In his recent interview with Piers Morgan, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, with his declarations of racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism, came across as the voice of a civilisation in decay. The cynical, mondain European Morgan, on the other hand, sounded like the rejuvenating advocate of a better future. Along with the Trump administration’s remarkable hostility to liberal Western democracies, that is a curious reversal. The New World and the Old World have finally changed places.
Think of Henry James’ American visitor to Europe, Daisy Miller, seduced by Giovanelli, an Italian gigolo, and symbolically killed by the moral rot of the older civilisation, dying of malaria in the Colosseum. Or Isabel Archer, another young American woman, in James’ Portrait of a Lady, this time in London, betrayed and debased by American expatriates soaked in corrupt European mores. In the interview, Fuentes seemed Giovanelli himself, seeming to seduce young American males with his desiccated assaults on history, reason and decency. Morgan found himself in the position of what might have been Daisy Miller’s American dad, glowering in derisive disbelief.
Despite Fuentes’s sociopathic intensity, or perhaps because of it, he is a blurry figure. His “ideas” are so contradictory as to be meaningless. He is, on the one hand, a self-declared incel (involuntary celibate). On the other, he claims to be voluntarily holding off on sex because he is waiting for the perfect union with the perfect Catholic wife. He accuses the Israelis – or the “Jews” as he calls them – of committing genocide on “white people” in Gaza when the people who live in Gaza are not – culturally or geopolitically – white. He has lots of loathsome theories about black people, but he pals around, as Morgan reminded him, with Kanye West. He is in many ways Charlie Kirk’s doppelganger, but he denounced Charlie Kirk. He sprang from the aberrant atmosphere exploited and perfected by Trump, but he denounces Trump.
His menace certainly doesn’t lie in his cunning. Much has been made of the aftermath of Fuentes’s October interview with Tucker Carlson, where Carlson listened sympathetically to Fuentes’s anti-Semitic rants. The resulting schism in Maga, the media quickly proclaimed, instantly made Fuentes a national right-wing leader. There is another way to look at that. Brutally repressive demagogues either consolidate and unite, or they simply destroy rival factions. Fuentes is no uniter – he is an indiscriminate alienator – and he is not exactly up to a purge.
Far from being the next charismatic tribune of the GOP, he is an outrage commodifier in a highly competitive American outrage-commodifying industry who depends on mass media to flourish. It is simply not accurate to say that Fuentes, to quote the Guardian, “has ascended… to a position within striking distance of the mainstream Republican Party.” Rather, the Republican Party, for all its spineless nods to racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny, is slowly moving within striking distance of Fuentes, since his juvenile attention-getting is not exactly going to help them hold onto the House of Representatives next November. Having lost gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, the mayoralty of solidly red Miami and several other less consequential but highly significant local elections, the Republicans are terrified of losing average, everyday voters – most of whom are women – who are increasingly repelled by Republican extremism.
Fuentes’s sentiments and his niche popularity are appalling, and troubling. I write hours after the shooting at Brown University and the terrorist slaughter at a Jewish event in Sydney. In this deteriorating world atmosphere, figures like Fuentes can serve as catalysts to disturbed minds. As an alternative political figure, though, Fuentes is not viable. His millions of social media followers have had no effect on actual American politics. It is hard to see young incels, or Groypers fighting to disrupt the social order after spending the afternoon masturbating with an AI bot. People march to pathological ideologies, not to pathologies in search of an ideology. You cannot hold a rally meant for the emotionally stunted. You would have to hold a rally for emotionally stunted people who are in thrall to a clear and dramatic vision of life (fill in the blank with something dehumanising but thrilling – see Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism”) that promises to un-stunt them.
Far more consequential than Fuentes’s self-castrating incoherences – he has, with his usual infantilism, hurled racist insults at Republican dauphin JD Vance’s Indian wife – is something far more intimate: his and his followers’ revulsion against having sex with a woman. It is striking how extreme forms of religious repression, in the form of the right-wing Catholicism Fuentes claims to adhere to, are becoming more widespread in America, not unlike the repressive effects of extreme forms of Islam. Alternating, with his typical confusion, between Islamophobia and Islamophilia, Fuentes has said that he looks forward to establishing “Catholic Taliban rule” in America, whatever that is. What really seems to attract him to the Taliban is its violent misogyny.
Just a few years ago, the ideas of Wilhelm Reich would have sounded quaint, trite even. Now, in the age of the Groyper, they seem revolutionary again. Once Freud’s favourite disciple, Reich migrated from Nazi-engulfed Europe to the United States where he eventually suffered something like a nervous breakdown, dabbling in bizarre therapies like the phone-booth shaped “orgone box” supposed to release primal sexual energy within anyone who sat inside it.
Before that, though, Reich sought to create a synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, with some brilliant, if eccentric, effects. He believed that what lay at the heart of capitalism’s deformations were sexually repressed personalities running capitalist societies – these were, for Reich, entirely males. Personalities not balled up by transactionalism or coarse distracting materialism, on the other hand, could give and receive the fullest physical pleasure with another person. In one form or another, Reich’s ideas inspired American artists and intellectuals from the radical Thirties to the radical Sixties and beyond.
One wonders what Reich would have made of Trump, a transactionalist par excellence, a compulsive womaniser and surely one of the most ungenerous, mean-spirited human beings ever to slither along history’s incarnadine carpet. One wonders, as well, what Reich would have made of Jeffery Epstein, the American elite’s very own Lavrentiy Beria, and of the multitude of American “thought leaders” who frequented Epstein’s domains. It might seem, at first, puzzling that both the highly sexual Trump and the celibate Fuentes would emerge from and exploit the same manosphere. But in fact, in Reichian terms, the sexually repressed Trump (compulsive sex is a sure sign of sexual repression) and the sexually barren Fuentes might well be two peas in a pod.
How feline – unlike Trump and Fuentes – American male icons used to be: Brando’s feminine features, Elvis gyrating instead of thrusting, Astaire’s and Sinatra’s slight girlish figures. Consider how fine were the features of Martin Luther King Jr, who loved women. Perhaps these men’s experience of women – naturally impulsive, as it seemed to be, rather than mechanically compulsive – allowed them, in some way, to acquire a female nature. To give up male control in the throes of pleasure. Perhaps it was this melting self-surrender that fostered an atmosphere of yielding, ultimately, to the common good, to the body politic: The New Deal, the Great Society, civil rights for blacks, women and gay people. Such waves of mutual giving and receiving, citizen to society and back again, seem thousands of years away.
[Further reading: The Bondi Beach shooting was an attack on Jews]
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