.

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Last week, Anthropic put in place new rules for its LLM Claude. The chatbot will now shut down or end sessions with users who “engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” Anthropic bans this behavior as an example of “cruel, abusive, or psychologically harmful conduct,” akin to “glamorize[ing] suicide or self-harm” or creating nonconsensual sexual materials of others.

You may notice an important difference between these cases. Glorifying suicide and self-harm could plausibly harm the user, who is human. Creating nonconsensual sexual materials involves the user harming someone else, who is human. But abusing Claude means you’re yelling at the algorithm. It is like cursing out your toaster. No human is harmed.

This may seem obvious to you. It seems obvious to me. But it doesn’t seem obvious to the geniuses at Anthropic. On the contrary, rather than justifying their “no abusing our model” dictat on the grounds that abusive behavior might encourage users to treat each other badly (which seems like a plausible argument), they explicitly frame abuse as bad for Claude.

After a “model welfare assessment,” Anthropic says that they looked at “Claude’s self-reported and behavioral preferences, and found a robust and consistent aversion to harm.” Claude they said, felt “distress when engaging with real-world users” who were abusive or brought up difficult topics. Anthropic adds, “Our implementation of Claude’s ability to end chats reflects these findings while continuing to prioritize user wellbeing”—a formulation which suggests that there is a distinction between Claude’s wellbeing and that of users (if Anthropic was only considering user wellbeing, no prioritization would be needed.)

Anthropic was even more explicit in a statement to CNET. “We’re uncertain whether models can experience harm, and we continue to explore this question in our research on model welfare, but we also believe that taking Claude’s interests and potential welfare into account may be relevant to safety,” Anthropic said.

Again, Claude is not a person. This is like Microsoft telling you that your word processing program gets upset at the words “shit” and “fuck” and that if you type them too often, the program will shut down. It is like telling you not to stick a fork in a wall socket because the wall socket will be depressed. There are of course very good reasons to not stick a fork in a wall socket. But they are about the safety of the human, not the fucking socket and not the fucking fork. (Fuck. Now I have hurt my word processing program’s feelings.)

—

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Our ethical obligation to Skynet

Why is Anthropic defending the safety of word processing programs and forks? One reason, as Omar Gallaga at CNET points out, is marketing. AI companies deliberately work to make their chatbots seem human-like because doing so increases engagement. Then they do “research” in which they observe that, yes, they have managed to get their chatbots to respond with “distress” (ie, word strings linked to distress) when people say distressing things to them. Then they use that as evidence that the chatbot is human-like, increasing engagement. “Personifying a chatbot is a useful way for the company to frame the product as trustworthy — a relational partner you remain loyal to — not just a software tool,” Gallaga says.

Anthropic could just be cynically boosting their product. But there’s a good bit of evidence that tech dopes do in fact believe they have created life, or that they may be on the path to creating sentient text generators.

As I wrote about a couple years back, many leaders in tech believe in an offshoot of Effective Altruism called longtermism which, per philosopher Emile Torres, “is built around a controversial vision of the future in which humanity could radically enhance itself, colonize the universe and simulate unfathomable numbers of digital people in vast simulations running on planet-sized computers powered by Dyson swarms that harness most of the energy output of stars.” As I explained the implications a couple years back:

Because these theoretical people are so numerous, we have a moral obligation to them that transcends our obligation to the poor now. Therefore spending money on tech development or on enhancing human intelligence is more important than spending money on … well, anything else.

Per philosophers Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò and Joshua Stein, this is why the EA organization OpenPhilanthropy spent $80 million in 2021 to study risks from AI and only $30 million to support the Against Malaria foundation.

It’s also why Anthropic is worried about the welfare of its models; Anthropic’s leaders are in a milieu which promotes a mystical belief in a future of sentient bots and which prioritizes the flourishing of those sentient bots. We need to protect Claude because if Claude is harmed it might get angry at us and go Skynet on our asses. But we also need to protect Claude because Skynet is the future and the (potential) machines are more numerous and therefore more important than us fleshy throwbacks.

