Trump: The Last American Hero?

The Kamala coup gifted us the perfect symbolic election.

On one hand we have the masculine vitality (albeit aging) of Trump, who we could almost call The Last American.

He embodies—in a way that is somehow both instinctive and self-conscious—that energetic American optimism, combined with a wistful awareness that his country is in danger of dying out.

One thinks of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. Aging but able to return for one last quest, wherein he deliberately reasserts the American mythos.

On the other hand we have Kamala, who with her Marxist father and impeccable DEI credentials represents something new, or at least new insofar as it comprises the naked face of the establishment.

Although there have often been subversives in America entirely at odds with its traditions (communist screenwriters in the McCarthy era, for example), we have in recent decades seen this new ideology take over American institutions. But until the emergence of Harris, it still retained the flimsy disguise of the old America in the figure of good old Uncle Joe Biden.

Harris, however, personifies the new Regime. Openly leftist and postmodern, and against everything for which America has traditionally stood. And everything that Trump represents (even if, as already stated, Trump is a somewhat self-conscious postmodern construction himself).

Because they are man and woman, we see the battle play out quite neatly in the two sexes (though Kamala’s side might argue there are more than two).

Thus the failure to capture the male vote is not a question of organisation, of getting ‘the brothers’ to get off their asses, as Obama has suggested.  Rather it is a result of the fundamental gulf between the two world views on offer. 

With the exception of the extremely cucked ‘white dudes for Harris’, there is nothing to appeal to men in the leftist postmodernism of Harris. It tells men their heroic impulses are toxic, and that their old heroes are actually villains. 

Black and Latino men are the demographics the Democrats are most scared of losing. But it is probably fair to say they are also the most likely to embody traditional masculine values, and thus will be the most alienated by the Harris offer. Whilst a subset of white men, neutered by material comfort and overeducated into perverse reasoning, vote for their own destruction.

And it can only be their destruction, because the ideology Harris represents simply has no place for the heroic. Whether that means physical conquest (note the unstoppable rise of MMA in rebellion against the feminine culture) or the intellectual and spiritual Jungian hero’s journey, these ideals are dismissed as toxic, patriarchal, inegalitarian, or the result of a ‘white saviour complex’.

However, in reality men are not being corrupted by Andrew Tate. Nor are they simply wary of voting for a female president. They are repelled to their very core by what Harris is offering. And they are absolutely right.

It is also no coincidence that in support of the aging American hero Trump, we see the ostensibly unlikely figure of a South African nerd coming in to fulfil the heroic role.

Musk is a slightly different kind of hero. Not the stoic frontiersman, but the real life incarnation of the cartoon heroes of Marvel movies, which have long been, along with combat sports, one of the few remaining outlets for the undying spirit of the heroic masculine.

RFK Jr also comes on board, nephew of one of the greatest quasi-mythological heroes in American history. While Trump is the East Coast businessman, RFK is the western outdoorsman, often found with an actual falcon resting on his arm, just in case you missed the imagery. His shaky voice by chance augments the metaphor of the fading but not entirely extinguished spirit of America.

America chooses, then, between one last attempt at glory, or its total eradication in favour of the managerial, the egalitarian, and the feminine, banishing the heroic masculine into the wilderness forever.