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so there’s this fresh load of smelly bullshit that’s being shoved in our faces, and it goes like this:
we can’t keep Trump off the ballot, his worshipers will throw a shit-fit. there will be riots in the streets and pandemonium at the polling places. that’s too messy, so let’s just give in and let Trump have his way.
I’m sorry, but letting a bully get away with whatever he wants for fear he’ll unleash his army of violent morons if we don’t is literally how fascism works.
If I told you that this was the transcript from a fourteen year-old girl’s latest TikTok, would you doubt me? Note the lazy swearing for emphasis and a gilding of edge, the histrionic hyperbole, the schoolyard framing (Trump’s a bully!), and the silly affected lack of grammar (at first I thought he might be on that weird “no capitalization to support indigenous people” cringe-signal microfad, but he capitalizes names, so I don’t know). There’s a core of a thesis here; Donald Trump has committed some yet unmentioned crime that is so serious that he- a former president and the likely Republican nominee for president in the next election- should be excluded from running due to his political beliefs. But it’s delivered as a sub-rational adolescent rant, in the tone one would expect to see from Kayla curtly informing her Snapchat followers that Makenzie is a total slut and no one should, like, be her friend.
The problem is not just that ostensibly grown men are writing stuff like this. It’s that they actually think this way and connect with an audience of other man-children who see this as a fine example of a totally sick burn, the phenomenon in the aggregate. “Oh he totally went there, he called Trump a fascist! And his followers are like, total morons and stuff. It’s the kind of BS my dad likes, and he’s so lame…” Eighty-thousand people subscribe to this stack- eighty thousand people who had a choice between watching a reaction video of an action figure unboxing or reading this hot take and they chose the lesser path.
It’s a thing.
By itself this would just be silly. Many would just assume the situation will resolve itself. This person has an opinion about Trump and presumably has one about Ninja Turtles. Perhaps he’ll eventually just get tired of karate-chopping his keyboard fighting MAGAts and put his skills to use debating whether The Shredder could take on Batman. But that’s not really how it works, and why that’s so has to do with how children, even in adult form, think.
Also a thing
Most adults rarely experience actual children as a collective. They see their own kids, perhaps some of their friends and their peer relatives, or else they coach or mentor or work in a business that caters to them. As a teacher, though, my experience is unique; my world is full of children, and I’m very much a minority in a microsociety in which they form the dominant cultural demographic. In some ways, a school is like a prison or a hospital or a retirement home, a little universe unto itself where one particular slice of an organic society is isolated and allowed to form a self-contained whole. There are distortions and weirdnesses, deviant values framing worthless things as invaluable while things of true meaning are out of reach. But the value in it for an observer is that, much like isolating some chemical from nature, one can see its properties more fully expressed. I don’t claim to be the first to notice many of these things, I offer them for your interest inasmuch as I assume most of you do not have my experiences.
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You could also just watch this.
The most important thing to know about a child is that he or she lives in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. After conception, a child spends the first nine months of its live in a solipsistic universe, floating in a warm sea of solitude. Then he roughly enters the world, cold, helpless, and frightened. He learns slowly over time that the voices and shapes he sees around him are not fragments of his own consciousness but distinct beings like him. They respond to his cries every time he voices them, but he himself can only flail helplessly as they do. He thus knows (intuitively) two things coming into self-aware childhood. One, he and his wants are the center of the universe, and two, he is wholly dependent on others to satisfy them. This presents a problem as he becomes aware that his wants will not always be satisfied. Sometimes these powerful beings around him thwart his will. Kids are cute right up until this point, when the beast emerges. But it is not merely self-centeredness driving this, but also fear. A child needs to feel like the grownups around him are omnicompetent and limitless; there’s a reason God reveals himself to us as a Father. The very hint that they are flawed beings represents a rupture to his sense of place in the universe. Thus the cognitive dissonance- mom and dad are perfect, and my desires are perfect, but mom and dad don’t always give me what I want…
Normally, entering the teen years, the first illusion disappears. A child notices that the world of adults is a machine lubricated by lies big and small. Dad tells him to read and study, but dad does neither with his own time; junior gets punished for smoking but recognizes the smell coming from his parents’ room when they think he’s sleeping. They’re not perfect after all, and their hypocrisy disgusts him. This is perfectly earnest on the part of kids. The best thing about them is that they cannot abide inauthenticity in others. In the world of boxing they say to never listen to a fighter, only look at him. He comes back at the end of the round beaten half to death, but insists he can keep going; you don’t listen, you look, and throw in the towel. Kids don’t listen, they look. That’s not to say they can’t be fooled, as they have little in the way of discernment (see influencers), but when they catch out fakeness it repulses them.
A proper education, a real cultivation of the soul, does not silence this voice in the young, but redirects it inward. Yes, mom and dad are flawed. But so are you. The things you want are appropriate for children, but it is time to put them away now that you see the world for what it is. As Athena says to Telemachus in The Odyssey:
οὐδέ τί σε χρὴ νηπιάας ὀχέειν, ἐπεὶ οὐκέτι τηλίκος ἐσσι.
Do not hold on to childish things, you are no longer of an age for that.
The context for this is interesting. Athena is telling him to investigate whether his father Odysseus, long absent fighting in Troy, is still alive. Also, she wants him to murder all the suitors who have shown up to try to slide into his father’s place and usurp him. If one of them succeeds, it would prevent Telemachus from fully becoming a man, both because he would lose his patrimony and more seriously because the usurper would then certainly murder him. Telemachus must become a man or die.