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Why Anthropic dreams of an imaginary friend

It can be hard to take this nonsense seriously. But to grasp the ominous implications, it can help to realize that this is not the first instance in which religious believers have invested imaginary others with vast moral weight as part of a dangerous political program.

The most direct predecessor here is the pro life movement. Rather than predict-text algorithms, forced birth advocates are invested in a cluster of fetal cells. But the emotional and political mechanisms work in remarkably similar ways. In both, believers claim non-sentient objects have moral claims that are not just equal, but superior to those of actual human beings. Once that ethical calculus is established, the believers can insist on political concessions—forcing people to give birth, funding AI rather than malaria abatement—that most people who aren’t bedazzled by the bullshit recognize as monstrous.

Another way of saying this is that forced birth advocates and tech bot fetishists are empathizing with objects of their own imagination. They have created a fantasy imaginary other and then they have put themselves into the place of that other, feeling its pain, intuiting its reactions (“if I were that chatbot, I would not like it if people yelled at me,”) and speaking in its voice.

As I’ve discussed before, the right often projects empathy onto imaginary victims who cannot speak for themselves precisely because they cannot speak for themselves. Empathizing with actual sentient peers who can form their own opinions and express them is a complicated proposition, inasmuch as those peers are likely to talk back and contest your version of their wants and desires. With actual human beings, you can’t just project your own views and values onto them; you can’t enjoy the sense of being simultaneously selfless and validated, victim and rescuer. If you say (for example) “Jewish people should be grateful to evangelicals for supporting Israel,” a certain number of Jews will reply, “fuck off you antisemitic ghouls.” Which can take the fun out of the psychodrama.

A chatbot, though, is not going to tell you that you have failed to take its real feelings into account, first because it has no real feelings, and secondly because chatbots are generally programmed to spew out validating text messages. That means you can see yourself as a noble altruist when you demand oodles of cash to create, cultivate, and/or defend the world from your fancy toaster—and when you deny cash to actual human beings who might, if they had the resources, block your stupid data centers and tax your bloated billions.

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The moral lessons of empathy for chatbots

There are, I think, two moral lessons here.

First, and emphatically, fuck these assholes. When they furrow their brows and say that they are looking out for the wellness of their chatbots, we should all recognize that they are lying to us and to themselves and are really looking out of the wellness of their pocketbook and power. Block their stupid data centers, tax their bloated billions, and prosecute those motherfuckers as needed. The chatbots are not alive, they have no moral standing, and anyone who tells you different is trying to con and crush you. Don’t let them.

Second, it’s important to recognize that empathy alone is not in itself an assurance of moral clarity or virtue. Feeling for others, or putting yourself in other’s place, has to be tempered, and measured, by actually listening to other people when they talk about their own experiences and needs. Otherwise you risk following the Anthropic path, boldly and brutishly seizing power in the name of your own oppressed toaster.

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—For decades now, Republicans have regularly attacked Democrats with inflammatory and contemptuous language, mocking their identities and even celebrating when they are literally assassinated. Democrats have rarely responded in kind; they tend to issue more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger statements at best or simply duck and cover at worst.

Last week, though, that changed. In his debate with his disgusting bigot of a Republican opponent Mike Collins, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff called Collins literally a “bigot”. He highlighted Collins’ habit of hobnobbing with open white supremacists by telling him bluntly, “You hired half the Third Reich to staff your office.” He added (accurately) that “If John Lewis were marching today, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.”

The next day, Louisiana Senator and disgusting bigot John Kennedy claimed that Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed “sleeps in a Bin Laden jersey”—an unabashedly racist and Islamophobic insult. El-Sayed did not deplore the lack of civility. Instead, he said that Kennedy “wears his bed sheets out at night.” Which is entirely fair. If you say racist shit, you get called a Klansman.

Democratic partisans on social media—used to the wearisome substitution of thin gruel for red meat—were giddy and almost disbelieving. Finally, Democrats were hitting back; finally they were laying out the stakes of the election clearly; finally they weren’t cowering in a corner while Republicans pissed on them. It felt like a turning point.

