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Trumpism won’t save Middle America Peanut the squirrel was its first martyr

Elon Musk won't bring the jobs back. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Elon Musk won't bring the jobs back. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images


November 6, 2024   7 mins

Grey squirrels don’t command much love, here in the 51st state. When Brits make memes about them, it’s usually a visual shorthand for strong views on immigration. But in their native North America they’re firmly associated with Disney princesses, and hence part of the pantheon of anthropomorphic cuteness.

So when New York State killed Peanut the celebrity squirrel, there was uproar. This bushy tale became a lightning-rod for Right-wing resentments about safetyism, women in politics, and uneven application of the law. But what makes Peanut a note-perfect metaphor for the electoral crunch moment now under way is none of these things: it’s the porno plot twist.

For anyone less terminally online, a recap: Peanut was a squirrel, orphaned as a kit and raised by Mark Longo, 34 — whose videos made Peanut a social media star. Then, on 31 October, Longo’s home was raided following an anonymous complaint. Armed agents impounded Peanut and a raccoon named Fred — then, in a decision Longo called “surreal”, euthanised Peanut and Fred, reportedly “to check for rabies”.

All hell broke loose. Peanut was reincarnated overnight, as the face of protest against over-mighty, impersonal and callous bureaucracy. Elon Musk weighed in; a torrent of memes has depicted Peanut as George Floyd, as a ghost animal on Donald Trump’s shoulder, or even as a replacement for the Republican Party’s elephant logo. Then, just as abruptly as the memes began, they halted again. For it transpired that as well as working as an engineer Longo was also what’s politely known as an “adult content creator”, who used Peanut’s social media platform to direct viewers to his considerably more NSFW “Squirrel Daddy” content on OnlyFans.

Yes, this is all happening several thousand miles away from me, and officially in a different country. But as its enemies are forever pointing out, “The West” is de facto the American Empire, and Britain one of its protectorates. In other words: this is also our election, and who occupies the White House is intensely relevant to us. We just don’t get to vote.

If a nutty story about a pet squirrel tells us anything about electoral contests on the scale of the United States, it’s that you can forget policy-based campaigns. With 161 million registered voters, all you can really contest is vibes. And in its sheer virality, Peanut’s martyrdom offers insight into one of those clusters of vibes. Meanwhile, the circumstances of his original celebrity hint, far more darkly, at why those grievances may remain unsatisfied — even if, as now looks likely, Trump will soon be back in the White House.

“With 161 million registered voters, all you can really contest is vibes.”

The Peanut moment crystallised two interconnected features of Trump’s 2024 campaign. First, the rise to prominence of people, views, and aesthetics from an extremely online Right that, back in 2016, was a subculture without institutional power. Love it or hate it, this tilt was reflected in the choice of J.D. Vance, a man who drops Right-wing meme allusions in mainstream press interviews, as Trump’s running-mate. And, secondly and relatedly, Trump’s principal 2024 backer: Elon Musk. Musk’s 2022 purchase of the website formerly known as Twitter, his adoption, re-platforming, and mainstreaming of e-Right aesthetics and talking-points, and his all-in backing of the Trump campaign in turn stand metonymically for a broader Right-wing shift in political allegiance among tech bros.

The Democrats’ pivot away from a historically laissez-faire approach to a determination to regulate Big Tech likely plays a part in this tilt. But so, too, does ideology — and especially the single-mindedness and practical focus required to found new enterprises. Among devotees, this “founder” ethos is almost cartoonishly personalistic, propounding a high-tech version of Great Man Theory.

The positive vibe on offer, then, is one of dynamism, innovation, growth, and agency, all symbolised by Elon Musk’s SpaceX achievements and aspiration to colonise Mars. Its advocates contrast this with a perceived Left-wing preference for collectivism, over-regulation, and safety-obsessed mediocrity. Is this a fair depiction of Trump’s enemies?

Supporters of regulation might point out that in its absence, powerful individuals can do great things — also ride roughshod over everyone else. But alongside such practical and — dare I say it — populist caution, there is also a sensibility at work among the anti-Trumpers. Some at least are clearly as repelled by heroic, masculine individualism as Musk and Trump fans are attracted.

