In the hopes of feeding my brain some more, to better think through something I’m trying to write about MAHA for a non-newsletter project, I started reading Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies last night. More accurately, I read most of Barbara Ehrenreich’s forward to Vol. 1 (of 2). I didn’t even make it all the way through the introduction before realizing, with nausea rising in my throat, that I wasn’t going to be able to read the book, which promised to be unflinching and outright gory in its depictions of the Freikorpsmänner of interwar Germany and their exuberantly gruesome violence. Not right now, maybe not ever. It’s not a total loss of effort, though, because some of what Ehrenreich wrote in the forward is still useful.
The blurb on the cover of my edition is from her introduction. Her interpretation of Theweleit’s volume as a “theory of fascism” is that “the fascist is not doing ‘something else,’ but doing what he wants to do [emphasis mine]... He [Theweleit] forces us to acknowledge that these acts of fascist terror spring from irreducible human desire.” This is a bit of a welcome challenge to me. I’ve been working with some of Wilhelm Reich’s insights from The Mass Psychology of Fascism in an attempt to reconcile the overtly irrational parts of MAHA – why do people vote for, work for, and indeed desire political movements that are contrary to their best interests, or actively and obviously harmful to them? Reich’s answer to this, surveying the population-average German fascist, is that fascism offered people satisfying emotional resolution for the intractable and intolerable contradictions plaguing their real lives, political, economic, and psychological.
So I appreciate the challenge to hold the possibility that this – even the misery and abjection of the MAHA movement, the vaccine-preventable deaths and miscarriages induced by raw milk, the humiliating gross-out extremity of the disgusting and venous Liver King and the influencers who film themselves blitzing raw chicken in a blender and drinking it – is indeed what these people actually want. I have no doubts about the sincerity of their beliefs, beliefs that, say, getting absolutely diabolical diarrhea or a high fever after consuming raw organ meat is actually a sign that one’s body is purging “toxins,” that vaccines are chock-full of these “toxins,” and so on. I understand that such beliefs are durable against even hard indicators of lived reality, like the finality of a toddler’s unnecessary death or a brush with hemolytic uremic syndrome. I think this durability has several headsprings, one of which is the rationalizing powers of the mind, another of which is the “distrust” that is so in the news these days – and the unfortunate reality that there are many countable instances where health officials and health professionals were, in fact, lying to their patients or the public out of venal self-interest. Once again, this is why I’m inclined to believe, as Reich did, that something about the persistence of these beliefs in the face of incontrovertible contrary evidence is down to the emotional resolution they offer for intolerable material conditions for which there is no effective political recourse. But of course, I should be keeping in mind that perhaps what these folks want is no more complicated than to drink sewage and let their children develop scarlet fever, that there’s no symbolic or “acting out” dimension, that this all is, like the Freikorpsmen’s violence, in fact the entire point. Let ‘em all eat shit and the strong will survive.
But your average German fascist was not a Freikorpsman, and I’m not at all sure about the “irreducible human desire” for fascism or violence. This is straight out of Guattari’s “micropolitics of fascism” (Ehrenreich does indeed talk about Theweleit’s work in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, the desiring production of violence), which I appreciate, but I’m just not sure there’s an irreducible human desire for anything.* To call the Freikorpsmen’s violence an irreducible desire is to transhistoricize it, as Guattari seems to (as always with him, it’s really hard for me to tell what it is that he’s actually trying to claim), and to make a quite strong case about human nature, as I think I’ve said before on this newsletter or elsewhere. It is to situate the force of explanation for organized political violence in this human nature, where I think it’s actually a good deal more malleable, and more in reciprocal relation with social structures. The central problematic for Ehrenreich reading Theweleit is how the hatred of women – also assumed to be primordial, deep-seated somewhere in human nature, rather than socially constructed and reinforced – gets alchemized into organized fascist violence. Does she really believe this? As she herself writes in the introduction, if you’ll indulge me in quoting at length:
The Freikorpsmen fought, first of all, because they were paid to, and, by the standards of postwar Germany, were paid generously. They fought also for revenge, believing that the German army had been betrayed in World War I – ‘stabbed in the back,’ as it was so often said – by the communists, with their internationalist ideology, as well as by the vacillating socialists and other insufficiently resolute civilian forces. But they fought most of all, because that was what they did. Robert Waite, in his classical history of the Freikorps, quotes a member of the famous Erhardt Brigade, a man who had started his military career in World War I at the age of sixteen: ‘People told us that the War was over. That made us laugh. We ourselves are the War. Its flame burns strongly in us. It envelops our whole being and fascinates us with the enticing urge to destroy.’
