Why do we resist psychosexual explanations for bad politics?

(Writing this post in msedit because why not, lol.)

I sent some crazy texts out this week and the cold reception reminded me that I might be the only one who thinks like this—and now I’m wondering if I’m crazy, but it seems to me self-evident that lots of politicians (and their supporters) are making their decisions on the basis of crude power fantasies rather than some specific policy objective. And if this is true, then it has pretty big implications for how we engage in political discourse, because there is no hope in getting through to a Trump supporter with arguments about how tariffs are bad for the economy if the Trump guy supports tariffs not out of concern for the economy at all but, basically, because he thinks that the steel industry is hot and that’s a thing we should be doing more of.

Well, that’s the second example I could think of, because I wanted to put the first example in this paragraph: It’s that stupid visa social media screening thing. There is no justification for asking student visa applicants to provide their social media handles as part of their visa application. Even if you accept the flawed premise that it’s “bad” to admit people to the US if they have political beliefs that do not align with US foreign policy objectives (we have those?), this particular way of screening for it is laughably gameable. If you are applying for a student visa, all you have to do is scrub your account of anything but innocuous restaurant pictures, maybe a few token MAGA takes for good measure, and the embassy will have nothing on you.

This, of course, is the real point of the social media handle requirement: It’s a sexual fantasy; the whole point is to make the visa applicants kneel and beg, say “please let me study in the One Great Country,” fork over their phone to the consular officer and let them scroll their vacation pictures, participate in this spectacle of American Greatness™ and provide further fodder for the “best president ever” narrative.

I think many people’s reaction to this framing is that it’s hyperbolic, exaggerating to make a point, being edgy on purpose. And maybe it is, but also maybe: What if what I’m saying here is just literally, factually true? Do we have a better explanation for this kind of megalomanical power moves than that Marco Rubio gets off on it? Recall that this is “little Marco,” the guy whom Trump literally teased about having a small penis … it just makes too much sense that this is all a dominance fantasy of his; for the life of me, I can’t come up with a better explanation—can you? But even my friends to the left of me think I’m way out of left field saying shit like this.

(Msedit review: It’s actually … kind of good? Very responsive, has word wrap, has functional keybindings. I tried using Find and Replace and it said This operation requires the ICU library whatever TF that is but I’ve had worse Linux problems.)