Irritable mental gestures
Like 1897 rumors of Mark Twain’s death, an assessment of conservatism’s poor health in America was “greatly exaggerated” when in 1950 Lionel Trilling wrote:
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Trilling wrote that years prior to Brown v. Board, the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, Bloody Sunday, and passage of the Voting Rights Act. Post-war cultural rejection of 100 years of Jim Crow injected a shot of adrenaline into the conservative impulses Trilling considered largely out of circulation mid-century.
Trumpism’s primal scream is certainly more reactionary than Trilling could have anticipated, as Andrew O’Hehir writes at Salon:
MAGA envisions undoing nearly all of modern history and returning to some primal, purified state of nature, or rather a meme version thereof: The 1950s and the antebellum South and the American frontier and medieval feudalism and the Neanderthal fireside — everything, everywhere, all at once.
Trumpism is a movement Trilling would still recognize as one that expresses itself “only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Memes and AI slop, in current parlance. Or in mass deportations and state-sanctioned street violence and murder. If those “gestures” appear garbled, it is because the “the high priests of MAGA ideology,” Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, are not driven not by coherent ideas. What drives them is visceral rage at cultural change that fails to center men as base as themselves. And by the congenital insecurity of Donald Trump himself.
Admittedly, even the most articulate MAGA ideologues — not that there are many — haven’t gone that far. But that’s where the collective brotastic idiocies of Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson and Curtis Yarvin and Andrew Tate and Pete Hegseth and whomever else all converge: Somewhere in the recent or distant or mythical past, everything totally ruled and “we” (a term of art, I hasten to add) never felt bad about any of it. Guys were guys and women were hot and there was lots of feasting and stuff. There was no wokeness, no political correctness, no gender-neutral bathrooms. Nobody used pronouns or talked about inequality or intersectionality or was gay (except sometimes in the locker room) or tried to make us ashamed for being awesome.
If that sounds like a 1997 frat party elevated to political abstraction, fair enough. MAGA’s explicit promise is to reassert white supremacy — along with its inescapable corollaries, male dominance and mandatory heterosexuality — while cleansing it of all guilt, all self-doubt, all uncertainty. History’s newsreels will run backward such that the crimes of colonialism, imperialism, slavery and so forth either never happened or were never crimes. (Your mileage may vary.)
A nihilistic impulse to tear down modernity drives them. Perhaps not coincidentally, The Washington Post this morning describes a strain of violent extremism characterized by nihilism, “an online revival of the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe.” Miller, Vought, et al. approve that message. They find meaning only in the power to dominate others. Might makes right is not much of philosophy but, for MAGA and its antecedent movements, a powerful one.
Their effort to undo modernity is as doomed to fail as uninventing the light bulb, the airplane, or the computer. But not before MAGA does consequential damage, O’Hehir argues:
In its most distilled form, MAGA ideology promises to salve that unease and heal the fissure, transporting its believers into an AI-slop alternate universe where the heart of darkness has been whitewashed and no one remembers slavery or imperialism or misogyny or thinks any of that was a problem. That’s a lot more ambitious than simply undoing the major political and social reforms of the last century. It’s more like transforming human consciousness, and the fact that it can’t be done doesn’t mean it won’t be massively destructive.
Stephen Miller, as it happens, has an extensive history of public comments that echo white nationalist talking points about the historical errors of “the West,” which has engaged in “self-punishment” by opening its borders to “reverse colonization” and becoming “the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights.” (That the “foreign labor class” in question included Miller’s great-grandparents goes unmentioned.) He would presumably say that he just wants to purge “the West” of its toxic self-doubt. Or to put it another way, he wants to destroy Western civilization in order to save it.
For white Christian patriarchy, that’s the bottom line, with all the irritable mental gestures that attend it.