Tweetstorm on Theweleit

gistfile1.txt

(tweeted in March 2016. Subsequently deleted)

"61. Fifth… I have no idea?

Here’s where I pull a Theweleit, throw up a picture of Tintin, and flee. https://t.co/QlYM3cAxLL"
60. Fourth, stop trying to explain Trumpism’s fascism by looking to the 1930s. That's too late. Fascism was born at Versailles (at least!).
59. Third, realize that rational or objective appeals to political economy or fretting over Kansas will accomplish nothing.
58. Second, see Trumpism as an extension of the male ego’s desire to dominate, meaning it’s undeniably racist and bigoted by design.
57. So, as Lenin would ask, “Что делать?” What is to be done? First, understand Trumpism as a real phenomenon featuring normal people.
56. For this strata-on-two-fronts, Trump is, as a Leader, “a man whom they themselves originally delegated heavenward” (II.409).
55. (This is how Trump’s own garish, nouveau riche brand works in his favor, despite his pedigree.)
54. …and to be dominated by a Leader “of their own kind,” who “*returns* to the people and remains there” (II.409).
53. The strata-on-two-fronts both desires to dominate (the migrant worker, the African-American, the workshy hippie)…
52. And Trumpism is also a response to the capitalist demand that generates male egos starved of their desire to engage in domination.
52. But not only BHO. For Trumpistas, the entire ruling caste is unfit to rule the American Empire. They are all traitors in some sense.
51. As such, @jbouie is right in seeing Trumpism as a racist response to BHO, who’s phenotypically unfit to rule the American Empire.
50. And Trumpism relies on that aggrieved notion, that Jesus-given right for white America to desire for itself an ewiges Reich.
49. We all make fun of white fragility and #firstworldproblems, but suffering is suffering, whether we think it’s deserved or not.
48. Trump is a revolution based on the “pleasure… taken in violating whatever displays itself as living” (II.420).
47. The Sanders soi-disant revolution is what it looks like to have a mobilized, political economical response to exploitation.
46. After all, if political economy were driving Trumpistas, they would be hashtagging everything #FeelTheBern
45. Back to Trump, though. The political economical rationale for his rise is insufficiently descriptive.
44. Of course, the way in which the attacks on Brussels are related to people’s gaining access to functions of domination is another issue…
43. After the Brussels attacks, Joann Sfar used Tintin to show a desire to move to the Moon. https://t.co/eem1m1gMIM https://t.co/MP1W9kG2Xz
42. Appropriate to our current moment, the final image of _Male Fantasies_ is Tintin’s rocket, going to the Moon. https://t.co/l2CihYz2Fs
41. Theweleit takes a dump on Marxism, runs away. 10 yrs later, I still don’t understand the end of _Male Fantasies_ https://t.co/cP9FgI3LyN
40. Communists, then, “see no base in that suffering for a politics of liberation” (II.420). (Compare the Left denial of #BlackLivesMatter)
39. Theweleit also sees this blindness in communism. Organizing exploitation is “easier to *understand* than mass suffering” (II.420).
38. Focusing on political economy is a means of simply not understanding human desire. They are orthogonal. https://t.co/Y7Ej3wbCLG
37. This is also why Walter Benn Michaels’s now persistent use of an income inquality chart often seems/feels beside the point.
36. Left parties, on the other hand, have a “fundamental commitment to the ‘primacy’ of ‘objectivity’ in one form or another” (II.418).
35. Fascists are all desire as a force of social production all the time. They desire to dominate. Objectivity, science… these mean nothing.
34. All (West German, but…) Left parties feature a “common denial of human desire as a force of social production” (II.418).
33. This lack of understanding is unavoidable in a Left analysis of Trumpism, which also is why Tom Frank’s economic analyses feel lacking.
32. “He takes it as an *insult* that his talent remains unrecognized” (II.408). The anti-fascist can’t see why the fascist is winning.
31. Every critique of fascism has the subtext of offering the critique’s author as a superior leader than the fascist one being critiqued.