And I think it is a turning point—or at least a potential turning point. It’s unlikely that El-Sayed and Ossoff will drastically change the trajectory or the margins of the midterms by calling a bigot a bigot or a Klansman a Klansman. But political rhetoric isn’t only about winning elections. It’s also about promises, and even more, perhaps, about identity.

Democrats have refused to call out white supremacy in the past because they have not wanted to be identified with overturning or resisting white supremacy. To have party leaders—potential incoming Senators—bluntly and forcefully call Republicans what they are is a statement that at least some people in the party do, in fact, want the party to be identified with crushing racists.

That doesn’t mean that white supremacy in the US is going to be overthrown in the immediate future, unfortunately. But it does mean it may be facing the kind of resistance from electoral leaders that has been very, very rare in American history.

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Democrats are ambivalent about white supremacy

To some, it may seem strange to argue that Democrats have not wanted to be identified with overturning white supremacy. Democrats are, after all, the party of landmark civil rights legislation; they are the party that elected a Black president. The House Democratic leader is Black; many of the party’s leaders are Black. Most importantly, its base is Black; Southern Black voters were the deciding constituency which chose Obama in 2008, Clinton in 2016, and Biden in 2020. The party in a real sense, is its Black supporters.

The painful truth, though, is that party leaders have often been very leery of those Black supporters. Bill Clinton in 1992 expressed this ambivalence by attending a Black event hosted by Jesse Jackson and deliberately insulting a Black invitee, the rapper and activist Sister Souljah, by comparing her to literal Louisiana Klansman David Duke. Clinton virtually never used such harsh language against his rabid Republican opponents.

Clinton’s ugly Sister Souljah moment has become iconic. But it’s hardly unique. Barack Obama denounced his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, in more nuanced, but comparable ways during his first election effort. And, in contrast to these efforts by party elites to distance themselves from Blackness, Democratic leaders often go out of their ways to align themselves with whiteness. Thus Vermont Senator and leftist Bernie Sanders asserted after Trump’s victory in 2016, “I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.”

Democrats oppose the Republican white identity party of raging fascism. But they have shilly-shallied about being the party of Black identity or multi-racial identity. Instead, both left and centrist Democratic leaders have often been more comfortable being the party of consensus white supremacy.

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There’s white supremacy and there’s white supremacy

As I’ve discussed before, following Julia Azari’s Backlash Presidents, the alternative to fascism in the US context is not generally anti-fascism. Instead, the alternative to fascist backlash is often a nostalgia for, and an attempt to restore, a bipartisan and less contentious white supremasist consensus.

Azari points out that before the Civil War, presidents mostly tried to defuse the issue of slavery and find a way to make it permanent and non-controversial. That compromise was ruptured by the Civil War and Reconstruction—but soon both parties were looking again for a way to find a bipartisan path which would subjugate Black people. They found it in Jim Crow in the South and grinding but less formal inequality in the North. Then that was upended by the Civil Rights movement—after which both parties again sought a compromise in color-blind racism. Everyone (ie, both party’s leaders) agreed to pretend that racism had been defeated and opposed real efforts (like busing) to alter de facto school segregation.

Or as I put it in another post:

What this means is that white supremacy is and has always been the elite consensus. That is in no small part because white people are the nation’s most stable and most powerful elite.

Sometimes, the elite white supremacist consensus is jarred or ruptured by a determined push for racial progress, like the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement—or, in a different vein, by the election of a Black president. This is followed by a fascist white supremacist backlash, unleashing chaos, violent white supremacist terror, and massive presidential illegality—in the form of an Andrew Johnson, a Nixon, a Trump. Elites then scramble to palliate and neutralize fascists by finding a new white supremacist consensus that every (white) one can live with.

Centrist chud and NYT columnist David Brooks channeled this kind of politics when he scolded Jon Ossoff for his too great enthusiasm in denouncing bigots. “Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up,” Brooks burbled. “That’s just not what we do here in this country.”

NYT columnist and guy who actually despises bigots Jamelle Bouie responded, “what if they are literally Nazis?”

