You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1996
Social-media users are lonely, isolated, and in search of significance. They seek to associate themselves with people who are significant, and significance is a criterion that is easy enough to conflate with fame, celebrity, or some kind of public profile, which is a proxy for status. Fromm traces the modern longing for fame to the end of the medieval period, as Europe’s fixed status hierarchies gave way to the disruption and uncertainty of early capitalism. We are in the midst of a similar disruption as globalization upends longstanding economic arrangements and communities while Instant Culture erodes the traditional bases of social relationships. What is happening in the early twenty-first century is a kind of reemergence of capitalism: twentieth century postwar capitalism shedding its skin as the new organism emerges, and much of what Fromm saw at the end of the Middle Ages has returned in high-tech form. From Escape from Freedom:
This underlying insecurity resulting from the position of an isolated individual in a hostile world tends to explain the genesis of a character trait which was . . . characteristic of the individual of the Renaissance and not present, at least in the same intensity, in the member of the medieval social structure: his passionate craving for fame. If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one’s relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one’s doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one’s individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructibility; if one’s name is known to one’s contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one’s life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.
Bishop Berkeley insists: “To be is to be seen.” By whom? By as many people as possible, and, especially, by as many significant1 people as possible.
Everyone now has the theoretical opportunity to connect with everyone else, including celebrities, politicians, and other high-profile people, with whom any social connection, no matter how trivial or ephemeral, is considered desirable. This is the Golden Age of Fame Whores. And any connection will do: Fans of this or that celebrity rejoice when the second-tier college sophomore who operates that celebrity’s social-media accounts follows, likes, or retweets them—a great many social-media profiles begin with a rapturous “followed by x”—but the boring, the intolerable, the trolls, and the late-night incel porn masturbators have to settle for boasting about who blocks them.
Example from personal experience: A person whose name means nothing to me and appears nowhere in my work maintains a Twitter profile that reads: “Kevin D. Williamson once called me a petty criminal,” followed by a disclaimer regarding which class of pronouns he prefers. Google does not bring up any instance of my having written anything about him or having mentioned him in any capacity, but whatever I am supposed to have written or said about him is, apparently, the first thing he wants you to know. I’m a pretty big Kevin D. Williamson fan, and even I think that’s sad. But I take comfort in the knowledge that I’ll be cast aside as soon as Howie Mandel blocks him.
Journalism and its not-very-bright kid brother, television punditry, offer a weird kind of minor celebrity. At the very high end, television pundits are proper celebrities: Tucker Carlson may not be as well-known as a minor Kardashian—and he is in the same business as the Kardashians—but he is as publicly recognizable as a middle-range movie or television actor, a Jason Bateman or a J. K. Simmons with his beard grown out, a Howie Mandel-level celebrity at least. My National Review colleague Kat Timpf, who is better-known as a Fox News regular, is famous enough that she gets attacked in public from time to time, most recently having been chased out of a Brooklyn bar by a raving lunatic who had had either too many cocktails or too few. But even an obscure print dinosaur like me has one of those awkward encounters they call “getting recognized” about once a month.2
The slight penetration of the world of celebrity by journalists and commentators has combined with the trends discussed above to produce one of the truly peculiar phenomena of our times: the media hate-fuck. A media hate-fuck3 is what happens when someone who disagrees with a certain media figure follows that person obsessively, like it is his job.4 It climaxes in a series of moral orgasms, each more intense than the one before, as the onslaught of outrages from the object of his disaffections continues relentlessly. Why anybody would want to be hate-fucked by a stranger who doesn’t even know he is hate-fucking you is difficult to understand. But Eros, too, is a jealous god.
I have always found this perplexing, and a little bit embarrassing when it comes to my own case: It seems unfair, and more than a little sad, that there are all of these people who hate me but take an intense, energetic, occasionally erotic interest in my career, while I hardly ever think about them at all unless something shows up in my feed.5 I have been on Fox News a few dozen times, but I have never watched a single Fox News program all the way through, including those programs that I have been on all the way through. And some of those shows I like. Investing that much time and energy in something I hate—for no compensation other than the pleasure of hating—is inexplicable to me. I am not above reading the New York Times6 op-ed page on a slow news day looking for a fight to pick—those endless digital column-inches are not going to fill themselves—but it is not the sort of thing I’d make a hobby of.
