American Separatism, Part 1
Notes on the Rise of the Anti-woke Jihadists in our Towns and Suburbs, Who Mix Up Antidemocratic Ressentiment With Honest Patriotism
After ringing up a guy last week (I work part time as a check out cashier at a grocery store) who wore a tee shirt with an AR-15 on it that said, “Come and Take It,” I was motivated to do a blog post and finally call attention to all the ridiculous men like this I’ve seen.
Considering as I read some left-leaning publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and that I watch CNN and PBS News Hour almost nightly, it really surprises me that I haven’t read or watched a single juicy story about the lonely terrorists in incubation, beginning to fill our suburbs and public venues, disgracing our communities and corrupting public life with their attention-seeking stupid, tribal animus.
It’s worth saying again: I rang up a customer whose tee shirt had the big black graphic of the assault rifle famed for its involvement in so many school shootings (the only humble reason for which anyone has ever advocated for gun control). The large print underneath the murder weapon read,
Come and Take it
Last week I also rang up a guy with a baseball cap that said more banally, “Fuck Joe Biden.”
And I can’t drive on the Long Island expressway to see my neurologist every two months, without of course to be subject to the ghastly sight of the innumerable Dodge Ram pick up trucks—covered in American flag and Trump regalia. It must be exhausting to be that fanatical. In the bed of one guy’s truck, he had half a dozen or more flags rippling, all signaling his sycophantic loyalty to MAGA, the architect of which has such contempt for his own constituents that recently he made trading cards of himself as an action figure, as a side hustle.
Besides the crass vulgar patriotism and the MAGA stuff though, I’ve seen some virulent antigovernment signage. I’m afraid of getting into a car accident sometimes, just trying to read the idiocy slapped on the rears of my fellow Americans’ locomotives. The most horrifying stickers I’ve seen were two grenades, one taped to each side of some Trump guy’s rear window. He had another sticker that said Ready for Anything, or something to that effect.
But particularly after the “Come and Take It” guy last week, it gave me occasion to wonder Jesus Christ, I’ve seen so damn much of these guys, where is the Washington—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—Post, with one of those delectably unsettling long form essays I could read on a Sunday morning, an essay about the growing numbers of these unhinged wackos (complete with survey evidence ranking levels of extremism in society), degrading our communities, dishonoring our national image, and embarrassing real patriots like me, normal patriots, who don’t need bumper stickers to prove our minimal self-worth to ourselves or to intimidate other people, to compensate for one’s own inferiority. There was one solid WaPO story I did read probably about a year ago now, where a woman who believed the election was stolen admitted to the post that sometimes she’s afraid she doesn’t even know what’s “real” anymore. That was good. But that was it.
Besides that, I haven’t read anywhere, any good stories about the separatists, and the reflexive posturing of their bastardized patriotism whose stupidity the rest of us are forced to endure on a mundane quotidian basis as they encroach on the domestic tranquility and civility a commuter like me, as well as commerce and society, depends on. The most recent guy I rang up wore a hat that said “I Identify NonBidenary,” which at least had the merit that it was hilarious. The rest of them obviously are all only virulent, and their slogans read like pathetic cries for attention for people who have never felt significant ever in their lives until the reality tv show of demogogic politics gave them a chance to feel like important. And now that trump is receding, they seem as if they’re just trying to chase a declining high.
Not to trivialize it though, they mean business. And we should take their imbecility seriously. Stupidity, irrationality and unbridled passion can take people pretty far—as far as the innards of the capitol, apparently. These people I am describing, foolish and imbecilic as they appear are the same species of deranged excrement that not only stormed the capitol, but violently assaulted and almost killed Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and attempted to kidnap and quite possibly assassinate Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. Unless a Republican who matches their standard of extremism is in power, such thugs, it’s possible if not probable, may not see any other government as legitimate. At the moment, they think the last general election was stolen, and that Biden is not their legitimately elected leader. Take a second to imagine how on edge, afraid, and desperate such a person must feel, as supercilious, childish and contemptible as they look. Whatever government we have short of nuts, because these people are nuts—they are apt to see it as an existential threat, not just to themselves, but to the republic, as they willfully define it. And the worse MAGA does in politics, I think the more likely these people could be liable to act out. Like a wounded wild animal.