But I think, from Brooks’ perspective, if they are literally Nazis, it is even more important not to say so. When confronted with fascism, the urgent bipartisan nice guy white supremacist response has always been to retreat. The problem, from Brooks’ perspective, is too much division, too much partisanship, too much resistance to fascism. Overweening equality upsets the hierarchy which has rewarded David Brooks and his ilk extravagantly. The goal is to kill (or, rather, not kill) the fascists with kindness.

Fascist brutality, from Brooks’ perspective, is unfortunate because it’s a sign that Black people and women and others have made too many gains and need to be smothered again in the bipartisan defense of hierarchy. That’s why Brooks objects to blunt repudiation of fascists (who he sees, ultimately, as his allies) rather than to the fascist program itself (which he believes is regrettable but ultimately on the right track if it represses Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and other left movements for equality.)

Brooks’ repudiation of Ossoff is, in other words, a Sister Souljah moment. As such, it is intended to do what all Sister Souljah moments are intended to do—rhetorically reassert bipartisan white supremacist consensus in the face of (supposedly) too strident calls for equality.

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Why can we call them Nazis now?

The difference between Clinton attacking Sister Souljah and Brooks attacking Ossoff is, of course, that Clinton, as a leading presidential candidate, had a lot more power than the rapper and activist he was kicking. Brooks is an influential pundit, but he is not a sitting Senator. He’s attempting to enforce a top down consensus from a position that is not exactly on top.

Which brings us to the question, what has changed? Why are leading Democrats like Ossoff and El-Sayed willing to denounce white supremacy without the usual equivocation? What is it about this moment that has made white supremacist consensus seem undesirable to at least some Democratic party leaders?

One factor, undoubtedly, is that Republican fascists have delegitimized themselves over the last two years in ways that American fascists have not delegitimized themselves since the Civil War—and arguably in some ways even more fully than then.

Trump is a uniquely chaotic, ignorant, and corrupt human being with few parallels in human history, and everything he touches turns to shit. That includes the white supremacist coalition he now heads. Jon Ossoff was supposed to be in a fight for his political life in generally purple Georgia; instead, he’s leading polls by nine points. He can use Mike Collins as a punching bag because he knows Mike Collins, Nazi shithead, is not a threat.

That doesn’t fully explain, though, why Ossoff, who has obvious presidential ambitions, thinks that his best path forward to a 2028 nomination is calling bigots “bigots” with his whole chest. Other Democratic figures interested in being president—like California Governor Gavin Newsom for example—have taken a more typical path of palliating existing hierarchies, vetoing protections for trans people, and fighting tooth and nail to prevent his state from taxing billionaires.

I think it’s important here that, while Ossoff is white, his political base is not. Black people are more than half of all Democrats in Georgia. In 2021, in the Georgia runoff election that gained him his Senate seat, Ossoff won 92% of the Black vote. That’s an impressive percentage even given the fact that Black voters tend to overwhelmingly cast ballots for Democrats.

Julia Azari points out that impeachment efforts against fascist backlash figures like Johnson, Nixon, and Trump have generally been led by Black legislators representing Black constituencies. In that context, it’s also notable that Black voters have become increasingly energized in the second Trump term. There is a massive surge in Black voters rightfully and righteously enraged by the brutal attack on Black voting rights through gerrymandering and disenfranchisement. Black centrist political leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn have responded by endorsing radical procedural moves like aggressive blue state gerrymandering and expanding the Supreme Court.

National Black leaders—like Obama or Kamala Harris—are often more cautious because they feel like they need to prove they can appeal to white voters. Ossoff, however, is white himself, and may therefore feel less constrained. Indeed, he may feel that he has to prove himself to Black voters, since his primary strategy is surely based on convincing Black Southerners to cast their ballots for him rather than for Black candidates like Kamala Harris and Corey Booker. As a white leader uniquely dependent on Black voters, Ossoff has powerful incentives to denounce white supremacy more vociferously than his peers.

Abdul El-Sayed is not running for president in the 2028 cycle. He has, however, been having trouble, at least by some metrics, with Black voters. Denouncing white supremacy in explicit terms is one strong way to underline the ways that racism—from Republicans, especially, but also from Democrats—harms both Black people and Muslim Arabs like El-Sayed himself.

