Life is an asteroid field of memes, allusions, bad jokes, true controversies, fake controversies, new celebrities, movie reboots, etc. It’s too much to understand, and as I get older, I have to mete out my attempts. I held out for a long time figuring out who Jordan Peterson was, and I feel better for waiting. One can avoid a good deal of discourse garbage just by maintaining indifference.
Such was the case with QAnon, which I had told myself to avoid. Maybe it will quickly go away, I said, like fidget spinners. Nevertheless, it persisted, and it hit enough planets in my internet reading galaxy that I finally felt compelled. To attempt to summarize it as briefly as possible: QAnon is a conspiracy theory that posits there is a coordinated deep state, Democrat-run ring of child-murdering pedophiles, and President Trump has been picked to reveal and destroy this cabal. We are able to glimpse into the clues regarding this cult via “Q drops,” cryptic messages authored by “Q,” an anonymous government operative with extremely high security clearance. Followers of Q amplify and explicate these messages, and it has become a large enough cultural force that a couple of Q supporters are on the verge of being elected into seats of Congress.
Periodic disclosure: I dislike the current president. Further disclosure: Reading up on this particular asteroid was painful. It hurt my brain to conceive of people going through such interpretive calisthenics to find something to believe in that somehow exonerated their support of Trump, a retconning of the most brutal sort. But perhaps this is what all apostates say.
It actually reminded me a lot of when I was in high school and getting into Phish. There are a handful of songs that the group used to perform that were part of the guitar player/singer’s senior thesis. Back then, without the internet, my friends and I were constantly accumulating bits of information and gossip about which songs were part of this prog rock cycle and what it all meant, etc. (sort of a mix of The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia). Of course when you’re an adolescent, this is what you do. You learn about the world by building an analogous one and piecing together knowledge about other built-out worlds. Wrestling, prog rock, comic books. You have to put in the work to become a member.
The QAnon phenom functions as a kind of interactive interpretive game, another version of a Live Action Role Playing game, but here the people who aren’t playing are simply the uninitiated, the ones who haven’t done the research. The Q drops don’t add up, of course. That would be too easy and that would solve the quest too succinctly.
Another view of the phenomenon is that it’s a kind of internet-facilitated coping strategy for part of the population that feels, rightly or wrongly, left behind by the transformations of the country. I don’t know enough about the topic to know if it’s solely made up of downwardly mobile white people, but so much of the Trump era feels ripped from a late Faulkner novel, the revenge of the Snopes — the disgruntled, the demoralized, the demographically dispossessed.
It also shares an aura of projection, like Trump’s own insults against his enemies. If there is any deep state-like coordination going on, it seems like it’s occurring amongst the Republican Senate majority, who have collectively entered a suicide pact, so that there is effectively no daylight between them and the president. If there is a secret government conspiracy occurring, perhaps it’s the administration that attempted to collude with a foreign government in 2016 and seems just as eager to more successfully repeat the process during this election. If there is a coterie of people who are subjecting children to nearly incomprehensible cruelty, perhaps it’s the administration that intentionally separated children from their parents at the border, parents who had abandoned their old lives in order to create new, better lives for the very children they were bringing with them. (Imagine the level of evil one has to be to enact such a policy. Imagine the kind of internal moral callousness one would have to harbor to be aware of these incontrovertible facts and still support that administration. There are limits to imagination.)
And if one needed to tie this all together somehow and charge the Democrats with the most horrible, inflammatory offense known to civilization, why not reach for the readymade one — the anti-Semitic blood libel trope, centuries old? It’s a tale as old as time: the truth’s out there, man.
Finally, what it reminds me of more than anything else is a bad parody of a Thomas Pynchon novel. I remember in grad school when a professor told me to read The Crying of Lot 49. He could tell that my notions of what fiction could be were entirely too provisional. (They probably still are.) So, being the dutiful student, I went to the library and read the short novel and finished feeling partly amused and mostly baffled. Sometimes I think that postmodern literature is a brand of humor, one that you either find funny or not, and for whatever reason (hopelessly suburban? chronically conventional?) I find it only mildly humorous. I went back to my professor and asked, what happens next? Does the novel imply that Oedipa will finally find the solution to the Tristero whenever she finds out who will bid on Inverarity’s stamp collection? And my professor said, No, I don’t think so. She will simply find the next thing, which will lead to the next thing. The book was too open ended, too nakedly conspiratorial (by design) to fit my hemmed in mind, and the QAnon situation feels the same. Each bit of intel just leads to another bit of intel and if these bits don’t congeal into a stable narrative, well, then that is on purpose, in order to throw off the literal-minded such as myself. And if the identity of Q is potentially revealed, well, can that really be the true Q, since by its very nature Q is both everywhere and nowhere all at once?
Just because people don’t go to church doesn’t mean the religious impulse has completely disappeared. Perhaps a salutary function of the church is that it disciplines this religious impulse, this rage to find order, into generally more constructive ends. The Q stuff feels like a disparate group of people struggling to build a church, assembling a text, and casting for a prophet, and looking for more believers. If it all added up, you wouldn’t have a church.
I didn’t Do The Research, but I did some research. Here are my sources:
An episode of Deep Background with Noah Feldman, where he discusses QAnon’s quest-like attributes with a game designer.
An article by Gregory Stanton where he argues that QAnon is quite simply re-branded Nazism.
Episode #166 of Reply All, where the hosts attempt a theory on the initial and morphing identity of Q.
A Slate article gloss of the same.
Tangentially related, here is Timothy Burke’s post about the core of unpersuadable brutalism lurking within our political conflict.