This, then, is the other basket of vibes on offer: that of a polity more comfortable than its Trumpian opponents with ordinary life, proceduralism, and diffuse accountability. The recent, evident ability of Joe Biden’s administration to continue on autopilot, despite a cognitive decline in its elected leader so visible it could eventually no longer be kept out of the press, offers an illustration of both the strengths and weaknesses of such a system. The clear inference is that the system itself is what’s governing, and who nominally heads it is less important.

For those to whom this represents “Our Democracy” it’s obviously good: overall a more stable, consistent, and equitable system. Its opponents, meanwhile, crystallised their distaste for this order in the martyrdom of Peanut: a cluster of objections more commonly conveyed by two online Right-wing terms: “the longhouse”, and “anarcho-tyranny”. The former borrows a metaphor from those anthropologists who describe early human societies as matriarchal, and living communally in village “longhouses”. In contemporary usage, this figurative “longhouse” is a bad thing: a negation of individuality, masculinity and ambition. It’s associated with women, with bureaucracy, with smallness of vision and stifling constraints on anything risky or heroic. For “longhouse” disrespecters, the fact that both Peanut’s alleged snitch (though she denies it) and the head of the agency that killed him are both women was viewed as emblematic of this pernicious state of affairs.

More generally, the “longhouse” also alludes to the perceived way bureaucracy has metastasised into what one Right-wing critic calls a “total state”: shorthand for critiques of managerialism stretching back to James Burnham in 1941 and centring on the deadening effect of such orders on innovation and agency. As one commentator put it, in a post mourning Peanut’s death: “Like Gulliver, we are held down by thousands of tiny threads, a net of laws and regulations, all of them enacted ‘for our safety’.” And the poignancy of Peanut’s tragic martyrdom to this state of affairs was intensified by a second feature of the same critique. Namely: that the problem with this total state is that it’s not actually total. Rather, its resources are asymmetrically applied: a condition the late paleoconservative Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny”.

Francis is a risky figure to cite, having been expelled from polite conservative circles some decades ago for forbidden opinions on race. More recently, though, he’s been hailed — albeit controversially — as having anticipated the ideological core of Trumpism. Anarcho-tyranny, in Francis’s formulation, describes a political order in which armed dictatorship coexists with lawlessness. It’s widely used online to denote an order that represses society’s law-abiding members, while ignoring favoured and often far more antisocial castes.

Francis first used it to describe efforts to impose gun control on ordinary Americans, while armed drug gangs roamed the streets; the term has also recently been applied to the case of Daniel Penny, a former soldier who restrained a schizophrenic man on the New York subway after he threatened other passengers, only to end up on trial for manslaughter when the man died. Penny, whose trial is ongoing, has become a byword for Right-wing frustration at a perceived official policy of punishing public-spirited action, while turning a blind eye to antisocial behaviour. Now Peanut, too, has been framed as its victim: Marc Andreessen, a noted Silicon Valley Trump supporter, denounced Peanut’s death as textbook anarcho-tyranny.

And even with Trump in the White House, my hunch is that Sam Francis would be at least partially disappointed — for either way, the war on Middle America that he so deplored may be unstoppable at this point. In Francis’s 1991 memoir, he described how “Middle American groups” suffer “exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites” via methods including “hypertaxation”, the replacement of manufacturing with services, “the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions” and — centrally — “the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan”.

It’s not hard to see the Trumpian grievances there in outline. On the X remodelled since 2022 as Musk’s personal Trump megaphone, video montages now circulate collating a sugar-rush of Middle American highlights in support of his candidacy: a kind of Adderall paleoconservatism, all Nascar, “forgotten men and women”, McDonalds, WWE, and loathing of “globalists”. Amid that mood, the now-notorious MAGA catchphrase taps directly into the fear and loathing engendered by that middle-class decline already observed by Francis in the Nineties, widely credited for contributing to Trump’s victory in 2016, and furiously evident in 2024.

But watching election fever peak from across the pond, amid Britain’s even grimmer crucible of war on the middle class, I can’t shake the feeling that despite Trump fever, nothing is going to deliver quite the longed-for restoration of 20th-century middle-class life and mores. The Democrats smear its memory as fake news, or even white supremacy; and even the faction now powering Trumpism is less aligned with its bourgeois values than with a more patrician Right-wing progressivism. And while this is distinctly more upbeat about the future than its enemies, it’s more characterised by libertarian tech-optimism, acceptance of inequality, and disdain for bourgeois mores than anything which could easily be termed “traditional”, let alone “conservative”.

