The Age of Spectacle, No. 39
Chapter 9: Saints and Cynics: Common Roots of Contemporary American Illiberalism
We continue now with part 3 of Chapter 9, and will complete the chapter next Friday, January 24. Chapter 10, the book’s final chapter, will start its rollout on January 31 and end, according to my calculations, on Friday, March 7, with part 45—so six more essays after this one. I then I plan to go through the manuscript from the beginning, editing the whole thing yet again and, when that’s done, start my search—sincerely but futilely, I still believe—for a publisher….just to be able to say I tried. When I give up on that score, I’ll create a small number of copies to leave to my three children, so far six grandchildren, and a few select friends. And that will be that.
Meanwhile, I’ve decided to call a halt on January 20, not to refining and polishing The Age of Spectacle manuscript all the way from dimple to duodenum, but to adding new data and citations. One has to draw a line in the temporal sand somewhere, and Trump’s Second Inaugural, marking the clear end of an era in my view, is as good a place as any and a much better place than most for that purpose. And what then for The Raspberry Patch?
I will return to the thematic eclecticism that marked its beginning nearly 13 months ago. But I also plan a new series that I will call “Notes on the Age of Spectacle.” As may be readily inferred from the name, this will consist of my analysis of the coming Administration in terms laid out in The Age of Spectacle argument. As my readers know, I’ve made some predictions, and we will learn together how canny I have been. So one book will close on January 20, to what fate no one knows, but only as a prelude to opening another. (This is not a new idea.)
I plan to keep The Raspberry Patch free to all, and with the comments section still unopened. But with the mention of money, let me end my introductory note today by informing you that I recently received an infusion in a single 24-hour period for The Raspberry Patch of more than $400 in two Stripe payments—from whom exactly I don’t know. I get notices of new subscribers and notices of payments, but these come separately and no concordance between them exists. Now that was unusual as well as pleasant for a Substack that suggests such a low $5/mo., $50/yr. tariff. All I can say is I hope the notion becomes contagious. If you folks don’t care to purchase surpassingly beautiful cyanotype art at www.hannahinblue.com, you should care to….. then you might as well give some of the money burning a hole in your pocket to me. Just my opinion, of course.
Chapter 9: Saints and Cynics: Common Roots of Contemporary American Illiberalism, part 3
. . . .Yet another example of reverse borrowing concerns fantasy wish-fulfillment. Even those who recognize clearly the dangers of MAGAt authoritarianism and its strictly instrumental attitude toward law are prepared to set aside due process if “good guys” kill “bad guys” when the law fails to rise to the challenges they pose. Frank Fukuyama recently admitted to having a soft spot for female hitman movies that display exactly this kind of violent wish-fulfillment storyline, a theme far more familiar in films that usually appeal to he-man-hero conservative tastes.
Fukuyama admits that, “Violent action movies are a dangerous fantasy” and that “a very pronounced cultural vibe . . . says that extra-judicial killings are OK if they are targeted at the right people,” which, is “why movies about female hitmen are so insidious. They create a moral universe and permission structure in which the casual gunning down of people becomes an act of justice.” Right. The wish-fulfillment part undisciplined, however, is what allows some to like these kinds of movies anyway:
A petite but skillful female hitman throwing a 300-pound thug against a concrete wall is so absurd that our brains tell us we have exited the real world and are living in a parallel fantasy universe that operates by different rules.[1]
Well, if that makes extra-judicial killings a fair subject of entertainment in a culture where increasing numbers of people already cannot distinguish the real world from what isn’t the real world, then where is the line in the culture that can still place some subjects off limits? About three months after “The Female Hitman” was published, on December 4, 2024 to be exact, Luigi Mangione murdered UnitedHeathcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, and a lot of people claimed to understand and even applaud the act. Mangione’s motive for killing people was not as philosophically broad as Ted Kaczynski’s—and it was less about hardware than software, so to speak, less about the machines of the Net Effect and more about its corporate bureaucratic manifestations. But it bore a certain clear resemblance. Coincidence? Of course. But also evidence for the insidious influence of the fictive hitman meme? Of course.