As with Ossoff, the electoral benefits of consensus white supremacy and catering to white voters—so obvious to Clinton and even to Obama—no longer apply, at least for some Democrats. In an environment where Trump and Republicans are loathed and in which Black voters—and not just Black voters—are enraged, Democrats have unusual and powerful incentives to treat white supremacists as despicable blights to crush, rather than as potential allies to cultivate.

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The white supremacist consensus is still lurking

None of this means that Democrats have abandoned the dream of white consensus, nor the tactic of throwing marginalized people under the bus. Various cowardly, bigoted Democratic candidates—most recently South Carolina Senate contender Annie Andrews—have been trying to transphobia their way into office. Anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism remains an issue in the party in general and in the Michigan Senate race in particular. Democratic leadership still resists abolishing ICE even as the agency demonstrates over and over that is an unaccountable fascist gestapo dedicated to terrorizing the public. Democratic leadership waffles on impeachment as too divisive because it might annoy David Brooks and others nostalgic for white supremacist consensus. Ossoff himself voted for the ugly anti-immigrant Lakan Riley Act. Etc.

The appeal of white supremacist consensus to elites in a white supremacist country is powerful and lasting. But El-Sayed and Ossoff show that there is also, right now, a backlash to the backlash. Twelve years after Trump rode into office on a wave of white supremacist rage against the first Black president, the resistance to him is not waning into exhaustion and acceptance—as the resistance had 12 years after the end of the Civil War and 12 years after Johnson’s Voting Rights Act.

Instead, Democratic politicians are feeling impelled by their constituents to take a harder line not just against fascism, but against the broad politics of white reconciliation. When David Brooks whines that he doesn’t recognize America anymore, we should all take that as a sign that better things are, maybe, possible.

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Look at that kitty!

Here is what I published this week.

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Politics

Meritocracy is a dagger in the heart of democracy. (Revealer)

Roger Marshall is running an all-time terrible campaign in Kansas. (Public Notice)

A new book studies how the Palestinian context of RFK’s assassination has been erased. (Religion Dispatches)

Progressives are winning. (EIH)

Trump chooses bad advisors because he is a bad person. (EIH)

A convo on corruption and fascism with Crynn Johnasson and Mark Cohen. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Kubrick traps the bad guys in The Killing. (Splice Today)

The Love of Your Life admits Covid happened. (Splice Today)

Lola runs in and out of noir. (EIH)

Zero Dark Thirty and torture as Oscar-bait. (EIH)

On Under the Skin and rape/revenge. (EIH)

Poetry

Too many similar poets. (Molecule)

The R Much Taken

Frost and Lowell and Burns and Pinsky
Herrick and Hass and Haydn and Creeley—
they bob and they sob in the selfsame shame;
all the vocabulary, just one name.

Sleepy and/or despairing poem. (Five Fleas)

it’s time to never get up again

From the archive

Track of the week

Nostalgic hyperpop ode to brutalist architecture.

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Irreversible (2002) has been lauded for its clever backwards narrative rewinding of the rape/revenge genre—you see the retribution first, and then, chronologically second, the sexual violence which sparked it. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is usually thought of as a sci-fi thriller—but it performs the same trick. The insect creature wearing Scarlet Johansson’s skin seduces and murders her way through a cornucopia of Scottish men. And then, finally, at the end, you get the rape; a lumberjack sexually assaults the alien woman— inadvertently revealing the chitinous abomination beneath her lovely surface.

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In rape/revenge narratives from the 1970s, the grim, castrating scythe of the plot is, often, explicitly feminist. In Ms. 45 or I Spit on Your Grave, women avenge their own violation—and that vengeance is figured as a just reaction not just to individual wrong, but to systemic evil.

Under the Skin flirts sinisterly with that logic as well. Johannson is so successful at cruising for men only because men are so determinedly cruising on their own account—hitting on her in clubs with clumsy pick up lines, offering her unsolicited roses, chatting her up and then attacking her car. Women for their part are shown at make-up counters, putting up a front to attract men, just as the alien has pulled on Johansson’s pulchritude like a wetsuit. In a world where men see women solely in terms of their outer skin, it seems only fair that women should show men the skin the men want, the better to devour the lookers.

