The Repression Insurrection
The reckonings came. They arrived dank and they arrived sticky and hot. They came not perfectly in sync, like in the movies; but they came.
This was “not a normal ideological division or an argument about strategy or tactics, but a split between reality and fantasy,” Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times of January 6th’s violent siege on the nerve center of global leadership.
Lapsed Republican David Frum, ever paying his penance, added in the pages of The Atlantic that we now have all the proof we need that victimhood has become “the central concept in modern conservatism.”
“Here they were, a coalition of the willing: deadbeat dads, YouPorn enthusiasts, slow students, and MMA fans,” scythed Frum’s colleague, Caitlin Flanagan, as she asymptotically approached “rube.”
Whether through severe declarations about partings of ways or dismissive cackles of satirical verve, #takes echoing throughout the internet’s several overlapping bubbles of Highly Educated Social Critics (HESC™️) have overwhelmingly projected — consciously or unconsciously — class superiority. Those people, we are told, shun face coverings and climate science and election results because they do not simply deny the truth, but distrust and reject the basic social and intellectual frameworks that enable a systematic pursuit of truth in the first place, believing such things to be a false bill of goods dangled by the privileged class.
We can and do judge these assertions on their merits. We can certainly call upon mountains of evidence across 4chan, r/thedonald, Infowars, the Church of Jordan Petersonism, and the QAnon industrial complex to surmise that our darkest, most consequential societal fissures are the product of class-based revolt against a moneyed, cultured elite that addresses flyover country with brutal condescension.
But what gets lost or obscured when we insist on honing our analysis through the economic lens is an alternative and far more uncomfortable theory of how far-right extremism has incubated, metastasized, and organized in the 21st century.
As the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich proclaimed: “Fascism is the frenzy of sexual cripples.”
(Replace “fascism” with “toxic masculinity,” if you like. The upshot is the same, and that’s the point.)
This is not to suggest that the Capitol was sieged by an all-incel army, though some subsection of the pro-Trump insurrectionists is surely stuck in the involuntary celibacy camp. Rather, Reich suggests that the sexual cripple is debilitated by some permutation of powerlessness, fear, humiliation, guilt, and shame that shares as a common thread at least some relation to the realm of the orgasmic.
Yes, America needs healing — the kind Marvin Gaye sang about.
That means David Frum’s diagnosis of the modern right wing’s total quality victimhood and Caitlin Flanagan’s suspicions about porn aren’t wrong; they’re simply incomplete. Reich, very much an anti-Freud in insisting that libidinous desire could be a path to self-actualization rather than an innately volatile energy that needed to be brought to heel, maintained that sexual repression could not be disentangled from violence.
To deny the existence of a sexual component within the cultural and intellectual ills that have poisoned conservatism, then, is to deny a fundamental animating force.
Historically, sexual agency in particular has a direct relationship with violence. Consider anti-miscegenation laws, the government-sanctioned mutilation and sterilization of Black and indigenous women, and the feverishly righteous backlash against the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights, and LGBT freedom; there is a recurring theme in the American cultural canon of belligerent reactions to the perpetuation of sexual autonomy by historically oppressed classes — that is, nonwhite people, especially women, perceived to be invading “white spaces.”
And the perceived threat of invasion, as well as the theft it presupposes, is worth unpacking in this tensest of national moments, as it’s a crucial pillar upon which Trumpism stands.
On cue, new research from political geographer and policy scholar Jacob Whiton further undercuts the flawed theory of mere “economic anxiety” as the animating force behind America’s extremist insurrection:
“[T]he picture that emerges of [congressional] districts represented by the most committed Pro-Trump Republicans is one of fast-growing, rapidly diversifying greenfield suburbs where inequalities between white homeowners and their non-white neighbors have been shrinking….”
Plainly, the 139 congresspeople who voted in favor of overturning the duly certified results of a legally conducted presidential election don’t come from some kind of post-industrial Mad Max wasteland. Critically, they are ever-decreasingly the kind of “slow,” cartoonish male oafs Flanagan so sneeringly eye-rolled in The Atlantic.
Rather, their rage is fueled by those infernal twins, diversity and equity, and by the vanguards of diversity and equity daring to practice the kind of sexual agency that would permit them to reproduce and put down roots within communities historically dominated by white men’s power.