David Foster Wallace argued that aspiring amateurs who envy professional athletes suffer from the “delusion that envy has a reciprocal.” They believe that if only they could get themselves on the other side of the envy equation, then all of the loneliness and dissatisfaction they feel in their current situation of envy would be transubstantiated into joy and contentedness equal in weight and scope. Envy and spite are two cocktails with a heavy pour of the same brand of hatred—and both are methods for trying to make that interior pain exterior.
The ochlocrats have many deficiencies, personal, intellectual, sexual, social, hygienic, and otherwise. But their most pressing deficiency is their lack of someone to hate other than themselves. They are not in need of an enemy merely for the purpose of psychological distraction, welcome as that might be to many of the members of this cohort. The antagonist serves a much more important social purpose—he is the purpose-pretext around which the personal and social identity of the ochlocrat is constructed.
Perhaps you find it difficult at this stage in your life to imagine being so mentally impaired and emotionally besotted that you cannot function without the crutch of some great fiction. But all of you know what it is like to be stone-cold stupid and high on rage: All you need to do is remember what it felt like to be a child.
When I was a boy in the 1970s, a few of us friends from the neighborhood formed a gang. None of us had ever seen a gang in action or met a member of an actual gang, but we knew the word and understood the concept, as all boys instinctively do—Us and Them. Our gang grew up out of the same Cold War cultural ferment and thin-spread paranoia that would produce Red Dawn a few years later, and, indeed, we spent a fair amount of time planning which sporting-good stores we would loot for guns and ammunition come the Soviet invasion and the need to head for the hills.7 We had a name (I cannot remember what, and it may have changed a few times), military-style ranks and a chain of command (there may have been five of us), colors, insignia, etc. What we did not have was something to do. I grew up in a peaceful, sedate Texas college town. I am sure that it had its share of crime, addiction, and violence—in fact, I know that it did; my home was a constant crime scene—but none of that really touched us elementary-school kids. Such horrors as we actually knew were ordinary and domestic, and hence hardly noticed.
What the drama we were enacting in our gangster play-acting lacked was an antagonist. Most of the kids in my neighborhood and at my school got along pretty well; poor Keith Black and I once got into a desultory fistfight in my front yard simply because we were the two biggest kids in the school, and it was understood to be inevitable that we would. (I am happy that we got that out of the way when we did, while I had the advantage and acted on it, rather than a few years later, when Keith would have proved a much tougher opponent.) We did not have an enemy, so we were obliged to invent one: a rival gang with a name, colors, and insignia of its own, and a dastardly leader with an involved backstory and a penchant for remarkable cruelty, feeding his victims feet-first into the lawnmowers that were the most dangerous things any of us had much real experience with. We would sometimes catch a glimpse of him and his henchmen, spying on us from a tall tree in someone’s backyard or exiting the park or schoolyard just as we were showing up. The game lasted only as long as it had complete psychological and literary buy-in from our little gang—such fantasies are as delicate as soap bubbles and collapse immediately when someone is rude enough to shove them roughly into reality.
Such childhood games cease to be charming around the time one’s age reaches the double digits; by the time Red Dawn came out in 1984, we were still planning for insurgent warfare against the Russkies—you can imagine the way in which we sagely nodded our sixth-grade heads at one another in the theater during that movie and the strategy session that followed afterward at Mazzio’s Pizza—but we had given up the imaginary gangs and the imaginary enemies. We didn’t talk about that, and it would have embarrassed us if someone had brought it up, something like the way we’d have felt if our grandmothers reminded us that only a few years before we’d talked about being cowboys or explorers when we grew up. Our attention had begun to turn, in an adolescent way, toward the real world, and toward politics. In the real world, there were real enemies: the Soviets preeminent among them at the time, but also Leopoldo Galtieri, the ayatollahs in Iran, the PLO, IRA, etc. None of these related to us in an immediate and intimate way—not like the invaders in Red Dawn—but we were immaturely and imperfectly beginning to come to grips with the world as it actually was and is, and to understand, in spite of our Wolverine fantasies, that we were not in fact at the center of the drama.
Shedding these self-centered illusions marks the beginning of the end of childhood. In retrospect, I would not have been worse off if I had waited just a little longer.
