The Original Rightwing American Perv

He paved the way for Mark Robinson, RFK Jr., Matt Gaetz, and of course Trump.

Poe.

I’m a pro-slavery Black Nazi perv! — Mark Robinson, posted to “Nude Africa”

Perverseness is one of the indivisible primary faculties which give direction to the character of Man. — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse”

People stick with MAGA now because horror, the grotesque, and perversion are compelling. The MAGA gothic, with its dead bear cubs dripping in decapitated whale fat and brain worms, casts a spell. 

But, even as it’s neither family-values Christian nor Wild West libertarian, the gothic also highly reactionary.

As the critic Robert Martin has written, the American gothic is “a politically conservative form that gives expression to the anxieties of a class threatened with violent dissolution.”

The genre was born among white writers in the days of slavery, when neurotic Southern gentlemen were gripped by fears of a Black uprising. 

Most of us Americans, however, don’t get consumed by the gothic. The country has a much more pervasive, happier, and cornier aesthetic. This is the poetics of joy and freedom that characterizes the Harris-Walz campaign. 

The American Romantic aesthetic is wholesome, outdoorsy, pragmatic, optimistic, pluralistic, generous. Its enemies are bigotry, tyranny, conformity, and neurosis. It prefers nature and imagination to classrooms and reason. Democracy and national pride are chief among its themes. It uses a conversational style. It defines American patriotism.

You’ve heard of its avatars in the 19th century: Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, Douglass, Whitman, Alcott. They embraced Lincoln and abolition; Melville praised Lincoln in Christ-like terms as “the Forgiver.” 

“Life is a boundless privilege,” wrote Emerson—and that, very schematically, sizes up the view of America as a glorious experiment in whose future it is a blessing it take part. 

You can see it in the Harris-Walz Freedom ad here. If you mist up, even a little bit, watching this, you’re probably an American Romantic at heart.

But there is a countervailing aesthetic in America,