The tacit marriage of illiberal extremes, well beyond their incidental anti-Semitic tendencies, has had and may have again direct policy implications. In January 2023, “burn it down” Republicans seemed serious about reneging on the Federal debt. This was not just performative brinksmanship, as the Tea Party pulled off to no one’s benefit in 2011, although it was also performative. As Charlie Sykes put it at the time, a textbook combination of “dead-end demagoguery, performative outrage, and nihilistic radicalism” has become the default MAGA means of launching spectacle. It plays wonderfully to the base, whose instincts are founded on the urge for counter-humiliation, and indulgence in anger against the exaggerated woke Left who, of course, more often than not also seem eager to burn the house down.
That displays of anger are sanctioned and even encouraged by the wider culture is almost too obvious to belabor: Displays of anger, the rhetorically louder the better, keep people glued to social media longer than anything else, which is great news for algorithm-armed advertisers. The same sanction is given in the trajectory of popular music—heavy metal, goth, rap, hip-hop, and more—over the past several decades. Contemporary American politics too often feels like an angry pissing contest between two seemingly opposite-minded but equally determined arsonists, each of which would be quick to blame the other if their own flammable desires were ever to come true. And again, even at the pinnacle of politics we have warning of the “outrage-industrial complex” from more than a century past; Mencken again: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
But now back to the 2023 debt ceiling episode: The sanctity of contracts is the bedrock of responsible capitalism, and responsible capitalism is supposedly the economic bedrock on which political conservatism rests. There is, however, nothing remotely conservative about reneging on the Federal debt and sending the U.S. and global economies into mutually reinforcing tailspins. It is exactly the sort of thing that an anarchist accidentally blessed with governmental power would do. Or that a clueless narcissist like Donald Trump would do with his favorite English word: tariffs.
Mark Lilla diagnosed this particular mania already back in Tea Party days, which seem about as distant to us now psychologically as the Boston Tea Party. Those whom he then called the new rightwing Jacobins share two
. . . classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket mistrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.[2]
Lilla could not have seen it coming so long ago, but he is describing a form of rhetorical spectacle when he invokes “apocalyptic pessimism,” for how else can such an effusion be expressed except spectacularly? How else would anyone be expected to notice? Again, as Rieff wrote and as Arendt had anticipated, lying is attention arresting as truth-telling is not, and the lies must be grandiose in a culture already bathed in mendacity, from the ubiquity of advertising to the dumb-downedness of mass-electronic entertainment.
As for his invoking “childlike optimism,” here Lilla was perhaps channeling Christopher Lasch’s 1979 Culture of Narcissism analysis, but also the many subsequent observations about hyper-individualism and the inherently infantile implications of “expressive individualism.” The current shade of rightwing populism, unlike the populism of the 1880s and 1890s, is about as airily narcissistic as it gets, even as it embraces a quasi-tribal, virtual communalism. Its narcissism often expresses itself as an anti-authority reflex nestled awkwardly within its own authoritarian tendencies, as in “how dare the government, any government, impinge on my absolute liberty by telling me what I can and cannot do, let alone lecture me on what I should and should not do?”[3] That same combination of hyper-individualism and virtual communalism, in different proportions, also characterizes the lesser populism of the Left—as with official San Francisco’s aforementioned attitude toward drugs. But only on the broad back of massive unearned affluence could spoiled rightwing brats in such numbers, and of such inarticulate intensity, be imagined.[4]
This is where the “New Right” pseudo-heroism of J.D. Vance and the Claremont Institute comes from, amounting to abstraction-envy bouncing off the woke Left. But notwithstanding its origin it may well prove shrewd as a political tactic. Polls regularly show that Trump supporters, most believing existential issues to be at stake, care more about taking and keeping power by any means necessary than they do about democratic niceties or the Constitution, which few have ever read (certainly including Trump himself). They value transhistorical heroism, or the pretense of it, over the narcoleptic proceduralism of American liberal democracy, preferring new or revived forms of monadic political theology to burst through the tedium ideological muddling through.[5] “They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1928; just shy of a century later her poetic insight echoes loudly in our time.