Our modern children have no such stakes and no such imperative. There is no time for putting away childish things as such; indeed, everything militates against it. Our young men listen to the counsels of Calypso rather than Athena, heeding her promises of eternal youth and indulgence. But that’s not to say that violence is absent from the equation.
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She’s never not naked in the paintings.
Not properly guided, the child ceases to be physically, but enters a kind of undeath; the manchild is a kind of zombie adolescent. He can appear harmless, funny, even endearing, but deep down he is still something monstrous, with no real place in nature. He cannot create or truly reproduce, only fatten himself on the creations of others and through the labor of those reproduced by others. Monsters are always dangerous. Fat and happy in their lairs, they pose no immediate threat, but children that they are, they persist in their belief that their wants are at the center of the universe and that mom and dad exist to provide them. The only difference for the manchild is that the universe is consoomer society, and mom and dad are the system. When one recognizes this, much of modern life makes terrible sense.
The violence comes into play when some enterprising sort weaponizes the child hive-mind of these people and directs it toward some hate object, something set up as a totem of the unwanted, will-thwarting parentally imposed limitations on a sense of freedom understood only as the absence of restraint. Isms and phobias and swerfs and ‘Nazis’- all of these things prevent the realization of a world in which all consumer possibilities are possible, right down to bespoke identities and interchangeable body parts. Statues are toppled, police stations are burned, helpless dehumanized hate-objects are assaulted, all in a puerile parody of Telemachus’s dilemma. As with him, the framing is that of survival- Substack white nationalist neo-Confederate Nazis want everyone dead OMG!!! But the threat exists almost entirely as a caricature of the actual thing. Exactly how many refugees does racist/sexist/-phobic America actually produce? How many does Substack even produce?
Children are cruel and irrational. It’s not all they are, but it’s part of what makes them what they are. The world they create when left to their own devices is not a pleasant one, especially when they face no consequences for their actions. And cruelty is an appetite that grows in the feeding. Being of limited awareness and with a poor capacity to envision the future, children make excellent soldiers, as attested to by many sad examples. Man-children, too, daydream of hurting their enemies and lack equally the foresight to predict what violence would mean. Consider this passage from Tiedrich:
fair? why are we being fair to a bunch of democracy-hating extremists who would shit on the Constitution in a heartbeat?
I’m so fucking tired of people giving into Trump’s threats and tantrums.
we can’t throw Trump in jail for violating his gag order. why the fuck not? yes we can. and we fucking well should.
we can’t put Trump on trial in the middle of a presidential campaign, it wouldn’t be fair. there’s that word again. why are we so worried about what’s fair to Trump?
I’m using the word “we” a lot here, because it’s not just Republicans — there are voices on the left clamoring for quote-unquote “fairness” too…
folks, Donald Trump has one goal: to end democracy and install himself as dictator for life. Trump and his Republican goon squad aren’t even hiding it. go read about Agenda 47, and Project 2025. they’re plans for totalitarianism.
it’s time to take these people seriously, and to fight back, in every way possible.
Note the blithe indifference, here and in the previous quote, to the possibility of massive civil unrest if the course of action he advocates were to come to pass. It’s beyond him what it would mean if people actually fought in every way possible. More than seventy million people voted for Donald Trump in the last election, and that many probably support him now. If five percent of those people took to the streets because the likely front runner was thrown into jail on a wholly novel legal theory..? But none of that matters because Hitler:
let’s talk about those German communists again, and their slogan, “after Hitler, us.” these babe-in-the-woods dopes actually thought that when Hitler’s term of office was up, the German people would be so fed up by his antics that they’d vote him out, and vote the communists in.
how is this magical thinking any different from the dipshits today who insist that “punishing” Joe Biden and handing Trump another presidency is going to lead to some great far-left utopia?
come on, people, how about a little critical thinking here.
know what happened to the German commies after the Nazis took power? their party was outlawed and its members ended up murdered or in concentration camps.
The specter of a communist takeover was a big part of Hitler’s appeal. Everyone knew what a “leftist utopia” would mean for Germany (the same thing it meant and continues to mean everywhere else), and the unhinged, violent lunacy of the communists was a major selling point for anyone promising order in a country that had been stable and prosperous within living memory. Tiedrich is oblivious to this and its implications for his own ideas. For him, an all out battle with half the country just makes sense, because what he knows about violent rebellion comes from Star Wars. He would happily do to Trump supporters everything he imagines they would do to him, gleefully hurting his enemies the way a boy pulls the legs off a bug (and for the same reason), and encourage others to do so as well. As I’ve said, the audience for this is not small.
So what to make of this? The failure is systemic, the product ultimately of liberalism understood in the sense outlined by Patrick Deneen, a system that promised liberation through control of nature, endless material progress and liberation from all forms of constraint. The men who built that system were men, but over time, their success proved its own undoing, much as a self-made man’s work can end up creating the conditions for spoiled and worthless grandchildren. We are all of us in some way the latter-day heirs of the eternal nursery world liberalism has created, and if it is, as I argue, unsustainable, then we must all of us as individuals do what we must to survive and thrive in the world that will follow the collapse of this one. Childhood ends whether we want it to or not; the conditions that keep it going in our society are artificial and unstable. The final piece that creates a man is an awareness of mortality, and perhaps it will take experiencing that on a grand scale to wake us from our childish dreams.
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