“Pseudo-Conservatism, the Soldier Male, and the Air Horn”

“while it’s certainly true that Trump emits many racist dog whistles, his gleefully essentialist, stridently phallic masculinity is a dog whistle, too. Really, it’s more like an air horn. Male Fantasies helps us to attend to that signal, to parse its frequencies, and to consider its message…Theweleit’s focus is the Freikorps, the ultra-right-wing militias that coalesced across Germany in the wake of World War I. Largely composed of veterans who felt lost and humiliated by the outcome of the war, the Freikorps fought Bolshevism wherever it reared its head, putting down the Spartacist revolt in 1919, helping to destroy the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and crushing communist stirrings in the Baltic states. These busy men, many of whom would become prominent officials of the Third Reich

“The most urgent task” of the soldier male, Theweleit writes, “is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines, and feelings that calls itself human — the human being of old.” Of all of these malign forces, femininity, or rather femaleness, is paramount, representing a noisome tarn, a swamp in which the ego will flounder and drown…

Over and over in Freikorps literature, Theweleit finds imagery of enemies transformed into what he calls the “bloody miasma” — a red cloud, a formless pulp — as the soldier male visits upon his adversary the feminizing dissolution that is his own worst fear. The red miasma then gives way to “a white totality,” a void where the enemy, the “swarthy rabble,” has previously stood. This hygienic zone of purity correlates with the ideal of the “white woman”; by displacing the tainted, teeming rabble, the white totality also displaces womanly filth. Race and gender are conflated. Theweleit dryly jokes that if you had asked a member of the Freikorps to note his sex on a form, he would have written “German.”…

Since the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, no “sudden and violent break” in American history has taken place. There’s no reason to assume that our future holds such an event, and no reason to assume it doesn’t. One of the hazards we are currently facing is the risk that we will acclimate to our circumstances, tell ourselves that what we’re experiencing is just another episode in the mundane craziness of American political life, soothe ourselves with the thought that a Trump presidency is highly implausible.

Among its other virtues, Theweleit’s book militates against such tendencies, offering a salutary reminder of the anarchic contingency of history. Anything can happen, and, in Germany, anything did happen. Those who banked on the plausible in Weimar Germany were proven naïve, even if they constantly adjusted their definition of plausibility to accommodate the latest bizarre occurrence. There was, finally, a rupture that nobody could have seen coming.”

So, this is dense — I had to read a lot of this twice, and ultimately skipped chunks, etc… But it was an historical/sociological analysis that really helped. There are a lot of dynamics at work here, including the reaction of masculinity to a more modern world.

Related: “Your Hitler analogy is wrong, and other complaints from a history professor”; “The white man pathology: inside the fandom of Sanders and Trump”; “The Republican Ticket: Trump and Pence” ← the transcript of their interview, along with my understanding of what it is about Trump that has permitted him this level of success; “Donald Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of Law, Scholars Say”