The Party of Emotion
Of all the slogans that were thrown about during the 2024 US election I think the one that frightened the Republicans the most was Kamala Harris’ threat that “we’re not going back.” What the right wants more than anything is to go back. That’s what it is, at heart, to be right-wing. A fanatic, desperate, nostalgia. “This is what they took from you,” is the rallying cry, captioning a beach or a cheerleader or a Borders.
For all their braying about facts and logic, they are hopelessly captured by the tyranny of their feelings. A feeling of perpetual loss driving everything they think and believe, chasing a past glory that, in many cases, they never personally experienced. Their slogans are never about improvement or development or progress, always about “going back.” Make America Great Again. Put things back the way they used to be, and keep them that way.
The US Department of Homeland Security, on Twitter, shared a vision of what America will look like once all the immigrants are gone, Hilariously, it has been taken down due to a copyright strike, but here are some frames from it. It's a series of old media clips with the text across the middle reading "life after all the criminal aliens are deported."
In short, it’s going to be the 1970s.
Specifically, it’s going to be a mythical version of the 70s that was almost completely white, but for a few black people here and there who were allowed to assimilate. It’s always worth mentioning that the people running these social media accounts are recruited from the groyper movement and are vicious, sincere white supremacists. One of the snippets of multimedia they cut into their slideshow was a very obscure short-lived McDonald’s mascot who is much better known as Moon Man after he was co-opted by online neo-Nazis. They are explicitly aware of this.
Modern technology has so greatly enabled the manufacture, distribution, and weaponization of nostalgia that it has enabled this feeling of loss to reach a critical mass. In the past it was television ads that sought to remind voters of the “good old days.” Now we can generate the 80s with AI and have fictional characters from the past literally tell you this is what we lost, and what we can have again:
There’s no logic whatsoever to this grief and desperation that we can wind time back entire generations. How would that even work? Would we bring back Blockbuster and have it somehow coexist in the same time and space as Netflix? There’s no talk of a Butlerian Jihad here, nobody is saying we’ll get rid of technologies that already exist, just that we’re going to keep all that stuff but also, somehow, bring back an aesthetic.
Despite the absurdity of that idea on its very face, the right have now determined to accomplish it through violence and a radical demolition of society.
There are a lot of things that distinguish this American presidency from all the ones that came before (including Trump’s first term), but I think the clearest distinguishing feature is that many on the right feel like they have won this time, and won permanently.
I know that’s not an original observation, but I don’t think it’s really hit home for most people the extent to which many (most? Has anyone done a poll?) Republicans truly believe this was the final election. I think that they’d like to keep the norms of a democracy, in the sense that there will “be elections,” but the feeling is that they will just be the Republican primaries. Twitter is packed with wishlists about which members of Trump’s family and cabinet should be president for the next hundred years, and in what order.
It should be very obvious from just a fundamental understanding of how reality works that this is impossible. Dynastic despotisms with sham elections exist, but Trump would have to get from here to there in just over three years—halve that if the Democratic party don’t fumble the ball at the midterms. (I give it about, fifty-fifty.)
In a way, the speed and desperation with which they’re trying to achieve the impossible, their very own Thousand Year Reich, makes me more optimistic. The frogs notice that the pot is boiling. A slower and more calculated plan might have more success. One that isn’t driven by impatient, stupid people.
I really feel that America is a type of country that’s really difficult to convert into an autocracy. That is my feeling, mind you, as I’m not a political scholar, but we are talking a lot about feelings today, and I have a high regard for liberal democracy as a robust institution. Fukuyama picked it as his end of history for a reason.
When you think about other sort of similar political arrangements that have slid into autocracy, there’s usually the weight of a broader context to consider. Russia was the world hub of the communist dictatorship experiment for most of the 20th Century—they tried to liberalize under Yeltsin, but then he passed the presidential torch to Putin, who just sort of… decided to keep it. Just a total Isildur move after cutting the Ring from Sauron’s finger. (Gorbachev doesn’t really deserve to be Sauron in this analogy though).
I suppose you can think of Iran as a democracy that suddenly oopsed itself into dictatorship, but then that required a full-scale revolution made possible with no small amount of meddling from… the United States. Point is, with a solid just-over 200 years without a single presidential candidate contesting their loss at the ballot box (unless you count the notably non-bloodbath of Bush/Gore), right up until Trump’s tantrum at the Capitol you have an extremely solid basis for democracy and the rule of law that the Trump administration can’t make a highly successful effort to wreck, and certainly not overturn.
But they will break as much as they possibly can, and as quickly as they can. As I’ve said before, this is a tantrum reaction—another emotional response. They think that they can break it enough, or in such a way, that they can keep some kind of very specific era of Americana alive forever. And somehow, despite the ostensible goal of reducing the size of government, they believe that the government will be able to micromanage the minutiae of the entire national culture, forever. Like when Trump intervened to stop Cracker Barrel changing its logo.
Even RFK Jr’s idiotic pressure campaign to compel fast food restaurants to use beef tallow in their fries has no basis in “health,” but for a return to how fast food apparently used to taste.
They’ll want the government to do that for everything, now. Or establish some kind of cultural police, I guess, to keep anything from ever changing. I dunno, it sounds exhausting, futile, and pointless, to me.
How anybody can see this as anything but a movement of emotional dysfunction is beyond me. You ask people what the root of their misery is and they’ll tell you it’s some nonsense like seeing black people on TV.
This, of course, runs downstream from powerful and influential figures like Elon Musk who take advantage of these bad feelings you’re having about life not quite feeling as good as it used to, or as good as you’re told it used to be, and telling you who specifically is to blame for this. And it’s always the blacks, the Mexicans, the gays, the transgender people.
Perhaps it’s a failure of the education system to teach about the realities of the bygone eras that the right wants to resurrect. Do you really want to go back to the housing market crash? You want to go back to the Bush era? To the Vietnam era, to rationing? To the century of endless wars, but at least Cracker Barrel had an actual barrel on the logo and McDonald’s still sold beef tallow fries?
The Democratic party will be back in power. The Republicans can’t prevent the inexorable march of time. They might, however, regret some of the stuff they just broke.
Hey by the way I’m writing a book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era got entwined with this anti-wokeness crusade and wound up accelerating the Western world toward Trumpism, shattering the precarious right/left truce and deciding to burn it all down instead. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
S Peter Davis
