Pagan MAGA

 The endless social media flame wars that define our modern politics gave us one piece of nastiness last week that I thought was unintentionally revealing. Stephen Miller said something gross and mean about Senate candidate James Talarico. 

The official Democratic Party account clapped back at him by calling him "ugly." (You see what I mean about this not being exactly our most lofty and inspiring moment in national politics?)

Then, Stephen Miller's wife Katie Miller clapped back in turn, calling the Democrats' social media account manager "unmarried with no kids"—as if that's an insult and a closing argument in itself.

"This is what a sad, unhappy female Liberal looks like," she added.  

I guess Katie Miller wants us to know that she is married (albeit to that), and has children. One can see her glowing to herself with hubris like Niobe over the thought: I produced more offspring than you!

This was not a one-off in Trump's movement. J.D. Vance has similarly invoked fecundity as if it were an outward and visible sign in itself of moral superiority. 

In his upcoming book, it appears he plans to share a just darling anecdote about how the example of Erika Kirk's baby-making persuaded his wife Usha to abandon her reticence about having a fourth child. 

These are the moments which remind me that the MAGA movement—for all its in-your-face protestations of Christianity—is really a pagan movement. 

"Come over to our side, we have better sex," seems to be their main pitch. 

"We have fun. We try to get rich. We pursue our direct self-interest. We procreate. We want more power, more money, and more of our genetic material spread out into the cosmos."

That is really the core of the whole "trad bro/trad wife" appeal. That's the advertising message: "just obey convention; make money; conform to your gender roles, and you will win the game of life."

We atheist liberals, meanwhile, are the truer Christians. Because we are the ones who get all hung up on questions like: "But is it right? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it equitable?"

We ask questions like: "Why should I get all the money, instead of someone else?"

Who has given to me this sweet,

And given my brother dust to eat? as William Vaughn Moody once asked. 

To which the MAGA pagans reply: don't ask questions; just go with it. Enjoy yourself. Let it all hang out. What society and tradition have deemed right and good must be so; so long as you don't overthink it.

As the Nazi character Bernard argues to the Popular Front leftist Peter, in Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure: 

"You tried to go against your class and traditions, while I am conforming to mine. I don't need any special psychological considerations for my conduct, whereas you did."

That's why—insists Bernard—your leftist movements are always full of frustrated neurotics—whereas we have all the pretty people. 

As MAGA might put it: We are the hot girl revolution. We have the dude bro vibes. 

Meanwhile, you are a "collection of neurotic Cinderellas," the Nazi Bernard puts it, "who wanted to overthrow a society in which nobody asked them to dance." 

In updated terms: you're just a bunch of "sad, unhappy female Liberals," per the rather less eloquent—and more redundant—phrasing of Katie Miller. 

But don't get smug, leftist men. Bernard has a phrase for us too: "male spinsters to whom Power had never proposed," he calls us. 

And so, Bernard's pitch to Peter is essentially the same one MAGA offers to all of us: Stop fighting. Accept the rules. Conform to "class and tradition"—be a girly girl or a manly man as your birth certificate decrees—and win the game!

"You go on for a while raging against yourself, wrestling with your antiquated prejudices, until one day, when you are sufficiently worn out, [...] you will quietly say to yourself: 'After all, why not?'..." says Bernard. 

To quote Roland Barthes: "There we are, rid of a prejudice that used to cost us dear, too dear, that used to cost us too many scruples, too many rebellions, too many battles, and too much solitude." (Howard trans.)

This is the heart of the pagan appeal. Get rid of that morose Christian conscience hanging over you! Be gone, "pale Galilean"! Come over to our side and just do what ordinary selfishness decrees!

As I once wrote in a poem: 

In suits they are, or

Pearls and heels – One feels

Like one of Satan’s lesser imps

Forced to watch as the angels process –

One’s sulfurous name having wisely been

Struck off the immortal scroll;

[...]

And then:

One wonders if it is not

After all so easy

To tuck in the shirt and find the mate

And birth the baby and bring up the child

And have the large family and build the large house

And make the large money and lay off the coffee

And quiet the large doubts and leave the large terrors

And maybe it is, but one knows the while

One would not do it if one could (and

Can); one recalls

A legend among some

Apologists (and anthropologists)

That the damned in fact desire

Their fate

Indeed they practically

Pray for it

And though one does not believe it, it seems

In one’s own case quite convincing.

In other words, I'd choose to be one of those neurotic "male spinsters" all over again; one of those "childless cat ladies" or cat men; one of those "sad, unhappy liberals" and "Cinderellas," even if I thought I had the option to choose otherwise. 

This is the lesson of Koestler's novel as well: even if many of our motives for altruistic and self-sacrificing political behavior can be reduced to neurotic impulses—that does not mean we should stop doing those things. 

"[E]thical imperatives," he summarizes in the Postscript, "cannot be invalidated by reducing them to factors operating on a different level[.]"

And so, I accept my fate as one of the Cinderellas. I accept my fate among the "sad, unhappy liberals"—the damnées de la terre. 

As Walter Kaufmann says repeatedly in his essays—if he absolutely had to choose between happiness and knowledge; comfort and liberty—he would choose knowledge and liberty every time. 

The MAGA pagans, with their simple, uncomplicated narcissism—their childlike pride in winning, having more, making more of themselves—are saying we should choose happiness instead, and let freedom, dignity, and truth go hang. 

In so doing, they are trying to take us back to a state of ignorance from before the fall. 

That's what all their boastful talk of fecundity and marriage is really about—it is an effort to uproot "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," as Koestler puts it—"to go back to the time before the fall, when man and woman were naked and not ashamed[.]"

To which Koestler replies: "Blessed be the fall, blessed the tree."

And so too, we say to all the MAGA pagans, with A.E. Housman: 

The laws of God, the laws of man,

He may keep that will and can;

Not I: let God and man decree

Laws for themselves and not for me;

And if my ways are not as theirs

Let them mind their own affairs.

Their deeds I judge and much condemn,

Yet when did I make laws for them?

Please yourselves, say I, and they

Need only look the other way.

But no, they will not; they must still

Wrest their neighbor to their will,

And make me dance as they desire

With jail and gallows and hell-fire.