Where Extremes Meet

 I never could quite bring myself to buy into the Wilhelm Reich theory that the psychic origin of fascism lies in sexual repression. After all—so much of the modern far-right seems grounded much more in a psychology of indulgence. The implicit promise of today's extremist movements often seems to be the release from all inhibitions—the relaxation of any moral norm or cultural taboo that could conceivably constrain one—rather than the repression of one's drives. 

But I had to give Reich's notion a second look yesterday, after listening to Ezra Klein's interview with John Ganz about the "groyperification" of the American right. Because one thing that their analysis of Nick Fuentes revealed is that the cult of sexual self-denial does indeed play a central—if rather paradoxical—role in the extreme right "Groyper" movement. 

Fuentes—they note—describes himself as a "proud incel." Which is already a paradox. If the celibacy is "involuntary"—as the term implies—then one is presumably not proud of it, but is trying to end it. And yet, Fuentes seems to enforce a kind of code of "incel" identity among his followers. So, I guess they're voluntary incels. Voluntarily involuntarily celibate. 

If this sounds like a contradiction, that's because it is—but it doesn't seem to have stopped them. This is a movement, if ever there was one, that "aye be whaur / Extremes meet," to borrow a phrase from Hugh MacDiarmid. The members of today's hypermasculine, very online extreme right seem well aware of the paradoxical, oxymoronic (emphasis on moronic) nature of their own ideology—and to embrace it as such. 

The central paradox of the movement was perhaps best distilled in one line—from the Young Republican group chat that Politico reported on the other week (which showed today's young GOP activist circles to be absolutely rancid with Groyper ideology): "Sex [with women] is gay," one of them said. It seems that horseshoe theory somehow applies even to homophobia. 

Here is "whaur extremes meet" indeed. "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself," they seem to say. 

Indeed, today's online extreme right truly does seem to contain multitudes. On the one hand, they include an army of X-using "gooners" who are obsessed with highly sexualized anime characters. Many of them confess to being addicted to online pornography. Yet—at the same time—as Ganz and Klein point out—they are also actively mobilizing to ban pornography from the internet.

Elon Musk embodies a similar paradox. On the one hand, he decries low birth rates—yet, he is trying to create anime sex-bot avatars to replace real women online. 

Here, as in so many places, antisemitism and misogyny supply the missing pieces to make sense of this riddle. 

The effort to ban online pornography has apparently gotten mixed up—Klein and Ganz explain—with conspiracy theories about Jewish tycoons profiting off of the smut industry. The Heritage Foundation's Kevin Roberts has even gotten in on the dog-whistles: naming and shaming two individuals with Jewish-sounding surnames, and calling for their prosecution, while overlooking several people higher up the corporate chain at Only Fans who have more gentile-sounding names. 

People within the online far-right unapologetically engage with pornography. They revel in it. But the conspiracy theory about Jewish profiteers allows them to simultaneously deny the role of their own agency and consumer decisions in this process. They can indulge their libido as much as they want, while claiming all the while that they are mere innocent victims of a plot to infiltrate their brains and get them chemically-addicted to "gooner" content. 

Likewise, misogyny also comes in to rescue these guys from the logical inconsistencies of their own positions. They can protest against "Only Fans"—and call for it to be banned—because it enables human women to profit from sex work; but they can also continue to enjoy their hentai memes in the meantime, since no actual women are involved. They can turn to anime avatars as a sexual outlet, since it's the only way to engage with heterosexual pornographic material without benefiting or interacting at any stage—however remotely—with actual human women. 

Similarly, Elon Musk's attempt to replace human women with online sex-bots may seem—at first blush—to be at odds with his much-vaunted efforts to foster increased birth rates. But misogyny is where the twain converge. After all—both efforts reduce fundamentally to a strategic effort to reverse the gains of feminism and to destroy women by depriving them of social power—or even of the ability to earn an independent living. 

In all these ways, then—it does indeed seem that sexual repression plays a pivotal role in this movement—even if it appears to be locked in a dialectical and mutually-reinforcing (rather than merely antagonistic) relationship with the movement's simultaneous emphasis on unshackling the male libido from all social and moral constraints. 

In order to understand the psychology of this, we should perhaps look not so much to Reich as to Freud. After all, Freud penned a remarkably prescient analysis of right-wing, machismo-drunk political movements as early as 1922, in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 

In this work, Freud argued that every militant political group adopts the same basic structure (which Freud saw as a distant echo of early human tribal formations). There is always a central, tyrannical father figure, who monopolizes resources and lords it over the army of "brothers" who follow him. The father figure imposes a severe sexual discipline on his followers—denying them any outlet for their libidos. And this pent up, repressed sexual energy on the followers' part then gets redirected into profound feelings of "affection" for other members of the group—and for the "father" figure himself. 

"[T]he primal father [...] prevented his sons from satisfying their directly sexual impulsions;" Freud writes; "he forced them into abstinence and consequently into the emotional ties with him and with one another." (Strachey trans. throughout) 

Does this not perfectly describe the emotional dynamics at work within the Groyper/MAGA movement? They accept sexual repression at the hands of their chosen male tribal leaders. And at the same time, they worship these tyrannical father figures—Trump especially—and seem to revel in the spectacle of these men unleashing their libidos. The latter process allows them to identify with such figures, writes Freud, and thereby to achieve a kind of vicarious gratification.

The inevitable result of this dynamic is a certain Führer principle among the repressed group of brothers (which Freud had already well described a full decade before Hitler came to power in Germany): 

"The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father," Freud writes; "the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority [...] The primal father"—who is clearly Trump, within the MAGA-verse (do they not often half-seriously refer to him as their "god-emperor"?)—"is the group ideal, which governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal." 

The two roles within this dialectic—tyrannical "father" and sexually-repressed "brother"—are embodied in the figure of Nick Fuentes himself (as Ganz and Klein explain in the podcast). On the one hand, he is one of the sexually-starved "brothers." But meanwhile, he is also the tyrannical father figure—viciously mocking and shaming his own followers, and imposing upon them a cruel discipline. 

"Fuentes openly says he’s one of those guys," Ganz points out, "He’s like: I’m a loser and an incel, there are no women in my life, etc. But the way he does that and the way he attracts an audience and the way he entertains his audiences — when he has their questions come on, he sadistically attacks them. He makes fun of them. He teases them." (Klein then plays a clip from Fuentes's show to illustrate the point.)

Presumably, this cruel treatment at his hands just leads to more self-hatred on the part of his followers; and thus, to more repression and self-inhibition; and thus to more adulation of the tyrannical male "leaders" of the movement (Fuentes, Trump, etc.) who seem to take whatever they want without asking and to set no limits to their own indulgence. 

It also leads them to turn even more to one another—their fellow Groypers and gooners—for affection and a sense of kinship. 

And this, surely, explains how the "extremes meet" in the Groyper phenomenon—how it can be that they are both the haven for "gooners" and yet want to ban online porn—in other words; how the movement has come so perfectly to embody the quintessence of "horseshoe theory." It is about destroying all norms and boundaries and taboos, and unshackling the male libido, as I always thought. But it is also about sexual repression, as Reich thought. 

The energy that powers fascist movements has always been a sexual one—but it is a sexual energy that has been repressed and perverted from its usual channels—re-directed so that it can feed a perpetual engine of outrage, Führer-worship, in-group loyalty, and out-group hatred. 

And what a dangerously potent psychic engine it has proved to be—both historically and today.