Reactionary Impotence: Jordan Peterson, Trump, and the Ideology of Decline
Abstract
This thesis identifies two complementary tendencies of the right wing. The first is the loud, proud, and aggressive reactionary politics of Donald Trump; the second is its seeming opposite, the introspective, self-critical, therapeutic program of Jordan Peterson. Where Trump emphasizes external action and political agitation, Peterson emphasizes internal reflection and political withdrawal. To that end, this thesis charts Peterson’s calculated rise to fame via his exploitation of social media, and the subsequent success of his didactic 2018 tome 12 Rules for Life; it draws from memetics, Marxist theory, and psychoanalysis to interpret him as uniquely successful in speaking to the collective insecurities of a generation of young men, who sympathize with right-wing politics even as they recognize its inability to improve the sociopolitical conditions under which they live. It analyzes Peterson’s honing of his own brand of anti-communist, anti-ideological, and anti-rational thought from his early years of obscurity to his flourishing as a public intellectual in the late 2010s. His dispositions lead him to familiarly right-wing opposition to novelty, feminism, and trans people; however, unlike Trump, who emphasizes masculine aggression and political engagement, Peterson adopts an aesthetic of meekness, of despair, of pre-emptive defeat. He does not expect that the right’s political program will succeed, and exhorts his audience not to try. In contrast to the neverending rally of MAGA Trumpism, Petersonian thought renounces political agitation as a route to happiness, and promotes focus on self-improvement instead. It accepts misery and hardship as a universal constant, telling adherents to refrain from attempting to change the world, lest they make it even worse. In this philosophy, neither America, nor the world, can be made great again, as they can under Trumpism; on the contrary, the apocalypse is unavoidable. In short, the Peterson movement is simultaneously reactionary and impotent.