The Popularist
How a dark narrative of apocalypse and decay infected the GOP
“My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus, and it has not been recognized as such … the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.”
– William S. Burroughs
About an hour after rioters forced their way into the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, Ted Cruz sent out an impotent tweet: “Those storming the Capitol need to stop NOW!” It remains unclear whether Cruz was just panicking, pulling a cynical stunt to try and avoid blame for the violent outburst, or if he legitimately believed that his tweet held the power to pacify the crazed Trump supporters. Since the November election, Cruz has used his platform to advance the “election fraud” narrative and decry COVID restrictions as the work of a “totalitarian cult.” So, why the Senator from Texas was surprised that a group of people who believed that democracy was being subverted by a Satan-worshipping cabal of elites decided to take matters into their own hands is anyone’s guess.
Or, maybe Cruz wasn’t taken aback by the rioters’ delusional fury, but by their usurpation of his moment. The subtext of his tweet is clear—Stop! I will handle this!—but why should the rioters listen? Cruz had helped convince a portion of the nation that the country was being stolen from them—and then proceeded to do nothing but soliloquize on the Senate floor.
Cruz fancies himself a cynical, shrewd politician. A Princeton debater, he is fond of picking up the most incendiary, divisive, anti-establishment rhetoric to propel his own “insurgent” political career. It was only natural that when the reactionary language of Trumpism emerged, he would seek to co-opt its power for his own ends.
But Cruz’s tweet reveals a central fallacy of modern politics. Like many Republicans, he believed that he was using the vocabulary of reactionary ideology for his own benefit. He expected that by telling the reactionary narrative of U.S. politics, he would be in control of the country’s populist right-wing anger.
This isn’t how language works. The words were using Ted Cruz. Cruz is no more powerful than the man with the bubonic plague who, while he is infected, holds the power to kill or spare those around him. Eventually though, the contagion does away with the infected man himself.
The idea that words and stories act like viruses can be traced back to the Beat writer William Burroughs. It was his position that words operate virally, as pieces of un-self-conscious code whose sole function is to replicate itself and which cannot survive outside a host. Have you ever heard of the cordyceps fungus? When a cordyceps’ spore lands on an ant, the ant becomes infected and, as the fungus grows inside it, begins behaving in strange ways. Eventually, the ant will have lost control over its musculature and will be forced, by the insentient fungus, to perform a series of bizarre actions for the benefit of the fungus inside, terminating in the ant’s suicide. The mushroom sprouts from the ant’s corpse and sends out more spores, continuing the cycle.
Language works in this viral way—though as Burroughs observed, we have achieved a symbiotic relationship with language that obscures its nature. Language empowers us, allowing us to communicate and cooperate. The cost is that the language uses us, to perpetuate itself, to infect new minds, to spread itself. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of using a word as a joke, only to find yourself saying it earnestly later on. Or maybe you’ve spent time around a certain community out of curiosity, and you find yourself beginning to agree with them where you didn’t before. Online political communities use memes and irony to draw people close enough to start changing the way they think. The ideas we spend time around worm their way into our thoughts. Sometimes, they colonize our thoughts, influencing the way we think and act.
Stories work in the same way as language or discrete ideas, although stories are much more complex and so too is their infectious process. The raw sensory data of day-to-day living, not to mention a hyper-informational world and thousands of years of recorded history, cannot be rendered intelligible in its totality. You need a “story,” a narrative, which tells you what this all “means.” Your story helps you select what is important to focus on, what events are worth your consideration. You have a story about who you are, about what your past experiences have meant for you, and about what that means your future will likely look like. It may not be a totally coherent story, but with it you have a general orientation towards self and world (or else you’re amidst an existential crisis). When we no longer understand what is happening and why, we search out new narratives.
Words beget stories and stories beget words: “People seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality,” wrote literary theorist Kenneth Burke. “To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality.” The words one uses are determined by one’s worldview. This worldview—which we figure to be the “accurate” representation of reality—ushers us towards the vocabulary the best supports it us. The opposite is also true, to a lesser extent. Narratives have explanatory function; our vocabularies gesture towards our explanations. Are Black Lives Matter protests “righteous” or “riotous?” Your answer is probably intertwined with how you view U.S. history.
Your understanding of history anchors your narratives about the world. In the light of historical narrative, meaning and order emerge. In this light, you interpret current events. What was allows you to understand what is. These judgments of what is in turn color your vision of what could be in the future.