The New Right believes that the Constitution has aged out, and nearly all its adherents support the Project 2025 blueprint for authoritarian governance (but lied about that before November 5 as necessary). They see a well-intentioned tyranny as a real alternative to what in their view is a chaotic and immoral democracy and, as David Mitchell put it, “Once tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary . . . its victory is assured.”[6] That is why We the People must never allow the idea of an American tyranny to enter the realm of the ideationally possible. If we fail at that, and we are perilously close, we should expect to experience Ortega y Gasset’s “reason of unreason” at scale and from top down, and we should expect to experience episodes of organized thuggery, ratified from on high but far worse than the January 6, 2021 incident at the Capitol, perhaps even resembling the iconic death of Miguel de Unamuno at the University of Salamanca in 1936.
If we then add to the narcissistic tendencies of so many affluent Americans these days the locked-in-the-now “present shock” so many experience, we get a unexpected kind of callousness that reshapes the past as funhouse mirrors reshape the present. The first casualty of that callousness is the obligation of intergenerational responsibility. Commented Jonathan Last,
It amazes me that today when people complain about what went wrong during COVID, they talk about business closures, travel restrictions, remote schooling, and sometimes having to wear masks in public parks. They never talk about the 1 million Americans who died from COVID during the pandemic. Trump understood that the living do not care about the dead.[7]
Those in the eternal now never do remember the dead, or much of anything else either. And now four to five years later they rarely if ever blame Trump for somewhere between a third and a half of those deaths due to his callous, politically self-interested incompetence in dealing with the pandemic. After all, that would serve no entertaining purpose and might require a few minutes of concentrated thought and competent dot-connecting memory. One might even need to read something to bring back to mind the pertinent facts of that time. No way: th;dd, as in “too hard; didn’t do”—a nice complement to tl;dr, you think?
The Right’s Crazy SOB Competition
The spectacalization of rightwing politics, which has continued apace, interrupted only briefly by Donald Trump’s temporary post-midterm swoon from popularity and power among the GOP elites, has taken over the Republican Party now in full. There is no other way to explain the elevation and re-election to House Speaker of Mike Johnson (R., LA), and the fact that not a single member of the Republican caucus voted against him the first time around despite his active role in fostering the Big Lie. They knew what they had to do: The show must go on.
Perhaps the best graphic illustration of the performative hollowness of what used to be the GOP is the Christmas family gunfest portraits that have spread among the would-be anointed. The Boebert family infamously started this trend in 2020, but it has since been embraced by many others, most spectacularly by Rep. Thomas Massie (R, KY), who was shown in advance of the December 2022 holiday with family in front of a Christmas tree, everyone armed with assault weapons to the teeth—even what looked to be a 12 or 13 year-old girl.
Charlie Sykes put his finger on what this really amounted to by referring during an MSNBC interview to the photo as the equivalent of a “dick shot.” The interviewer, Lindsey Reiser, was taken aback—an even rarer event these days when it is genuine as opposed to staged—and Sykes sort of apologized on the spot, but not really since he quickly added: “He’s basically trying to show off. He’s trying to trigger to get the reaction. . . . It’s designed to show off in this fetish kind of way” akin to the aforementioned phenomenon of vice-signaling. Sykes continued his non-apology thusly:
Massie is a not a serious man, and his performative assholery did not deserve a serious or respectful response. Posting this photo has the same relationship to responsible gun ownership as sending out a d*ck pic does to genuine romance. Unfortunately, it also seems to capture so much of what the post-policy, post-governing GOP has become these days.