The Freikorps paramilitaries were made by the experience of WWI, not by irreducible human desire. Right? It’s hard to tell what Guattari thinks. He writes in his essay “Everybody wants to be a fascist” that “what fascism set in motion yesterday continues to proliferate in other forms, within the complex of contemporary social space. A whole totalitarian chemistry manipulates the structures of state, political and union structures, institutional and family structures, and even individual structures.” And that “a military machine, as such, crystallizes a fascist desire.” The Freikorpsmen were part of that machinery persisting into the unstable interwar period. Their desire to do violence seems to be largely reducible to their experience in WWI. But maybe Guattari is saying that an experience like WWI somehow activated the impulse to fascist violence that lurks in us all? It’s hard to say. I don’t know that a satisfactory resolution of the question can really be had.
Whatever the case, this traces a story that is recognizable to contemporary Americans, too. Vietnam War narratives like Michael Herr’s great book Dispatches, or even more clearly, Apocalypse Now (1979), for which Herr was a screenwriter, and the Global War on Terror CIA-Hollywood collabs of the 2000s like The Hurt Locker (2008), repeat familiar cultural scripts about men who, once turned into warriors, are unable to run the tape backwards and reintegrate back into civilian society as normal guys. The better analogy to the Freikorps might thus be something like ICE, the January 6 insurrectionists, and the various right-wing paramilitary movements, populated as they all are with the leftover combatants of the wound-down GWOT. They are the internal core of the imperial boomerang; the material investments in the military and surveillance technologies through the GWOT activate “totalitarian chemistry” now in the creepily-termed “homeland,” down to the level of fantasy – Punisher shit, Turner Diaries shit, perverted superhero shit, the recent DHS video of the trucks with fresh ICE wrappers patrolling DC to a cheap-sounding trap beat. Are these desires innate, or are they constructed socially, through the most sophisticated ideological and dream-penetrating apparatus in the history of the world, the American culture industry?
Can we find an answer in the way that fascism inheres in the relations between men and women, as Ehrenreich argues in her introduction? It is, one might surmise, a part of this long capitalist “conjuncture,” this gendered micropolitics of fascism. Violence against women is both extremely common and extremely normalized in our society. Experiences of combat – what is smoothed over and medicalized as post-traumatic stress disorder – are a major predictor of perpetrating intimate partner violence. Last night, I skipped ahead in Theweleit’s book a little bit and, skimming, read one Freikorpsman’s account of a sexual encounter with a woman, quoted at length. It wasn’t graphic or gory. It wasn’t even overtly violent. It was still so upsetting to read that I had to put the book down for good and switch to something boring (the good old New Left Review is always there for me in times like these). Actually, the word I want to use is repulsive. Reading it made me feel repulsed. I was repulsed because the encounter was so recognizable, the casual psychopathy with which men treat women, who as a rule they don’t see as fully human, right there, just under the skin like a freshly blooming bruise.
