On the Politics of Pain

So it's gonna be four years of this shit, isn’t it?

My apologies for the hiatus, friends. Life comes at you fast and a brand new baby in the house pees at you faster. A lot has happened since we last had a chat, not the least of which has been Trump’s official return to the White House. A return marked by a flurry of executive actions purported to be the first step in returning the country to sanity. Most of these were undoing most of his predecessor's executive actions, but few of his new orders made headlines.

There was the withdrawal from the WHO, a move he attempted in his first term but didn’t last long enough to see through. There was his dubious attempt to end birthright citizenship by presidential decree and his more concrete directive to end the asylum program effectively. There was his long telegraphed pardon of the J6 rioters, something I unironically believe Biden should have done on his way out of the door out of spite. And of course, there was the official White House decree that there are officially only two sexes, male and female, established by possessing either large or small reproductive cells at conception.

It is worth it to dig into that last decree in particular because it helps to explain something about the entire MAGA movement and what it actually means to the people who support it. The authors of the order that Trump signed were particular in making sure that it referred to sex rather than gender. As The Hill reports:

The executive order, which pledges to defend women from “gender ideology” and restore “biological truth to the federal government,” defines male and female not by physical or chromosomal differences but by reproductive function, which an administration official said was done intentionally.

“Chromosomes are characteristic of your sex, but the binary nature of sex, the reason you and I are all here, is deeper than that. It is the large reproductive cell, the small reproductive cell, working together in a binary function in order to perpetuate the species,” the official said.

Now none of this careful and considered wording kept Trump from saying “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female”, when he signed the order.

So what gives? If the people behind the order were so intentional in eliminating gender as a category and solely defining people by biological sex, why did Trump mention gender? Furthermore, did anyone consider that defining sex as being determined by reproductive facilities at conception would functionally mean that everyone in America is now a woman, given that sexual differences are not expressed at conception and all fertilized eggs are essentially female? What about intersex people or people who can never reproduce? Does any of this matter?

Well, it certainly matters if you are a trans person who now may not be able to leave the country with a passport that contains their now politically incorrect gender (or sex?), but it also matters on a larger scale for everyone. Because now we get to talk about the F word.

If you aren’t following the ins and outs of the transphobic gender critical movement, you’d probably just brush off the incongruity of Trump’s statement and the order he signed while saying it as his typical inability to know what the fuck he is talking about. And he certainly doesn’t know what he’s talking about but that’s kind of the point. The text of the order is influenced by the kind of pseudo-scientific transphobia made popular by people like J.K. Rowling and others who like to refer to women as possessors of the large gametes. This is a product of gender-critical feminism, a pessimistic version of feminism that sees patriarchy as an intractable condition of modern society. Men will always seek to subjugate women and that fact of life isn’t just a social construct but a genetic reality.

The thing is, gender-critical feminists are still kind of feminists. They still believe in equal rights for women, they still believe that women should be protected from sexual harassment and assault. They believe in a woman's right to choose. A non-insignificant number of them are lesbians who believe in marriage rights for same-sex couples and other protections for gay men and women. But for some reason, those issues have taken a back seat to make sure that trans people are minoritized and ostracized if not outright legislated out of existence. And to that end, they’ve found common cause with an ascended far-right politics that is outright hostile to the rest of their stated political priorities. What does it mean to a person like J.K. Rowling that her number one political issue is now a crowning achievement of a cadre of men credibly accused of sexual assault?

Well, I can tell you what it means. It means power. Specifically, the power over those less powerful is a replacement for any sort of meaningful consequences or accountability for those with real power. Gender-critical feminists don’t believe that the contours of the patriarchy can ever meaningfully change, the best they can hope for is shaming “real men” into protecting women through chauvinistic protectionism and the establishment and maintenance of women's only spaces. A few powerful men were brought low by the MeToo movement, but those scant few who faced real consequences were too many for a group of people who believed their amassed fortunes and power put them above petty concerns like consent. So trans people, specifically trans women, were offered as a scapegoat for all of the impotent rage felt by women in a society that continued to look away from their suffering.

If you take a trip through God Emperor Elon’s Twitter or Zuckerberg’s AI slop warehouse formerly known as Facebook, you’ll see countless MAGA conservatives expressing borderline orgasmic pleasure at Trump coming back to power. But very few of these posts express any joy for the expectation that their lives will be any better now that Trump is back. Instead, the thing that seems to be leaving conservatives quaking with ecstasy is the expectation that all the people who they blame for America’s decline will be properly punished by their big orange daddy. Trans people will be forced to go back into the closet. Minorities who pushed for more inclusive workplaces will be forced to let Janice from accounting touch their hair again. Immigrants will be rounded up and forcibly expelled or interned in camps far away from real Americans. And most importantly liberals will cry.

Any hope that people’s lives will be made better is tied to the punishment of some group. How will Trump spur the growth of good-paying jobs? By kicking out immigrant workers. How will he bring prices down? By firing government employees and eliminating regulations. How will he unite a fractured nation? By using the power of the state to marginalize competing ideologies.

