HIGH ENERGY: Political Feeling on /r/The_Donald

[A Gulf of Feeling]

A while back a woman named Kellyanne Conway took to the airwaves to explain why the man she works for, President Donald J. Trump, began his administration with an easily verifiable lie about the size of his inaugural peni-I mean crowd. Her interviewer, Chuck Todd, asked why the president would choose to initiate his official relationship to the public and the press with such an apparently petty moment of self-aggrandizement. What followed was a defining moment of national incredulity when Kellyanne suggested that the press had one set of facts and spokesperson Sean Spicer gave the world some of his own “alternative” ones.

Except not everyone was incredulous. As has been the story for much of last year’s election and the first month of Trump’s presidency, there is an enormous gap in feeling between Trump’s supporters and his detractors on the things he says. I say “feeling” because the distance between the pro- and anti-Trump camps is primarily a sentimental one. Kellyanne’s alternative facts are divisive not because they are in and of themselves outrageous, but because they have failed to inspire a universally incredulous response from the electorate. One common criticism of the left as it exists in the United States is that it lacks imagination for the future – since the sixties it has had a hard time seeing political possibility outside the confines of global capital and centrist organizing. Trump’s win has highlighted a different failure of the left’s imagination, however: a failure to imagine how someone – anyone – could be ok with the Donald as president.

To be clear, there have been many, many attempts to explain the Donald’s continuing and often mystifying support. You’ve likely encountered some of these explanations: the growing legitimacy of white supremacy as public discourse, the rising tide of authoritarian fascism, electoral meddling by foreign powers, the backlash of a disenfranchised white working class against a global economy that has passed them over, the failure of feminism as an intersectional project, etc. etc. There is good reason to spend time considering each of these lines of argumentation, and it seems likely that to a certain extent, they each help us understand why Mr. Trump won the election. Where they do not help us, however, is in understanding what sustains the intense support the Donald still enjoys from a certain subset of his online constituents despite what has been by virtually all accounts a disastrous first month in office. President Trump rides on communities of support whose defining attributes are not a shared set of ideological tenets but a carefully cultivated mélange of highly motivating feelings expressed through a sophisticated, fluid, and often arcane vocabulary.

What follows then is an attempt to use one of the more prominent gathering places for Trump supporters online – reddit.com/r/the_donald – to think about that seemingly unbridgable affective gap between “us,” the incredulous ones, and “them,” the hardcore “centipedes”[1] that have for nearly a year given rabid Trumpish fandom pride of place on one of the Internet’s most frequently visited destinations. A couple quick caveats. First, I do not believe that the folks on /r/the_donald represent the majority of Trump voters, and I am uninterested in trying to forge that connection. Trump’s popularity has always been driven by a hardcore minority and a relatively passive bunch of hangers-on who either out of Clinton-phobia or belief in the dogmas of “business sense” went along for the ride. Minority or majority, either way, their high visibility, high impact discursive tactics have always been the driving source of Trump’s reactionary brand of populism, and therefore warrant our attention. Second, this piece is in no way an attempt to build a bridge across that gap of sentiment. There are more than enough white liberal dudes already calling for the abandonment of “identity politics” in order to recapture the centrist voter, as though we must accept institutional racism and misogyny as the cost of doing business in democratic governance. Instead, by exploring and accounting for the affective economies of Trumpish Internet communities, I hope to help us understand the limits of reasoned debate in our political climate, the emptying of language in the era of the Donald, and the seductive appeal of belonging to hype.

[NSFC: Not Safe For Cucks]

CUCKOLD

NOUN: the husband of an adulteress, often regarded as an object of derision

VERB: (of a man) make (another man) a cuckold by having a sexual relationship with his wife. (of a man’s wife) make (her husband) a cuckold.

Of the unlikely linguistic phenomena surrounding Trump’s ascendency, the resurrection of cuckold, or “cuck,” out of the Chaucerian haze to prominence might seem the most baffling. And yet on /r/the_donald, cuck has become a crucial tool for managing the affective relation between themselves and the rest of the world. To talk about cucks in the Donald’s world is to apply the shame of being un-manned to those who have not yet realized the glorious truth of God Emperor Trump[2]. To be a cuck is to be a dupe; it is to be made a bitch of by those you trust. Cuck is the opposite of woke or red-pilled. If you are a cuck you cannot be trusted in even the most basic cognitive or social tasks and you are probably a degenerate yourself – why else after all would you fail to secure your own wife? Must be because your dick doesn’t work, or worse, because you are a faggot.

Cuck collapses a rather run-of-the-mill political accusation, that your opponents are easily manipulated and blind, into a broader ecosystem of hypermasculine sexual prowess. Nowhere is this clearer than in the tagging system for posts on /r/the_donald. Reddit uses tagging to inform users about the content of a link before they click it, and moderators of individual subreddits are empowered to create their own sets of tags that cater to the specific needs of that community. One of the more popular tags on /r/the_donald is NSFCucks: Not Safe For Cucks. This, of course, plays on the widely used acronym NSFW (Not Safe For Work) which generally denotes pornographic material that your workplace might find objectionable. Like pornography, which purports to tell a naked truth, NSFCucks material offends by violating the norms that guide a cuck’s belief system. Material tagged NSFCucks is material the community deems to be “triggering,” like this post where a member of the community brags about firing seven employees who participated in this week’s #DayWithoutImmigrants protests. [Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5uk6md/i_fired_7_employees_across_3_different_states/] This is the second marker of the cuck: misguided empathy. Community member TrumpIsAHero asserts his non-cuck status by brushing off the tears of his newly fired employees with one word: “SAD!”