The Tragedy and the Comedy of the Prevailing Delusion
The irony is, in the demented worldview of their bastardized patriotism—which they use as a juggernaut to distance and separate themselves from the rest of us—I think that unless we join them, they are more inclined to see those of us who are not MAGA as a threat to America itself, why just because the rest of us are not MAGA, why, just because we’re not as grossly covered and practically tatted up in obscene distasteful antisocial slogans and cheap miscellany as they are, as if every day were a kind of perpetual pep rally for authoritarianism. In their perception, their antisocial manners are justified to preserve and conserve, even to save, the American experiment—Save America—from all enemies foreign and domestic. In other words, their virulence in their eyes, is not virulence. For they heroically want to protect what is rightfully theirs by inheritance. Yet they truly feel more and more like foreigners in their own land. From their perspective, because everyone else is not MAGA, and MAGA is the real America, that makes the rest of us the insurrectionists. Recall the title of Tucker Carlson’s propaganda film about January 6: “The Patriot Purge.”
I think these people, i.e. these utterly unhinged stupid losers, and the significance of their tragicomic rebellion, deserves at least a column somewhere. Their presence is an international humiliation, and unless they are only enthusiasts (and it can be hard to tell who’s only being outrageous just to be notorious, and thus garner attention), they could be a lurking omen of civil conflict hiding in plain sight that urgently deserves mention. Not to mention such an article documenting it would make for a really good read. Right?
I would be particularly interested to get an enlightening psychological opinion of these people. For instance, how about an article about the brain chemicals released as a MAGA guy watches Tucker every night?
What also intrigues me is how this fits into a pattern with the revolts against established institutional authority erupting all over the world threatening civil order (read Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public)—from the decentralized, democratized information that makes the sovereign citizen mistrustful of absolutely everyone except himself; to the algorithms that exploit people’s reactive tendencies to feed them entertaining content whose explosive effect only leaves people more fragile and desperate for the cheapest validation of their preexisting convictions; to the correspondingly low attention spans and low regard for other people; and the infantilism our obsessively self-focussed self-centered morally decadent culture of self-indulgence endorses as the conceit of the moral imperative of self-care—comfort, pleasure, putting your needs and urges first for the sake of your wellbeing at the expense of all commitment to abstract moral principle.
How Identity Politics is a Unique Product of Contemporaneity
Since I exiled myself from social media a few years ago, I am deeply intrigued by the obstreperous new personality, and the herd tendency, uniting the lonely inferior souls among us under the polymorphous malignant banner of identity. I think what’s interesting is how social media has fractured society into rival sects which each encourage hyper-conformity to their particularistic identitarian orthodoxy, in a zero sum quest for political power. How has everything become zero sum and why has everyone lost moral principles? My theory: because the convenient availability and accessibility of information has fractured the vulnerable individual’s notion of objective impartial factual truth, and accelerated a decades long erosion in social morality. And without universal truth, there can be no universal moral values either—plunging people into a nihilistic struggle between rival subjectivities; the best example of which is the absurd culture wars.
In our intensely visceral, rather than literal, brave new world, subsisting artificially on a limited number of characters, crass memes, vulgar hashtags, and symbols and emojis, and annoying mediocre phrases everywhere like, the “red pill” and the “blue pill,” the “black pill” and “based, “normies,” “boomers”, “cringe” —in my opinion the civilized modern world threatens to degenerate into an irrational almost pagan—most importantly superstitious—world of mythical symbols and the mystical charismatic figures, with celebrity status, who like priests, know how to employ them, and manipulate the new morally bankrupt individual’s lonely chimerical longing for identity as illusionists, who would be authentic Orwellian ministers of truth. Eg. Donald Trump with Truth Social, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Elon Musk, free speech absolutist who nonetheless proclaims his aversion to the free press, banning certain journalists he doesn’t personally like from Twitter. Less than propagandists, more disturbingly they are like puppeteers, Musk tweeting once inarticulately, “prosecute Fauci.” Trump—“terminate” … “the constitution.”
But the digital revolution’s consequences for enlightened reason is another topic for a different day. Let’s talk about the separatists.
