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I'm not confident about any of this
Jul. 18th, 2019 04:58 pmSomething I'm optimistic about which also gives you significant insight into how pessimistic I am is: I don't think there's a Trumpist equivalent of the Hitler Youth. In pretty much all of the long-running totalitarian takeovers which include mass murder, it seems like there is a Hitler Youth or a Red Guard or some type of child soldier contingent which is under the thrall of the regime. This seems valuable to a dictatorship for two reasons - one being the value of the youth movement itself (for all the reasons you'd want young soldiers) and the other being the symbolic value - children are the future and your remaking of society is also the irresistible future.
I'm not saying here that there aren't teens for Trump; we've seen there are. I'm also not saying there weren't middle-aged people behind Hitler, Mussolini, etc. What I'm saying is (1) if there was a sizeable organized pro-Trump youth movement, we'd see it paraded around, which is not happening, and (2) not to get complacent, but it's fairly weird how gerontological the Trump movement is. Fascism as we have seen it before has been invested in the idea of youth and virility and physical strength and physical purity, both as an aesthetic and an ideal.
Maybe that was a coincidence of the futurism of the 1930s and we have a different futurism now, one that is mediated by screens, in which the physical body is irrelevant, but I have trouble believing it is possible have a non-physical fascism. Fascism is obsessed with bodies. We talk about how the good guys have the edge demographically (Trump's base is dying off), but this is also an emotional weakness: the GOP's literal soft white underbellies are also its figurative soft white underbelly, a constant visual reminder that they are not likely to be made great again. That future does not exist.
I don't know what to think. It's like there is a group of people trying very hard to build a death ray, but they are missing the firing pin and don't know how to get one because the only people who make firing pins are their worst enemies. So that's scary but also comical.
I wonder whether at this particular moment in the U.S. we have flipped our youth and our elders. Teenagers are under a lot of pressure right now to work hard and solve everything and not make any mistakes and cover up frailties, which is stuff I'd typically associate with an aging head of household. Then you have this group of retirees who have teenage anxieties about not fitting in socially, who have free time to fill, and who are awkward about reading social cues (overestimating threats, not being able to tell what is appropriate).
I'm not saying here that there aren't teens for Trump; we've seen there are. I'm also not saying there weren't middle-aged people behind Hitler, Mussolini, etc. What I'm saying is (1) if there was a sizeable organized pro-Trump youth movement, we'd see it paraded around, which is not happening, and (2) not to get complacent, but it's fairly weird how gerontological the Trump movement is. Fascism as we have seen it before has been invested in the idea of youth and virility and physical strength and physical purity, both as an aesthetic and an ideal.
Maybe that was a coincidence of the futurism of the 1930s and we have a different futurism now, one that is mediated by screens, in which the physical body is irrelevant, but I have trouble believing it is possible have a non-physical fascism. Fascism is obsessed with bodies. We talk about how the good guys have the edge demographically (Trump's base is dying off), but this is also an emotional weakness: the GOP's literal soft white underbellies are also its figurative soft white underbelly, a constant visual reminder that they are not likely to be made great again. That future does not exist.
I don't know what to think. It's like there is a group of people trying very hard to build a death ray, but they are missing the firing pin and don't know how to get one because the only people who make firing pins are their worst enemies. So that's scary but also comical.
I wonder whether at this particular moment in the U.S. we have flipped our youth and our elders. Teenagers are under a lot of pressure right now to work hard and solve everything and not make any mistakes and cover up frailties, which is stuff I'd typically associate with an aging head of household. Then you have this group of retirees who have teenage anxieties about not fitting in socially, who have free time to fill, and who are awkward about reading social cues (overestimating threats, not being able to tell what is appropriate).
