Sidney Sweeney and the Real Problem

Prefer to listen rather than read? Podcast version here

It has come to the Internet’s attention that Euphoria actress Sidney Sweeney wore a hat at her mother’s 60th birthday. The red hat, which her mother had custom-made for her guests, was emblazoned with the slogan “Make Sixty Great Again.”

I do not know what Sweeney’s personal politics are but no one else seems interested in finding out so I’m not sure why I should find out either. As with every other fight on the Internet, this conflict has little to do with people at the center of it and everything to do with some larger and intractable social issue. In this case, the real problem is that 74 million people voted for Trump in 2020 and, statistically speaking, a lot of us are related to them. 

What do we do about that?

I have called the far right movement proto-fascist for years. What I called far right two years ago is now clearly conservative and increasingly the “proto” drops off of my descriptor. Trump and his propagandists have whipped Republicans into a frenzy. 70 percent of Republicans believe Trump won the election even though every claim of widespread voting fraud has been thoroughly debunked. “Debunked by liberals,” someone retorted on the CPAC stage recently without elaboration: a successful way to dismiss all evidence and continue to believe a lie.

My job involves consuming a lot of conservative media and attending political events and I can tell you I’m as frightened as I’ve ever been. Halfway through watching Trump’s CPAC speech, surrounded by his screaming fans, I realized I am not going to stick around for the thing that’s coming. I do not want to fall silent at the hands of 74 million of my fellow Americans. I am farther down the list of People Who Are Problems than my queer and trans friends, and I worry about those friends every single day. I am urging everyone in my life to think about an exit plan.

74 million people. Most of us came of age in a world where Nazis were a handful of sick weirdos who did a parade once in a while and could, in fact, all be punched. You can solve the problem of hundreds or even thousands of dangerous people by banishing them from polite society, but you cannot solve the problem of 74 million that way. I do not mean you shouldn’t, I mean that you cannot. Trump voters comprise 28.6% of the adult population of the United States, that’s over one in four people. You cannot exclude the Trump voter from public life because they are the public.

And we are, I think, frozen in the horror of this. We are looking to the recent past for strategies and repeating them over and over again in hopes that they will save us. Punch a Proud Boy on the street, get a Nazi fired. It’s a scientific fact that Proud Boys have punchable faces but you cannot punch 74 million people into silence. It would, in fact, be monstrous to do so.

It is impossible to flatten 74 million voters into a single cartoon prototype. Your neighbor, your bartender, the guy wheat-pasting propaganda about The Jews. Your mom, the armed militiaman at the border, the owner of your grocery store, the guy handing out leaflets for Jesus. The libertarian, the homophobic immigrant, the man who thinks that immigrant stole his job.

74 million people. 74 million reasons.

74 million seduced by talk radio and podcasts and their leader’s bravado. 74 million living in terror. They voted for Trump because of economics, or nationalism, or fear that white people are being outbred. Racial hatred, homophobia, transphobia, jobs lost to outsourcing. Their communities decimated by Oxycontin, their business failed in the wake of COVID restrictions, their child’s changed pronouns, taxes on their high income higher than they’d like. That sinking, queasy realization that the next generation will be worse off than the last and that this degradation might go on forever: a nation in decline. And, as the evidence of their eyes shakes their faith in this nation, liberal voices lecturing them on their country’s ugly history. Attacks on identity from every side. A stripping away of all hope. From their perspective: death drive.

Not everyone grew up with the quintessentially American promise of increasing prosperity and moral virtue, but a lot of us did. We are all dealing with the death of that dream in different ways. And some of those ways are monstrous.

74 million monsters. Could that be true?

People are comparing Sweeney’s mother’s “Make Sixty Great Again” hat to a swastika or a KKK hood, and 30 years from now that might be true. It isn’t true yet. MAGA remains a movement struggling to be born, the predictable horrors have not fully happened yet. It is possible, in many corners of this nation, to sincerely believe that a vote for Trump is a vote for salvation. If you believed the things Fox News told you, you would surely do the same.