His Christmas tweet—with its callous and vicious indifference to the latest gun-related tragedy—was not about any coherent idea at all, but it fits a pattern. As the GOP becomes an ever-more unserious party, its pols increasingly compensate for their various inadequacies by flaunting their hardware. For a certain class of GOP politicians, this gun cosplay is a subset of their obsession with faux toughness. But it also reflects the way that triggering memes have displaced the business of governing, or even the attempt to govern. . . .
Massie himself seemed to understand this. Back in 2017 he had said:
All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand [Paul] and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.
So Massie knew what he was doing in December 2022: He was intent on snatching the “Craziest SOB” title back for himself. In hindsight, he clearly failed.
Alas, that competition was and remains fierce. It has become hard to top Vivek Ramaswamy, who clearly learned a great deal watching Donald Trump channeling Vince McMahon. Ramaswamy’s talent for producing “wow, you don’t see that every day” two-headed carnival calves was unsurpassed when, during the November 8, 2023 faux Republican presidential candidates’ “debate,” he outdid himself in delivering surrealist shiny objects to hijack everyone’s paleolithic-origined novelty bias: He called Ukraine’s Jewish President Volodymir Zelensky a Nazi, puppeted Alex Jones’s nutcase fantasy that Joe Biden isn’t really acting as President—later repeated by Stephen Miller—and much more. At one point, Ramaswamy got personal and dragged Nikki Haley’s daughter into the circus, prompting Haley to refer to him thusly: “You’re just scum.” That, too, was something you didn’t see or hear every day. In fact, you never heard language like that used in any presidential candidates’ debate forum. But as of January 20, 2025 Haley had faded from view and Ramaswamy was vice-chair of DOGE, with a plush White House office to boot.
But the real novelty of that November 2023 encounter, when seen in a surrealist context, is that Haley wasn’t performing. At that moment her expression came spontaneously from the heart, and for once, at least, the ever tedious Rachel Maddow said something reasonably succinctly about Ramaswamy:
He makes them say things that you can't imagine they’ve ever said before in their lives. He makes them make facial expressions on the stage that you’re quite sure that they don’t know that they’re making in public. He really brings out a side of them that makes news, frankly.[8]
It is not incidental that the attention-seeking “craziest SOBs” in Congress are also para-literate: They don’t read, let alone deep read, so they can’t actually think. So perhaps it is better that they stick to circus than try to govern. But with the advent of a House of Representatives majority after the 2022 midterms they were not able to just goof off and act out. This became vividly clear when Mark Meadows’s e-mail trove just after January 6, 2021 became public knowledge in December 2022. There we beheld a group of Republican Congressmen urging Meadows to convince Trump to declare “Marshall law.” Alas, they can’t spell either. Marjorie Taylor Greene mixes up “gazpacho” and “Gestapo” and no one on her side of the aisle blinks an eye.
Even some quite conservative Republicans are from time to time willing to acknowledge what has been going on among their own ranks. Some saw what was coming long before Donald Trump ran for President. One conservative declaimed in 2011 that the Republican Party was now “defined by what it opposes: science, liberalism, and gays.” He added, tellingly: “[W]ith few exceptions, the American Right is no longer a bastion of maturity, but a factory of anger and contradiction.” That was J.D. Vance, writing as J.D. Hamel before his changed his surname for the second time.[9] Now that he is Vice-President of the United States, a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, it matters that no seems to know what Vance actually believes. Talk about A or not-A: Vance is a walking, talking, breathing Ripley.
