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I agree with the assessment that QAnon is the future of the Republican Party, but I don't agree with this read on what myths are/do. Political myth is performed and understood in concrete, rather than abstract terms; it occurs at the level of sentiment and affect in narrative. https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1295395636775284752
Do (all) members of QAnon believe that there is actually a cannibal cabal living under the DNC and a Chuck E. Cheese in suburban Denver? No! It's a claim of *action*, best understood as a manifestation of political will to destroy/kill political enemies.
A political myth is, first and foremost, motivational. That is, the line between myth and action itself is razor thin. Sorel recognized this in his analysis of myth: the myths themselves contain within themselves the vision of the world they hope to enact.
The *details* of the mytho-history are almost wholly irrelevant. What it *promises* is relevant; a world cleansed of corruption (manifested in political psyche as violence against the most innocent; children) where they are empowered to destroy all imagined political barriers.
What is the promise of Qanon? The obliteration of *politics itself*! It promises a revealed truth where nobody can ever again dispute the (imagined) unity of popular will because all who have done will be discredited, destroyed. The end of politics promises the end of strife.
Myths are, in no way, a means of overcoming cognitively dissonant facts. Adorno makes it clear that the line between myth and the facticity of 'enlightenment' is hazy to begin with: it's a means of articulating and promising a different set of political and social circumstances.
Flood is right on the money âMythmaking is the partner of theory. Only by fitting events together...is it possible to âdemonstrateâ that particular values...have efficacy in the social world....myths purport to prove the validity of values by showing that they can be enactedâ
There's this bizarre sentiment, particularly among liberals (of the left and right variety) that myths and conspiracies are a kind of short-circuit of the brain: they're there as a lumpenprole 'God of the Gaps'. No. They're fundamentally a claim to power, not a explanation.
In 'Occult Roots of Nazism' Goodrick-Clarke explains the political fantasies of the Germanophone Ariosophists as a reaction to political anxiety. All these weird conspiratorial visions of a hyperborean Atlantean past were claims about proposed *futures* not histories of the past.
Or, consider the appeal my by Artolt Bronnen when it was positively clear Germany had lost WW1: there's a huge constituency of silent 'stone-hewers' out there that demand we fight on, unlike the urbanites. It is not even an attempt at analysis, its a motivational values-claim.
How is QAnon to be fought then? Certainly not with 'factual narratives', that isn't the point of the movement to begin with. It can only be fought with better, more compelling, more totalizing mythologies that promise something better.
Don't be afraid of political mythologies qua political mythology. Every political movement under the sun makes use of them, some more compelling, some more outlandish, some less of both. Some of them are even truly banal. Socialism has become afraid to engage in myth-making.
