By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
As a question of law and public policy, I’m an
old-fashioned let-your-freak-flag-fly libertarian, “consenting adults in the
privacy of their own home” and all that stuff, and, in that respect, I do not
very much care whether Mark Robinson—the modern GOP’s “third-most
popular black Nazi”—consumes great quantities of pornography or what kind
of pornography he consumes. I do not even care very much about his fantasy acting-out
on the message boards of a pornographic website. Eros, too, is a jealous
god, and, at times, an unusually savage one.
I’ll even nod solemnly and try very hard not to roll my
eyes as I note that Robinson—the Republican candidate for governor of North
Carolina and the state’s current lieutenant governor—says this is all made up,
a hit job concocted by … somebody. I’ll stipulate and concede and tolerate a
great deal.
Just don’t ask me to pretend that I’m surprised.
It is worth reiterating that the Trump movement is led by
Donald Trump, who is himself an occasional
performer in pornographic films, a former buddy of Jeffrey Epstein who described
him as a “terrific guy” with a manful appetite for women “on the younger
side,” whose businesses have in many cases been scams (Trump “University”) or
exercises in utter incompetence (his ownership of the Plaza, the casinos again,
Truth Social, six bankruptcies in 18 years, etc.), who has sustained his
fortune not with savvy real-estate investments but by working as an advertising
mascot for Mammon and as
a game-show host. He is very weird about women (Trump’s current wife is a
former employee of the modeling agency he set up to secure proximity to such
women) and he named his youngest son after the
imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York Post about his
sex life. Trump has never, to my knowledge, called himself a Nazi, and I do not
believe Ivana Trump’s claim
that he regularly read a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. A book of Hitler
speeches is still a book, after all, and I am not engaging in hyperbole
when I write that I very much doubt he has ever read a book all the way
through.
It is not really true that opposites attract. Ivy
Leaguers tend to be friends with and marry other Ivy Leaguers, and evangelicals
tend to spend a lot more time with other evangelicals than with militant
atheists. Vegans socialize sadly with other vegans. Most of us end up in
churches, clubs, schools, neighborhoods, marriages, friendships, and careers
where we are surrounded by people who are a lot like us. It is not the opposite
that attracts but the adjacent. Trumpworld is a satellite of Pornworld.
Donald Trump plays a special role in the Republican Party
and on the modern right, but the movement he personifies did not begin with
him. Populism has always been thick with crackpots (Ross Perot), grifters
(Steve Bannon), and degenerates (Matt Schlapp), and, in more than a few cases,
people who ticked more than one of those boxes, such as Sen.
Strom Thurmond.
Thurmond is an interesting example: He is today and
forever rightfully associated with the cause of racial segregation, but, before
his 1948 “Dixiecrat” presidential campaign, Sen. Thurmond had been seen as
something of a moderate on race. Not an integrationist, mind you—this was a
South Carolina Democrat in 1948—but someone who publicly abjured extremist
rhetoric and abusive language, and who was notably praised by the NAACP after working
to see to it that a group of white men who carried out an infamous lynching
were arrested and tried for their crime. (They were acquitted.) Thurmond seems
to have latched onto the issue of segregation not out of any particular passion
for racial politics but because he thought it was a good issue to ride to
national prominence. And it worked: He became a gargoyle, and gargoyles
are prominent.
Thurmond was a canny politician, and he saw a brighter
future for himself in the Republican Party than with the Democrats. Ensorcelled
by the prospect of poaching a Democratic senator and gaining a foothold in the
kind of politics Thurmond represented, the Republican Party was far too eager
to welcome a defector they should have rejected, with William F. Buckley Jr.
writing in his syndicated column that Republicans “will do well to be generous”
with Thurmond on matters such as seniority, in the hopes of inspiring others to
follow. Which others? Buckley names segregationists such as James Eastland,
Herman Talmadge, Sam Ervin, and a bunch of other people the GOP would have been
better off without. Imagine an alternative history in which Republicans said,
“Thanks, but no thanks” to Sen. Thurmond et al. It is a happier timeline than
our own.
In the end, Thurmond was practically alone among major
Democratic segregationists to actually switch parties—an early example of
conservatives being too willing to sell their souls at an embarrassingly low
price. Buckley would, to his credit, come to regret his earlier obdurate line
on civil rights, but the right’s temptation to accommodate the immoral and the
disreputable in exchange for the merest whiff of political advantage is a
mistake that Republicans have repeated over the decades.
