Republicans are about to inflict a
rather strange vision of masculinity on America, one that is less the Triumph of the Will that
they wanted, and more Idiocracy. The
political messaging to their audience is simple: Democratic men are all gay
transgender tofu-eating double-Communist weenies, and you don’t want to be
that, do you?
It’s been heading in this direction
for a long time, but it came into stark relief when White House aide Stephen
Miller accused Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico of being
transgender. “He’s clearly transitioning into a female,” Miller said.
“When Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood
doesn’t come out. Soy milk comes out.” This followed attacks on Talarico
by his opponent, Ken Paxton, who called him “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “James
Tala-freak-o.” Fox host Jesse Watters called him a “gay vegan.”
To set the record straight,
Talarico isn’t transgender, he isn’t
gay, and he’s not even a vegan. Also, unlike Paxton, he isn’t a scandal-plagued
attorney general who narrowly avoided indictments for securities fraud and
bribery. Paxton let a child predator off with one
day in jail and no sex offender registration because he was an influential
Republican. Paxton has been involved in multiple cheating
scandals, but to Republican strategists, the fact that Talarico once ate a meatless
breakfast wrap and doesn’t promise to eradicate transgender people makes
him less of man.
Accusing Democratic politicians of
being transgender or transgender allies has deep historical parallels with Nazi
Germany. Nazis routinely accused
political opponents of being Jews, having Jewish blood, or being “friends
of the Jews.” Today, Republicans use transgender
people in the same way. They present 0.5 percent of the population as
simultaneously a dire threat that is destroying the country and pathetically
weak and disgusting. They promise that only when “those” people and all their
supporters are gone will the country truly be great again. Indeed, both Project
2025 and the Republican legislative agenda, Project 47, bear eerie
similarities to the past.
Republicans offer a vision of
manhood that is meant to look like a parade of Aryan Übermenschen but instead comes
across as a depressingly absurd circus sideshow. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
does push-ups and pull-ups badly, while bench-pressing what appear to be fake
plates. His performative
masculinity in his speeches makes it clear why he was forced out of the
National Guard before he could be promoted beyond the rank of major. Secretary
of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promotes all-beef
diets, raw milk, and shooting
up on steroids, while looking and sounding like a Tom Waits outtake.
For a group that actively reviles gay people,
the Republicans and their influencers are surprisingly averse to women. Fascist
influencer Nick Fuentes has a
lot to say about women, despite being a virgin, never having been in a
relationship, and insisting
that “having sex with women is gay.” Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate argued
that any sex with women strictly for “feeling good” without the
possibility of procreation is “super gay.” He has also suggested that
“true alpha” men shouldn’t waste their time with women for physical
release. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson has promoted getting a suntan
on your scrotum and perineum as a way to increase testosterone for “real men.”™
Even Alabama GOP Senator Tommy
Tuberville recently got in on the “it’s gay to have a girlfriend”
narrative. He declared on Fox News, “They’re now called the socialist,
globalist Democrats, and it’s just unfortunate.… They’ve left their base of
middle-class and union workers, and now, their new girlfriend is illegal aliens
and women.”
This cavalcade of over-the-top
performative hypermasculinity ends up looking a lot more like Mike Judge’s 2006
film Idiocracy than anything depicted by Nazi propagandist Leni
Riefenstahl. Idiocracy captures this current trend, with characters who
are moronic describing the one average-intelligence, non-moronic human of “talking like a f-g.”
In the movie, President Dwayne
Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho (played by a jacked Terry Crews) is a pro wrestler
who randomly sprays the air with machine-gun fire during
his State of the Union speech while promising to fix everything. The character
highlights how a society stripped of critical thinking elevates leaders who
perform “strength” over those who possess actual competence. The
performance of power has become the definition of power.
Idiocracy—which, remember,
came out 20 years ago—depicts
a trashed White House with a destroyed East Wing, inhabited by a cadre of
unqualified idiots and in-laws working for a “five-time ultimate smackdown
champion” and porn star president. In the real world, the East Wing is a
smoldering wreck, Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden is reduced to an outdoor
strip-mall food court, and an Ultimate Fighting Championship fighting ring is being built on the grounds to honor a president long associated with World Wrestling
Entertainment and Jeffrey Epstein.
Idiocracy repeatedly highlighted
how frighteningly dumb over-the-top masculinity was and what it would look like
if it came to power. The answer was a society that thought it was a good idea
to water your crops with a sports drink (Brawndo), leading to famine. According
to the movie, this world where famine was a result of stupidity wasn’t supposed
to exist until 500 years in the future. But today in real-life America … well,
have you seen the price of groceries lately?
Performative masculinity relies on
emotional reactivity. Whenever the future society in the movie faces a problem,
their instinct is to shoot a gun into the air or scream, mimicking an angry
toddler. Now, anytime something doesn’t go President Trump’s way, he threatens
to have people imprisoned via angry rants on Truth Social, occasionally
coating the walls of his home in ketchup
in a fit of rage.
Poe’s law is an internet adage stating
that without a clear indicator of the author’s intent (like a winking emoji or
tone indicator), it is virtually impossible to distinguish a parody of extreme
views from a sincere expression of those views. Today, I’m not sure how you
could parody how the United States has descended into a form of performative
weirdness that was considered too over the top just 20 years ago.
Perhaps the saddest part of this
for me is remembering how masculinity used to be idealized in movies. I grew up
with The Right Stuff and Chuck Yeager as the pinnacle
of what an American man should be. He was portrayed as unpretentious, honest,
confident, intelligent, competent, brave, calm, and dedicated to his wife. He stole
the show in a movie that was theoretically about the Mercury Seven astronauts.
Today, that form of masculinity seems positively anachronistic.
More’s the pity.
