Over the weekend, Twitter took a turn more PornHub than political, with an extremely profane tweet from Leah McElrath, an evidently left-wing freelancer, gaining traction into Monday. The contents of the tweet, which I won’t relay directly, contrasts somewhat graphic images of a sexually incompetent Michael Avenatti against recent senatorial-loser-turned-Democratic-presidential-hopeful Beto O’Rourke, fantasized as a sexual connoisseur so to speak.
I’m not much of a prude, and if we were discussing the extremely intimate fictionalizations of Presidents Tony Goldwyn or Robin Wright, this really wouldn’t register on the national Richter scale of obscenity. But to objectify and indulge in obsessions over real, tangible political figures is another level of Freudianism. From the beginning of Betomania to the weeping, fawning BuzzFeed lists, we’ve seen adoration for a politician elevate to new levels of insanity. Sure, women loved Slick Willy, and Democrats bragged that President Barack Obama was young and good-looking, but the Daily Dot reported that an Instagram video of O’Rourke preparing a steak was making people “horny.”
So we need to unpack, beginning from how politicians went from statesmen, to political patriarchs, to father figures, to Daddy.
Obviously politicians since President Calvin Coolidge have dramatically expanded the size and scope of the executive, but a major through-line of Republican opposition to Obama was his willingness to take it to a new level. We rightly decried the burgeoning nanny state, dreaming of a Ronald Reagan to replace a vastly expanding executive branch. Enter Donald Trump.
But then Trump won the Republican nomination and subsequently the presidency with the promise of a government made great again, with a commitment not to a limited government, but an active one. He promised tariffs and “The Wall,” explicitly pledging to protect entitlements. Small government figures are easily to compartmentalize. Big government figures become personalities in their own right. Just as the Left was keen to deem Obama “America’s dad,” members of the Right crowned Trump the godfather, the god-king, and, of course, Daddy. (Credit to Ben Shapiro for documenting all of this.)
Sigmund Freud — whose methods have been thoroughly disproven — saw the natural progression of Dad, to Daddy, to significant others as an obvious byproduct of an Electra or Oedipal Complex. In a way, it almost makes sense that our hyper-present political sphere has graduated to the hyper-sexualization of our politicians. O’Rourke then can’t just be a decent-looking Texas dad; in the era of political omnipresence, we must view lawmakers not as empowered bureaucrats but as epic heroes. And with real life physical intimacy in free-fall, of course people project their personal desires onto not just normal public figures but specifically impersonal ones.
It’s disturbing, not just to objectify a random stranger who doesn’t fulfill a role of aesthetic celebrity as the receptacle for your sexual dissatisfaction, but also how much it signifies the complete politicization of our culture. But perhaps it makes sense. If God and sex are dead, of course politicians will fill the void.
