About two years ago I wrote here about the politics of disgust. What I mean by this is very specific: it has its origin in an influential Political Science paper written by some behavioralists in the discipline who wanted to examine the connection between political ideology and physical sensitivity to certain triggers like the picture here:1
The paper was written before the rise of the MAGAs. What’s interesting and suggestive is the fact that its findings seem to chart a path to the kind of culture-war politics that one finds today on the right. I don’t think it’s the case that right wing strategists read the paper and attempted to apply its insights (such as they are): that would be too simple and straightforward. At the same time, the kinds of things hypothesized there are a weird and uncomfortable portent of the contemporary r/w obsession with LGBTQ and trans issues, the vehemence of which seemed to come out of nowhere, and which operates ideologically out of all proportion to reality. MAGA politics is by nature deranged, but it’s especially deranged around these two or three hot-button issues.
There are good reasons for the Right to focus on culture war issues — mainly as a distraction from actual class war — and the origin of those issues in utterly unjustifiable levels of inequality provides the reason for the distortion: as I have said elsewhere, the intensity of political polarization reveals/conceals an equally insane level of exploitation. Whether formally or informally, MAGA strategists discovered a discourse that works on powerful emotional registers, and therefore works well where it is needed: in the elaboration of ideology.
So what are the hypotheses of the study?
First, based on previous research connecting self-reported disgust sensitivity to opposition to opposition to gay marriage [9,10], we hypothesize that physiological responses to disgust stimuli will positively correlate with attitudes towards gay marriage and will do so even when controlling for the effects of self-reported disgust sensitivity.2
This places the article in a family of studies that purport to examine the connection between physical registers of disgust (i.e. whether one is sensitive at the level of physiological reaction to various triggers) and political ideology: the findings will suggest that conservatives report higher levels of sensitivity, while liberals will report lower ones. The second hypothesis, however, addresses the question of intensity of feeling:
Second, and also based on previous research, we hypothesize that physiological responses to disgust stimuli will have weaker but still noticeable effects on other sex-related attitudes (for example, those pertaining to pre-marital sex, to pornography, or to abortion) but not to most other political issues (for example, those pertaining to economic and to defense policies).3
The picture that emerges, then, is relatively clear: conservatives are squeamish about a lot of things, some of which are clearly political (marriage equality), while others are not (eating worms or bugs). From here, the ideological/strategic question arises, namely how might we tie these two things to a larger and broader political agenda
“I don’t want to eat the bugs.”4
In the article I just snapshotted, Eamon Whalen examines some truly wacky political conspiracies, and ties them to the rise of the right wing manosphere and related hardcore fitness fascism discourse. These connections are not self-evident, and they need some conceptual disentangling. The first part is consistent, and fits with a straightforward ideological project: The Great Reset is a global conspiracy that seeks to emasculate Western men in part by undermining the consumption of red meat and replacing it with a diet of insects. This is almost a word-for-word reiteration of the Hibbing et al. study I mentioned above, using viscerally disgusting imagery (eating worms/eating bugs) and tying it to a sinister global agenda: OUR ENEMIES WANT TO FORCE US TO EAT BUGS (and by the way, LOOK AT THIS PICTURE of a guy eating worms). “I don’t want to eat the bugs,” Noor bin Ladin says.
From here, though, the argument (such as it is) gets a bit muddy. if the image of global Big Insect force-feeding cockroaches and crickets wasn’t strange enough, the alternative is at least as bizarre:
(From the New York Post: https://nypost.com/2022/11/30/liver-king-ripped-after-leaked-email-claims-11k-a-month-steroid-use/)
If Big Insect is working through the WEF to get us to eat bugs, influencer goobers like the Liver King and Raw Egg Nationalist want us to eat … liver, testicles, offal and raw eggs? But this shouldn’t make sense, right? If conservatives are squeamish about sex and food, then the last thing they should want to do is consume raw testicles:
This suggests a couple of things. First, the experience of disgust is clearly under-theorized. Perhaps we should talk about strong and even “visceral” compulsion as a repulsion/attraction complex. They are in fact inseparable: the human appetite for sex makes this irrefutably clear. Both disgust and longing are forms of arousal, which leads to our second point: perhaps, like practically everything else, the MAGAs undermined and even destroyed the way we commonly think about the conservative disposition. Perhaps pursuing culture war politics at the level of visceral affect disclosed something that was probably intuitively evident already: attraction and repulsion are plastic. One can use disgust in positive ways as well as negative: Look at us, we are the truly HARDCORE, the 5% who will stop at nothing to achieve masculine greatness, seeking antimodern “primal” experiences that spit in the face of bourgeois comfort, etc etc. The athlete, the artist, the philosopher who consciously shapes his life in pursuit of an ascetic ideal can in fact transcend mere humanity. Normies will find this pursuit troubling or “problematic,” but like Diogenes we embrace the marginal and offensive, the disgusting, as a way of valorizing a new world and a new man beyond social mediocrity.
And so on. This is the tenor of what one will find in the writings of BAP and Raw Egg Nationalist, and the rest of it.5 It’s derivative and risible, but I think it discloses something about the way right wing politics has changed: it seeks to be both ultra-normative by appealing to disgust in a negative way (“public schools have kitty litter boxes in the bathrooms now!”), and transgressive for a self-identified quasi-fascist vanguard. These are in tension with each other, of course, which might provide an opportunity for Left strategists like me (and one presumes) you as well.
What I am just noticing now is the small caption to this picture, which notes that the *actual* pictures used in the study could not be republished, which led them to reenact one of the pictures using one of the scholars who wrote the study. In other words, the guy with worms in his mouth is one of the authors of the article. This is somehow disturbing.
Smith KB, Oxley D, Hibbing MV, Alford JR, Hibbing JR (2011) Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations. PLoS ONE 6(10): e25552. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025552, page 1.
Ibid., page 1, my emphasis.
Eamon Whalen, “Blood, Soil, and Grass-Fed Beef,” Mother Jones Magazine (May/June 2023). https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/04/raw-egg-nationalist-wef-great-reset-meat-eggs/
For more on the wacky world of Raw Egg Nationalist, and the deeper roots of right-wing vitalism in German monism and much else besides, see “Raw Egg Nationalist’s One Weird Trick,” here. The author of this really great article has a substack, here.