30. Theweleit notes that the Left constantly denounces and ridicules fascism, denying “the nature of fascism as a popular movement.”
29. Anyway. The second point of Theweleit’s analysis on fascism is aimed not at Trumpists, but, rather, at the Left.
28. Then the access to these functions of domination is denied, we get white fragility and similar tropes, some expressed violently.
27. Remember Theweleit on fascism: “It promised its followers access to functions of domination, not only in war, but outside it.”
26. And this is because imperial capitalism, just as it was central to Wilhelmine Germany, is also central to contemporary America.
25. But BHO’s use of the Empire-weapon is inconsistent. Conservative friends call for its persistent use. *This **desire** predates Trump.*
24. The President whose foreign policy has seemingly never met a group of Muslims it didn’t want to bury under drone rubble is “weak.” What?
23. I was startled last year to hear conservative friends moan that Obama has made the US “weak” abroad by acquiescing to Putin, Iran, etc.
22. But the Minutemen predate Trumpism. And so does the feeling that the US is now a loser nation that is always losing like a loser.
21. The Freikorps (the focus of Theweleit’s study) went to Latvia to protect Germany from Bolshevism. Minutemen, Arizona, USA, Mexicans.
20. It is/was a threat to the strata-on-two-fronts and *also* is/was a threat to the implicit right of Germany/USA to dominate the world.
19. The de-whitening of America stands in for the threat to the 1920s German fascist of the imminent dictatorship of the proletariat.
18. They need to be controlled by the fascist middle-managerial class. As such, gains by minorities and immigrants are seen as a threat.
17. The fascist strata-on-two-fronts logic requires that these people be  forever part of the bottom stratum. All must be refused to them.
16. This is how Trumpism was introduced to us, on the rhetoric of opposition to a permanent underclass made up of immigrants and non-whites.
15. 1st: “(… migrant labor may be the organizational form in which strata-on-two-fronts gain easiest access to contemporary power)” (II.407)
14. But two aspects of Theweleit’s analysis on the nature of fascism are particularly salient with regard to fascist Trumpism.
13. Theweleit positions this compulsion to domination in contrast to economic explanations for the rise of fascism (depleted middle class).
12. This strata-on-two-fronts was a nursery for fascism, which satisfied the “*psychic compulsion* to domination.” https://t.co/Yg8snGZkvM
11. Theweleit introduces (?) the idea of the “strata-on-two-fronts,” a class (?) under siege from both the élite and the proletariat.
10. Theweleit in turn leans on a deep, deep archive dive into the aesthetic lives of Freikorps soldiers and their aesthetic production.
9. Anyway, back to Trumpism and how it is (now assuredly) fascist. Here I lean on Klaus Theweleit’s insane, great _Male Fantasies_.
8. I’m not an expert on US public policy, but I’m pretty sure David Souter had very little to do with dismantling welfare in the US…
"7. …seem quaint today:

But if Souter and Thomas have their way
You’ll be standing in line unable to get welfare"
6. And then there was the *previous* threat, George H. W. Bush. Concerns like those voiced by Digable Planets around then in “Femme Fetal”…
5. But _It Can’t Happen Here_ returned to our collective memories in 2000, alongside the *previous* “fascist” threat, George W. Bush.
4. There are ways of reading Lewis’s account of the 1936 Democratic National Convention that do reek of Trumpism, mostly in the spectacle.
3. In Lewis's novel, Windrip wins the Dem nomination (in Cleveland!) with strong symbolic military/religious support https://t.co/VdRspwnyEt
2. Mostly, the comparisons feature the worst kind of Godwinism, cut with a (knowing?) reference to Sinclair Lewis’s _It Can’t Happen Here_.
1. I find pretty reductive and unuseful a lot of the comparisons between Trumpism and most aspects of fascism from the 1920s and 1930s.
0. Here are some ideas about Trumpism and fascism. This index-zero tweet serves as fair warning, RIP Phife Dawg, etc.