Therapeutic Nationalism and Other Opportunistic Decouplings

get ready

For years now, I’ve written once or twice annually about a phenomenon that I’ve struggled to name but which everyone understands. It’s a particular kind of social and aesthetic culture, not exclusive to Instagram but very heavily associated with it, that merges girlboss feminism with the contemporary therapeutic imperative, a strange syncretic mysticism involving horoscopes and “manifesting,” and a blanket excuse for narcissism and selfishness dressed up in quasi-political and self-help terms. You know what I mean.

Some of these memes are comically ridiculous, most of them are fairly innocuous, and a few of them make me deeply sad. But they all reveal a tangle of conflicting attitudes and ideas that are quite confused. You would never assemble these various impulses into a life philosophy on purpose; they’ve been grafted together mostly thanks to the weird rhythms and path dependence of social media. Either way, I’ve argued that they present an essential problem with any kind of “I can have it all” philosophy - millions of people absorb this stuff, and because many of the things we want in life are zero sum, not all of them in fact can have it all. Almost all of them, in fact, will get very much less than it all. You have this absurd manifesting/The Secret stuff, where grown adults genuinely convince themselves that they can will what they want into being simply through wanting it. Well, alright: what if two people want the same promotion at work, and they’re both manifesting it? The clod philosophy this is all attached to says that whoever wins wanted it more, and since wanting can’t be quantified, no one can ever prove that isn’t true. (Convenient!) Regardless, in the case of the singular promotion and two people manifesting for it, only one of the people who has read endless memes like these actually ends up being self-actualized by success. This is OK; life can be full of contentment and disappointment at the same time. Part of what makes this kind of messaging pernicious, though, is that it suggests that not getting everything you want is always a personal failure you shouldn’t accept.

It is not possible that God promised the whole garden to everyone. (That’s not how fractions work, even for God.) It is not socially responsible to believe that you are entitled to the whole garden. And setting yourself up to see anything short of the whole garden as failure is a recipe for making yourself miserable.

That’s related to another point I’ve made, which is that these memes create an unachievable expectation that healthy, successful women aren’t in possession of ordinary confidence but of lunatic confidence, a kind of confidence rarely seen outside of Michael Jordan or bipolar mania. In a particularly perverse irony of the sort that seems to usually afflict women, this demand for outrageous self-confidence becomes just another bar that women feel like they can’t meet. A whole affirmational culture that ostensibly exists to help and affirm and praise women ends up being just one more on the long list of expectations that our society heaps on them: hard-charging and career-oriented but always putting family first, well put-together but always effortless, sexy but not slutty, Madonna and whore, you know the whole deal. I’m sorry that this stuff is so gendered, but it is, and I’m sorry that I’m the wrong messenger on this topic, but no one else is making these arguments, so I must. Yes, I concede that for most people who indulge in this stuff, it’s a harmless hobby that maybe pushes them to be a little better to themselves. But as time goes on, the messaging has grown more and more deranged, and young people are very susceptible to this sort of thing. And my job is to worry.

At the top, there, is a largely-meaningless image that takes these thoughts to the next level. Most people will tell you it’s not worth thinking about, but I can’t stop thinking about it. For the record I don’t blame the people who enjoy or even make those memes for this next part; it’s just a particularly dark extension of it all.

Dark because, hobnobbing there with Indian Prime Minister and arch Hindu-nationalist Narendra Modi is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, herself a populist, nationalist, and virulently anti-immigrant leader who rode to prominence on a platform of returning Italy to a state of national purity. The term “fascist” is criminally overused these days, but the Brothers of Italy, the party Meloni helped found and currently leads, has legitimate, no-bullshit fascist associations. Meloni has attracted many admirers among American conservatives for her constant, reflexive references to tradition, to Italy as an ethnic concept, to “God, homeland, and family.” These particular abstractions are of course employed in service to keeping more brown people (browner than Sicilians, even) from entering Italy. I think most people would acknowledge that to a remarkable degree, today European politics are immigration politics, and the right-wing, anti-immigrant side that Meloni represents appears to have all the momentum. I can already hear the keyboards chattering to tell me that actually nationalism is good and immigration is bad etc etc. But I am a leftist, I think immigration makes us strong, and I think the nativist turn in Europe and elsewhere is really bad.

And then there’s the phone case.

Apparently the one Meloni has is not identical to but from the same series as the one seen at the left. A cutesy phone case that contains “affirmations for anxiety” is not at all in and of itself objectionable. But it certainly is marked, culturally, in 2023. An obsessive focus on certain kinds of behavioral or psychiatric disorders is very de rigueur among the college educated and online; the notion that anxiety is confronted with affirmation, with the repetition of self-soothing mantras to help the person saying them assert control, is also marked, culturally. Neither is particularly bad, in my opinion, although you know I am antagonistic to that culture. The issue today is that it is a culture, and if you were forced to choose, you’d say it’s a liberal one. It’s liberals who have tended to participate in the cultural fixation on mental illnesses as essential personality traits and liberals who talk about affirmation and self-care and regard the world in almost exclusively therapeutic terms. These are not conservative habits; indeed, conservatives spend a lot of time making fun of them, sometimes with legitimate points, but usually only with empty derision.

