Death Drive

  Thanatos is in the driver's seat of today's GOP. I don't know how else to describe the careening suicidalism of the party's most recent activities. Even as the planet bakes and no politician can deny even in front of a hard-right audience (at least not without getting booed) that global warming is real—even then, the party's candidates at their second debate earlier this week spent the evening outbidding each other for who would pledge to burn fossil fuels the most if elected. (One of the few jabs Haley landed on DeSantis, for instance, was to accuse him of cancelling a few drilling and burning operations in his home state.) 

Likewise with the party's ongoing infatuation and death-embrace with Trump. Here is self-destructive behavior at its most incomprehensible. The man lost the previous election, tried to stage a coup, and has spent the years since penning increasingly vindictive and unhinged micro-edicts, in which he calls for the death of his enemies and declares his intent to eliminate the independence of large swathes of government should he be re-elected to office. And yet it seems all-but-inevitable at this point that GOP voters will crown him yet again as their nominee for president. 

And as of this writing, the House GOP is poised to shut down the federal government—possibly for days or weeks—because they cannot agree among themselves sufficiently to fund the government on even a short-term basis. One of the main sticking points in these flailing negotiations seems to be attributable to a small but influential hard core of isolationists in the party—call them the Putin faction—that categorically refuse to fund the Ukrainian cause at even a fraction of what the country's embattled defenders have requested. 

This, I confess, was never what I saw coming. I thought, at the start of the war, that I would spend the next several years warning Republican politicians against excessive hawkery vis a vis Russia and arguing against overt U.S. military intervention or other measures that would risk escalating the violence. I didn't expect the dominant GOP contingent to emerge would be one that sought to eliminate all U.S. support for Ukraine, mock the country's defenders, kiss up to the invader Putin, and sit back and allow the Russian war machine to crush its unoffending neighbor into submission.

This precipitous drive toward self-annihilation on the part of the GOP would seem to be their own problem to solve; except that we're all stuck in the car with them. They are driving the whole country, not just themselves, to the brink. 

The image comes to mind because I was just reading John Hawkes's visceral existential thriller, Travesty, which gives us precisely this premise. The story is told as a suave monologue from the point of view of a coldly sophisticated murderer, who is driving a car that includes his daughter and her lover (who is also having an affair with the narrator's absent wife) at breakneck speeds in the dead of night down a French country road, with the intention of ultimately annihilating them all by smashing the car into a stone barn just past his family's residence. 

The book evokes Camus in its use of the monologue form (much like The Fall, which supplies one of the story's epigraphs), as well as in its examination of crime through existentialist themes (not to mention the dark concurrence that Camus himself died in a car wreck). It is also reminiscent of Baudelaire in its themes of the artist as criminal and the superiority of the artificial and imagined to the natural and real. And it is highly Ballardian too in its fetishization of the death wish and its erotic treatment of automobile crashes. In short, Thanatos and Eros are both very present in this book, performing a dance in each other's arms. 

What is motivating the driver in Hawkes's searingly intense tale (the author is known for the gripping emotional power of his prose, and the reputation is deserved)? Why is he driven to this ultimate gratuitous act? 

Likewise, what could be motivating the drivers of our own national fate to pursue their present suicidal course? Why do they want to drive American democracy off the cliff and leave it in smoldering ruins, including by willfully reversing any limited progress we've made on slowing down climate change, restoring to office a man who openly despises democratic institutions and will seek to install himself as autocrat if he can, and cozying up to a Russian gangster-potentate who intends to export his model of illiberal authoritarianism worldwide? What could lie behind this astounding will to self-destruction? 

The narrator of Hawkes's tale considers and rejects various psychological explanations for his actions. Does the death wish stem from a fear of death—an obsessive dread with the prospect of self-annihilation so all-consuming that people end up bringing on the very thing they fear? He says no. 

Ultimately, to the extent he supplies any explanation, Hawkes's narrator suggests that he is motivated simply by the attraction of the unthinkable: the fact that a car full of life, a beautifully-designed machine carrying three breathing people, can be transformed in an instant into its opposite: a dead and mutilated husk. It is the paradox of "design and debris," he calls it—and it is but a subset, ultimately, or mirror and analogy, of the larger paradox of death, of "death's terrible contradiction," which he summarizes as follows: "it [i.e. death] will come, we cannot know what it is; it is totally certain, it is totally uncertain)[.]"

Perhaps something similar is what's driving the fanatical thanaticism of our present-day GOP hardliners; the MAGA maniacs who seem to be willing and eager, almost literally, to just "burn it all down." It is hardly conceivable to most Americans, after all, that they could actually succeed in this act of destruction. We believe our democratic institutions are impregnable; that our economy is intrinsically blessed and our nation fated to succeed. "It is something like the rising of the sun," as Edna St. Vincent Millay once wrote—satirizing this complacent attitude on the part of our fellow Americans—"For our country to prosper; who can prevail against us?" 

And when something seems so assured and impregnable, there will always be some dark destructive urge in some corners of the human spirit that wishes to assert its own power and freedom by toppling it. It is the same lure of absolute freedom that André Gide described in his concept of the "gratuitous act"—the truly unmotivated crime which—precisely because it serves no purpose and feeds no drive—establishes more than anything the freedom of the will. This is how the death wish comes in. 

Our MAGA revolutionaries are drawn by this mechanism, I hypothesize, to the possibility that that they could make the inconceivable happen; that they could subvert a democracy and a constitutional order that have lasted for two hundred and fifty years by turning it on its head and electing to office a deranged crackpot, failed real estate investor, and Z-grade celebrity bent on a mission of vengeance, with the power and will to destroy the independence of federal agencies and consolidate power behind him. 

They are Hawkes's narrator driving the car full of his family members and friends toward a stone wall and doing it all, not because it makes sense, or because they have some rational purpose to fulfill, but precisely because there is no reason to do it (as Hawkes's narrator observes, he wishes to leave no evidence behind that would point to a motive or explanation, because "that is exactly the point [...] what is happening now must be senseless to everyone except possibly the inhabitants of the demolished car"). They are seeking, like Gide's Lafcadio, to feel their own ultimate existential freedom through the commission of the truly unmotivated act. 

The self-annihilating extremists behind the wheel of our current national vehicle are seeking what Hawkes's narrator calls "the truest paradox [...] one moment the car in perfect condition, without so much as a scratch on its curving surface, the next moment impact, sheer impact. Total destruction." They want it precisely because it shouldn't be possible; it goes against everything we've learned to regard as our national destiny. "[C]essation is what we seek," says Hawkes's narrator, "if only because it alone is utterly unbelievable." 

This is why the far-right faction of the GOP is trying so persistently to drive us off the cliff. It's not because our democracy is unstable: it's precisely because it has held for hundreds of years. It's not because things are going so terribly poorly in our country; it's because they have been going so predictably well for so long, and it "would be fun," as D.H. Lawrence once wrote in a poem, "to upset the apple-cart/ and see which way the apples would go a-rolling." 

It is a political ideal, that is to say, for people who have reached the last outer boundaries of reckless nihilism; a program for people who don't value anything in humanity enough to try to spare even themselves, let alone others; a philosophy for people so fundamentally juvenile and morally irresponsible in their outlook, in the deepest sense of that term, that they don't mind pulling the temple down on their own heads. 

But of course, as D.H. Lawrence admonished in another equally memorable and quotable poem, the nihilists had better be careful what they wish for. "After me, the deluge!" they may cry in their ecstasy of puerile recklessness. But what they might not have considered, observed Lawrence, is that the deluge might come—at their own bidding—while they are still standing there.