We are, moreover, always trying to bring others over to our way of seeing things how they “in fact” are. The speaker’s words, and the worldviews they spring from, seek to reproduce themselves in the minds of the audience. Every explanation is, by its nature, a tacit attempt at persuasion. Are you trying to “stop-the-steal” from a totalitarian deep state? Or maybe you are “pro-democracy” and your opponents “insurrectionists.” Each of these characterizations shows your hand. The words you use argue on behalf of the narrative from which they spring. They function like the spores of the cordyceps—little flecks of the narrative which spew out from one person’s fully formed worldview and fall upon the head of some other person, as of yet unaffected by that narrative. Those spores, if they are particularly effective or if their target host is particularly susceptible, may come to “infect” a new host. That person starts becoming shaped by their vocabulary and a narrative starts to grow in their head. When the cordyceps has taken hold of their brain, their meaning-making-machine, they are fit to go spread more spores and convert more followers. Speech cannot be “neutral.” It is an organism all its own.
In 2011, Steve Bannon had his first meeting with Donald Trump in a Trump Tower conference room. Seated silently next to them was the president of Citizens United David Bossie. Bossie had decided it would be useful to introduce the intellectually shallow Trump to Steve Bannon, a scholarly rising star within fringe right-wing politics. The strange bedfellows had convened so that Bannon could give Trump a crash course in political theory and praxis.
Bannon did not take Trump very seriously at the time, but the reality TV star was nonetheless a promising mark to bring into the reactionary fold. Trump, after all, had spent the past four years alleging that Obama was a Kenyan, Communist, and a leftist leading an all-out assault on all that is good and holy. All that Bannon needed to do to win a media ally was sell Trump on populism, a political approach which strives to appeal to ordinary people and pit them against the established “elites.” Towards this end, according to Bannon, he launched into a galvanizing account of the U.S. populist tradition à la Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan. Midway through, Trump interjected. “That’s what I am!” he said eagerly, “a popularist.” Bannon shook his head. “No, no, it’s populist.” Trump, as is his nature, ignored his mistake and doubled down. “Yeah, yeah, a popularist.” Bannon opened his mouth to correct Trump again but shut it when Bossie gave him a swift kick under the table.
Trump would not be a populist; he would be a popularizer. He effected not policy but popular culture. What he popularized was the reactionary-myth; a dark, viral story foretelling the collapse of the United States. The fodder of Bannon, Breitbart, and Q-Anon., the story would completely infect the Republican party—and, in time, the American public writ large.
Sequencing the Genome
Obama’s victory left the Republican party ideologically compromised. Newt Gingrich’s gridlock obstructionism and botched impeachment, Bush’s two failed wars, the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s, and crushing electoral defeats in ’06 and ’08 had badly discredited the GOP. In the minority, the hollowed-out party was desperate for a path back into power.
A path forward emerged in the form of the Tea Party, a rhetorically vitriolic, venomously anti-establishment movement which disseminated the reactionary rhetorical virus now at the heart of the Republican party. The Tea Party’s apocalyptic narrative, and the way it connected with disaffected, resentful, portions of the population, gave Republicans immense political strength. In turn, its rhetoric would colonize the GOP.
The Tea Party did not come out of nowhere. The appearance of any phenomenon is a late stage of that phenomenon. By the time the boils of bubonic plague blister and ooze upon the host, a violent cellular war has already been fought and lost out of macroscopic view. The roots of reactionary ideology—the absolute opposition to political and social reform under the belief that reform leads to civilizational collapse—trace back to the French Revolution. Frenchmen who “reacted” to the revolution by calling for an end to secular republicanism and a return to Catholic monarchy argued the left was destroying the national moral character, that violent mobs were coming to terrorize the people, and that the country needed to restore its ostensibly stable past.
The earliest French reactionaries sought to address the ills of society by restoring the King. But you’ll find very few monarchists these days. More modern strains of reactionary thought can be traced back to the 20th century and the rise of European authoritarianism. In the early 1900s, French writer René Guénon developed what he called Traditionalism. Traditionalism, ironically, added novel elements to old-school reactionary thought by merging Eastern religious concepts with a profoundly 20th century anxiety about liberalism and global society. Guénon, like our modern prophets of doom, was prone to grandiose pronouncements warning of the imminent destruction of Western civilization.