Then there was the bizarre spectacle—no other word works as well—in January 2023 of a new Republican-majority House of Representatives turning the usually simple matter of electing a Speaker of the House into mass bed-wetting orgy. Commenting on the 118th Congress’ desultory debut, after it tried and failed to elect a Speaker on any of, at that point, the first six ballots, Rep. Daniel Crenshaw, from Texas’s 2nd District put it plainly: “They’re like children. This is such a childish attempt at gaining attention. . . . petty attempts to gain notoriety. It’s unbelievably frustrating and they should be held accountable for it by the American people.”[10]
Crenshaw was only 38 years old at the time but, as a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer with a Harvard University graduate degree, he certainly knew at least a little something about accountability and taking one’s responsibilities seriously. He even ventured into governing efforts from time to time, something that MAGAts faced for the first time after the November 2022 midterms. What Crenshaw seemed unwilling to do, publicly at least, was to connect any dots between a then-former President’s outsized influence on his party and the fact that the MAGA congressional contingent was and remains to a fault childish, petty, desperate for fund-raising-useful fame, and at best quasi-literate. It was so manifestly uninterested in policy or governance that it didn’t know what to do with a majority legislative position except try to burn down the Federal government through a debt-ceiling crisis.
Either that or indulge in child-like episodes of the unreal, such as Marjorie Taylor Green’s proposing in late June 2023 that Trump’s two impeachment trials be “expunged.” It is not clear if she knew what the word actually means, for no such thing exists legally, constitutionally, or rationally for that matter. What she proposed was the equivalent of proposing the deletion of last month, last week, or yesterday from history. Is she an obsessive video gamer? That’s the sort of knee jerk re-set/do-over tic often acquired as a shadow effect from that activity. More likely she thinks that being expunged is like wiping dirt off one’s body in the bathtub with a sponge. Trump has this “dirty” record, so let’s “expunge” it off. Sounds sort of similar, like gazpacho and Gestapo.
Trump has always been more spectacle than substance, and so his base has tended to be more performative than seriously invested in outcomes. Nor is Crenshaw entirely a stranger to spinning, tactical equivocation (a.k.a arse-licking), and self-promotion. It doesn’t always take one to know one, but it frequently helps. Crenshaw’s colleagues got busy following the same path, as though they were living in some kind of cartoon show while spouting silliness on the floor of House of Representatives.
One even got the impression a few weeks before Rep. Green’s suggestion that she and some other Republicans actually wanted to see what would happen if the Federal government defaulted, not just as a tactic to harm the administrative state and its meliorative agenda—as with Grover Norquist’s meta-tactic of opposing all taxes during the Reagan era as a mean to “starve the beast—but because it promised a huge “wow” experience. It promised to be entertaining, at least to some tastes, because it would have been a wow-you-don’t-see-that-every-day Ripley kind of thing. It would have been a major “wow now,” as we might coin it, and for people deep into self-directed quasi-dreamtime theta as their preferred mode of cognitive being that is what matters most.
Besides, some barstool conservatives love fireworks, and not just on July 4. Some people just enjoy blowing shit up.[11] As a form of cognitive closure, many people also enjoy finishing a disaster they did not start or intend, as in the Rick Roberts country song lyric, “If you’re gonna throw yourself away, you might as well do it right.” The late Murray Welt dubbed this basic idea the “Root Beer Syndrome,” the reason requiring a brief story.
In the autumn of 1970 two young women Murray and I knew in high school times went off to be freshmen at the University of Chicago. They soon began to engage in behavior not well appreciated by their middle-class Jewish parents. So the parents, who were all friends living down the street from one another, decided together to pressure their daughters into behaving more in line with parental expectations by first limiting and then cutting off their spending money from home. So the young women, we’ll call them Janet and Nina, in their penurious state would gather up their coins, go down to the main floor of their dorm, and each buy a root beer from the vending machine, then at 35 cents a pop. They would then open the soda cans and pour the contents down the drain of the water fountain near the vending machines, laughing loudly--since they both disliked root beer.
