Testosterone

 After the spectacle of the UFC cage-fighting on the White House lawn yesterday—not to mention Elon Musk's debut as the world's first trillionaire, in the same week he was personally egging on a lynch mob in Belfast to burn asylum-seeking families out of their homes—you might think that more brain-dead testosterone is the last thing this society needs. 

You might think, in such a world, that mindless, infantile masculine posturing is "the one thing a man has had too much of," to borrow a phrase out of context from D.H. Lawrence. 

But no. Apparently not. Apparently a lot of people even on the nominal Left now are saying: "that's not enough; we demand more machismo! More machismo!"

I've already dealt in an earlier post with Ken Klippenstein's remarks about how Graham Platner's campaign supposedly spells the end of what he calls the "smoothgroined" (i.e. dickless) politician. According to Matt Yglesias this morning, Matt Stoller has apparently joined the team as well, branding Platner as the doom of the "H.R. lady" version of politics. 

What amuses me about this is how often people frame these kind of remarks as if they were hard-wrung concessions. "Gosh, we'd love to still be nice and polite, but what can we do? The masses demand an asshole, so we have no choice but to deliver." 

In reality, the people treating Platner's machismo as a "positive good" (as Yglesias describes this perspective) were generally macho assholes from the start. They have been annoyed by the kind and gentle, perhaps "feminized," variant of left-wing politics all along, and were just waiting for an opportunity to let the asshole side of their personality hang out. 

I mean, c'mon; who would be surprised by Stoller's remark or think that this is out of character? He's been yearning for a dude-bro axis spanning the left and right for years, which he connects in some vague way to romantic populism and his anti-monopoly obsessions (Richard Hofstadter called the antitrust movement the "old romance" for a reason). 

Stoller isn't just neutrally chronicling some external shift in the political winds to which he must accommodate himself. He's been praying for exactly this moment since he entered life as a pundit. People like him and Klippenstein are "hell-bent on a self-fulfilling prophecy," to quote a William Gaddis character. 

Given the choice between this "dirtbag left" brand of politics and the so-called "H.R. ladies"—between the testosterone-addled school of populist politics and the supposed "smoothgroins"—I'll opt for the smoothgroins every time. 

Anyone yearning for the opposite—anyone still imagining that more penis in our politics is what we need, and that it will somehow save the Democratic coalition—should heed Harold Pinter's admonition in his poem "Democracy": "There's no escape. / The big pricks are out. / They'll fuck everything in sight. / Watch your back."