Taking power, taking revenge: the asshole society strikes back
Source: ideogram.ai; prompt: a bunch of trumpists with maga-hats destroying a pride flag.
08.02.2025
Dear friends,
It’s Wednesday, February 5th, I’m standing at a tram stop in dark, rainy Düsseldorf, putting on my glasses and preparing my daily dive into the cesspool of assholery that both “highbrow” and social media have become. My opening question, as it has been every day since J20, when a fascist project took power in what is still the most powerful country in the world, is this: what have the triumphant Trumpists managed to dismantle now? Which “normality” of the past few decades has fallen victim to their vengeful fury this time? The next question is: how far along are these same processes here in Europe, in Germany? To what extent is the increasingly trumpified German conservative Party pushing similar strategies, similar discourses? How far have they already gone in cooperating with the revolutionary fascists of the AfD? The question is: where will the hammer of the right-wing counter-revolution fall today?
Everything is on the table
To be honest, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the crap I have to absorb from the news every day. From Trump’s hate-filled blitz of executive orders, aimed at rolling back everything that annoys the arseholes (trans people in the military, wind turbines, the WHO, “foreign aid,” etc.), to Sahra Wagenknecht's proposal to let the German Volksgemeinschaft decide on minority rights (human rights are just so much woke nonsense, after all), chancelor Scholz’s smug national egoism (“More for you, better for Germany” is one of his election slogans), Habeck’s frothy-mouthed call for an “enforcement offensive” against undocumented migrants, to Merz’s shameless ass-forward crawl towards the AfD—much of this no longer feels like rational action. It feels more like a politics driven entirely by raw emotion.
It feels as though the right wants to take revenge on everything and everyone that has made them feel bad over the last 80 to 180 years. If it annoys the right, it has to go, regardless of whether the investment political capital into the operation makes any rational sense. Then again, we've known for a while that right wing politics aren't driven by quantifiable political rationality. In the current situation, it’s first and foremost revenge-driven. Revenge against everything that has contributed to the feelings of right-wing shame and guilt that have been so diligently repressed over the past decades, and are now fuelling the right-wing offensive. And that’s exactly what I want to explore today: the question of “revenge” as a driving force in right-wing politics (this story could also be told from the left – cf. Luigi Mangione – but that’s for another time).
Do the arseholes really feel ashamed?
Before I delve deeper into right-wing revenge and what it means for us, I need to address a question I’ve been asked repeatedly since the publication of my book and the almost simultaneous dramatic escalation of right-wing shamelessness and subsequent open assholisation: “But Tadzio, why do you keep talking about shame? The right-wing arseholes actually aren’t ashamed at all; they’re just openly being their awful selves.” But I’m convinced: yes, they really are ashamed, because they fail every day at the most basic of expectations. They fail at being human (in the sense of the phrase “he was a real mensch”: “As borrowed from Yiddish, a mensch or mentsh is 'a person of integrity and honour'”, which is what everyone wants to be). And I’m convinced they know this, or at least sense it, because only the fact that they feel the shame and guilt I’m talking about explains the cringeworthy, petulant and childish reactions of the right to anything that restricts their absolute and limitless freedom of action, to anything that makes it impossible, or tries to make it impossible, for them to behave like toddlers with uncontrolled temper tantrums.
I think this argument is already pretty solid—because without it, we simply have no explanation for the structurally childish petulance of adult right-wing men—but if it’s not enough for you, I have a stronger one. One that doesn’t rely on proxies like “men's temper tantrums” but directly explains the emergence of shame in male-socialised subjects, showing why ALL men, actually all people I know, regardless of the values they believe in, feel ashamed every day, feel guilty every day, and therefore unconsciously wait every day for absolution from the GodFatherState. This explanation begins, as it often does with me when it comes to shame and guilt, with stories from the world of gay men (more precisely: MSM, men who have sex with men). And with a twist: our homosexuality (in the sense of patriarchal heteronormativity) is not our failure—it’s our fathers’. And they’re not ashamed of our being gay, but of their failure at one of the two tasks that still fall to the male in raising children in the post-Fordist patriarchy: teaching them “what it means to be a man.”
We are their (your) shame
To explain this, I need to share some stories from the collective experience of how queer men often experience “family” —in this case, not my own (at least not consciously), but a kind of aggregated experience that all too many MSM have, and which was summarised by US psychologist Alan Downs in his brilliant book The Velvet Rage. For MSM, and especially for those who struggle with themselves and their families (so, basically, almost all of us), it’s a must-read.