We are now forced to confront realities that until recently were purely academic. In Germany’s last free election until after 1945, 33.7 percent of voters voted for the National Socialists. Thirteen million Nazis flying thirteen million swastika flags, thirteen million Hail Hitlers, thirteen million war criminals.

Some of those people were voting for the Holocaust. For World War II. 

I cannot believe all of them were.

I have never been able to believe that – not as a freak spending her summers curled up with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or Richard J Evans’ Third Reich trilogy and certainly not now, as I look around at my country – this country that I love – and see seventy four million of my fellow Americans cast a vote I feel is similar.

As a child I watched The Sound of Music over and over again. It was my favorite movie and my introduction to the concept of Naziism long before I could understand what it stood for. There is a scene where Captain Von Trapp plays Edelweiss just before fleeing through the Alps and out of his beloved Austria forever. Halfway through the song his voice cracks and he cannot continue. As a child I did not understand this but I watched it recently, as an adult, and broke down completely. I am crying as I type this.

So I get it. I get why screaming at some stranger you have never met on a show you like who also wore a hat feels better than understanding the depth and devastation of the forces tearing us apart. The longer we can pretend this is a problem we can solve by taking hats off, the longer we can make plans that do not end in 2024, live something like a normal life.

Maybe it’s worth it. Some blackpilled part of me thinks it might be. Ruin some woman’s day, week, month, maybe her career to maintain that illusion just a little bit longer. Needs of the many and all that. We’re doomed anyway. Why not keep the party going just a few more hours?

Yesterday I went to Coney Island with a friend. We walked down the boardwalk and got hotdogs. The sun was blazing and the air sticky, the ocean serene and calm. Above us, cartoonishly fluffy clouds hung breathless in a perfectly blue sky. Every hundred feet or so a tent with a DJ and gigantic speakers pumped something upbeat, something party. People danced–sometimes just one guy, sometimes several dozen. 

We stopped at a tent playing some kind of afro-EDM. An older couple swing-danced ten feet away from breakdancers doing impossible things with their bodies. Kids, teenagers, and adults moved to the music with varying degrees of skill. The percussion, we realized slowly, came from everywhere around us – a tall man with an enormous cigar in his mouth expertly playing the drum, maracas and tambourines scattered through the crowd. It smelled of churros and cannabis and clean ocean air.

This is America. The real one. A strange and beautiful combination of cultures from around the world melded together into something incredible. The story of how those cultures came to be located in the same place is one of horror and a reckoning is long overdue. I’m not sure any of the people dancing felt the weight of our history in that moment.

Joy wins out. We rise from the ashes and create beauty. Because we are human. Because we are good.

I’m not sure anyone can extinguish that kind of eternal revolution. The sheer pleasure of existing and feeling sun on your skin, of moving to music and feeling at home with your friends in a crowd of strangers. Of connection and community and the bonds we feel for each other. Family, falling in love, caring for the children, handing the world over to them when they come of age. Growing old and basking in the life that you created, or the lives you touched.

Severing those bonds seems the opposite of what we need right now.

Every day, millions of Americans turn on their phones and settle down to be assaulted by  rage-filled frightened voices that scream that you are evil. As someone left of Mitch McConnell, you are personally in league with the Chinese Communist Party to destroy America out of sheer demonic hatred. You want to rip out their child’s uterus and cut off their breasts, forcibly inject them with poison, throw Trump voters in jail for the crime of political dissent, steal their money, tank the economy. They do not think you mean well. They think you are doing this stuff explicitly to harm them, that you are doing it on purpose, because you hate them.

And the best thing you can do – maybe the only thing you can do – is to stay in these people’s lives if you can, if it’s safe. As a living refutation of all that nonsense. So that every time someone says something like “we should declare the Democratic party a domestic terror organization” or “they’re all a bunch of groomers” there’s that weird twinge of discomfort in the part of their brain that loves you instead of twisting agony as they think about the party that stole you away from them.

It is, I think, braver than sitting at home in the dark and yelling at strangers.