Puerilism

 The worst thing about the style of this new/old administration—well, after the perversity, the stupidity, the moral ugliness are all taken into account, perhaps—is just how juvenile they all seem. I won't say "young," because many of them are very much not young. But unmistakably juvenile—even the old ones. They are living embodiments of the "puerilism" that Johan Huizinga associated with the far-right politics of the 1930s—and which he saw as the opposite of all true youthfulness, playfulness, and humor.

The "puerilism" of the administration is most obviously on display in the actions of Musk's team of twenty-something "DOGE" hacks who are currently running around the federal government firing all the adults. But one can see it too every time J.D. Vance opens his mouth. 

At the Oval Office meeting this week with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Vance was invited at one point to comment on his recent controversial speech at the Munich Security Conference (the one in which Vance called on Western Europe to bring fascist parties into their governing coalitions). Vance stammered through an awkward response that could not be described as anything other than boyish. He had the adolescent's insecurity, with the adolescent's mask of pseudo-confidence to try to brazen it out.

It's the same impression one gets from watching spectacles like the fresh-faced doofus Sean Duffy running the nation's transportation infrastructure. This team of would-be juvenile revolutionaries—on their Children's Crusade to destroy the American way of life—first decided to axe hundreds of positions from the FAA's safety team. Then, when planes started to fall out of the sky, they pivoted a week later to realize they had to spend more money to recruit air traffic controllers. 

This is the sort of thing any grown-up could have told them would happen. But they refused to listen to the grown-ups. Musk and his army of trolls have been so brainwashed by their own social media feeds that they sincerely believe the federal government is made up of a bunch of "woke" layabouts, and that they can defund and dismantle the whole apparatus with no negative consequences. 

It's only after they start doing so that they gradually realize—oh wait, maybe we need things like global public health programs in order to stop new hemorrhagic fevers from spreading around the globe. Or: maybe we shouldn't have axed the Ebola or AIDs programs so hastily, now that people are dying. Or: maybe it was a bad idea to try to dismantle the FAA right after the country's worst aviation disaster in decades. Maybe blaming all of these disasters of our making on "DEI" has limited returns...

Fools and little boys in the skins of middle-aged men. To Huizinga's point, they have none of the admirable traits of genuine youthfulness. But they embody the worst kinds of immaturity; of puerilism.  They have the ugly aspect of youth that Milan Kundera describes in a passage from The Joke: "Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand." 

Kundera goes on: "And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature [....] a playground for easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into catastrophically real reality." 

That is the essence of this administration: a playground for the immature. A playground for easily-roused mobs of children. It is staffed entirely by young-to-middle-aged Millennial men whose worldviews were shaped entirely by the social media platforms they now control. They have "memorized speeches" they learned on X about the federal government being full of "woke ideologues," and they fanatically believe it. Or, like Vance, they have heard from social media that Western Europe is a land of social justice warriors, and they can't wait for the chance to spit in their eye. 

But then they actually go out and do these things—no longer on social media, but in the real world. They start firing safety personnel at the FAA. They start laying off thousands of career civil servants. They issue "stop-work" orders for the global humanitarian aid infrastructure—and, as anyone could have told them to expect (and, as many people did in fact try to tell them), innocent people immediately start dying for it. Their "simulated passions" and "simplistic poses"—which worked great for them on social media—have proven to be "catastrophic" when translated into reality—in just the way Kundera describes. 

Kundera's protagonist himself immediately regrets having to make this observation about youth. He was himself one of the young revolutionaries who established Czechoslovakia's communist regime—only to see it turn against its own progenitors. He says that there is much to admire in youthfulness, and that he does not wish to slander his own former dreams. 

But it is undeniable that the old liberal faith that "the young people will save us" may not be quite true anymore. It may be, to the contrary—as Nabokov once wrote (in Strong Opinions)—that "[i]t is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found." It may be that the young, with their "simulated passions" and their "memorized speeches that they only half-understand" are the people most likely to go along with any new totalitarian movement that traipses along inviting their devotion—because they have the least memory of what they are giving up by selling out democracy. 

One recent New York Times article illustrates the point in a particularly distressing way. The core takeaway from the article is that Germany's neo-fascist movement—the AfD—is essentially a young person's party. It is Germany's youth who are mouthing Nazi slogans. It is Germany's youth who are "ironically"/not-so-ironically risking fines and jail time by flashing each other Hitler salutes. It is Germany's youth—not its elders—who are taking the AfD's message onto social media platforms and winning new adherents as "influencers." As the Times summarizes: "Young activists are forming a new core of Germany's nationalist, anti-immigrant party." 

(Meanwhile, it is the older generation of Germans—like Olaf Scholz—who still tend to be committed to the mission of postwar democratic Germany—who see in democratic Germany, as Scholz recently said, a "historic mission" to say "never again" to the crimes of the Nazi past: "Never again fascism. Never again racism. Never again war of aggression," as Scholz put it.)

Many observers from the Obama era still can't quite wrap their heads around this reality. They think: but the young people are always progressive. The young people are always right. The young people will save us. 

But will they? Or, was Nabokov not closer to the mark: that young people tend to be the biggest "conformists"—whether for a good or an evil cause, so long as it is currently trending? Was Kundera's protagonist—in his darkest mood—perhaps not getting at the truth: that young people tend to "fanatically believe" in a handful of second-hand ideas that they picked up from others, but that they take with perilous seriousness and literalness precisely because they have no direct life experience of their own, and no memory of the past, by which to measure its truthfulness? 

Perhaps the young people—especially the young ones embracing MAGA or Germany's Neo-Nazi party—are of the sort best described in a poem by D.H. Lawrence: "The worst of the younger generation, those Latter-Day Sinners, is that they calmly assert: We only thrill to perversity, murder, suicide, rape—bragging a little, really, [...] and at the same time expect to go on calmly eating good dinners for the next fifty years." That certainly seems to be an apt description of the young fanatics at CPAC or AfD rallies who cosplay Nazism or worship Trump as a Roman Emperor. 

Lawrence's point was that it is only the younger generation who play-act at nihilism in this way, because they don't actually have any real experience of the sorts of perilous forces they are uncorking. The older generation of Germans know—they know all too well. But the young have never learned this lesson—at least not for themselves—and so now, they may have to learn it all over again, through experience—at inestimable cost to all the rest of us. 

It's all well and good to invoke the forces of "nihil" and the "deluge" upon others, Lawrence writes: But what happens, "my dears"—Lawrence wanted to know—when "nihil come[s ]along and hit[s] you on the head"? What happens when the planes start falling from the sky, because you—in your boyish faux-confidence—fired all the grown-ups?