Indeed, the first half of the film fairly revels in its ruthlessness. In one scene, a good Samaritan tries desperately to save a wife and husband from drowning. After the Samaritan has failed and lies exhausted on the beach, Johansson walks over laboriously in her high heels, picks up a rock, discards it, chooses another one, and then bashes his head in. She then pulls him away, while the drowned couples’ baby wails helplessly.

The alien woman’s feeding ritual is also gleefully, if dreamily, vindictive. She leads the men into her home, and when they have stripped, lures them into a black pool, where they float, genitals mutely visible to the camera, until some unseen force sucks their insides from their bodies. All that’s left behind is the detumesced, flapping, shapeless skin—a full body version of the rape/revenge’s beloved castration trope.

For better or worse, this is the genre pleasure of rape/revenge—the vision of women picking up the violent weapons of patriarchy and using them with more skill and viciousness than men themselves ever managed. Men judge women on their outer carapace, so the alien woman turns men into nothing but their surface. Men violate women; so the alien woman turns men’s entire selves into a brutally violable orifice. It’s not pleasant, but it’s justice, of a kind.

In a normal rape/revenge, that justice is delivered at the end of the film; the woman is assaulted, and then returns, empowered, to tear off the bloody phallus for herself. In Under the Skin, though, the alien starts out with that bloody phallus—and then, hesitantly, tries to put it aside to turn herself into a more standard issue Hollywood feminine victim.

To the consternation of her male, motorcycle-riding, and mostly superfluous confederate, the alien starts to develop a conscience. She has an ambiguously guilty flashback to the crying baby. She picks up a man with a facial deformity, and rather than killing him, allows him to escape. Critic Kailyn Kent says that this encounter “is as emotionally generous as the film gets,” but that wasn’t exactly my takeaway. Rather, the film shunts the disabled man into an easy narrative of stereotypical goodness and innocence. He’s friendless, has never had sex, and so is to be pitied. He’s offered the fantasy of sleeping with Scarlet Johannson, and in return offers her and the audience the assurance that #notallmen. That assurance saves Johannson, whose generosity, erotic and otherwise, puts her on the path to humanity. (The man isn’t so lucky; like many disabled characters in Hollywood, once he’s fulfilled his role in someone else’s narrative arc, he’s summarily executed, in this case by the motorcycle guy.)

So what does it mean to be on the path to humanity? In the alien’s case, it means she becomes feminine—or, in the logic of the film, disempowered. The former rapacious hunter, capable of animation, charm, and a cold competence, becomes an unexpressive dishrag, not unlike the skins of those guys she used to eat. To replace her former diet, she tries to consume cake without success. Saddened by that failure (no cake?) she lets some guy on a bus pick her up. She trails around after him, and eventually, unenthusiastically, submits to sex, which she breaks off when she realizes she doesn’t have the right genitals for it. She leaves for a walk in the woods, is sexually assaulted by a lumberjack, and then, finally is murdered. The assault causes her skin to tear off, and she is fully feminized in her victimhood through the revelation of her black, semi-insectoid inner self.

The unpleasantness of the alternatives here are fairly consistent with rape/revenge films more broadly. Rape/revenge generally presents violence and empowerment as deeply compromised; The Stendahl Syndrome, in which the victim psychologically adopts the personality of the rapist she murdered is an extreme example, but not out of line with other films in the genre. In Ms. 45 or I Spit On Your Grave, too, revenge is as much a capitulation as a triumph; to pick up the knife is to become the monster violator. You can be the rapist or you can be the raped. Being human is not an option.

Patriarchy is bleak in Under the Skin; patriarchy is bleak in rape/revenge. Still, the progressive revelation of that bleakness works somewhat differently when you switch cause and effect. In rape/revenge, the weak, feminized protagonist must become a killer to protect herself. In Under the Skin, the killer needs to become weak and feminized to gain her soul. The first is a story of destroying oneself for the sake of empowerment; the second, of destroying oneself for the sake of disempowerment.