In the weeks before Trump was inaugurated again, liberals delighted over what they called the MAGA Civil War. To briefly recap: Vivek Ramaswamy, the model MAGA minority former co-head of Trump's DOGE department, made waves amongst the MAGA faithful when he asserted that the HB-1 visa program that essentially provides immigrant indentured servants to the tech sector was necessary because Americans lack sufficient grind mindset. The nativist wing of the party took exception to the idea that a brown person would support depriving Americans of jobs, and would have the gall to imply there was something deficient about American culture compared to other countries. Other minority MAGA supporters found the racialized invective they believed was reserved for Spanish speakers and Black people suddenly turned toward them, and for a brief moment considered that maybe the political movement they had glommed onto in the hope of a new economic libertarian century was actually motivated by naked racial animus.

In the end, Vivek found himself unceremoniously dropped from the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon doubled down on his cryptic endorsements of fascism and that has seemed to mollify conservatives enough to distract from the fact that Trump has no intention of modifying the HB-1 visa program and forcing tech companies to hire American coders. Because in the end, all that really mattered to the nativists was that the Brown guy who spoke out of turn got put in his place. And that was a small price to pay so that the people bankrolling Trump’s second term could keep importing cheap and exploitable overseas labor.

Fascism is never built on a coherent set of politics. The glue that holds fascist political projects together is the pain of the perceived other. That pain is properly distributed to those who deserve it is how huge incongruities in the substance of fascist political projects get papered over.

As long as people are allowed to hunt down and punish dark-skinned immigrants, it doesn't matter that Trump is promising to make America a leader in AI, a technology promoted with the explicit purpose of eliminating jobs. It doesn’t matter that his ill-thought-out tariffs will assuredly raise prices beyond the inflation generated by the pandemic. As long as people who believe in basic epidemiology are forced to watch a raspy-voice charlatan sex pest take a blowtorch to the concept of vaccination, it doesn’t matter that eliminating environmental regulations will result in far more negative health consequences en masse. As long as Black people are put in their place for making white kids think about the consequences of white supremacy it doesn’t matter that public education will be gutted and parents of special needs kids will be left at the mercy of the free market to find a school that will accommodate their children.

None of these things matter because deep down we know that the current system is never going to change them. We have to understand that Trump's most hardcore supporters didn’t vote for him because they truly believed that he would make their lives better. They know that politics doesn’t give a shit about their lives. They voted for Trump because he and his new tech overlord friends will make sure that the people they see as below them will stay that way. This is the hidden memetic message behind every “It’s time for DEI to DIE” or “We’re back to two genders, cry harder” posts. They are saying that they don’t care if they win, as long as those other people lose.

It’s important to note that this sort of nihilistic punishment fetishization isn’t confined to the domain of conservatism. Liberals indulge in this kind of thinking too. You can see in the posts by Kamala supports gleefully looking forward to Hispanic Trump voters getting deported or the destruction of Palestine as a punishment for those who abstained from voting due to the genocide.

Trump’s late game “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for You” ad may not have been a deciding factor in the election results but it was emblematic of the political divide we find ourselves in. Trump and MAGA’s primary appeal to voters is the promise that even if their life is shit, their place on the social hierarchy above others will be guaranteed by the state. If we want to understand how text generated by an ostensibly feminist movement was used in an executive order by the Pussy Grabber in Chief, this is all you need to know. The most heinous crime that trans people as a group ever committed was seeing themselves as the social equals of “normal” women. Trump doesn’t give a shit about sexual assault or women's sports, but he will make sure that normal people have someone to look down on. And that’s about all he really has to offer.

Fascism thrives when there is no positive populist alternative. For decades, Democrats rejected and stifled the populist parts of their base and the result is an electorate that views them with apathy at best. Not all people who voted for Trump did so to cause suffering to the people they hate, but even those people still chose Trump because he presented himself as a massive deviation from the current system. Even if they didn’t harbor animus toward trans people or uppity minorities, they still believed a massive change was worth the risk to those groups. If there is to be any serious challenge to Trump’s MAGA fascism in the coming years, it has to start with the idea that there is a path to substantial change that isn’t rooted in the suffering of people without power.

This politics of pain is all conservatism has at the moment. Right now it makes them powerful, but it also contains the seeds of their downfall. The politics of pain cannot sustain itself. To paraphrase a quote from Margaret Thatcher, at some point, you run out of other people's suffering. A significant amount of pain will be distributed to the designated groups and things will not materially get better, because those groups were never the authors of American dissatisfaction, it was always the same people who are currently posing for pictures with President Trump. Democrats were always afraid to make enemies of those people, they wanted it both ways. Defend the powerless while making sure the powerful sacrificed as little as possible. This strategy got us here, where now the powerful will have to sacrifice nothing as the most vulnerable among us foot the bill for American rage.

We have a chance here. It is a chance that will present itself through a torrent of hurt, but it is a chance. A new narrative of change without suffering will be hard to push through an establishment that seems to acquiesce to power, but without it, the road we find ourselves on has a well-documented precedent. So in the meantime, on the ground organizing is the most important thing. Politicians won't protect us. We are the only ones who can have our backs at this moment. Demonstrations of solidarity will do more than progressive lawmakers hurling moral platitudes. Within the politics of pain, solidarity is the best defense.

Solidarity forever.