Sen. Barry Goldwater had an excellent record on civil
rights and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on defensible constitutional
grounds—which, to put it generously, wasn’t universally the case among
his fellow opponents. Goldwater knew that he was making common cause with a
raft of bigots and crackpots, and, rather than drawing the necessary lines and
making the necessary distinctions—and paying the necessary political price for
doing so—he was determined to “hunt where the ducks are,” as he put it. There
wasn’t anything inherently wrong with Republicans’ effort to appeal to voters
who were thrilled with the racial rhetoric of Thurmond or George Wallace by
presenting to them good policies that appealed to the better part of their
political characters—that is a lot of what the much-misunderstood “Southern
Strategy” was about—but doing so brought with it the temptation to accommodate
that which should not be accommodated and to gloss over the indefensible.
The stakes aren’t always as high as they were in the
post-war years. But Republicans knew that figures such as Christine O’Donnell
(the “I am not a witch” lady from Delaware) were grifters
and crackpots and
that the Tea Party movement was attracting more than its share of these. It was
also clear to anybody who was paying attention that that the Tea
Party movement was not conservative and that it was intellectually
incoherent, but Republicans wanted to get into the protest game and leapt
headlong—again—into a populist morass from which they have never quite
emerged. The Tea Party movement was the soil in which the belladonna of
Trumpism was planted and took root. The theater of populism, like all theater,
has its roots in ritual, and its real meaning is its meaning as ritual, as
performance: Pay attention to us! This is the story we are telling about
ourselves and our world! It doesn’t matter if it is true, but it isn’t
really about facts or history—it is about the pursuit of status, about
aspiration.
In that regard, the kind of pornography that Robinson was
commenting about is less interesting than the fact that he felt compelled to
make public comments about his taste in pornography, albeit from behind the
protective veil of anonymity. Some individuals—and some communities—have a
powerful need to be seen, to be observed, as though they are only able to
experience their lives in a secondhand way, through the observation and
reactions of others. These are the people who seem to think that they cease to
exist when they are not being looked at—or, in the case of Donald Trump, when
they are not being talked about. Trump’s weird obsession with audience sizes,
ratings, rally attendance, etc., is well-known, and he seems to believe that he
is—or he aspires to be—the most talked-about person in human history. (Sorry,
Jesus!) It’s like a radical version of the observer effect: The observer brings
the phenomenon into existence ex nihilo. (And think about that void!)
Trump’s political career hasn’t been hindered by his social-media addiction—his
political career serves his social-media addiction, and that is its only
real purpose beyond keeping him out of jail.
Experiencing life’s most intimate moments secondhand
through the mediation of pornography is a natural complement to that mentality.
The reason people have absurd and self-dramatizing social-media lives is the
same reason people make sex tapes or watch others’ sex tapes. Marshall McLuhan
had it less right than did Jean Baudrillard: It isn’t that the medium is the
message, it is that the signifier has entirely supplanted the thing signified,
swallowing it whole like an ortolan. Life is not for living—it is only a
necessary input for the creation of content.
Melania Trump, the third lady, has been busy
defending her lesbian-porn-ish nude-modeling work from … nobody, as far as
I can tell. The subject had not been raised in some years, but the need to be
talked about—to be seen—does not just go away when your public profile begins
to fade, as Mrs. Trump’s has. Of course, there are financial considerations—she
has a memoir to peddle—but it isn’t just that. It is never just
that. Mrs. Trump desires to be something grander than … whatever it is she is
calling herself these days. That dream of reinvention also is part of the
populist spirit.
Donald Trump at one point tried very hard to start a
rumor that he was romantically involved with Carla Bruni, the French singer and
wife of former French President Nicolas Sarközy. Mrs. Sarközy was sufficiently
embarrassed and inconvenienced that she complained
publicly about the lie. She is an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and one
could easily understand why a man would wish to be connected with her; but
Donald Trump did not wish to actually be connected with her, only for people to
believe—to say—that he had been connected with her. To understand the
difference between the former desire and the latter is to understand Trump in
full—and about 80 percent of Trumpism, too.
One imagines (one does not enjoy imagining) Mark
Robinson, self-described “black Nazi” and pornography enthusiast, sitting at
his computer, typing obscene comments awkwardly with one hand, when an idea
enters his head: political office, the public life perfecting the pubic
life, the lonely voyeur hitching a ride on American Greatness and being carried
to previously unimagined heights of ecstasy, an orgy of being seen and of
approval. If you want to call him a pervert, think first of his political
ambitions, obscene beyond the merely pornographic imagination.
The libertarian in me does not much care what he does in
the privacy of his own home.
The libertarian in me also very much wishes he would have
kept it there.
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