Nor are Trumpist policies likely to be much more oriented toward Middle America. Will he bring back the manufacturing jobs? Perhaps the factories might re-shore, but chances are the work will be much more automated, meaning Middle America won’t see its 20th-century jobs return. And while the personalistic Trump/Musk approach might free the talented few to soar, and might even reduce the flow of illegal migration, early indications are that it will also create still brisker headwinds against — for example — the dull work of challenging the monopoly capitalism that’s a major contributor to the downward pressure on Middle America.

In sum, and at the risk of stating the obvious: neither side is going to bring back the 20th century. And nowhere could we find this more vividly illustrated than in the story of Mark Longo and Peanut the squirrel. In the bourgeois 20th-century culture that now survives mainly in social media video reels, Longo might have made a decent living as an engineer. Only his neighbours would have known he had a pet squirrel. In the 21st century, he made better money instrumentalising this cute relationship, and the wholesome, practical visual aesthetic of his IRL job as engineer, to promote pornographic content.

Longo is only one of some two million Americans selling such material. I don’t think there is any reversing so far-reaching a moral, economic, and technological shift. Nor is there any reversing the rest of the digital revolution. In its wake, tradesmen now tame squirrels and make porn, and the future is (maybe) brain implants, robot dogs, and space colonies. Middle America has, it seems, rejected egalitarianism, anarcho-tyranny, and “power without responsibility” under the Democrats’ swarm regime, in favour of a (SpaceX) rocket-powered Trumpian future. The world had better strap in.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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Dylan B
Dylan B
5 hours ago

I don’t know what I think of Trump. On the one hand he is ridiculous. The perma tan. The hair. The ridiculous long red tie. The frankly bizarre but often funny quotes.

And then on the other hand there is that part that genuinely interests me. The drain the swamp part. The why are we doing it this way part?

Maybe it will take a ridiculous man, with some interesting allies (RFK, Tulsi and Elon) to turn America around. Maybe.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
4 hours ago
Reply to  Dylan B

Tell me about it. I like to think of myself as a reasonably modern, well-educated woman who can take care of herself and with an aversion to primitive “me, Tarzan – you, Jane” behaviour.
And YET – I can’t help but be impressed by Trump’s ability to come within a hair’s breadth of death and get right up and pump the air with his fist. And now, likely win the election.
I don’t think it’s the masculinity that impresses me so much as the sheer defiance and the resilience of the guy. The latter of which we softy westerners could certainly do with more of.

Brett H
Brett H
1 hour ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Yes, this is not about masculinity or any aspects of gender but about powerful personalities that make things happen in this world, so many of them being American. For a long time we’ve had nothing like this and for a few generations it’s truly a shock and a challenge to their thinking that you might actually be allowed to have a personality that is yours and to develop it further as you choose.

Carlos Danger
Carlos Danger
4 hours ago
Reply to  Dylan B

In 1966 management expert Peter Drucker wrote a book called The Effective Executive. It’s a good book, with insight. (Though a little boring and dated in places.) One insight in particular stands out for me. “Strong people have strong weaknesses.” He points out that some people in judging executive ability focus on weaknesses rather than strengths. But that’s wrong.
Instead of trying to find an executive with no real weaknesses, Peter Drucker said, look at strengths. If you choose a person without weaknesses, they will be mediocre at best and incompetent at worst. Where there are peaks there are valleys. Choose for strengths, and look past the weaknesses.
Looked at that way, Donald Trump does very well. He has his weaknesses, and they are strong weaknesses, but his strengths are tremendous, a lifetime of accomplishments. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has few weaknesses, but few strengths either. A list of her accomplishments, other than winning elections, is empty.