Well, here we have an arch-conservative woman who appears perfectly capable of holding down both the therapeutic maximalist worldview and the fearmongering, xenophobia-stoking worldview at the same time. Maybe it’s just a phone case she randomly picked up; maybe it means nothing. And yet I find it a deft little symbol of a plausible future that I’m seeing more and more hints of: rather than conservatives continuing to fight culture wars they can’t seem to win, regardless of political victories, some conservatives will simply embrace a lot of the cultural artifacts and identity bric a brac the conservative movement writ large has long derided. And since the liberal turn towards a politics predicated on fashion and virality leaves the actual politics unmoored from the cultural ephemera, there will be little to stop this appropriation. The marriage of premodern attachment to hierarchies of ethnicity and tribe with 21st-century boss-bitch-but-also-performatively-vulnerable culture might appear absurd to most of the people who practice the latter. But since so much of left communication and outreach has been dependent on making left politics cool and defined through shared social bonds rather than political theory, there’s not much that can be done to stop people from picking and choosing different kinds of virtue signaling. “Woke, but conservative” is not an impossible future.

Turns out that when you spent a decade (to pick an example) teaching people that being a socialist means constantly sharing Simpsons and Sopranos references, using those touchstones to define in-group status rather than actual tangible political beliefs, you’re contributing to politics as a hazy gumbo of deracinated social signifiers, filled with people with no particular moral vision at all and no qualms about heading off to another party if the one they’re at seems like a drag. (And American socialism, in 2023, is definitely a drag.)

There is no doubt outrageous hypocrisy out there right now. We’ve seen, in recent times, that after a decade and a half of mocking people as “snowflakes” when they ask for certain social accommodations, conservatives are very happy to turn around and treat people with exactly those kid gloves when the culture war positioning is right. We’ve seen the notion of safe spaces go from a reflexive laugh line among a broad swath of our political culture to being talked about in hallowed terms, when the right sort of person is asking for one. It turns out that the snarling culture warriors who are so disdainful of coddling and participation trophy culture are not attached to those stances if the price is right. As you know, I am someone who has an attachment to civil liberties as a left-wing virtue and who has long questioned whether treating people from marginalized groups as if they’re made of glass is what’s best for them in the long run. I would like to think that this is animated by actual principle and consistent notions of how the world does and should work. But what we call American conservatism is a great adaptor. Until recently, I would have said that evangelical Christianity was its philosophical lodestone, but as important as those people are for votes and dollars, Christianity barely impacts conservative debate in 2023. It’s also tempting to nominate free-market economics as the bedrock, but Donald Trump has proven amenable to policies that are remarkably far from laissez faire. The real non-negotiable demands are “cut my taxes” and “crush my enemies.” For a long time you would have assumed that, say, someone who talked about their trauma and their star sign would have been one of those enemies. I’m suggesting here, with no evidence but considerable confidence, that this is not or will someday no longer be the case. I’m suggesting that these cultural-political signals are far more malleable.

The headline here is “Conservative UT-Austin Students Say They Often Feel Marginalized by Peers.” There are many, many pieces like it. What the Ben Shapiros of the world refuse to acknowledge is that this complaint is not in any meaningful way whatsoever any different from the way snowflake libs complain - begging authority to make the world less scary and more sweet for them. It’s always been like this and it can be no other way.

Here in the 2020s, whatever line between the political self and the cultural self has evaporated. There’s been talk for years about the demise of the cross-partisan friendship, the end of friendly political antagonism. The rise of social media didn’t just leave us constantly rubbing our brains against everybody else’s, they made the site of political communication the site of complaining about NFL officiating and moaning about a bad plot turn on a beloved TV show etc. As I’ve said specifically regarding media in the past, this has certain obvious bad consequences, principal among them that they hasten political sorting along the lines of artistic tastes and lingo and self-performance, which confuses the actual policy debates beneath and leaves us with no vocabulary to argue with our counterparts. This likely sounds like an argument against what I’m talking about today, the ability of people from profoundly different political backgrounds to appropriate iconography and philosophy and vocabulary and symbolism from cultures that would typically be thought of as antagonistic to those politics. But my point is that treating politics as a big online popularity contest was always a mistake in the first place, that the use of lifestyle branding as an advertisement for left-liberal politics was effective but costly, and I have little doubt that we will see, in the near future, an American politics of therapeutic nationalism, one which keeps the Instagram memes and the affirmation and the self-care and the therapeutic narcissism and the jokes about Zoloft, but grafts on border security, disdain for the poor, and submission to the god of finance.

A phone case is only a phone case, of course. But a Simpsons gif was always only a Simpsons gif. The adherents that were gained in the past decade or so, by any side, were gained with cheap appeals to fitting in, which were never a solid basis for politics. And so what will follow will be a certain spectacular kind of chaos, an ugly wedding of all of the bad things you can imagine, the trivial and the deadly.