Some people readily understand what this means but others are puzzled by the described behavior. A second, hypothetical example may help get the point across. Suppose that while vacuuming the dining room rug you happen to knock the machine against a rickety leg of an old china cabinet and the leg breaks, the whole cabinet then falls forward onto the floor, bouncing off the corner of the dining room table as it tumbles, breaking the glass in the cabinet door and smashing every single item in the cabinet—except for a single antique teacup. You survey the disaster, espy the sole surviving teacup, pick it up and….what do you do with it? You smash it down on the floor, of course, so that its pieces may join the rest of the debris. You do that because in a hopelessly catastrophic situation it somehow feels right to finish the catastrophe. It is a kind of closure-delivering emotional punctuation point.[12] Sometimes making things a little worse somehow makes them feel a lot better, temporarily at least, because it resolves ambiguity and uncertainty, which some people more than others have trouble tolerating.
At first glance the Root Beer Syndrome appears to be a form of nihilism, but it is better described as a guardrail, ritualized and even a bit artistic--if done in the proper spirit--protection against nihilism. It lacks the cynicism that nearly always accompanies nihilism, and it lacks the darkness of Eco’s mournfulness, to wit: “In a world full of lies, the only truth is that there are only lies.” It is rather, so to speak, a spontaneous petite mal deployed to prevent a gran mal. Cynicism is a form of purposelessness that more often then not comes to rhyme with hatred, for baseless hatred is a projectile form of cynicism’s self-reproach; the Root Beer Syndrome has a purpose, and it is innocent of cynicism and hatred both.
The Root Beer Syndrome can apply to people with and without a very good education, with and without a reading habit, with and without a stable family situation, and with and without enough money to satisfy basic needs. But as a form of spectacular behavior, of acting out, of heroic self-victimization, it manifests more readily among those who feel humiliated, defeated, disrespected, and generally unable to focus on much of anything. It tends to manifest among those more prone to seek escape into the theta zone and those prone to acting out in ways associated with a modal pre-adult personality.
Taken together, then, barstool conservatives look to be in the process of demonstrating the Root Beer Syndrome at full social scale in the United States, with political implications no one could have imagined possible a few decades ago. If we are lucky the current upsurge in nihilism associated with positive vibes about authoritarianism will prove to a petite mal rather than a gran mal. But that is not a wager to be lightly undertaken after the November 2024 election, which has given rise, as described below, to signs that the Root Beer Syndrome is spreading in a generally left-of-center direction, as well.
[1] Fukuyama, “The Female Hitman,” Persuasion, September 6, 2024.
[2] from Lilla, “The Tea Party Jacobins,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010.
[3] There is the occasional humorous expression of this, such as when an elderly woman famously held up a sign at a populist anti-big-government protest which read: “Hands off my Social Security!” Where she thought her monthly check came from remains a mystery.
[4] Relevant here as background, focusing on generational culture churn, is Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
[5] See Don Kettl, “The Crusade Against Expertise, Part II,” American Purpose, November 18, 2024. Part I from November 9 is good too, but less directly relevant to the point being made here.
[6] Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Sceptre, 2004), p. 363.
[7] Last, “What If Trump Is Right About America?” The Bulwark, May 24, 2024.
[8] Maddow quoted in Charlie Sykes, “’You’re Just Scum’,” The Bulwark Morning Shots, November 9, 2023. Confession: I could not quote Maddow directly from her show because in any event I watch little television and cannot bear to watch her, lest I start clacking my teeth like a dog on speed.
[9] J.D. Hamel, “Huntsman: The Truer Conservative,” FrumForum, September 11, 2011, referenced in William Kristol and Andrew Egger, “Inside JD Vance’s Blogger Days,” The Bulwark, July 26, 2024.
[10] Crenshaw quoted by Tim Miller in “The MAGA Crackup,” The Bulwark, January 3, 2023.
[11] What should be a classic literary description of the joys of explosives comes courtesy of Umberto Eco’s character Ninuzzo in The Prague Cemetery, Chapters 8 and 11.
[12] Not everyone understands this even upon explanation, but in American culture most people do. It would be interesting to conduct a cross-cultural experiment on the Root Beer Syndrome.