Contempt.
Contempt is the primary affect expressed by JD Vance. You can watch it crawl across his face during speeches and recent political profiles. Of all the peacocks in the MAGA pageant, he is the most American monster of them all: a product of multiple, intersecting systems including the military which shape the ‘exemplary’ arc of his life, which amounts to a trauma plot with rural bootstraps. Vance goes to Iraq and then studies law at Yale, where he finds himself among the anointed (a prime recruiting ground for fascism, given the sense of entitlement that is cultivated in students who believe themselves to be “the best and the brightest”). One needn’t cite the Kissinger-complex to note the over-large role that Yale played in justifying and legalizing George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” Like his peers, JD rises to the top and marries Usha, who is arguably smarter than him, and who provides him with access to the immigrant family network that positions him to discount speculations about the racism inherent to his obsession with white supremacy (coded as “western civilization). In the process, Vance also masters the elite social networks which enabled his book to be published.
And yet: JD Vance has been robbed of something.
As he stands before the mic in Germany, his eyes glimmer with resentment and rage. Like most MAGA acolytes, Vance sees himself as the perpetual victim. And, much like the evangelical American Christians raging about the “war on Christmas,” Vance polishes the myth of his own persecution.
I have said this before and I will say it again: Christians have never been persecuted in this god-forsaken country. It is precisely this absence of lived experience with actual persecution that enabled James Dobson to build a financial empire by hawking the brand of American Christians as long-suffering, persecuted victims. I am tired of the lies and fake martyrs. MAGA Christianity can’t even handle an eye-roll— they keep so many guns that toddler-shootings have become a regularity here. Your American Jesus wasn’t crucified yesterday. Your macho god is as fake as the Pimp POTUS’ spray tans.
Evil is ordinary resentment huffing supremacist ideology based on sacrificing a scapegoat. It’s not esoteric. It’s not deep. It’s simple. And when it appears among the truly underprivileged, it tends to be aspirational, the result of identifying with the power of the oppressor. This contempt rooted in a sense of entitlement is always representative of power, of having access to power and expecting that access to reap dividends.
In the past month, I have had almost identical conversations with Birmingham residents who voted for Trump. If it is surprising, it should not be. Essentialism fails every test: this is how Kelly Anne Conway and Lauren Boebert advocate for policies that eviscerate the lives of humans with whom they share a gender. Power is power. Wanting power often aligns us with the oppressor.
Because literature does, in fact, matter, I will note that the Italian writer, Alberto Moravia, quietly brought affect studies to the novel; his subject being the men and women who were seduced by Italian fascist ideology. It’s hard not to ponder the blind loyalty that characterizes MAGA: Trump’s flock will follow him anywhere. Much like Netanyahu’s.
And it strikes me that there are several passages in Moravia’s Contempt that speak to the present for me. Here is one of them:
“Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is a form of vengeance, of blackmail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.”
Netanyahu, Trump, Putin—- and the millions of careerists who desire money, power, and glory so fervently that they have invested in silence to assure the ruling classes of their loyalty.
On that note, David Brooks’ recent (desperate) pronunciations fall flat. Like many neoliberal apparatchiks, Brooks argues from the wrong foundation, even as he advocates for mass demonstrations. Worldviews matter: they are the basis from which we imagine a future. It is too easy for the anointed to forget that the US has never been the land of milk and honey for migrant workers and various immigrants. Patriotism, itself, is an increasingly pernicious mist that attempts to unify an opposition to Trump without upsetting the billionaire class that determines US elections since Citizens United.
I am staring very closing into the mirror of Josip Novakovich’s words in Shopping for a Better Country: “I was taught not to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism; the word patriotism was an attempt to present the same ugly nationalist phenomenon of favoring your country over others; patriotism was a patriarchal swindle that made it easy to recruit soldiers to shed the blood of other peoples.” I am leaving this mirror here for those Americans who like to mutter exceptionalist nonsense like “Yugoslavians have always been at war,” as if those wars were not started by extremist nationalists evoking a battlefield humiliation from centuries before in order to condone genocide, massacre, and a maniacal devotion to vengeance.
Contempt. Watch for it. That’s why your Trumpist friends laugh and cheer as the White House issues its latest vulgarity. They may shrug in your presence but, at home and in their cars, they love it. See? They’re getting their revenge. And there is no deeper story, unfortunately. There is no god, no principle, no depth: just contempt for the designated scapegoat.
Happy Harrowing of Hell to all who celebrate.