by Christopher Hall
Comic horror’s fundamental lesson is that the world is not what it looks like. This thought is given particularly sharp expression in John Langan’s The Fisherman:
‘When I look at things – when I look at people – I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid…All a mask…and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask, if I could make a fist and punch a hole in it…what would I find? Just flesh? Or would there be something more…Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us.
The speaker here is in grief after his entire family was killed in a traffic accident, and there is a sense that only such large dislocations can jar us out of a sense of the reality of the world around us. There is another sense, however, in which this dislocation is a fundamental condition of modernity. A person in the Middle Ages could stand on a still, firm platform and watch the universe revolve around her. It was obvious the platform was solid and still – she wasn’t moving, was she? – and from that fact many other conclusions could proceed. (This is, of course, a vast over-simplification of the medieval worldview, which, for one thing, very much did believe in non-terrestrial realities. But it remains the case that for a large part of human history the route from perception to conclusion was reasonably short.) Now, not only must we accept that we are, in fact, travelling at tremendous speeds in various directions relative to other objects, but we also do so through space that is curved, though time that slows down the faster we go, and, thanks to quantum mechanics, upon a platform where “solidity” does not mean what we expect. The winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022 won “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” The actual meaning of this is beyond most people – it certainly is beyond me – but the net result is that now one may approach the oracle Google, ask whether the universe is “locally real,” and receive the answer, “No.”
When Kamala Harris, in August of 2024, began calling Trump and his base “weird,” it resonated first and foremost through the intricate codes of behaviour MAGA has indulged itself in. “Let’s go Brandon,” wearing diapers and massive ear-bandages, and the bizarre religious fetishism for a man who is in no way Christ-like, all contributed to the idea that Trump’s supporters had become, as was and is commonly said, “disconnected from reality.” Much of this may, in fact, be derived from the online world where a good deal of Trump’s support originates; to be strange is the simplest method by which to weed out the normies. This sort of political coherence is hard to come by; even so, Trump’s response was, as is common with him, reflective in the sense that he merely threw the insult back: “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.” “I think we’re the opposite of weird, they’re weird.” And, an increasingly long time ago, at the moment of the Sixties counterculture that gave rise to the modern Democratic party, they were weird.
So MAGA is weird, and their cultural and political opponents are weird. Are they weird in the same way?
Perhaps contrary to expectations, I’m going to suggest that we leave aside the more brazen aspects of MAGA’s displays, as I don’t believe that really gets to the core of Trump’s weirdness; at any rate, Trump’s carnivalesque should be the subject of another discussion. We can begin, instead, with populism and truth. Sophia Rosenfeld notes in her Common Sense: A Political History that populism has an “epistemological” nature in that “it depends on a particular understanding of human cognitive and moral capabilities.” She further notes:
Here the standard claim is that “the people,” when not being misled by false authorities, are in possession of a king of infallible, instinctive sense of what is right and true, born of or nurtured by day-to-day experience in the world, that necessarily trumps the “expert” judgments and knowledge of a minority of establishment insiders.
Common sense, of course, can be a potent political force, especially as it tears away elite assumptions about who should “rightfully” be in charge. And I don’t want to give the impression that it is synonymous with error – which, of course, would be the ultimate elitism. Yet if populism is a clash between a “people” and an “elite” – however we may wish two populate those categories – I think is fair to say that elite expertise at its base challenges our common perceptions about how the world works, oftentimes to the point where “day-to-day experience” is simply not capable of processing or imagining actual reality. And populism is in part a reaction against that challenge.
So, however weird MAGA looks, they in fact inhabit a world which is nearly pre-modern in nature, a world in which the platform is solid, it does not move, and A = A. We live in a simple world, and only simple solutions can be effective within it. There are obviously only two genders, and those who say there aren’t or that gender is a “social construct” are being willfully perverse. Obviously, grand, abstract forces like “systematic racism,” “privilege,” and “patriarchy” do not really exist. The dark machinations of the global economy aren’t really that complex – just apply tariffs and manufacturing will come back to America. We soon see the lengths to which common sense can be stretched. When asked, quite reasonably, what evidence he had that DEI policies were responsible for a plane crash, Trump responded simply that he had “common sense.” We have somehow ended up at a place where assertions like “Only white, male, straight people can be trusted to be competent” – for Trump could have meant no other thing – are being presented as representative of the plain, good-old-fashioned world-as-it-is which pernicious liberals would deny.