Why They Are Separatists
In the news and popular culture, they’re more likely to be called insurrectionists, because of the association of their ilk with January 6th. And I don’t disagree with that description. I think it’s a fine one. But I call them separatists, because separatism is a finer distinction. While retaining the connotation that they are insurrectionary, separatism is a better description of their methodology. They are not secessionists like the confederacy during the civil war. These people have no intention of formally breaking away. They are separatists in that they either would prefer to force the rest of us out, or force the status quo to conform with the dictates of the particular agenda of their identity group. Or Die. Hence the “come and take it” guy’s shirt advertising his willingness to potentially die for his right to own a semiautomatic gun in violent conflict. (If that sounds like empty rhetoric to you, it’s not; I think he’s being sincere; these people don’t have very fulfilling lives, and I think they really would die for the right to own a semiautomatic rifle, for lack of anything else for a stupid person to stubbornly attach himself to and otherwise apply one’s impulsive desire for heroic self-sacrifice).
These people perceive themselves as nihilistically locked in a zero sum, winner-take-all, nonmoral, unprincipled struggle for survival. But it is a struggle for arbitrary power. Now that they have declared our system of government broken and therefore arbitrary, they provision themselves with the license to rectify the current situation by whatever means necessary, arbitrarily. Take the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, for instance, these pompously named militias of bad looking, single men, with no lives. There is no rational debate or persuasion, or agreed-upon truth to use for reference, not within a system, which one convinces himself, is rotten at the foundations. For these people staging violent conflict, and intimidation, is their only option now that they can’t get their way otherwise under what is to them a regime that has no legitimacy. They are separatists, because they are a sectarian insurgency who perceive it as their god-given right, their sacred mission, to divide and conquer and carve out as much space of the country, as territory, for their herd of obstreperous losers as they can.
They even like to describe themselves as violent irrationalists. At a conservative conference not long ago, maybe last summer, I remember hearing that one of the speakers said to fire up the crowd, “we are domestic terrorists!” In a video on the religious right on Youtube I watched, they showed a podcaster yelling to his listeners, “we are the Christian taliban!” In my analysis, these people are not secessionists, because they have no intention of breaking away or leaving. And they are not only insurrectionists, because if they even could run the government, a lot of them wouldn’t even like to nor do they even want to, demonstrated by the attention seeking chaos caucus which has hijacked the house of representatives, cheerleader Lauren Boebert, smug power hungry psychopaths Jim Jordan and Scott Perry, and Heath Ledger joker Matt Gaetz who only wants to watch the world burn.
These people, the charlatan leaders and their doped-up-on-Tucker disciples, are much less interested in taking over the government. Their only interest is to keep the democratic party out of the process by any means whatsoever, if not to destroy that party, that rival sect, in competition with them for absolute power, to deal with whom principle and rational argument is irrelevant. This is separatism, not secession nor insurrection. They have more in common with bomb throwing jihadists, who don’t even know what they want, who will kill and die for an incoherent extreme mythology, only because it makes them feel special to be a member of a metaphysically chosen, magical group of the spiritual elect.
Since we’ve pinpointed their methodology which has no roots really in politics, or ideology (if they had any ideology they would want something tangible, but they want nothing, only the demolition of whomever threatens their existence) or philosophy, rather their only care is cultural identity, the question that remains for the psychologist is, what characterizes this sectarian nihilism? What is its nature? What are its origins? Where the hell does it come from?
A Partial Diagnosis
There was at least a great Wall Street Journal editorial I read the other day which hits the nail on the head. Andy Kessler writes in his column “The Voting Bloc Against Bossiness,” “Meet the dontells, sure to be a political force in the next few elections. Their mantra is simple: don’t tell me what to do, hence the name. Their telltale sign is an obvious case of ODD. What’s that? Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which according to Johns Hopkins Medicine, is a behavior disorder, often in children who are uncooperative, defiant, and hostile toward peers, parents, teachers, and other authority figures.”
Kessler imputes this right wing populist backlash to the accumulating bossiness of the increasing soft despotism of the politically correct left— “use only paper straws. Don’t tell me what to do. You can’t say ‘master bedroom’ anymore. Oh yes I can. That 6 foot tall dude winning all the NCAA women’s swimming meets is really a woman. I don’t think so.” Kessler says, “tea partiers and red-hatted MAGA supporters pushed back against Obama era bossiness. They didn’t want high taxes to pay for open border welfare, gun confiscation, or being woke poked. Heck, they even supported a blundering bloviator for president. That’s how desperate their dontell dedication was.”