The many flexible applications of “cuck” have the added effect of securing a tight loop of mutual re-affirmation. To frame gullibility as emasculating shame is to ensure that a community never allows itself to be put in a position of admitting wrong. The intellectual superiority of /r/the_donald is secured not by strength of argumentation or even repetition of dogma, but by an emotional ecosystem built around expelling, deriding, and exposing the cuck in all his embarrassing nakedness. This is why trolling has been an essential tool of the online Trumper – it ensures at all costs that the cuck stays outside of their midst while soliciting moral and intellectual indignation that confirms the in-group beliefs about how cucks behave. You can see this commitment to trolling the cucks as a foundational community ethos as easily as organizing /r/the_donald by all-time upvoted posts, all of which were therefore visible on /r/all, the website’s public facing front page. The vast majority are simply pictures of Donald Trump’s face with headlines like “CAN’T STUMP YOUR PRESIDENT TRUMP” or “Hey admins, we found a picture of your wife’s boyfriend’s president!”

Finally, this discursive economy causes /r/the_donald to have some strange and surprising infatuations in apparently unrelated arenas. For instance, the recent disputes between popular YouTuber PewDiePie, Google, and Disney has made quite a stir on /r/the_donald. [Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5u6nro/pewdiepies_channel_just_pretty_much_red_pilled/] After PewDiePie’s recent “Death To All Jews” stunt for his Youtube channel, Google and Disney cut official ties with the entertainer, a move that folks at /r/the_donald believe exposes their own cuckishness to millennials who now will see social justice issues for what they are: shallow, meaningless political correctness enforced by oversensitive SJWs that can’t take a joke.

[WINNING]

It isn’t all negative affect and insults in Trumpland, however. In fact, much of /r/the_donald can only be described as HIGH ENERGY, yet another of the subreddit’s many content tags. And as effective as cuckoldry is at conjuring the feels of a strong community, it is this notion of high energy that goes the farthest in explaining why you might feel a little mad like I now do after spending some time visiting these communities online.

HIGH ENERGY describes the momentum of the movement. It speaks to a kind of manifest destiny that underwrites communities like /r/the_donald who see their rise to power as a sort of karmic reckoning for the accumulation of wrongs perpetrated by SJWs, the liberal media, and the corrupt Democratic establishment. HIGH ENERGY always smacks of inevitability. It can also be a sort of community resource to be shared among like minded movements, as in “Brexit, take my HIGH ENERGY,” and in this way HIGH ENERGY signifies the broader linkage of authoritarian, xenophobic movements across the globe. Your post might be HIGH ENERGY if it gets to the top of Reddit by gaming their algorithm. Your post might also be HIGH ENERGY if it screenshots a particularly zesty tweet from the new Commander-in-Chief.

HIGH ENERGY posting asserts victory before it happens, and in the assertion, brings victory into the present. It’s not so much an act of faith as of radical prophecy. Trust in the Donald because he has already won. You can see that he has already won (and will continue to win) by how much the community asserts that winning in the now. You can see already the way this inverts the cuck, whose emasculation at the hand of feminists and identitarians have left him with low energy, while loyalty to Trump promises a pathway to recaptured virility. This is what is meant by Make America Great Again. As long as America is low energy, as long as it has been cucked into submission by things apology tours and Black Lives Matter, it will languish, impotent and frail. HIGH ENERGY is the prescription. It is winning by fiat, and it is why Bill Maher’s brand of platform-providing liberal discourse can never counter a movement like the Donald’s. It is why we did not in fact share a moment of national incredulity at Kellyanne Conway’s interview. It is why for many in the center and on the left this entire election has felt so jarring, like they don’t recognize the world they live in anymore. Where we might want to think of policy and governance as a question of facts, argumentation, clash, and money, places like /r/the_donald wash all of that away with a seemingly unassailable network of feeling.

To belong on /r/the_donald you don’t need to hold any particular policy position at all. Holding policy positions is simply a strategic error to the online Trumper because it exposes you to a world of argumentation and a mode of knowledge production that works for the cucks. Much better to model your communities on Donald’s own style of debate, which is to say, not a style of debate at all, but a relentless assertion of supremacy. There was no shared moment of national incredulity because there has been a sea change in what politics consists of. There is a gulf of sentiment because one group, the incredulous ones, believes they derive feeling from reason, and the other asserts, prima facie, the feeling as ground zero. If there is to be a sustained resistance, and if it is to be at all effective instead of ending in yet another splintering of the leftists, liberals, and centrists of our country, we have to begin with some assertions of our own.

[1] A self-assigned designation for Trump supporters online. Derives from episode 4 of the Can’t Stump the Trump Youtube series.

[2] One of many favored designations for President Trump on /r/the_donald

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Jordan Wood is a Ph.D candidate at Syracuse University where he writes about video games and other things.

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