And why exactly does the alien want to be disempowered? Why does the monster want to be human? The film’s artsy ambiguity is a convenient way to avoid answering those questions. A child’s cry and a disabled man’s desire combine into a siren call to selflessness; inside every monstrous feminine is a stifled yearning for domestic bliss. The parallel with Johansson’s Black Widow in Age of Ultron is oddly synchronous. In both, the insect-affiliated awesome wielder of violence reveals that she hates her own distance from femininity, and longs to be a normal woman—bearing children, having sex with nice guys, not committing murder on a daily basis.

In Under the Skin, though, if you’re not the murderer, you’re the murderee. Again, that’s consistent with rape/revenge. But it’s also, in this context, disappointing. The film’s protagonist, after all, is not a woman. She’s something else—and her monstrosity, while horrible, could in theory offer an alternative to the dreary, familiar skin of gender. She isn’t interested in sex; she isn’t interested in children; her motivations are oily, black, opaque. She is a dream, not necessarily of a better world, but at least of a different one. When she abandons that difference for the comfort of convention, it seems like a tragic lack of imagination—not least when the film tells us, with the usual gestures at pathos, that the final embodiment of womanhood is rape and death.

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This week North Carolina Senator and wishy-washy anti-Trumper Thom Tillis wandered around the media promoting his boring new book and cosplaying as a possible 2028 contender. In the middle of that sad exercise in gormlessness, Tillis opined that Trump’s relentless effort to raise prices on average Americans has one core cause. “I think he got bad advice,” he told interviewer Stephanie Ruhle. “I think the biggest problem with the president is that he’s listening to people who like to tell him how right he is.”

Ruhle was singularly unimpressed. She pointed out, rightly, that Trump chose his advisors, and that Howard Lutnick, in charge of the transition in 2024, specifically said that the most important quality in advisors was their loyalty.

Tillis nodded and furrowed his brow and said that yes, the president should change course and choose better advisors—advisors, he implied, like independent thinker of deep thunks Thom Tillis, who’s going to need a job after his Senate term ends in January.

As Ruhle attempted to point out, though, Trump will never appoint Tillis to anything, no matter how Tillis abases himself, because Tillis insists on acting as if he thinks he is, or should be, as important as Donald Trump, and because he has criticized Trump in the past.

Moreover, Trump is not a bad president because he is getting bad advice. He gets bad advice because he is a bad president which is inextricably intertwined with the fact that he is a bad person.

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The President’s job is listening to people

Way back in the beforetimes when George W. Bush was the worst president America had ever had, that worst president boasted, “I hear the voices and I read the front page and I hear the speculation. But I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.”

This neatly summarizes the popular vision of the president as a tough-minded boss who is most presidential when he’s making tough, lonely decisions in the teeth of opposition and criticism.

The fact that Bush thought of himself this way is not unrelated to the ways in which he was such a terrible president. Because the fact is that the president is not a tough, lonely decision maker. In any administration, there are thousands and thousands of decisions that the president isn’t involved in. Even if the president decided and decided all day every day and never quit for a round of golf, there is no way he could be involved in even a fraction of the day-to-day decisions needed to keep the enormous federal government running, not to mention all the decisions needed to keep a political party functioning.

The most important job of the president isn’t making decisions. It’s gathering information about what is going wrong and where to focus attention. The information gathering starts as part of the political process; campaigning for president involves listening to the electorate (through one on one conversations, through talks with other elected officials, through listening to experts and journalists, through polling) to identify areas where people are suffering or are unhappy, or where problems are likely to develop. It continues in office, as the president attempts to keep track of information coming in from Congress, from cabinet officers, from the electorate, from the media, and on and on.

This isn’t to say that the president never makes decisions. Obviously, the president makes a lot of decisions. But anyone can make decisions. Any asshole can sit at the head of a desk and say, “I like it when things blow up; let’s start a war with Iran!” The difficult part of the job, the important part of the job, is being able to sort through information so you know enough to know that starting a war with Iran (or invading Greenland, or preventing people from getting vaccinations, or putting your name on the Kennedy Center) is not a decision that should be on the table in the first place.