Traditionalism, the foundation of almost all modern reactionary thought, is a decidedly apocalyptic narrative. Condemning “the modern decadence,” and the “myth of progress,” Guénon believed that the secular and progressive reforms of the 1800s and 1900s would bring about what the Hindus call the “Kali Yuga.” The Kali Yuga is a six-thousand-year dark age wherein tradition is wholly forgotten and society is plunged into a state of total decay and spiritual desolation. In the Traditionalist mind, politics is a zero-sum game. Every step forward for the political left is a step closer to civilizational collapse.
Ronald Reagan was an especially effective host for reactionary rhetoric. His fluency in the new media of cinema gave him, like Trump, the ability to deftly manipulate popular culture—the country’s ideological circulatory system. Without any of the hysterics of Guénon or the Tea Party, Reagan Americanized and popularized the reactionary narrative of progressive liberals rotting all that is good and holy. With a popularist fervor and a smile on his face, Reagan led a revolution of American political discourse.
In Reagan’s telling, America was an inherently just and powerful country; its prosperity was divinely ordained. America’s problems were not caused by imperial overreach in a globalizing world, or by systematic inequality, but by the American left: The left-wing of American politics was literally the force of political, economic, cultural entropy—basically Guénon’s thesis.
Reagan warned that environmental and market regulations were a tool of “controlling people.” He feared “modern-day secularism,” and called for a restoration of Traditional morality. Reagan alleged that the Great Society, a legislative agenda composed of Civil Rights and social welfare programs, “perpetuate[d] poverty,” caused riots, and was responsible for America’s economic difficulties. He reminisced about a time when “the country didn’t even know it had a racial problem,” and argued that “if an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” It was liberals, with their incessant whining about race, who were the true source of racial tension.
The U.S. in 1980, like the Republican party in 2010, was a ready host for a new narrative. During Carter’s presidency, liberalism imploded. The U.S. was badly hurting from social unrest, a failed war in Vietnam, and economic downturns which stemmed from the cost of maintaining both domestic programs and primary superpower status in a quickly globalizing world. In the 1960s, critics accused Reagan and Goldwater of offering “simple solutions to complex problems.” But, at the onset of the ailing ‘80s, Reagan’s narrative proved all the more effective for its simplicity. Reagan wasn’t a doomsayer, though; he pitched the reactionary worldview with a charismatic levity.
Carter couldn’t offer anything as flashy. He begged the nation to consider its limits and cease to “worship self-indulgence and consumption.” It was an act of profoundly prescient philosophy and terrible rhetoric. Reagan, for his part, wanted a country “where people can still get rich.” In the 1980 election, Reagan won a landslide victory.
Ever since Reagan introduced the reactionary rhetor-virus, the GOP’s rhetoric has centered around dismantling liberalism under the assumption that domestic peace and prosperity will naturally result. But when that peace and prosperity did not materialize in the ‘90s and early 2000s, the optimism of Reaganism took a darkly Traditionalist turn. After all, if the Republicans held power for so long and yet the Reagan utopia had not materialized, then the liberals must be even stronger, even more sinister, than Reagan thought.
The Tea Party emerged in the late aughts. Cloaking their ideology in the moderate language of small government and fiscal conservatism, Tea Party activists asserted that the left was pushing America to the brink of civilizational collapse. If the liberals cannot be deposed, as Reagan had hoped, they must be destroyed. The Tea Party had no appetite for compromise or civility. There was no price too high to pay to hinder progress(ives)—decency, democracy, and the Republican establishment be damned.
Then-House Minority Leader John Boehner and his fellow conservatives struggled to control the sudden influx of iconoclasts. Their efforts were undercut by Republicans who, like Cruz and Graham today, tried to harness this emergent reactionary narrative for their own political ends. Politicians like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor encouraged the spread of the Tea Party’s frantic, angry, reactionary rhetoric, betting it could be harnessed to restore Republican preeminence.
Politicians, naïve to the nature of rhetoric, are used to telling fictions they only half-believe. The Republican Party leadership did not understand the immense toxicity and infectiousness of the Tea Party’s apocalyptic orientation. But Steven Bannon did, and he relished the opportunity to burn the system down. Like any graduate of Harvard Business School, Bannon is primarily a rhetorician. He possesses an acute awareness of the power of narrative. This, combined with his fully-fledged reactionary worldview shaped by his right-wing Catholic upbringing, gave him insight into the origins and possibilities of the 2010 Tea Party insurgency. Bannon reasoned (correctly) that the failure of the Iraq War and the financial crisis were the fatal blows to the traditional narratives which kept establishment American authority in place. To so many, the past had become confusing, the present unintelligible, and the future indeterminate. The country was in a crisis of meaning. People were desperate for a new story, and Bannon was going to use the Tea Party movement to peddle it. Bannon had read and absorbed Guénon; he knew the Kali Yuga was engulfing the West. He just needed to spread the word.