It is Christmas as I write these pages, and my wife is wearing a T-shirt with an image of Santa Claus over the caption: “Don’t Stop Believing.” (Another member of the family is wearing the same shirt but with a Spice Girls-derived caption: “Tell me what you want, what you really really want.”) I would not be the one to tell a little kid that there is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy, or that the Easter Bunny is a perverse cultural vestige of an ancient fertility cult that never failed to give the proper due to the legendary fecundity of the Lepidorae clan. But someone should break the bad news to Antifa and their imitators online and in the real world: There isn’t any Nazi menace lurking in the United States. And the play-acting on that score would be embarrassing for thirteen-year-olds—for thirty-two-year-olds, it’s delusional and neurotic. There is no secret cabal of Cultural Marxists out there; patriarchy is a figure of speech; white supremacy is not the American zeitgeist.
Even with the shadow of President Donald Trump falling across these fruited plains, this happy republic is not three tweets away from the Holocaust or one bad-hair day away from cattle cars. Melania Trump may very well wish that she were isolated in a bunker as the world crumbles around her, but she is not so lucky as that.
So why all the fantasies about the rising Nazi menace—the strangely welcoming and celebratory hysteria about the dark shadow of fascism that is, as Tom Wolfe wrote, always falling across the United States but always landing on Europe? On the subject of Nazis, P. J. O’Rourke once observed that no one fantasizes about being tied up and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal, and I suppose the same thing extends to such ordinary Republicans and figures of the Right as Mitch McConnell and Lou Dobbs.8 The most infamous practitioner of white racial-solidarity politics as of this writing is Richard Spencer, a well-heeled and gormless suburban kid from Highland Park.
Nazis should be made of sterner stuff—or at least less fabulous stuff.
Eric Hoffer, the American social critic and author of The True Believer, had our ochlocrats’ number way back in the 1950s: “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”
If the fanaticism and the mass movement is to serve its purpose, then these causes and grievances must be matters of public performance rather than matters of the private soul. They must be occasions for the pursuit of glory, and only the most cultivated kind of mind can comprehend the idea of a private glory. “Glory,” Hoffer wrote, “is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience . . . . The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending—for making a show—and also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle.”
A particular form of spectacle is ritual. And that is what the social-media mob attack actually is: a purification ritual, analogous to the scapegoat ritual described in Leviticus.
1 You can just assume the asterisk here and elsewhere.
2 A while back, I was in an Academy sporting-goods store in Houston when a young man approached me with his hand out in a friendly gesture. “Love your stuff!” he said, shaking my hand and smiling . . . but never bothering to interrupt the telephone conversation he was having simultaneously. That’s kind of my sweet spot, really: Well-known enough that people sometimes want to come and introduce themselves, but not so much that anybody gets too weird about it. Fortunately, I was in Academy that day buying a couple of boxes of 6.5 Creedmoor ammunition, so I was in character. But I intend to use this episode as an excuse if my wife ever tries to send me to the store for feminine products.
3 It is appropriate here that the first name appearing in Urban Dictionary’s usage examples for “hate-fuck” is that of Ann Coulter: ‘ “Man, I would like to hate-fuck Ann Coulter,’ said Jeff, a staunch liberal.” I guarantee you that Ann Coulter does not think about Jeff at all, one way or the other.
4 Which, sometimes, it is. I once read some tweets from the poor little Caitlyn over at Media Matters for America assigned to the Kevin D. Williamson file. She complained that it was dreadful work, and I do not doubt that it was. But she never seemed to wonder why she didn’t have a better job. National Review, my journalistic home, used to maintain a blog dedicated to correcting the errors and distortions of Paul Krugman. For a while, I edited NR’s “Media Watch” blog.
5 Searching for one’s own name on the Internet is supposed to be some sort of embarrassing faux pas, but I do not see why: When people write about me, I respond, if what’s been written is worth responding to. People who sell thoughts to the public used to consider that a part of their job.
6 My fellow conservatives seethe about this on purely tribal grounds, but I subscribe to the New York Times and read it every day. Its op-ed page is terrible, and its national political news is hit-and-miss, but it is an otherwise excellent national newspaper, though of course inferior to the New York Post as a New York City newspaper.
7 Heading for the hills is a hard thing to think on the Texas Panhandle, where the nearest hills are a few hundred miles away.
8 Odontophiliacs notwithstanding.