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

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.

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.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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