Capping off his discussion of what Aufklarung really means, Kant says that it’s man’s escape from his self-imposed unmundigkeit. That’s a paradoxical claim, because unmundigkeit in the juridical sense (as, it seems, Kant means it) is a state of legal minority or tutela – something that by definition you can’t impose on yourself. One common feature shared across the family of legal concepts to which unmundigkeit, tutela and minority belong is that those who come under them get stripped of their capacities as legal agents – so, if you impose a tutela on yourself, it’s immediately invalidated.
Of course Kant knows all that. The paradox is intentional, a kind of allegory. When we realize that our tutelage is self-imposed, then we see it’s paradoxical and unreal. We discover that we’ve been acting according to a law that is no law. Now we’re “free” in the sense that we were free all along, but didn’t realize it. That’s one particularly optimistic way of thinking about enlightenment.
Well, so much for all that. Kant’s figure still has something to tell us, though, about the dark age to come. It’s a way of addressing the question – “what do they want?” – that comes naturally to me, and to a lot of other people, when right-wing voters and politicians invoke “getting back to the good old days” as a political platform. We rightly think that they don’t mean this literally, in the factual sense of returning to an era before iphones or airplanes or electric lighting. It’s a figural statement. For what? Racism? Reinstating “traditional gender roles?” Fascist authoritarianism? Yes, all those things – but then, why not be specific? Why bundle it all together under the heading of a sepia-toned nostalgia for “the good old days?” The easy answer is that they’re trying to fool you, that “the good old days” are some kind of a dog whistle. It should be obvious by now, though, that they don’t care about fooling you. They only care about fooling themselves.
How does nostalgia work for that? In two ways. First, obviously, it helps Trump supporters not think of themselves as Nazis, which would be uncomfortable even for (most of) them. But it also helps them disguise what they want in another way. Their appeal to a particular historical period as ideal keeps them (and us) from recognizing what might be the most important fact about this historical period: it’s when most of Trump’s supporters were children. What they really want is to get back under tutela. They’d impose it on themselves if they could, but that’s impossible, so they elect politicians to do it for them. Getting someone else to impose tutela on you is, at the personal scale, just a kink; at the national level, it’s fascism.
The views I’ve just expressed fit oddly with the way adulthood works in actual right-wing rhetoric. There, the grown-up in the room is usually some dweeb like Ben Shapiro telling infantilized “millenials” (the unholy persistence of that generational name being another can of worms entirely) to stop throwing tantrums about whatever today’s grievance is. That brings up a real schism at the center of right-wing thought. Trump voters want to be coddled like children – remember, most of them love social programs, and Trump stood out from the Republican field in 2016 by promising to keep his hands off of Social Security – but they also want to be respected like adults, to monopolize adulthood for themselves.
Can they have it both ways? That’s the promise of a uniquely American form of fascism, one that owes as much to Jim Crow and the Antebellum South as it does to 1930’s Europe. For the most part, Trump voters don’t dream of an all-white America – and this is why they can tell themselves they’re not racist. They just want an America where being white entitles you to respect from everybody else, where minorities know their place in line (to borrow Arlie Hochschild’s forceful metaphor) is at the back. Grown-ups first, which is actually how dinner used to be served in most American households (and probably still is in the atavistic swamps of Alabama, or whatever.)
A fantasy of childhood surrounded by a fantasy of adulthood – but they’re both fantasies, and that’s why the Trump movement is ultimately a rejection of the kind of adulthood that Kant talks about. Trump voters want to be deceived about their own value, like children are. Children, of course, don’t generally know that they’re being deceived, at least until they get an obvious signal of that, like a participation trophy, which is why those have gotten to be such a bug up Fox News’ ass – not because they spoil children, but because they destroy an illusion which viewers of Fox News would also like to enjoy. As adults, they know that children get lied-to all the time about how great they are; forgetting that fact would be an essential step toward becoming children again themselves, toward feeling like they were worth something again.
Why take that backward flight? There’s a dark side to Kantian enlightenment from the perspective of our self-worth: our self-imposed tutelage was all about us, but the real world’s nothing like that. One after another, a series of Copernican Revolutions decenters us until we realize we’re not even the protagonists of our own life stories: we’ve been working for some other asshole the whole time. Does it actually have to be this way? Not if emancipation follows upon enlightenment, not if we get the freedom to use the powers of which enlightenment has already made us aware. Capitalism is the blockage that keeps us from full freedom. It forces us into subservience, actually, in a way that strips us of even the real independence that the enlightenment-era bourgeoisie enjoyed (on which, more later.) The result is a form of adulthood that, for most people, seems grim and grey by comparison with the technicolor Disneyland we’ve built for children. No wonder some people want to go back.