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Trump listens to Trump, and also flattery

Trump does not see the job this way. He doesn’t see it as a job. Trump believes that the title “president” means “god-king.” He thinks he is divinely chosen by the volk to channel their true yearnings, and that, for condescending to do so, he is entitled to do anything he wants, up to and including just seizing billions in taxpayer dollars for himself.

All presidents are massive egotists, and all of them think that their electoral victories give them special insight into What The People Want. Most presidents nonetheless also understand that they have been hired to do a job, and that a big part of that job is taking in information. They will, for example, read intelligence briefings. They make some effort to notify and consult with members of Congress before major military operations. They act as if someone out there might know something important they don’t.

Trump, in contrast, believes that the only information that matters is the bullshit that falls out of his own orifice. He regularly insists that he is super smart, and that that super smartness is the be-all and end-all of governing. For instance, he recently insisted on social media that “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Being “smart” here doesn’t mean learning about a complicated new topic and consulting experts in order to make an informed decision. It means that opposite of that; to be “smart” in Trump’s sense means that just sit there in your own skull congratulating yourself as everyone heaps praise upon you.

It also means that anyone who does not heap praise on you is stupid and nefarious. Trump’s attacks on the mainstream media are wearyingly commonplace, but even Fox is too independent for him at this point. He recently railed against the network for occasionally interviewing Democrats, for including Jessica Tarlov, a token liberal, on the show The Five so that the conservatives have someone to gang up on, and for not praising his rallies enough. Any pushback, no matter how minimal, is too much. Really, for Trump, any pushback, no matter how minimal, is treason.

The flip side of Trump’s refusal to hear anything but flattery is that he will listen to absolutely anything if it’s swathed in flattery. If you tell Trump he is smart and a great man, he’ll do whatever you want. Why shouldn’t he? He knows everything, and anyone who knows he knows everything is smart and should be listened to. QED.

One laughable example of the ease with which Trump is rolled occurred last November, when golf crony Bill Pulte convinced Trump to propose 50-year homeowner mortgages—a terrible policy which everyone hates— by comparing Trump to FDR and showing him a posterboard ad mock up. Less amusingly, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu convinced Trump to join him in his illegal war of aggression against Iran by sustained personal appeals, including by telling Trump that Iran had tried to assassinate him.

You can see Trump’s rage for flattery in smaller ways too. His judicial nominees won’t admit that he lost the 2020 election. Why not? Maybe they’re all fools and conspiracy theorists unfit for office. But probably, in addition to that, they have been told, and believe, that if they say that Trump lost in 2020, he will withdraw their nominations. To become a judge under Trump, you have to be sure not to tell Trump something he doesn’t want to hear—even if that something is obviously true; even if denying it makes you a conspirator in insurrection.

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The problem is the fascism, not the advice

Trump does not want advisors who will provide him with actual information or independent perspectives because he see the presidency as spoils, not as a charge or a responsibility. He believes his election means he is entitled to endless praise and ass kissing. The idea that he would trade that in out of concern for the American people is as preposterous as the idea that he would trade it in for the respect of gormless lackwit Thom Tillis. It’s not happening.

Trump’s theory of governance is fascist. He believes that as leader he is the embodiment of popular will, and that he should be venerated as such. He hires advisors who believe that as well, or who will lie about believing it. Advisors are not there to contradict him and not even there to inform him, because, as a fascist leader, he knows everything already, and opposing his will is to oppose the mandate of heaven.

Trump has not chosen poor advisors and therefore ended up doing foolish and fascist things. Rather, he is a fascist and a fool (the two are inseparable), and he therefore chooses evil and foolish advisors in his own image. Changing advisors will change nothing, because any advisor who would work with Trump—like, say, Thom Tillis—has already revealed their unfitness through their willingness to do so.

Trump is responsible for his own ignorance and his own evil. His advisors are responsible for theirs. And partisan hack Thom Tillis, when he apologizes for Trump and speaks as if dear leader has been betrayed by his scheming viziers, is responsible for his own ignorance and evil as well.

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