What’s odd in the writings of the godfather of weirdness, H.P. Lovecraft, is the nature of those who understand the real nature of the universe, or what’s called among Lovecraftians “The Mythos.” Lovecraft had absorbed some of the insights of General Relativity in his work, the first mention coming in the 1933 story The Dreams in the Witch-House. There, the protagonist engages in discussions of
freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum.
Lovecraft learns from Einstein that reality in no way conforms to the expectations of ordinary perception. And there is no joy in this revelation. The inevitable reaction of Lovecraft’s heroes to the world beyond the world is disgust. But there is a dual vision in Lovecraft; reality is repulsive only because it is unfamiliar, and not at all comfortable to human bias. It shows no anthropocentric tendencies; it is aloof, indifferent. So our disgust when presented with it is, of course, a matter of perspective. Everything horrid in Lovecraft – the confabulations of the Mythos, the monsters and Elder Gods – represent the myriad ways in which the mind will reject the world if it refuses to make itself companionable.
Lovecraft was also a thoroughgoing racist, but the fundamental common feature of his white, male narrators is their naivete and their determination to hang on to their diurnal reality. The racial underclasses in Lovecraft’s stories are frequently the ones most in touch with the realities of the Mythos, and if this causes utter repulsion in his white protagonists, it is not because they are engaged in some monstrous falsehood; they are proponents of the heresy of the truth. As suggested in Victor Lavalle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, a re-telling of what’s often considered to be Lovecraft’s most racist story, The Horror at Red Hook, from the perspective of a black man, non-whites may find such indifference of the real preferable to actual malice. “Cosmic Horror” becomes, in this ingenious inversion, not merely a matter of perspective but one of power. Many of the current acolytes of true weirdness – who may be some of the racialised people Lovecraft despised, or the members of a largely white, educated technocracy – still suffer mockery and hatred. Their deep taboo is that they insist on pulling on the strings of the mask.
If common sense, so constituted, is the engine of populism, this explains why populism slides so easily into authoritarianism: the world itself spins out of commonality into complexity and must be put back into a shape more apprehensible, by whatever force is necessary. And the process only renders this shape less Euclidean and more Einsteinian. When populism’s policies fail, explanations are layered upon ever more daft explanations for the breakages in what was supposed to be obvious. And the resulting incoherence must be defended without restraint, and with violence if necessary – even if not. I suggest, then, that in the moment of confrontation with true reality, the central revelation of cosmic horror, Trump’s absurdism merely signals the energy inherent in his counter-response. Trump’s lies are saving America from the world as it is; that is the real political horror story of the moment.
Weirdness, again, is a matter of perception. Transgenderism isn’t weird unless you are determined to think it is. But even if it is mere conservative bias which assigns weirdness in this way, it seems a more objective fact that the world is indeed getting less and less familiar. Between ourselves and the future lie a set of modalities which are utterly alien: AI, climate change, the penetration of technology into our very minds by means biochemical and physical, an economy which no longer needs or provides for an ever-increasing percentage of the people. And technology will insist that historical comparisons become nearly meaningless. Every year takes us further away from a past we wrongly assume is a ground and a baseline. The pull of that past, when America was Great, is not merely political nostalgia, and it is not merely revulsion with some aspect of the present. This kind of revolt against the future comes only at the cost of the most severe cognitive dissonance.
It has been tempting for me to think of Trump as the monster behind the mask – America’s id revealed, the impulse to crass authoritarianism which, despite enduring frequent remission and claims that it has in fact been eliminated, seems always capable of return in the body of the US republic. And of course, there’s something to that view. But so much of the spectacle of Trump seems not like a revelation of something but rather like an occultation, something blocking the line of sight to something else. Trumpism is the mask, and Trump’s central political action is to mend the cracks that constantly appear in it. But the alternative – pulling of the mask – is painful, horrific, and permanently disturbing if we are not in the proper mindset. Am I actually suggesting Democrats embrace this kind of weirdness, in opposition to Trump’s kind? Demand, as the counterculture once did with Vietnam, that Americans stare the actual situation in the face, without filters? The anodyne campaign of Kamala Harris and its failure suggests, at the very least, that we aren’t going to win with what passes for “normalcy” in Democratic circles. A new politics must insist that Americans return to some kind of homeostatic relationship with reality – and actual reality, pleasing features and warts and all. If “common sense” is not an option, neither is the treacly paste of liberal optimism. We do, after all, have to the live in the world as it is, as it is becoming. And there won’t be anything weirder than that.
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