Last edited 3 hours ago by Carlos Danger
RA Znayder
RA Znayder
1 hour ago
Reply to  Dylan B

Maybe. But of course we can look at his first term. How much did he do for Middle America back then? And Elon? How likely is it that he has ulterior motives? Perhaps they all do. After all, these people are as distant from working people as you can possibly get. And I also think that people in the Rust Belt know all this. They are not stupid but they are out of options because the left turned their backs on them.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 hour ago
Reply to  RA Znayder

I don’t think Elon has any ulterior motives – at least any that are mercenary. He already has more money than anyone could spend in several lifetimes. He strikes me as being genuinely concerned for the well-being of democracy and the freedom of speech upon which it depends.

Claire Grey
Claire Grey
3 hours ago

As a small c conservative I have no wish to “bring back the 20th century”, and I seriously doubt whether any other c conservative does either. As far as I am aware the West has, on the whole, always managed to maintain an equilibrium between the forces of technological progress and social traditions which serve humanity well.
Technological progress and the coming thing are inevitable, but they need to be tempered by all that we have learnt and created for ourselves in the past that is good, which, in my view, is conservatism at it’s best.

I am not American but, for what it is worth, I think Trump is probably the leader required right now. Harris would have been just a puppet.

Last edited 2 hours ago by Claire Grey
J Bryant
J Bryant
11 hours ago

Great article with Mary Harrington on form. It’s old times again on Unherd.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
5 hours ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Yes – I just wish she’d stop mentioning in every article how she’s online so much. We know. And to be honest, she’s preaching to the converted because the people that read and comment on her articles must spend a sizeable chunk of their lives on the internet aswell.

AC Harper
AC Harper
2 hours ago

In my opinion “diffuse accountability” eventually becomes so diffuse that no accountability exists. Why do we elect leaders who have no accountability? Politicians who kick the can further down the road, or into the long grass, are not doing anything.
Arguably the USA election was a call for greatness vs a call for further diffusion of accountability. With a Trump win (both in electoral college votes and the popular vote), Republicans winning the Senate and probably the House it would appear that the “diffuse accountability” mindset has failed.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
4 hours ago

I think Trump will go down in history as an Andrew Jackson figure: a highly controversial, highly masculine figure who polarises the electorate and reforms the political landscape for years to come.
According to the White House website:
As national politics polarized around Jackson and his opposition, two parties grew out of the old Republican Party–the Democratic Republicans, or Democrats, adhering to Jackson; and the National Republicans, or Whigs, opposing him.
Who knows what will now happen to the two parties. It’s turbulent, but exciting to watch.
Also a word on the high-powered masculinity of the Tech Bros and how anti-Trumpers are repelled by it. Let’s ask: how did it come to be that the Tech Bros came to be such a thing, and that they are “bros” and not “sistaz” or whatever?
I look at Elon Musk and co and don’t see threatening masculinity as such, but a dominant characteristic which I think is still more widespread among men than women and which drives them to success (and notoriety): more powerful egos, burning ambition to achieve, affinity for risk, more likely to look at insane things and go “yeah, I can do that”.
I’m not saying that women don’t have these traits, many do – it’s just that, at this point in the female emancipation story – women are still held back by certain stereotypes that they have to wrestle with. I think – in 20-30 years time, tech will be more female.
And the final point to this: don’t feel threatened by the masculinity of the tech bros and criticise them for it. Do more to empower women and help them develop the characteristics which are critical to this kind of success and influence.

Last edited 4 hours ago by Katharine Eyre
Carlos Danger
Carlos Danger
3 hours ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

I’ve worked in Silicon Valley as a lawyer for many years now. It is male-dominated, that’s for sure. But there are some women who do well at the highest ranks here. One person who showed she had what it takes to build a company from nothing into a strong unicorn was Elizabeth Holmes. And look where her efforts got her. She’s sitting in a federal prison in Texas when she should be leading a company.

Last edited 3 hours ago by Carlos Danger
Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
1 hour ago
Reply to  Carlos Danger

Elizabeth Holmes was a monumental fraud, I don’t think she’s a suitable role model. For anyone.
The lesson from that drama (as well as the Wirecard fraud) is how even well-educated, experienced people can be led down the garden path if there’s a lot of money to be made.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 hour ago

For all his faults Trump has done something that the world needed doing: he’s created a new coalition of working people that crosses the class and racial barriers that his opponents have worked so hard to erect. That’s a good thing.