Owing to plummeting voter turnout, Trumpists in these 139 congressional districts are now compelled to oppose democracy itself due to “a keen sense that their hold on power is fragile and dependent on minoritarian features of our political system,” Whiton writes.
As white male domination recedes more and more, active rage denatures into fragility, then powerlessness. Powerlessness gives way to humiliation — the bailiwick of the sexual cripple riddled with the cancer of late-stage masculine rage.
A spiritual predecessor to the insurrectionist movement, former Fox News host John Gibson outed himself as a nakedly blathering racist in 2006 when he declared live on air that the current birth rates across racial groups meant that white people needed to “make more babies” before the majority of the US population suddenly became Hispanic and civilization itself went down the toilet.
“[D]o your duty,” he warned.
Fearing cuckoldry both literal and cultural, it was something between a plea and a war cry: Our power is waning as *their* power is growing. And it’s because they’re literally out-sexing us, the implication was.
Fast-forwarding to January 6th, the Charles Murray-esque faux-intellectual lineage of this kind of sex-as-war moral alarmism — and the conch shell call for reactionary violence woven into the very fiber of it — is plainly traceable. Framing sexual behavior as a moral duty that supersedes and even precludes all enjoyment (“procreation, not recreation!” Gibson brayed) is a crystalline, Atwoodian manifestation of repression. Uncut, raw.
So, what to do about a culture that glorifies violence but is hostile to sex? How do we mitigate the unstable isotope of Trumpism at critical mass?
The short answer is dismantling the sexual austerity native to the puritanical, guilt-ridden religiosity that has served as the nuclear reactor inside the conservative power plant since the Reagan era.
“When sexual feelings and religious feelings became separated from one another, that which is sexual was forced to become the bad, the internal, the diabolical,” Wilhelm Reich writes in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, drawing a through-line from far-right extremism to a public liturgy that seeks to suppress sexual desire and attack it with humiliation and shame rather than teach, say, an approach grounded in health and science.
Does a Biden-Harris administration stand any chance of toppling the Christian Right? No, and it will make zero attempts to do so. But there are very real things that the new president and his allies in Congress can champion that will signal a meaningful pivot from sexual reeling to sexual healing, including:
- Expanding health care coverage to all Americans through expansions of Medicaid and Medicare and/or an evolution of the Affordable Care Act
- Disavowing abstinence-only education and withholding federal funds from public jurisdictions that proliferate its harms
- Increasing funding for K-12 public schools and Headstart, and ending programs (private school “vouchers,” etc.) that undermine and endanger them
- Restoring full and robust support for the Title X Family Planning Program and health organizations like Planned Parenthood
- Enforcing a pro-choice litmus test for members of the presidential cabinet, federal government contractors, and NGOs that receive foreign aid
- Dismantling the Hyde Amendment
- Ensuring real and lasting legal consequences for every single Capitol insurrectionist and the figures who incited them
- Replacing by executive order the editorial staff of The New York Times with the editorial staff of Teen Vogue
(That last one’s a personal pipe dream, but I ain’t even half-kidding about it.)
It’s an inconvenient truth that no one, from the president on down, can stop Hollywood and all other limbs of the culture industry from reinforcing unrealistic, unhealthy sexual attitudes and depictions with a capricious wave of the hand. From the wrath of so many magazine covers perpetuating harmful notions of an ideal body image to Game of Thrones’ ridiculous, needless use of “sexposition,” there’s a hell of a lot that’s entrenched that must be decommissioned before our sexually crippled society has a chance at rehabilitation.
Simply teaching Portnoy’s Complaint in every middle school won’t thread that needle straight away (though it would be one hell of a start). But if we are to “eradicate the shame around orgasm and sex,” as comedian and Reich adherent Marc Maron waxed on a recent episode of his WTF podcast that led me to revisit the radical theorist’s oeuvre, it cannot be achieved violently. These are energies, after all, that have to exist in balance with one another.
And if balance is our ultimate goal, perhaps Reich’s peculiar but dignified notion of “sex-economic conditions” shall be our guide.
“We mean more than just the possibility of a regulated and satisfying love life,” he writes. “Over and above this we mean everything that is related to pleasure and the joy of life in one’s work.”
I’m a bit hot and bothered just picturing it.