Bannon co-founded Breitbart News with Andrew Breitbart in 2007 as an alt-right alternative to both the mainstream media and Fox’s right-wing media empire. Breitbart himself had been a master rhetorician and devoted culture warrior of the first Obama term. But he died suddenly of heart failure in 2012. Bannon, who had been making boring, alarmist political films lauding the Tea Party and attempting to blame the financial crisis of the American left’s destruction of traditional values, returned to Breitbart as its Chief Executive. More interested in outright proselytizing than Andrew Breitbart, and animated by a far more coherent and apocalyptic worldview, Bannon used his direct editorial control as a means of effecting the conversations taking place in the Tea Party and on the increasingly-online alt-right. Bannon had his agenda. But the story of the Kali Yuga had an agenda of its own.
The Armor-Piercing Shell
In his first meeting with Bannon in the Trump Tower conference room, Trump’s insistence that he was a popularist wasn’t a moment of lexical confusion. It was a radical, if accidental, act of self-revelation. The foundation of Trump’s political career was not, like Bannon, a sincere desire to take on the “elites” and “restore” the common man to his place of primacy in the Republican Party. Rather, Trump’s politics is rooted in his fascination with the popular. Like Reagan, Trump was a performer first and foremost. What Trump lacks in political, financial, and administrative acumen is compensated for by a Barnum-esque sixth sense in the realm of popular-culture and new media.
Bannon viewed apocalyptic reactionary rhetoric as a legitimate means of restoring power to the people. Trump saw it only as a means of securing power for himself. Thus, what Trump picked up from Bannon wasn’t the finer points of history, but a pre-constructed rhetorical toolbox which provided grounding to Trump’s shallow reactionary intuitions. He picked up the virus.
Breitbart grew more popular during Bannon’s residence as its leader, coincident with the broader rise of the online reactionary-right during the Obama presidency. It won its biggest victory in 2014 when Breitbart undertook a massive campaign to defeat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his Virginia primary race. Cantor’s opponent, little-known economics professor David Brat, appeared on Breitbart’s podcast every week leading up to the election. He used the vocabulary of anti-immigration as a cudgel against Cantor, who supported the GOP’s attempt to win more Hispanic voters by working with the Democrats to pass a bipartisan immigration amnesty bill. Brat savaged Cantor as an elite, a pro-immigration traitor.
To everyone’s surprise, Brat deposed Cantor (who had himself, remember, tried to use the Tea Party to depose Boehner) and became the first person in U.S history to defeat the House Majority Leader in a primary election. The upset sent shockwaves through mainstream media and terrified Republican Party leadership, which rushed to abandon the amnesty bill and to further incorporate the Tea Party’s rhetorical style.
While the GOP establishment was loathe to work with Democrats, they knew full well that the government would cease functioning and fall into disorder if they did not make some concessions. But their base would not permit it. After Cantor’s loss, the GOP swore even greater fealty to the reactionary virus and became even more hostile to compromise.
With elation, Bannon watched Cantor’s defeat and the Republicans’ subsequent capitulation. The GOP establishment was increasingly weak, prime for a hostile takeover. But this usurpation would require something much bigger than the engineering of a single congressional race. Bannon and the reactionary right would need to win the Republican presidential primary if they were to genuinely reorient the party. Bannon wagered that a radical enough candidate would be able to secure a solid base in what was shaping up to be a chaotic primary. The Breitbart executive took a meeting with Ted Cruz, figuring he might be ambitious enough to run the total war campaign Bannon desired. But despite their initial flirtations, Cruz and Bannon would not end up as collaborators.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump stood in the lobby of Trump Tower to announce he was running for president. Few expected much from Trump that day. And clearly no one, perhaps not even the man himself, realized that Trump was about to deliver one of the most consequential and effective acts of American political oration in the nation’s history. The address itself was a mess, a jumbled mix of insults (the Republicans are “losers,” the Clintons “murderers”), recriminations (Mexico is sending “drugs…crime…[and] rapists” into the U.S.), and frequent self-congratulatory digressions (“I have a great family”). Trump eschewed traditional oratorical imperatives like cohesion and argument. Politico dismissively called the speech “quixotic” and “entertaining,” as if to suggest Trump might provide some low-stakes levity throughout the primary.
