Castration anxiety in 'White Famous' (2017)

The actress Laverne Cox, in the 2020 documentary film "Disclosure" (see 12:35-14:15 in the Netflix version) says: "There is a history of emasculating Black men in this country, like, a literal history during slavery and during Jim Crow when Black men were lynched. Often, their genitalia was cut off. And so a Black men donning a dress is this emasculating thing. And I do feel like the relationship that a lot of Black people had to me [as a transgender woman] is about that legacy of trauma around the historic emasculation of Black men in America."

The documentary shows a clip from the 2017 TV series "White Famous."

Screenshot from 'White Famous,' as reproduced within the "Disclosure" documentary

The eunuch in the film 'Judith of Bethulia' (1914)

The historian Susan Stryker, in the 2020 documentary film "Disclosure" (see 8:30-10:00 in the Netflix version) discusses the 1914 film "Judith of Bethulia." She says it is "one of the films that is often credited with inventing what's called 'the dynamic montage'." In the film, Judith sneaks into General Holofernes' tent. He dismisses his eunuch, after which Judith decapitates Holofernes with a sword. Judith leaves. The eunuch reenters the tent, discovers the general's body, and picks up the murder weapon.

"There's a claim," Stryker says, "that this is one of the first films that we know of where a [director's] cut in the film is used to advance the story. And there's a kind of, like, trans, or, you know, gender nonbinary character who is kind of circulating around the cut in the narrative. It's almost like the figure of the 'cut trans body,' the eunuch who's been castrated or emasculated, who is a 'cut figure', presides over the invention of the cinematic cut."

Screenshots from 'Judith of Bethulia,' as reproduced within the "Disclosure" documentary

'Unholy': White American evangelicals' reverence for Trump

A summary of ideas from
Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump by Sarah Posner (Random House, 26 May 2020)

Why Trump? And why, of all possible followers, white evangelical Christians? Trump's appeal is not just a "personality cult," Sarah Posner says. His movement has historical roots. Posner highlights the historical “racist grievances of the American right, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education and persisting through the 1960s and ’70s in opposition to school desegregation.” Today’s popular notion “that an imperious, secular government was bent on stripping Christians of their rights”—in response to which Christians are making laws dedicated to protecting “religious freedom”—originated in that time. Paul Weyrich cofounded the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Republican Study Committee, and the Moral Majority which conveyed the message that “an ‘elite’ secular political culture...had foisted unwelcome social and cultural changes on white Christians.” The IRS had denied tax exemptions to about one hundred private schools that were “segregationist hard-liners who refused to adopt a nondiscrimination policy even on paper”; Weyrich falsely claimed that the IRS was trying to close the schools altogether. (Abortion, by contrast, didn’t become a rallying cry for evangelicals until the late ‘70s and ‘80s.)

Trump approached the 2015-2016 campaign by “enthralling the alt-right, a once-fringe movement of white supremacists and neo-Nazis...with his cruel nativism and casual racism.” For example, in November 2015, before he’d even won the Republican nomination, he retweeted a false claim about crime statistics sent from a white supremacist account. Previously, American candidates could be expected to refuse the support of white supremacists in clear terms, but Trump never did.

After Richard Spencer made a Nazi display, for example, Trump heard the concerns of New York Times reporters and still required three days before he was willing to speak the words: “Of course I condemn.” Hardly a convincing repudiation of Neo-Nazism (as Posner sees it and presents it in this book). As a result, the far-right increasingly believed that Trump was lifting them from the fringe and carrying them into the mainstream.

Trump, in part because of behavior like this, also “simultaneously drew the attention of curious white evangelicals, many of whom also responded to his racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim rhetoric, cheering it as a brave assault on political correctness.” It didn’t matter that “he did not even try to tell a personal salvation story or display the most rudimentary Bible knowledge.” Evangelicals wanted him nonetheless because they saw him as a “a wall builder, a rule breaker, and most important, a strongman.” They wanted “a leader unbowed, one who wasn’t afraid to attack, head-on, the legal, social, and cultural changes that had unleashed.” Trump also “satisfied many evangelicals by picking Pence as his running mate, and he lined up his final, crucial endorsements from important figures like Perkins and Dobson.”

Their choice of Trump isn’t merely a transactional bargain in which evangelicals set aside their religious convictions in exchange for some policy wins. Trump delivers not only “policy” but “power,” and for that reason they consider him “anointed, chosen, and sanctified by the movement as a divine leader, sent by God to save America.” He is part of their religious convictions. They grant unprecedented leniency for his religious apathy and illiteracy, while he uses unprecedented power on their behalf.