Carlos Danger
Carlos Danger
11 hours ago

Not to mention that Mark Longo’s porn is gay porn, which he describes as “kinky”, that uses the word “squirrel” in a metaphoric way that in my innocence I’m not conversant with. But the porn did not feature the now-dead P’Nut, apparently. And Mark Longo’s German wife Daniela has her own OnlyFans site.

The Longos did well well with their porn, claiming that they made $800,000 in one month that allowed them to buy their 350-acre farm in southern New York that they moved to six months ago. It’s unclear how their finances are faring now, though. Mark Longo implies that they are not doing well.

I don’t think the fate of poor P’Nut will last long in people’s memories, and poor Fred the raccoon is already a forgotten footnote. Nor do I see any lessons to be taken from them, other than if you move to New York with illicit wildlife you should be aware that they are strict.

This raid apparently came after the Longos had been warned, and the warrantfor their seizure had been signed off by four department heads and a judge. When you flout the law by showing your illegal pet to millions of people around the world on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to advertise your porn business, expect a knock on the door.

I too think the results of this election (I predict a Kamala Harris victory) won’t change much. But I do think the president does make a difference. Joe Biden has been just a figurehead, and the results he has achieved (or actually, not achieved) reflect that.

Joe Biden should have been active in the Ukraine mess and the Middle East mess. He should have been an honest broker, bringing both sides together. Like Donald Trump did, and would do again. But Joe Biden was missing on action. And Kamala Harris will be just as bad, if not worse.

It’s like the CEO in a public company. I was general counsel of a public company that changed CEOs during my tenure. The change was not a monumental one, but still it mattered. A lot.

martin ordody
martin ordody
1 hour ago

Can’t agree with anything. Just to predict what under Trump will not work is wrong. Maybe the better analysis would check what under the Democrats went wrong and what he should do to correct.

Will D. Mann
Will D. Mann
1 hour ago

Regardless of whether or not Trump’s policies will be good for America, his isolationism, Tariffs, promises to withdraw climate change agreements, NATO and “end the war in Ukraine” will have huge impact on the rest of the world, including us in the UK.

Victor James
Victor James
1 hour ago

Typical Mary article. Subtle mocking of the ‘right’, but restrained and respectful language for the ‘left’.

Mustard Clementine
Mustard Clementine
1 hour ago

Neither Trump, nor any Western populist, truly cares to restore the middle class. They have simply been able to take advantage of the fact that not enough in opposition to them seem to think it necessary to meaningfully address declining living standards. They clearly don’t even need to deliver on any of their promises, for this trick to keep working. Simply saying you notice things people notice – even when you’ve had years in power already to suggest you won’t actually do anything meaningful about them, either – is apparently enough when the other side still leans much too far towards a “don’t believe your own eyes” bent.

Sigh.

Chipoko
Chipoko
1 hour ago

“Middle American groups” suffer “exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites” via methods including “hypertaxation”, the replacement of manufacturing with services, “the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions” and — centrally — “the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan”.
Very well articulated!

Tom Lewis
Tom Lewis
6 hours ago

Mary for President.
There are SO many fantastic people out there, how the hell did we get to the point where the only options on offer come polling day are several kinds of awful, which ever side, if any, they claim to represent ?

Douglas Redmayne
Douglas Redmayne
2 hours ago

Unregulated ” big tech” means AGI and the full automation of labour will happen faster because regulation and free speech guardrails add cost and inhibit progress. Many Trump voters will be rendered permanently unemployed but older Democrat voters with pensions ( and I) will at least get robot servants and self driving cars.

Dillon Eliassen
Dillon Eliassen
2 hours ago

“But as its enemies are forever pointing out, “The West” is de facto the American Empire, and Britain one of its protectorates. In other words: this is also our election, and who occupies the White House is intensely relevant to us. We just don’t get to vote.”
You Brits are lucky we Americans ain’t into taxation without representation.

Terry M
Terry M
15 minutes ago

With 161 million registered voters, all you can really contest is vibes.
Mary completely misses the mark. This election was about issues – immigration, inflation, abortion, war, Israel, Iran – that were often confused with and by memes; Mary only saw the memes. Kamala et al were hoping that’s all the people saw because that’s all she had. Eventually enough people were exposed to her shallow, vapid, shifting views and inability to articulate a position on anything, and went to Trump.