But to the point: in and throughout decades of therapeutic practice, Downs kept hearing similar stories about the fundamentally disturbed father-son relationships of gay men (forgive me if I translate “MSM” as “gay”—it’s formally totally inaccurate, but the term “gay” is important to me in terms of my own identity construction, while “MSM” is a purely sociological category), began to examine these stories for a generalisable basic structure: is there an experience that (almost) all gay men share, which, if it doesn't pre-determine, then at least powerfully shaped our experiences with family and society? And indeed, building on a psychoanalytic framework, he found exactly such generalisable elements of the gay experience, which, as you’ll see, also apply to the experience of non-gay family members, especially the father—which is where we’re going to get back to the rest of y'all.
Downs focused on the father-son-relationship, which psychoanalysis takes to be the central relationship for those socialised into masculinity, and which, for many gay men, is a deeply disturbed one. To summarise: as briefly mentioned above, in today’s patriarchy, the father is assigned only one responsibility in the family besides earning money, namely, teaching male children “what it means to be a man”. And because “wanting to suck dick” and “yearning for romantic relationships with men” doesn’t fit well into traditional notions of masculinity, the gay son, as soon as the father perceives his non-straightness (this often happens unconsciously, long before the sons themselves understand it), becomes the father's constant confrontation with his own failure. All of this makes it very unlikely that a stable, nurturing father-son-relationship can emerge from this, as the father basically cannot, does not want to look at his son; what he actually wants to do is look away.
Every desperately loving and lovelorn glance from the emotionally abandoned, lonely son reminds the father that he can’t do what he should do as a human being, as a father: love his son, be proud of him, support him in being what he wants to be. Instead, he feels disgust, which is not primarily directed at the son, but at himself, because HE, the father, has failed—because the son (at that point) is still innocent, so the guilt MUST lie elsewhere. And what’s more obvious than blaming oneself and then wanting to repress this feeling of guilt and shame (“Oh God, what did I do wrong? Did I not beat him enough, not make him drink enough freshly killed stag’s blood?”)?
The son's gaze thus leads directly to self-hatred, which is why this gaze must be avoided (hence the well-known cliché of gay men having unusually strong relationship to their mothers: many mothers compensate, often unconsciously, for the love-withdrawal of the failed and ashamed father with a stronger turn towards the now emotionally abandoned son). The stories of angry fathers who reject their queer sons, throw them out onto the street or beat them up are stories of repressed self-hatred and of petulant, angry revenge on the one who reminds them of what they, as fathers, as men, as the patently ridiculous “pinnacle of evolution”, as alpha lions of the social jungle, have messed up: they failed to be men. A total catastrophe. Doesn't even bear thinking about. But how, when the gay son is constantly skipping around the flat, and with every movement that is NOT perfectly manly, reminds the fathers that they, too, are not perfect men, because what kind of perfect man would have a son whose idea of masculinity includes sexually satisfying other men? No no no, that’s not how it should be, that musn't be.
What the arseholes fail at, what they’re ashamed of
Why am I telling you all this? Because whenever I talk about the shame and guilt I attribute to the arseholes (hence the force of their “coming out (Opens in a new window),” which can’t be explained without reference to prior shame), I’m asked if I really think the arseholes feel ashamed, since they seem so shameless. But that’s exactly the point: the petulance and childishness of the arseholes when confronted with limits on their behaviour shows that deep down they know: “Shit, what we’re doing is actually a disgrace, so I’m going to shout even LOUDER that I can do whatever THA FUCK I want, oleeee, oleeee, oleeee oleeee!”
And why is it a disgrace? Not because the arseholes have failed at the humanistic demands and values of a supposedly enlightened society which they never shared, but because they’ve failed at their own atavistic values (Grunt: man teach son to be man, GRUNT! Man provide for and protect woman and family, man secure future, GRUNT!). For example: within the framework of European-capitalist modernity, it was the job of white men to subdue the earth, and apart from a few brutal potentates with serious mental health problems, most people in positions of power knew that it’s not good for the long-term stability of one’s own rule to destroy the livelihoods of the ruled to the point where they can no longer live under that rule, in that place. So the arseholes haven’t just failed at the progressive values of a society that forces them to accept queers and trans people as reality; they’ve also failed at their own demands of what it means to be human, what it means to be a man. Because “setting your own house on fire and then standing next to it while laughing maniacally” isn’t exactly the human or male ideal of the right either (there’s more “leadership” and “responsibility for those who naturally stand beneath the man” there).
And then there’s the failure at the basic challenge of being human: neoliberal speech acts (“There Is No Such Thing As Society!”) or fascist prepper fantasies aside, humans are fundamentally social beings. We don’t even need to go back to Aristotle and the zoon politikon; we can just look at the reality of human life: conceived in the fusion of bodies in the sex act, relationally born, then completely dependent on others for years (both the children and, to some extent, the parents), we are thoroughly social beings. This is even correct in terms of evolution: after Darwin proved evolution and defined it as “survival of the fittest,” the “anarchist prince” Kropotkin proved in his studies of evolution that in species with higher social and cognitive development, “survival of the fittest” equalled “survival of the most cooperative.” Human cooperation is an evolutionary imperative; to be human is to interact with other humans, and I strongly suspect that, for example, “individual preppers” have to stockpile all these supplies so inefficiently because they’re afraid of their eternal and continued basic failure: the failure to be able to interact in a stable and authentic way with other humans (hence the supreme weird- and unpleasantness of all these right-wing political clowns). They're afraid of being rejected by people.