Although Trump is illiterate in evangelicals’ lexicon and spent his adult life flagrantly contravening their sexual mores, his evangelical supporters are nonetheless starstruck. He may not be one of them, but they idolize how he loudly and fearlessly articulates their shared grievances—that alien anti-Christian, anti-American ideologies have taken over the government, judiciary, media, education, and even popular culture and forced edicts upon a besieged white Christian majority, cowing them into submission by invoking 'political correctness' that aims to censor, silence, and oppress them.

White evangelicals identify with Trump so completely that, for them, “defending him,” Posner says, “became indistinguishable from defending white Christian America.” He enables their “Christian supremacist agenda” while they enable his “white nationalist agenda.”

The far-right opposes international cooperation, or what they see as a New World Order. The religious right-wing uses the phrase “shining city on a hill” to represent the myth of “American exceptionalism.” It was a favorite phrase of Reagan’s in his campaign speeches; Reagan added the word “shining” himself, but otherwise it is a reference to the Sermon on the Mount. Today, the religious right-wing and also the political far-right wants the United States to boost its own power “defined by a rejection of the hard-won and fragile American values of democracy and human rights, and by an exaltation of authoritarian natalism, xenophobia, and homophobia.”

The religious right-wing assigns Hillary Clinton the role of the villain in this story. In their view,

the fact that he vanquished her while spurning political customs of probity suggests a supernatural force must be behind his improbable rise—because only by a divine hand could the rigid conventions of politics and the satanic machinations of the powerful have been so decisively shattered.

Religious leaders shield him from all criticism, thereby giving

moral cover to the president’s racism and white nationalism. With each tweet excused or rationalized, with each racist utterance waved off as misunderstood or manipulated by 'fake news' to make Trump look bad, with each rejoinder that it is Trump’s critics who are fomenting divisiveness, Trump’s evangelical loyalists have helped make the unthinkable — an overtly racist American president — a reality.

His offenses include "casually racist tweets or statements, policies that banned immigrants and refugees, deported them, detained them, or otherwise mistreated them, including children and babies." In mounting defenses of these, "Trump’s evangelical defenders were effectively solidifying the Republican base as committed to both Christian and white nationalism."

Trump and the religious right-wing are politically symbiotic because “the movement desperately needed a savior; Trump was eager to oblige because of his bottomless need for a worshipful retinue.” It makes sense, then, that while only about a third of Americans who are not white evangelicals believe that Trump told the truth about the Mueller investigation, two-thirds of white evangelicals say they believe Trump on the matter. And Trump, for his part, will embrace any evangelical leader who is loyal to him.

The religious right-wing has "sustain[ed] a presidency in the face of unprecedented scandal," Posner says, demonstrating that their movement is still very much alive in the 21st century.

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In 2023, Brian Klaas writes:

"Trump shifted America’s Republican political landscape. His party is now within the Land of Authoritarian Politics. This is the world I’ve studied for more than a decade, from Madagascar to Belarus and Thailand — and now in the United States.

In that world, rational choice models fall apart. They’re comically bad at predicting events, because voters will repeatedly cling to a single charismatic individual even if they lose. Policy becomes secondary to personality."

* * *

The cult of personality around Trump has countless loyalty tests. There are the lies you’re expected to parrot, from the Big Lie about the 2020 election to the conspiracy theories that circulate among MAGA disciples.

But there are also the outward displays — flags, hats, bizarre art that depicts Trump as a superhero, or even flying on an eagle. (The lack of similar products for Biden is a sign of a healthy political party in a democracy, in which politics is about policy goals, not a person. When’s the last time you saw a Biden flag?).

* * *

Moreover, everything that would normally fry a candidacy in the Land of Normal Politics — such as being indicted for dozens of felonies and pending further felony indictments from several active criminal investigations — can electrify a candidacy in the Land of Authoritarian Politics.

— "How Trump Could Win," Substack, April 21, 2023

Here's a far-right superhero in Argentina, Javier Milei, elected president in November 2023:

In the Iowa caucus in January 2024, CNN says, "The education gap among evangelicals remained enormous." Trump and DeSantis each got "slightly less than two-fifths, according to the CNN entrance poll" among "college-educated evangelicals." By contrast, Trump got the vote of two-thirds of evangelicals without a college degree, beating DeSantis in this demographic "by over three-to-one."

Philip Bump points out that, when the Supreme Court granted presidential immunity, it was "opposed by most Americans and even most Republicans — at least until the question was framed as granting immunity to Trump." (Washington Post, July 3, 2024)

'Cruel Optimism': Wanting something that isn't really good for you

Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)

The author doesn't use the term "Stockholm syndrome," but that's how I could most succinctly phrase her thesis in Cruel Optimism. Instead of having a love/hate relationship with a person who is your captor, however, you have a love/hate relationship with an idea to which you are captive. Somehow, remaining in the dynamic has come to seem better than the alternative.

