The Civil War of Wishful Thinking

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, March 07, 2021

 

The revolution came. The revolution went.

 

The QAnon nut-cutlets whom good Republican loyalists expect the rest of us to pretend don’t exist were anticipating a very big day on March 4, when, according to their dotty prophecy, Donald Trump was supposed to sweep back into power, revealing that he had secretly remained president all along.

 

That scenario, one part soap opera and one part opera buffa . . . did not come to pass.

 

Some people are taking it pretty hard. It wasn’t as big a disappointment as Dr. Strange’s failing to show up in the finale of WandaVision, and it wasn’t as big a disappointment as Ozzy Osbourne’s most recent album, but, if you have the right kind of ears, you can hear the sighs of bitter lamentation rising like swamp gas from Palm Beach to Mountain Home. I am reminded of the newspaper cartoon of the Heaven’s Gate cultists standing in front of a very stern-looking St. Peter, sheepishly asking: “No spaceship?”

 

“No spaceship.”

 

The Q cultists — and a great many mainstream Republicans — will never be able to admit their defeat in 2020, because doing so would force them to tacitly acknowledge that they got hornswoggled by a low-rent con artist and have nothing to show for it except a closet shelf of dopey red caps. And so there was Trump at CPAC, claiming he’d actually won the election, and belittling those Republicans who in reality, back here on Earth, did win their most recent races — Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey, Mitt Romney, etc. — as though he had not just gone down in ignominious and humiliating defeat to a fried-baloney sandwich and a pair of discount-rack Ray-Bans. Trump did his act, and Republicans clapped like demented seals, made Tusken raider noises, and then paid obeisance to a golden idol.

 

Losing is hard, and it is harder still if you sold your soul and pawned your self-respect for a mess of “so much winning!” pottage.

 

But the Q kooks aren’t the only ones on the lookout for flying saucers, because Q is only one side in a dialogue. Those who see themselves as the heroic protagonists and Q as their dastardly antagonists need Q there as an emotional foil, because they are deep into a feverish role-playing game of their own. Consider these reader comments at the end of an unremarkable account of the most recent Q shenanigans published in Newsweek, which still exists. (Comments sections are moral and intellectual sewers because they offer a genuinely representative sample of what a certain class of Americans believes.) In the comments, you will see Americans fantasizing about the government’s slaughtering other Americans (“mow them down”), you will see people who no doubt think of themselves as nice progressives indulging in racist (“Tyrone”) fantasies about their cultural enemies being subjected to prison rape and sundry fantasy violence of all other kinds. This isn’t the Slack channel at Mother Jones or an MSNBC staff retreat; these are the readers of Newsweek, who sway in the wind like a field of moronic corn.

 

And if you read what they have to say, you will see the mirror image of the Q phenomenon itself. Conspiracy theories are not exclusively, or even mainly, constructed parallel realities in which people sincerely believe — they are ritual exercises in raising and lower the status of competing social groups. They consist of ceremonial praise and, more important, ceremonial insults. For Q, every Democrat is a pedophile, and on the New York Times’s opinion pages, every Republican is a white supremacist. There are many (too many) on each side dumb enough to believe that sort of thing in a literal sense, but the literal sense is not what matters most in this context. What matters is the comprehensive contempt that is inexpressible in an ordinary political context and the imputation of depravity that complements it.

 

Remember that both sides at the Battle of Stalingrad thought they were the heroes.

 

I do not think the United States is headed toward a civil war — civil wars are too much work. But it does matter that the dominant American political fantasy of our time is a dream of civil war. The mass arrests dreamt up by Q and the massacres envisioned by its rivals may be exercises in wishful thinking, but what Americans are wishing for matters.

 

So why this?

 

One of the functions of conspiracy theories — and of the histrionic mode of political discourse more generally — is that they give us something to talk about while we are assiduously not talking about what is actually going on. And what is actually going on is, more or less, this: The two main currents of American life — the rural-religious-conservative and the urban-hedonist-liberal — have always been at bottom incompatible, but that incompatibility seldom was felt urgently when those two ways of life were in effect independent sovereignties within the context of a regime that was federalist, local, and customary. But the big changes of the 21st century — globalization, political centralization, and the transformation of cultures by the Internet — have all pushed community life in the direction of standardization and homogeneity: Where there had been hundreds of wildly diverse newspapers there is now a handful of likeminded technology giants; where there had been tolerance and even celebration of regional variety in both public administration and personal manners, there is now an exacting political and social puritanism, so vicious that it cannot even leave room for Dr. Seuss; where there had been a complex ecosystem of institutions and relationships, there is a series of crude symbiotic oppositional pairs: Donald Trump populism and Bernie Sanders populism, Fox News and MSNBC, QAnon and people who get their political news from Saturday Night Live.

 

Whether that state of affairs amounts to a series of relatively trivial social rivalries or an existential threat to national coherence depends largely on how much the two tribes sincerely hate each other. And right at this moment, the evidence suggests that the mutual hatred is both intense and widespread. That’s good news for such entrepreneurs as Elizabeth Warren, the po-faced Jim Jones of punitive tax policy, but it is bad news for the country.