Trump’s use of language is prototypical of the type of virality that Burroughs imagined. Trump uses specific words and phrases that spread like wildfire and embed themselves deep inside people’s minds. Sure, the speech didn’t “make sense,” but CNN doesn’t report on speeches: They report on soundbites. Trump’s focus on clickbaity, viral, reactionary talking points and repetition (read: memes) provided endless soundbites upon which CNN anchors could practice their hollow exegesis. The vacuity of Trump’s actual ideology was irrelevant. The mainstream media was bewitched, and it would unknowingly reproduce Trump’s words, his rheto-virus spores, endlessly and for free throughout the entire 2016 election. The reactionary right responded immediately to Trump’s signifying. Their undying support in such a turbulent primary proved more than enough to see Trump to the nomination.
More importantly, however, Trump injected the Traditionalist apocalyptia directly into the mainline of American culture. It was no longer the stuff of fringe-websites and insurgent candidates in deeply gerrymandered districts, it was on national television most days of the week. Trump, like Reagan, insisted that our beleaguered country was facing existential crises. These problems were not endemic, the two men argued, but were the result of a dangerous Deep State-led predominately by the malevolently progressive Democratic Party. (Reagan’s Deep State was the liberal Big Government of LBJ; Trump is less clear on where exactly the 21st-century Deep State resides. Comet Pizza, maybe?) Trump’s narrative, however, had none of Reagan’s optimism. For Trump, Bannon, and the modern reactionary rheto-virus, the end times are here. “The American Dream is dead,” Trump announced at the end of the speech. That day, Bannon and the rest of the reactionary-right knew they had found their man.
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton was so unpopular that the Trump campaign, generally a volatile mess, rarely had to stand on its own merits. Clinton, for all her tactlessness and elitism, knew that Trump was not just a bad candidate but host to a dangerous infection. When Trump elevated Bannon to the role of Campaign Manager, 88 days before the election, Clinton followed in Jimmy Carter’s footsteps, continuing the time-honored tradition of Democratic sermons which are incredibly wise and politically suicidal. In a speech condemning Bannon’s appointment, she famously warned that “a fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican party.” The prognosis was dead on, of course. Bannon’s formal integration into the Trump political movement heralded the final stages of the reactionary rhetorical revolution on the American Right. But despite Clinton’s prescience, the strength of anti-Clintonism caused the speech to backfire. If Clinton represented everything wrong with politics, as so many believed, then her opposition to Trump and Breitbart was just more proof that those groups were earnestly populist—unconcerned with the desires of the American political-economic elite. Trump lost the popular vote by two points, but won the electoral college.
No one knew what to expect. The Democrats were dismayed and humiliated. The Republican establishment was shellshocked, especially after a tape was released in the October before election which showed Trump bragging about his desire and ability to sexually assault women. Bannon figured he had a good sense of what would come next: He would now become the chief philosopher behind a Donald Trump-led political realignment which would radically restrict immigration, upend trade, dismantle all of the federal government’s regulatory bodies, and completely destroy the establishment GOP. All of this leading, inevitably by Bannon’s logic, to the grassroots restoration of Traditional—mythical 1950s—American prosperity and cultural values. Trump is “an imperfect instrument, but he’s an armor piercing shell,” Bannon would rave.
Bannon misread the situation. Trump is virtually useless politically. Bannon’s populist project would fall flat on its face under Trump, and the GOP establishment Bannon loathed would continue to exert significant legislative influence. Yet for the reactionary virus, Trump was an ideal host.
The emergence of the reactionary kleptocracy (by which the rhetoric of anti-elitism, apocalypse, and pseudo-populism is used to further the GOP’s elitist agenda) was less the product of intelligent design than the natural law of political forces taking the path of least resistance. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan snapped out of their stupor and resolved to limit Trump’s effect on legislation. Many took seriously, as Bannon had, Trump’s promise to raze and rebuild the Republican Party, radically altering the way Washington did business and producing some effect on the laws passed by the GOP Senate and House.
But Bannon’s vision always turned on being able to compel the Republican legislature and, if that didn’t work, use primary challenges to replace them with more rabidly pro-populist candidates. This didn’t pan out in 2016, when Trump-style insurgent candidates didn’t do particularly well and Congress looked roughly the same as it had in 2014.
