Murder War Violence Submission
The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Other Anxious Men
Who is Steve Schmidt and Why Should You Care?
On December 10, 2020, Lawrence O’Donnell, host of the MSNBC’s Last Word, interviewed Steve Schmidt, former Republican Operative and Campaign Manager for John McCain and Sarah Palin, and founder of the Lincoln Project. According to some it was Steve Schmidt who insisted that McCain select Sarah Palin as a running mate. Before you read further, you must listen to his impassioned plea.
Lawrence O’Donnell Interview, Steve Schmidt, December 2020
Now that you’ve listened to his warning about the Trump brotherhood we want you to listen to this Ted Talk by Juliet Mitchell. The remainder of this post and future ones will not seem reasonable without listening first to both Schmidt and Mitchell. How does a brotherhood of violence form? Why not a sisterhood?
Why Steve Schmidt? Why Juliet Mitchell? For 4 years we have tuned into MSNBC and CNN (not because we expected deep understanding) in the hope we might hear something about the social movement (i.e., Tea Party, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Barry Goldwater, John Birch Society, The Family, Ronald Reagan) leading to our current moment. As we listened to Schmidt’s lament and rage we couldn’t help but wonder: how was it that he stood behind Sarah Palin, even insisting on her as a running mate for McCain. And Bill Kristol, Editor of the Neoconservative Weekly Standard and former Fox News Commentator, joined others in supporting Palin. Now Kristol and Schmidt appear regularly on MSNBC and CNN. This shift seemed in some ways remarkable to us and in other ways expected. Yet how does all of this go mostly unnoticed and how do Schmidt and Kristol find it so easy to join these ranks? We don’t have the answers. But we’d like to propose that Juliet Mitchell offers us one way of thinking about the underlying psychic formations. Before we insist on your reading further about her work, however, we want to make a few observations.
In order to understand the rise of the right in the U.S. (also around the world) we need to understand that the center has shifted so far to the right that former Neocons and Paleocons now appear acceptable, even reasonable to us. That explains their frequent appearance on liberal talk shows and shout TV and their drift into the mainstream of politics. And when liberals and conservatives express concern about the Left, we cry and laugh: there is no left, there is no there there. And we should not be surprised to hear the neoliberal Joe Biden calling for the so-called left to step aside and let him take control (see new book by Marcetic, Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden). To further understand these twists and turns in U.S. politics we turn to the work of Donald Warren, author of a very important book and analysis of what he called the Radical Center (also the title of his book). Warren analyzed the social movement dynamics that produced George Wallace and the widespread support for him among U.S. industrial workers. The absence of a genuine left partly explains the steady movement of the center to the right (for a more recent and significant study of the far right, see Lenny Zeskind’s work, Blood and Politics). This rightward drift produced Donald Trump, no doubt, but Trump is merely a symptom of a deeper crisis: the failure of decades of neoliberalism (listen to interview and read Davies’s recent book, see below) and the mounting and extreme economic inequality worldwide.
Now this brings us to back to Steve Schmidt, the Proud Boys (and like-minded) and Juliet Mitchell. You’ve listened to her argument (see above) and we will only add the following. We cannot possibly understand the social movement that brought us Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and the Proud Boys without understanding the underlying psychic structures and anxieties that boys have about murder and violence. The rhetoric is about a rivalry between good and evil, winner-take-all, and as Mitchell argues, it is a reaction to the loss related to the new sibling replacing “me” (The Law of the Mother). One can’t help but wonder about The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and many others who have called for violence, they have formed a brotherhood, they are armed, and they are prepared to take back the nation. In order to understand our current political crisis, a psychoanalytic perspective is required; it is not all that we need, but psychoanalytic theory must be part of the explanation—without it, we get top-down (social) explanations only.
Others, many others (sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists), have written about the rise of the right but few have helped us understand the depth of male anxiety (Juliet Mitchell is an exception) that fuels the psychic energy mobilizing social movements. This weekend (December 12, 2020) the former General Mike Flynn, convicted and pardoned felon, spoke at a pro Trump rally in D.C. Hear his words and think again about the brotherhood Mitchell describes. You might consider listening to the Davies podcast or even better, read his book (see below) and then think again about the words Flynn uses to describe the brotherhood. Also take some time to listen to the White Nationalist, Nick Fuentes; he makes a call for abandoning the GOP. Read the reporting on Fuentes by the IREHR.
Some Related Recommended Listening and Reading
Some nation states have formed in places where unification was nearly impossible. This is often due to ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences. At these times and in these places force has often been used to unify. In Africa, for example, the formation of nation states was nearly impossible and force was repeatedly used. William Davies, in his recent book, Nervous States (above you’ll a podcast interview with Davies about this argument), argued that neoliberalism (below you’ll find a podcast by David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism) cannot offer citizens identificatory (means of identification) possibilities. In short, for Davies, the neoliberal state cannot create the conditions necessary for strong identifications. This might explain why Hillary Clinton failed and even if they succeed, Biden and Harris will not produce a sense of belonging sufficient to create the common good or purpose necessary to address climate change or the pandemic.
References
Barney, D. D., & Dalton, L. E. (2006). Social Work Under Nazism: An Analysis of the ‘Profession-in-the-Environment’. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 17(2), 43-62.
Brown, W. (2006). American nightmare: Neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and de-democratization. Political theory, 34(6), 690-714.
Burghart, D., & Zeskind, L. (2010). Tea Party nationalism: A critical examination of the Tea Party movement and the size, scope, and focus of its national factions (pp. 57-67). Kansas City, MO: Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights.
Blee, K. M., & Creasap, K. A. (2010). Conservative and right-wing movements. Annual review of sociology, 36, 269-286.
Levitas, D. (2004). The terrorist next door: The militia movement and the radical right. Macmillan.
Marcetic, B. (2020). Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. London: Verso Press.
Margolis, M. F. (2018). From politics to the pews: How partisanship and the political environment shape religious identity. University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, J. (2013). The law of the mother: Sibling trauma and the brotherhood of war. Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 21(1).
Mitchell, J. (2013). Siblings: Sex and violence. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Mudde, C. (Ed.). (2016). The populist radical right: A reader. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Neiwert, D. Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump.
Stein, G. J. (1988). Biological science and the roots of Nazism. American Scientist, 76(1), 50-58.
Zeskind, L. (2009). Blood and politics: The history of the white nationalist movement from the margins to the mainstream. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Zeskind, L. (2012). A nation dispossessed: The Tea Party movement and race. Critical Sociology, 38(4), 495-509.
Andrew Sayer
Neoliberalism
If you don’t have time to check out our recommended reading list on neoliberalism, take a few minutes, only 19, to listen to David Harvey’s introduction.