And I am inclined to agree with him. The left’s progressive (pun intended) school marmishness over the last decade or so has greatly exacerbated and inflamed the herd tendency of social conservatives. I would add, it’s no coincidence the right seemed to get ten times crazier in direct proportion to the growing madness of the left. Quite often the more I read about how nuts the left has become, it actually surprises me sometimes that the right hasn’t reacted more extremely than it has so far.
This is something no one would like to admit is a threat to democracy, the baleful dynamic through which the left’s excesses dump gasoline on the fire of the right. And you probably don’t hear this argument much principally because so many of us who still believe in democracy and scorn the right happen to be leftists, too. It wouldn’t be easy, and in this tribal age, it would be social suicide to admit the extremism of your own ideological group generates such reaction that people want to overthrow the government mainly just to stop critical race theory.
It’s a lot easier for journalists on CNN or in The New York Times to throw their hands up at the radical right, which as a phenomenon it’s more comforting to see as an isolated event. It’s even more convenient to see MAGA as the inevitable offshoot of conservative beliefs, in other words distinct from all other influences. While it might be more comforting for people on the left, and even outraged Never Trump conservatives, to perceive this extremism as its own animal, this antidemocratic fury was not stoked in a vacuum, but it has largely—not entirely—been provoked more and more by the ever more dogmatic progressive wing of the Democratic party. As a natural consequence of progressives having become more totalitarian, the right has been encouraged to lash out and rebel directionlessly, aimlessly, childishly, to do anything to contain the left telling them what to do, how to talk and how to behave.
Kessler notes, “It’s about freedom. Are dontells libertarians? Not necessarily. There is a deeper psychology of freedom that runs through society, way beyond Ayn Rand fanatics or Cato Institute donors or even crypto crazies. This is especially true in Silicon valley, even though its residents won’t admit it. Disruption almost by definition is not listening to what others tell you to do.”
Conclusion, Separatism is not Vain Reaction
Near the end he says, “we no longer live in a nanny state but a bossy state. You must express the prevailing opinion or face mockery. Do this, don’t do that.”
While I think that Kessler’s characterization of the National Conservative right as “dontells” is spot on, I think his suggestion that they only don’t want to be told what to do misses the important fact that these people are increasingly inclined to play offense rather than defense to get their belligerent way. His psychological theory is good; except in my judgment, his portrait is too benign.
Indeed if the left’s bossiness has inflamed the new right, then it is incumbent on us to observe, as the left’s excesses mount, the right is apt only to become more offensive, more assertive, antagonistic and militant, as opposed to merely defensive reactive and silly.
In my next post, American Separatism part Two, I will explain why I think this is.
Share with me in the comments any separatist lunacy you’ve witnessed in your communities.
—Jay
Yeah i’m against the death penalty too by the way. I think this was all well said. And you touch on something here which is a huge problem with american paleoconservatism which is that they identify freedom perversely with the ability to take the law into their own hands, and to use violence in an aggressive way, rather than in a defensive/ self-defense way.
As a Canadian who travelled through the Midwest and south I agree with all this 2nd amendment American aggression labelling - it’s scary to pull up to a gas station behind a pickup truck that’s bumper stickers are threatening to kill you and do it without hesitation. I think it goes to the heart of a massive cultural weakness in the USA which has been eroding to the human experience and fabric of your country that is Americans have the lowest value for life of any of the western nations. You are all so in each other’s faces with these threats and labels and the undercurrent of death penalty, cops shooting people sitting in their cars, massive jails with death penalty sections, school and massshootings daily, fucking endless wars, stand your ground - you’ve become a society that lives wit constant threats to your life being put in your face. One way to restore some of your national unity would be to end the the death penalty because lefties and libertarians can agree on that and these sides coming together to recognize the value of the individual human life is a necessary moment for your nation. and get rid of that stand your ground law, that’s as anti-human and demoralizing a law as can be. You can kill your neighbours son for taking your bike - you don’t respect each other’s lives and have the lowest value for life in the west and that’s the separatists greatest weapon against American order and restoration. Am I willing yo die to take away your AR15 - no. Am I willing to die to live in a society where I don’t feel co Stanton under threat and devalued - maybe, and that’s where the fight is at right now.