The legislature, though far from centrist, was not interested in endorsing an agenda which made them and their donors politically irrelevant. McConnell whipped out his Obama-era bestseller—Maintaining the Status Quo During a Presidency Meant to Shake-Things-Up—and got to work figuring out how traditional kleptocratic legislation could retain its priority during Trump’s unconventional term. The plan? Limit Trump’s influence on policy while capitulating, totally, to his reactionary rhetorical style. They would adopt Trump’s language, words, orientation, while reinforcing their establishment agenda. In a manner typical of the Republican’s rhetorical realignment, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham explicitly discussed his desire to use Trumpian rhetoric to advance his own political goals and ambitions. In a year, Graham went from the tepid admonishments in vogue circa 2017 (“President Trump’s tweet today suggesting Attorney General Sessions pursue prosecution of a former political rival is highly inappropriate”) to full-throated culture warmongering (“I know I’m a single white man from South Carolina and… I will not shut up”). “I like being relevant,” Graham remarked.
In a way, this reactionary-kleptocratic crossover worked exactly as McConnell or Graham intended. Trump was a Popularist, concerned with little outside that week’s news cycle. Legislation, sad to say, rarely makes the frontpage of New York Times for more than a day or two. Trump was completely unwilling to do the hard work associated with controlling Congress and pushing through a President’s institutional priorities. An incredibly strong media presence, Trump is a complete incompetent when it comes to governance. Outside of a slew of (no doubt pre-written) executive orders meant to signal the beginning of Bannon’s reactionary-populist project, Trump put little effort into running the government and showed little resistance when the GOP establishment asserted itself as the people who were going to actually run the country. Trump really didn’t see populism as anything more than a good rhetorical style by which to garner praise.
Throughout the first year of his term, Trump would totally abdicate his responsibility to govern and abandon the populist political project, kicking Bannon out of his role as the President’s “Chief Strategist” in August of 2017, only seven months into the administration. Control of the party’s legislative priorities was handed over to the establishment who, in return, totally relinquished control of their own messaging. Bannon, after his ousting, remarked resentfully that “no administration in history has been so divided among itself about the direction about where it should go.”
But this, again, shows Bannon’s misunderstandings. Trump was never concerned with, or capable of inducing a political realignment. The failure of Trump’s populism is obvious. The Republican-dominated Congress of 2016-2018 only really accomplished two major things with their federal trifecta. They appointed a throng of conservative (as opposed to reactionary) judges. And they passed a massive kleptocratic tax “reform” bill so blatantly friendly to the top 1% and the donor class that Steve Bannon later tried to distance himself from it in a desperate attempt to salvage his populist street-cred. That’s it—that’s the Trump presidency’s legislative legacy. The much-touted tax cuts for those in lower income brackets, the everyman, weren’t even permanent. They were set to phase out in 2021. The Wall was not built, no immigration reform bill passed, healthcare reform failed (badly). No drain-the-swamp populist in their right mind would consider these wins. Sam Nunberg, a Bannon ally, lamented in 2017 that the “Trump administration is on the precipice of turning into an establishment presidency.”
Thus, while they adopted his rhetoric, the GOP establishment routinely humiliated Trump by preventing him from making good on even a single campaign promise. Institutionally, they held almost all the cards. To the Republican establishment, who believe only in political expediency, this was a success story. The rich-friendly agenda of the GOP remained essentially the same as it had under Bush Jr. or would have under Jeb. The only cost was that the Republicans had to change their rhetoric, which seemed a small price to pay. A Republican taking a public position which was insufficiently conciliatory, even encouraging, towards the reactionary right would earn you the scorn of Trump’s base and a lambasting on Twitter, but the base didn’t demand specific legislative redress. As long as you wore the mere aesthetic of a reactionary, repeated reactionary buzzwords, justified one’s actions through the reactionary narrative, you could stay in power and continue opposing wealth redistribution or economic regulations. McConnell stood up against Trump’s desire to shut down the government to win a deal on “the wall” but refused to rebuke Trump’s rhetoric, offering little more than limp murmurs of discontent.
But where Trump and Bannon overestimated their political efficacy, the Republican establishment badly misjudged the efficacy of rhetoric. It is clear, in retrospect, that powerful conservatives had no idea that rhetoric is a virulent strain of self-replicating ideological code. By allowing Trump to dominate right-wing messaging, and ultimately coming to repeat it themselves, the GOP was fundamentally altering the national psyche and summoning the Kali Yuga.
