Beware the Gleeful Leapers

Some of the cheering I have seen from Trump supporters these past two weeks reminds me of something.

Historians, when writing about fascism, talk about a desire express by some intellectuals in the first half of the past century to jump into the abyss. The idea is to experience some sort of redemptive purification. To break through to “the other side,” or to penetrate the Veil of Maya, to see the truth masked by the illusory nature of our perception. Thus fascists were exhilarated by action, which is all the more appealing the more dangerous and, frankly, crazy, the action is. Crazy, after all, denotes something outside the bounds of normal, accepted behaviors. One seeks to transgress normal.

A classic of the genre is Ernst Jünger’s WW1 In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel). Jünger described his experience of combat on the Western Front in terms of transcending reality and becoming Superhuman. He exalted in the experience. It was everything a bored young man could wish for: A life where all gives way to primal drives.

Men transformed into unbridled killers.

There is a powerful echo of that in a marvelous oral history of the Japanese side of WW2, Japan at War. Some of the authors’ interviewees talk about Pearl Harbor in similar terms. Basically, when they heard about the attack, they knew what would happen. They knew that attacking the US was probably suicidal. Remember, at the time, Japan was bogged down in a massive war in China, where it already had bitten off far more than it could chew. The last thing Japan needed was to pick a fight with the most powerful nation in the Pacific. But it took the leap. Japanese people exalted in the sheer lunacy, perhaps not despite but rather because they knew it was bat shit crazy.

Joy in lunacy

This brings us to Trump. Much of why some delight in Trump is his transgressive approach to norms, be they social, political, or diplomatic. They exalt in the crazy. I can't help but think that they thrill in the sheer recklessness of it all. Pointing out the dangers of, say, needlessly starting a trade war with Canada or Mexico, does not dissuade MAGA. If anything, it makes the leap into the abyss more appealing.

Fascism scholars try to contextualize this mentality in terms of some societal discontent with bourgeois values and daily existence. It reflected a cultural malaise. Abyss jumping offered redemption, a chance to exalt in heroic living. Like Jünger in the Western Front. Jünger of course was an outspoken critic of liberal culture (though to his credit he turned against Nazism during WW2).

So is that what's going on? Perhaps not despite but because of our society’s abundance and ease, we are eager for transgressive experiences that give us a rush we are looking for, if not redemption. I don't know.

I just know that the thrill some express at the tumult of Trump’s Stormtrooper tactics (in the WW1 sense of the word…Jünger was a Stormtrooper) against societal, political, and diplomatic norms reminds me a bit too much of the joy some Japanese felt when they learned their government had started a war with the US. It's not that they didn't grasp the risk Japan was running. On the contrary, that precisely was what thrilled them.

German Stormtrooper. Trained to do the crazy things. They died in disproportionately large numbers.

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Stormtrooper tactics were a thing. If you’re curious, read all about them here, in Gudmundsson’s Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918, https://amzn.to/4hEgglu

Storm of Steel is one of the best war memoirs out there. What’s weird about the book, though, is that Jünger liked war. Read here: https://amzn.to/40HKOMk

Japan at War is shocking reading. You’ll walk away convinced that but for the whole genocide thing, the German Army had nothing on the Japanese Imperial Army when it came to war crimes and general depravity. https://amzn.to/40YB1CN