John le Carre, dead last year at the ripe old age of 91, lived to see the end of the Cold War, the waning of U.S. hegemony, and the widespread adoption of an epithet, “cuck,” that could have been applied to his best-loved literary creation. George Smiley, the protagonist of le Carre’s Karla trilogy, is many things: a portly, unassuming man with a habit of cleaning his glasses with the fat end of his tie, an expert in German literature, and a quietly competent spy for the Circus, the fictional version of Great Britain’s MI6. He is also, in the parlance of U.S. politics circa 2021, a cuck. At the beginning of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley briefly considers leaving his wife after yet another episode of infidelity. “George, how can you be so vulgar?” his solicitor tells him. “Nobody divorces Ann. Send her flowers, and come to lunch.”
In the pre-Trump era, “cuckold” was a decidedly old-fashioned term, but in 2015, “cuck” and “cuckservative” bubbled up from the nether regions of the internet as terms of disparagement for anti-Trump Republicans. The insults had more to do with Trump’s macho posturing and insulting treatment of his rivals than substantive political disagreement, but insofar as it signifies ideological difference, “cuck” implies an unmanly and anti-American subservience to outside interests. Like the pathetic husband cuckolded by a promiscuous wife, establishment conservatives had been “cucked” by the banks, Big Tech, unreliable foreign allies, the military-industrial complex, the Democrats, illegal immigrants, and so on.
The idea that sexual and political dominance are intertwined is not a new one. The Iliad begins with a prince running off with another man’s wife. Julius Caesar is said to have cuckolded his political rivals. Silvio Berlusconi, the most plausible in a long line of proto-Trump figures, was caught on camera making the sign of the horns, the symbol of the cuckold, behind the Spanish foreign minister in 2002. In U.S. politics, dominance and subservience are usually political subtexts. “Cuck” and similar epithets have brought them to the fore.
In the 2015 Republican presidential primary, the main target of these vulgarities was the hapless Jeb Bush, whose mild demeanor, establishment credentials, and listless on-stage performances (“Please clap”) made him an inviting target for the Trumpian onslaught. Bush, his detractors claimed, wanted the public to share in his humiliation by getting taken advantage of by illegal immigrants and unreliable foreign governments. And he was symbolically cucked on the debate stage by Trump, who stuck him with an epithet, “low-energy Jeb,” that has followed him ever since. Much is made of Trump’s disparagement of women. Equally noteworthy are his attacks on male political rivals, who are usually cast as subservient foils.
Le Carre’s world is much quieter than Trump’s, but themes of subservience and dominance abound. Viewed in a certain light, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and its two sequels are cuckoldry all the way down. Borrowing the terminology of modern pickup artists, one posthumous appreciation of le Carre’s books even calls Smiley a “beta spymaster.”
The trilogy follows Smiley’s spy-vs.-spy rivalry with Karla, his Moscow Center counterpart and nemesis. At times, it is hard to distinguish between the institutional and sexual rivalries. Smiley first meets Karla in an interrogation, during which Karla pockets his engraved lighter, a gift from Smiley’s unfaithful wife. Thereafter, Karla exploits his knowledge of Smiley’s marital problems to humiliate British intelligence by means of a double agent.
Moscow’s man in London is Bill Haydon, the golden boy of the British secret service, who seduces Ann, on Karla’s orders, as a means of discrediting her husband’s suspicions about him. The promiscuous Haydon cucks his country because he resents Great Britain’s subservience to the Americans, who have cucked the British out of their global role. After Haydon is exposed by Smiley, he is killed by Jim Prideaux, another former lover and a British intelligence officer whom Haydon betrayed (cucked?) in the field.
When Smiley finally brings Karla down in the final installment of the trilogy, sex is the catalyst. Smiley’s People opens with the brutal murder of an emigre Russian general by Moscow assassins. The hit arouses Smiley’s suspicions, and his investigation into what Karla was trying to hide brings him to another exiled officer who betrayed the general to Moscow. Naturally, this betrayal was motivated by sex — the old general had cucked his comrade. Even Oliver Lacon, Smiley’s bureaucratic overseer, complains about getting cucked by his wife’s riding instructor.
Are the Smiley books a parable about alpha and beta males? In the hands of a lesser novelist, the Karla trilogy might have devolved into a crude sexual metaphor for personal rivalries or power politics, but le Carre is too good a writer to turn his characters into caricatures. Smiley is not a “cuck.” He’s a spy whose wife happens to be a serial philanderer. In the field, he’s self-assured and occasionally ruthless. By the end of the trilogy, he is widely acknowledged by his colleagues in British intelligence as the indispensable man. Reducing a character such as Smiley to his sexual or romantic inadequacies would render the books unintelligible. How could a cuck have bested Karla and Moscow Center?
In 2021, we have become our sexual preferences and peccadilloes, a flattening of human attributes that le Carre would have found bizarre. Smiley, the wronged husband, is also a coldly efficient operator. The mole he eventually exposes, Haydon, is a widely admired intelligence officer whose treacherous motives defy easy categorization. Haydon’s betrayal is driven by an oddly warped sense of patriotism, a longing for Great Britain’s old imperial role. In the books, he is the only character who still speaks of “England” and English interests unironically. And despite his prowess at seducing women, Haydon also has several male lovers.
Returning to le Carre in 2021, it’s refreshing to encounter characters who are not defined by their roles in the bedroom. Just as identity has been subsumed by sexual preference, “cuck” and its variants reduce politics to locker-room one-upmanship. Le Carre’s novels are a timely reminder that there is more to life than dominance and subservience. Somewhere, Jeb Bush is nodding along in agreement.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Eger, Hungary.