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The privileged human as a petulant brat
You probably know what’s so annoying about privileged people: that when they’re not treated as privileged, when they’re not allowed to stand above others, dictate to them, or simply take whatever they want, they feel unfairly treated. The problem about this is, of course, not the fact that they feel bad about it; the problem is that it’s precisely this feeling of “not getting something one believes one is entitled to” that drives people to enter into conflicts, to fight against those who take away what they consider naturally theirs (cf. “moral economy”). That is: any attempt, even in the slightest, to establish the fundamental equality that humanism assumes and promises will be seen by privileged actors as an unacceptable restriction of their natural freedom of action, and will be fought accordingly. To be sure, in the long “era of progressive mass movements,” this fight was quite frequently lost by the privileged.
But this feeling of entitlement can’t on its own possibly explain the fucked-up reactions of rich, powerful people to any attempt to include them in reciprocal social relations, because, as already said, these reactions always reveal a fear, a petulance at their core: I believe that this petulance arises from the fear of not being good enough for other people, of not being able to meet their demands and needs, and therefore of being rejected by other people: these rich and powerful “individual preppers” are, at their core, deeply insecure people who accumulate their power and wealth, among other things, because they must assume (from painful experience) that other people will reject them, and that they will therefore actually be alone. The mere presence of other people with demands, with needs, with troubles and desires is something that communicates to the right-wing assholes their own failure at the basic attempt to be human.
The revenge of the arseholes
And that’s exactly where the danger lies now: now the assholes are finally back in charge, now the wind of history is blowing in their direction, after 50, after 150 years of illegitimate restrictions, and now they want revenge. Everything, really EVERYTHING, that reminds them of their human shortcomings must be removed.
Why is the Trump administration dismantling every bit of “foreign aid,” calling the people who work in the USAID “evil” and “radical lunatics”? Not because it would save so much money, or because USAID bureaucrats have so much power, but because the basic principle of “foreign aid” is the assumption that one owes something to someone else, and because one subconsciously knows that this is the case, one must destroy that which makes this claim and what reminds one of what one wants to repress. (I could go through every move of the Trump II administration in the same way—revenge on the Justice Department, revenge on the Environmental Protection Agency, revenge on the FBI... Of course, there are always very concrete interests at play, but they don’t explain the petulance and assholery with which these moves are being pushed through and celebrated by the base—but I can’t be bothered, there’s just too many of them.)
A cultural example, the Netflix series Yellowstone, with Kevin Costner (the American man’s man since Clint Eastwood became just another old weirdo): it’s a TV series entirely based on the assumption that no one is ever nice or good to anyone, unless out of the narrowest self-interest, not even to their own family. Why is the show written like this? It’s deliberately aimed at Trumpland, and shows a world where EVERYONE is an asshole, so that the Trumpist assholes don’t have to feel ashamed of their assholery, their human incompetence.
The German debate on migration also makes it clear: it’s not about real threats, it’s about getting rid of migrants, not even letting them in, pushing them away. I wrote about this three years ago, saying that migrants are our bad conscience, they are the repressed guilt of the externalisation society (Opens in a new window). And for those who still ask if the assholes really feel ashamed: of course, because even among nationalist arseholes, most people wouldn’t openly say “of course we should take everything away from others and build our own lives with it.” Even they would (mostly) say that MAN should build his own prosperity without taking from others. Not even assholes are proud of being brutal thieves.
What am I getting at? That the whole world is a source of shame and guilt for the assholes, because everything in it reminds them of how they have behaved towards this world and the people in it. That’s why the right-wing counter-revolution is currently taking the form of a scorched-earth (literally) revenge campaign—not because those they’re taking revenge on have taken so much from them, but because they remind them of what they, the assholes, have taken from others, because everything reminds them that they couldn’t even fulfil the very first task, the first demand placed on them, also and especially by themselves: to be a mensch together with other such Menschen. That’s why the assholes want to destroy every society, grind down every bit of community, because they want to create a world where everyone is forced to behave like an asshole, so that the rest of us don’t constantly remind them of their own shittiness, their own failure. But because our sociality is a fundamental part of being human, assholes will always be shamed by other humans, and will always want to take revenge on other humans.
To avoid facing their shame, they will therefore burn the earth, and many of us with it. There’s no compromise with this: it must be fought by everyone who still wants to be a mensch.
With humanist regards,
Tadzio