Even in 2017, it was clear the effect that the repetition and popularization of Trump’s rhetoric was having on the country. On the 11th and 12th of August 2017, mere days before Bannon would be fired—an event that marked the end of Trump’s chance at serious legislative political change—a moment of massive cultural-ideological transformation occurred. Disparate members of the reactionary alt-right came together in Charlottesville, Virginia for a rally dubbed Unite the Right. Attendees adorned themselves in fascist symbolism, chanted racist rhetoric, and brawled with counter-protestors. A young neo-Nazi, seething in his conviction that the Left was attempting to steal the country from him and bring a dark age upon the Western world, drove his car into a crowd of people and killed a woman. This event led to a disastrous news cycle for Trump but yielded no serious reconsideration or reorientation from the GOP establishment. They could not exit the reactionary-kleptocratic pact. Dropping the rhetoric would mean losing their institutional power. Even as the Kali Yuga wafted out from the imaginations of the reactionaries and into our own reality, the Republicans demurred.
This was, and still is, the state of the Republican Party. Its leaders tenuously chain the old-guard protect-the-rich Republican governing to reactionary rhetoric. Each requires the other for its survival. So why does Trump’s base, who ostensibly wanted a champion of the people, still support him?
“Fascism,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” The reactionary-rhetorical revolution may not have changed the position of Republican politicians, a cynical cohort who never took their words very seriously to begin with. But it has thrust huge segments of the American population into the reactionary orientation. For many of Trump’s supporters—especially those in Q-Anon, the new de-facto religion of American reactionaries—the verbal reinforcement of their narrative is sufficient validation. And, particularly in the age of the internet, it may be increasingly irrelevant what the GOP thinks of the words they use. For words have intentions all their own.
Hyperstitions
Last year in Manatee County, Florida, two Republicans, establishment men if there ever were any, competed for a County Commissioner’s seat. Despite the fact that, according to the New York Times, the county has voted for every Republican presidential nominee since 1948, one of the candidates began his campaign by making his slogan “Make Manatee Red Again.” His opponent shot back by listing his top policy as “Support[ing] President Trump.”
The district has been solidly Republican for a decade, yet the prevailing rhetoric reproduced the ideology of left-wing invasion and the desperate need to defend a besieged land. The former candidate won, but it really doesn’t make a difference. Both were financial professionals supporting the same fiscal policy any Florida Republican would have in 2008 or even 2001. All over the nation, Republicans of all ideological bends are appropriating the reactionary narrative for their own political careers. Increasingly theatrical politicking, mixed with a touch of real-fear-of-the-left—basically, the elevation of rhetoric—is the real effect of Trump’s presidency.
This legacy is not merely aesthetic. The spread of such an irrational, apocalyptic, paranoid ideology hystericizes society. As the reactionaries grow more frantic, so does everyone else. And the source of the infection is here to stay. Some might argue that the Republican Party will necessarily soon fracture into discrete parties—one for zealous reactionaries and the other for sane Conservatives. If this is your belief, your optimism is commendable. But the GOP has, over these past four years, spread the rheto-virus far too wide and deep within the minds of their voters to ever turn back. And why bother turning back? The reactionary narrative comes with a built-in justification for kleptocratic policy. America’s ills derive not from faulty legislation or wealth inequality, but from the radical-leftist-pedophile-Satanists, who are always obscured and unaccountably absent from public view, gumming up the works.
But the reactionary elements on the American right won’t for long be beholden to the establishment’s pleas to allow elected legislators to handle the situation. A central tenet of the ideology is that failure can never be explained by faults in the ideology itself but only by the right’s failure to deal harshly enough with the left. Republicans will either have to keep rhetorical pace with their increasingly rabid base or else be eaten alive by it, replaced by some new face who may not vote much differently, but would be a more willing host to the Word.
