Many extreme ideas that first look wacky and disreputable and then end up sweeping the country originate in California, and such is definitely the case with the Claremont Merry Pranksters and their thing: The urgent need to blow up American democracy.
Named after their ‘sixties precursors who drove a school bus all over the US while similarly denouncing The Establishment, the Claremont group also shares with the original Pranksters a virtually all-male membership, a belief in “the power of a certain kind of approach to politics that’s sensational,” and a commitment to overthrowing the country.
Their creed: Human society is incapable of the kind of rational, deliberative government that liberal democracy requires, man. Y’all need a dictator, like Donald Trump, cuz without him you is making one shitty stinky mess of things.
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Given their belief that (in the slightly altered words of SNCC, another ‘sixties precursor) ‘the only position for women in CMP is prone,’ it must be quite the provocation that not one, not two, but three women have lately written the most in-depth and scathing denunciations to which the organization has ever been subjected. “We’ve been warning people about Vagina Dentata from day one, and here it is,” one Prankster (He goes by the anonym Santa Monica Centurion. Okay, I made him up.) has commented in response to the girl essays. “Now they’ve really gotten their teeth into us.”
The first essay appeared around this time last year and, in a more in sorrow than anger way, noted the increasingly Dennis the Menace feel of the group. This year, as the CMP’s escalating hatred of liberal democracy, coupled with rage at Donald Trump’s and John Eastman’s post-Jan 6 travails, has taken it way, way off the reservation, Laura K. Field and Katherine Stewart both openly express horror at the combination of juvenility and violence inside the organization.
Why has so much of the American conservative movement embraced the story that the principles of equality and the pursuit of a more just society are the greatest threats to Western civilization today? Who or what is responsible for giving these paranoid ideas an intellectual veneer? The Claremont Institute gets you much of the way to an answer.
The paranoid Claremont men have convinced themselves that they must kill nihilist, relativist, progressivist, female-fetid, American democracy before it kills them:
“Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” argues author Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, in a lengthy book excerpt published in Claremont’s online magazine, The American Mind. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”
The armory might not have been necessary had Eastman’s traitorous January 6 plan, in which Claremont continues fervently to believe, worked.
[C]onsider the cynicism and nihilism necessary to believe in [Eastman’s] theory—or even to take it seriously as a possibility… You must believe that our institutions are so top-to-bottom corrupt that nothing and no one is worthy of civic trust. Not the neighbors who served as election observers, not the poll workers, not county officials, not city governments, not state legislators, and certainly not Republicans in Congress. This is conspiracism in its most unaccountable form... Once you begin understanding our national politics as a matter of emergencies, corruption, and lies reparable only by figures of exceptional heroism, there is no returning to a politics of the everyday, of democratic choice and representation, and of disagreement, contestation, and compromise. There is … no easy weaning from the dystopian hype.
For evidence of the survival of the non-cynical world, read this.
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I remember my first encounter with dystopian hype (“[M]any Republicans … are pushing the view that America is a degenerate society that cannot be saved.”), and I remember how sexually exciting I found its dark Eastwood (Wood, not Man; Clint, not John) pathology: It was my reading, as a Northwestern undergrad, of Kit Lasch’s (I got to know him when we were both at U Rochester) Culture of Narcissism, a book whose utterly black disposition in regard to every aspect of America has been shamelessly adopted by Patrick Deneen and other contemporary theocrats who want to convince you that your secular life in this country is so unbearably empty that you’re desperate to embrace existence under an all-male, all-powerful, Vatican.
Lasch himself, I was excited to discover, was a handsome, brooding, chain-smoking, dead-ringer for John Cassavetes, and the whole spectacle – intellectual, erotic – had me weak at the knees.
But, tu sais, I was twenty-two years old and really dumb and immature – pretty much where the leadership of Claremont is today – and then I grew up and saw how cheap and manipulative radically dystopian anti-Americanism is, left and right variety. I mean, it’s the oldest sales pitch in the world – your Dodge Charger is a total piece of shit you should be embarrassed to be seen in. I’ve got a late-model Mercedes C-Class you’ll feel much more meaningful inside of…
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“They just want to blow the place up,” concludes Katherine Stewart, and oh how the UD I used to be loved this disrupter shit.
Yes bring it on baby pistol whip me with your AR-15 make me feel young again.