This introduces another convolution into my original topic of concern. The MAHA mamas are not Freikorpsmen. Most of them are women. Solidifying a base of women’s support within the MAGA movement was the key strategic maneuver of RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Trump after he dropped his own presidential bid. So are we really talking about some kind of double emotional dividend – the emotional dividend of health fascism, and the emotional dividend of the tradwife who licenses, sanitizes, and advertises the most ruthless forms of gendered oppression? What is this emotional dividend? There’s a recurrent theme in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon of women being sexually attracted to domineering, fascist, some might say evil men – multiple characters in Gravity’s Rainbow,** Maxine Tarnow and Nick Windust in Bleeding Edge, Frenesi Gates and Brock Vond (such a great name) in Vineland, and so on. This is not really, in my reading, a commentary on women per se so much as an allegory for the Modern condition of being desirous of our own domination. Are we such because of some deep unconscious desire to be dominated? Or are our desires shaped by the concrete realities of our lives, which include domination as a constant and defining feature, especially if we are women? Does the answer to this question exist, and does it matter?
I would love to see some breakdown of the scope and demographic composition of the popular base of MAHA. I do know that it is a lot of women – women who get their news from Instagram, of all fucking places, and women who are overburdened with responsibility for children and infantile husbands at the same time as they are deprived of meaningful autonomy in more and more spaces. Those spaces include school (witness how the Covid-era backlash to school closures morphed so fluidly and easily into trans panic and MAHA), they include medicine and health care, and they include the private space of the family. These spaces are the social environment that “made” the MAHA warriors, and I do think there is something to the idea that the information environment of Instagram and the scammy MAHA narrative does offer the kind of emotional resolution and catharsis that Reich was talking about. The content is obviously bullshit, but it responds to women’s fears and anxieties, particularly around their children, and articulates those fears to the right.
Witness the comfortable parallel between the “invaders” of the male-coded Amerian fascist discourse (immigrants, nonwhite people generally, fictional nonbinary college students, whatever the fuck) and the dialectic of contamination and purity that characterizes the female-coded MAHA version of the same. For these mamas, it’s products of the industrial order seeping into our and our children’s bodies, corrupting them invisibly from within – “chemicals,” “toxins,” whatever is in seed oils that is supposed to be so bad, plastics, pesticides, episodes of Cocomelon, or whatever. (Of course, there is an unconscious resonance here with the reactions to the disowned fear of vulnerability that intruded so dramatically as a result of Covid, the threat of infectious diseases.) It’s easy to see how this finds a comfortable home in a fascist political culture and discourse, and the tradwives are all over it, for sure. I think that I still think that the central problematic is what type of emotional fulfillment or resolution of the intractable contradictions of women’s daily life the firehose of MAHA horseshit offers. We don’t have to agree or even to empathize too much with these women (truly some of the dumbest we’ve got) to wonder about the social forces and the experiences that shape their “desire” to drink raw milk and shit themselves constantly. There are a lot of these and we have to come back, at some level, to the structure of American health care itself, which women do experience as more disempowering than men, and which does devolve responsibility and blame to individual patients (and to mothers of children with any kind of medical needs, in the case of children), and which is, at the end of the day, a scam in its own right.
The parallel scam structures of MAHA and “straight” health care is a theme that I will explore further in the piece I am writing. For now, it seems to me a little unfair to dismiss Reich’s analysis as a symbolic/unconscious “reading” of fascism rather than a “seeing” and accounting-for of fascism. Reich’s primary object of analysis is not the violence of fascism (as is Theweleit’s) but rather the material and psychological basis of the contradictory and irrational appeal of fascist rhetoric and fascist politics. I think Reich’s argument could (and in some ways does) accommodate both of the phenomena that Theweleit and Ehrenreich are discussing, including and especially hatred of women. To understand the health fascism of MAHA at the political level and how it is being airbrushed and disseminated at the popular level requires, I think, some kind of understanding of women’s autonomous experiences separate from their status as objects of male hatred.
* I don’t think Guattari is using desire in an exactly vernacular sense; more of a specific technical, French-psychoanalytic sense, I think to distance himself from Lacan, and that’s all I have to say about that.
** If sadomasochism – leather whips and shit – is the characteristic perversion of Nazi Germany, as Pynchon so vividly explores – then the characteristic American fascist perversion has got to be coprophagia, right? Although, come to think of it, there’s some of that in Gravity’s Rainbow too.