The Republican Party today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic. Since 2016, they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.
None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.
They know.
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Half of America. Half – by this account – is morally diseased, crooked, grotesque, depraved, tortured, or in league with the same. One hundred sixty-six million five hundred thousand people in the country are malicious nihilists, or positively attracted to them.
Say it’s true. How in the world to account for it?
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Ol’ UD says it’s that tasty German plate, Cheesy Nietzsche. “It’s the absence of surprise to life that harrows the head of everybody American you know,” wrote Thomas Pynchon, and it’s arguable that their always-entertaining, always a radical new stupidity/insult/outrage/lie, candidate puts a welcome spring in the step of otherwise enervated folk.
These people are looking for a specifically MAGA transvaluation of values. Yes, you can call it dime-store nihilism (it’s très Trumpian to kill yourself); at a slightly higher level, you can call it dollar-store dionysianism, but the point is a puborectalis-tightening encounter with the illicit, with an outrageous and ongoing public display of norm-nihilating. All That is Solid Melts into Hair.
Coastal elites like UD might prefer their boredom-suspending transgressiveness to take place with innocuous irony on the fart patio of Portlandia’s vegan cafe, but it’s not for her to decide how heartland Americans want to play this thing. All she can do is vote against it and pray.