Novel rhetorical viruses spread most effectively among the disaffected, disempowered, and desperate. When our old stories lose their credibility, we search for new stories. When our old communities break-down or disappear, we seek new communities (often, these days, online). This can be a good thing. Sometimes a new story about how the world works really does help us navigate existence and live better lives. Our old stories and vocabularies really weren’t working. Reaganomics led to millions of jobs being shipped overseas and the beginning of corporate stock buybacks, the age of the shareholder’s precedence above the worker. Bill Clinton’s acceleration of Free Trade only worsened these trends and his cutting of social services meant a large number of people during times of financial crisis fell through the cracks into poverty. Bush Jr.’s conservatism flunked. Shopping didn’t help us overcome the national Trauma of 9/11, and there is good reason to believe that the conservative assumption that banks would “self-regulate” had a lot to do with the ’08 financial crisis. Likewise, Obama’s economic recovery “made at best a modest dent” in income inequality. Is Biden really going to provide the decisive break with these past failures which the nation so severely requires?
A decidedly new narrative about our national past, present, and future is the only path forward. We are at the terminus of decades-long failure in federal policy. The particular type of hopelessness in this country—fueled by decaying institutions, out-of-touch major parties, Congressional gridlock, political volatility, a mental health crisis, mass incarceration, technological overload, drug epidemics, social dysfunction, unending hollow consumerism, incredible wealth inequality, sexual anxiety, broad (sometimes subconscious) racial hostility and/or paranoia—threatens to produce increasingly delusional political narratives on both the left and right. But a politics of apophenia, while out of touch with reality, at least doesn’t blindly insist that everything is going great.
As it stands, the GOP’s preferred mode of governing, elitist kleptocracy, has a built-in opposition to systematic change. Republican leaders refuse to let government act effectively. They promise mythical “private” solutions to the truly gargantuan problems which plague their base. The GOP is a deeply ill patient who refuses to step out of the cold, all the while complaining about their pneumonia. The party’s obstinacy will continue to make much of their base’s lives worse, triggering the reactionary virus’ evolution into increasingly destructive, anti-democratic, hysterical ideology. Just like Reaganism’s built-in accelerationism which caused his strain of the virus to mutate into the Tea Party, modern Republicans are stuck in a recursion loop in which the American right will grow more restless, more pessimistic, and more aggressive.
There is a wrinkle in the idea that our narratives of the world are the light by which we make sense of our past, present, and future: Our expectations of what could be often determine what will be. Philosopher-turned-shut-in Nick Land wrote of the “hyperstition,” an “element of effective culture that makes itself real.” A hyperstition is a society-level self-fulfilling prophecy. The word comes out of a fringe-political theory called “accelerationism”—an incongruous, though increasingly reactionary-dominated, group of extremely-online people who believe, for one reason or another, that societal trends should be accelerated (possibly to the point of social collapse). Whereas a superstition is a fictional story that remains fictional no matter how many people believe in it, a hyperstition is a fictional story, a narrative, which is capable of making itself real. Stories and vocabularies spread infectiously, popularizing certain expectations. It is always the case that our pre-figuring of what is in store considerably determines what is in store. Our picture of the future conjure the political, cultural, and economic forces which direct us, often, towards that future (especially in the case of economics, where speculation plays a great role and where the market is especially susceptible to expectations). Our early science fiction about space travel oriented the United States towards their interest in space exploration. How many NASA workers took the job due to their childhood love of Star Trek?
Less hopefully, a psychotic picture of the future will produce psychotic results. The Kali Yuga rages against its imprisonment in the mind and the unconscious, occasionally bursting tentacles out, like an Old God, to wreak havoc as it did in the Capitol on January 6th. Ted Cruz and his ilk, who used the power of the reactionary rheto-virus for their own ends, will not be able to turn back the Kali Yuga by speaking sternly to it. The mystical words Cruz employed to summon the beast cannot be dissuaded by the common pleas of a warlock horrified at the demon he has brought into this world. (“Stop…NOW”). This demon resides in more minds than ever. The Kali Yuga is the evangelical’s end of times, it is Q-Anon’s “storm,” it is the Boogaloo Boys’, uhm, “Boogaloo.”
And if enough people think society’s collapse is imminent, then society will, in fact, collapse. Like a stock market crash, free government cannot survive an exceptionally broad crisis of confidence, no matter how unreasonable the cause of people’s skepticism. Even among the left, how many did not feel the chill of a new Civil Conflict brewing in their imagination when they saw the riots in the halls of Congress. Egged on by the delusions of the right, the American left may ramp up their own politics of phantasms, declaring war on increasingly obscure, maybe even nonexistent, entities. All the while, the Kali Yuga lies in wait. Today’s delusion, tomorrow’s reality. Now you know the true name of that dark future residing in the back of your mind, or in the forefront of the reactionary’s. But be warned: if you believe in the Kali Yuga, it will come. ▩