Young Republicans

 Probably by now we've all seen the Politico story about the leaked group chat messages from the nation's Young Republicans—a sprawling network of Gen Z party activists that includes some staffers and other people in influential positions in the nationwide GOP. 

The reported messages are obviously racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, and everything else awful you can think of. The people who wrote these quips come across as simply dreadful—the worst you can imagine. (It's as if the made-up Stephen Glass story about CPAC from the '90s was reborn in living color.)

What strikes me especially about the messages, though, is the pervasive tone of trollish irony from people who are actually close to centers of power and responsibility. 

It reminds me of those quotes you will sometimes see attributed to "senior administration officials" in the Trump administration—in articles such as this one from Rolling Stone. The ones in which the officials in question are happy to mock the inadequacies and excesses of their own party—so long as they will not be named in doing so. 

After all, a lot of the worst, most appalling reported quotes from the leaked group chat—the ones praising Hitler, etc.—were offered in the context of half-critically acknowledging how extreme and fascist the Republican Party has become under Trump. 

The notorious "I love Hitler" remark from the comment thread—for instance—came in response to saying that one of the party delegations was sure to vote for whoever was the most right-wing candidate. 

In other words: the point of the "joke"—to the extent it had one other than trollish nastiness—was that even these Republican activists are willing to admit privately that there is no upper limit to how extreme their party is willing to go in the Trump era. Even as they puff out their chests and angrily disavow in public that the MAGA GOP has become a hotbed of fascism and neo-Nazi ideology—they are all willing to admit as much and joke about it when they are amongst themselves. 

This—even more than the racism and nastiness, etc.—is what I take from these leaked threads: the sense that people within the Republican Party know exactly what's happening here; and yet are trying to distance themselves psychologically through humor from the reality of what they are doing. 

They know full well that Trump is a would-be authoritarian following in the footsteps of racist demagogues and dictators past. They can't escape some feeling of guilt from helping to bring him to power. And so, they crack "jokes" as a way to disassociate themselves from what's happening. 

On some level, then, it seems as if these staffers—much like the anonymous Trump officials quoted in the Rolling Stone article—are frightened by the dark forces they have awakened. And the only way they have to process this vague sense of guilt and fear is through engaging in a kind of gallows humor. 

They crack "jokes" about sending their political opponents to the "gas chambers"—because they are dimly aware that Trump really is organizing a campaign of authoritarian state repression against his critics—that he really did send at least 250 innocent people to a torture prison in El Salvador. 

They laughingly admit that their party is rife with Nazis—because such stabs at pitch-dark "humor" are the only way in which they can admit to themselves something they all know, but that makes them deeply uncomfortable—something painful, yet perfectly obvious to anyone who spends time on right-wing social media. 

So, they "ironically" parrot centuries-old tropes of anti-Black racism. They "ironically" praise Spanish conquistadors for raping Indigenous women. They "ironically" talk about murdering their opponents or inducing them to kill themselves. 

As Politico summarizes—members of the group chat "mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide[.]"

These are people dancing on the edge of the moral abyss—who know that they are facing the abyss—who know that they helped create that abyss, and did all in their power to allow it to consume the constitutional democracy that was their birthright as Americans.

And so they "joke," because "joking" about it is the only way they can disguise from themselves the knowledge that the abyss they are creating could one day swallow them too. 

As D.H. Lawrence once wrote: 

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.  [...]

They say: Après moi le deluge! and calmly expect that the deluge will never be turned on them, only after them.

Post me, nihil! -- But perhaps, my dears,

nihil will come along and hit you on the head.