Optimism — Berlant says in her Introduction — may be described as “the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.” (What this force feels like is individual and variable.) “Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least.” The term “cruel optimism” means that “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing,” she says in the Introduction. This happens “when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially,” or, in other words, “when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.” The feelings involved are also complex. One might feel “pleasures of being inside a relation” despite being “bound to a situation of profound threat”; this, too, is cruel. She is thinking in particular of “the fantasies that are fraying” in the late 20th and 21st centuries, like “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy,” especially given our modern human condition that is so crisis-filled “that adjustment seems like an accomplishment.”

The period called “the impasse” is when a person “moves around with the sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event.” In terms of the human ability to feel or function, an impasse is “temporary housing,” which is better than altogether falling apart.

A sudden event, yielding an aftermath “when one no longer knows what to do or how to live and yet, while unknowing, must adjust” is one kind of impasse. Another kind is “coasting through” a nameless status quo. (Chapter 6, p. 200)

“All attachments are optimistic.” (Chapter 1, p. 23) They are cruel when they present as "an affectively stunning double bind: a binding to fantasies that block the satisfactions they offer, and a binding to the promise of optimism as such that the fantasies have come to represent. Cruelty is the ‘hard’ in a hard loss. It is apprehensible as an affective event in the form of a beat or a shift in the air that transmits the complexity and threat of relinquishing ties to what’s difficult about the world." (Chapter 2, p. 51) The “double bind” is that “it is awkward and it is threatening to detach from what is already not working,” and that is why we sit in an “impasse of the present.” (Chapter 7, p. 263)

Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

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"Tragic optimism," by contrast, "is the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite its inescapable pain, loss and suffering," in the words of Emily Esfahani Smith in the New York Times. The word was coined by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. She explains: "For a long time, many psychologists embraced a victim narrative about trauma, believing that severe stress causes long-lasting and perhaps irreparable damage to one’s psyche and health." Today, however, psychologists believe that a majority of trauma survivors "exhibit what’s known as post-traumatic growth. After a crisis, most people acquire a newfound sense of purpose, develop deeper relationships, have a greater appreciation of life and report other benefits."

So, "cruel optimism" is when you start off hopeful but life harms you, and "tragic optimism" is when you start off harmed but find hope. Perhaps that is oversimplified, but it seems to boil down to that.

'Surviving Autocracy': one rejected myth, one persistent myth

Throughout U.S. history, Masha Gessen (they/them) begins their new book Surviving Autocracy, there has been a national myth of a "fundamental structural state of exception that asserts the power of white men over all others," i.e. a narrative that we'd immediately be plunged into chaos if we didn't let white men have all the control. (A "state of exception" is the use of an apparent crisis as a pretext for overriding existing legal constraints on the ruler's power.)

At the end of their book, they cite the historian Greg Grandin. Grandin, pointing out the United States' colonialist "myth of a goodness it embodied," observes that Trumpism "rejects even the myths that were used to justify expansionism." Trump is committed to isolationism and to narrowing the in-group of who counts within American democracy. Indeed, when he lies to justify a military attack, he embraces "the sense of inhabiting a contracting space rather than an expansive empire." In this way, Trump is unlike the younger Bush, who at least had a "pretense of promoting democracy" or "policing the world" behind his false claims.

Trumpism rejects the myth of American goodness. It accepts the myth of white supremacy, specifically that white supremacy is a tolerable way to deal with anxiety and uncertainty.

These ideas, and very much more, in this book:

Masha Gessen. Surviving Autocracy Riverhead, June 2, 2020.

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In June 2023, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, said: “If he gets back into power, he will never leave.” He wants power so he can "shut down all investigations" of his corruption and other crimes.

More quotes on solitude

"Loneliness is not death. Yet we might as well be dead when our only possibility is to be alone, because the worst aspect of loneliness is that it ends the possibility of meaningful experience by translating the inner dialogue of solitude into a monologue of desolation. As the quintessential condition of singularity, loneliness is unlike the condition of solitude, although, unless the world becomes so bleak as to be irremediable to us, we hold out the hope that we may emerge from loneliness into solitude. In solitude, we are each of us by our self, but not yet alone, because we are more or less happily occupied with our self, beside our self in a positive way, or in Arendt’s term, two-in-one. To move from loneliness to solitude is to recover the world we have lost."
— Thomas Dumm. Loneliness as a Way of Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. pp. 40-41.

...beyond strategic / activist self preservation, there’s something else to be gained here: Doing nothing teaches us how to listen. I’ve already mentioned literal listening, or Deep Listening, but this time I mean it in a broader sense. To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.
— Jenny Odell, "how to do nothing," Medium: Culture, 29 June 2017