The week I became a father, two things happened. Fires engulfed the Amazon, and a man who made his living as a columnist for the largest newspaper in the country complained to a university provost that a professor had called him a bedbug on the Internet. This was the world into which I welcomed my first child: a place where people with power behaved like children while the planet burned.
Five and a half years later, our civilizational outlook has not improved. It is not just the fires, floods, zoonotic diseases, and other insignia of ecological emergency. It is also the discomfiting spectacle of a leadership class so extravagantly unfit for the task at hand. Incompetent rulers are nothing new. They are one of human history’s main themes. What feels more specific to our time is the extent to which our leaders have responded to a moment of severe and proliferating crisis by regressing into a childlike state, and encouraging their followers to do the same.
In 1933, the year that Hitler took power in Germany, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich proposed that fascism begins at home, in the domestic sphere. The first authoritarian state is the family, he argued, ruled by the father. Here children learn the submission to authority—and the identification with it—that makes a good fascist subject. The idea proved influential for later thinkers trying to map the psychology of authoritarianism, and it has an obvious kernel of truth. In our own extremely desublimated era, one doesn’t have to look very far for verification: “It’s like Daddy arrived and he’s taking his belt off,” a ruddy Mel Gibson gushed the other day on Fox News about Trump’s visit to Los Angeles, during which he had scolded Karen Bass, the city’s mayor and a Black woman, at a press conference.
But Trump is poorly cast for the part of patriarch. While he glowers in his official portraits, his political style is more silly than stern. He babbles. He is a creature of impulse and instinct, fickle and dysregulated. His humor is that of the schoolyard; his train of thought is, at minimum, haphazard. If you have ever heard a toddler tell a story, it sounds like Trump: digressive, bizarre, filled with tonal shifts, often hilarious. His inner circle exudes a similarly infantile affect. Elon Musk is nothing if not a smirking preadolescent. J.D. Vance looks uncannily like a baby, which is presumably why he decided to grow a beard, with the result that he now looks like a bearded baby. “Let me say very simply,” he told an audience of antiabortion fanatics in his first speech as vice president: “I want more babies in the United States of America!”
It is stressful to be young. The world is confusing, the process of fitting oneself into it long and painful. But these difficulties are offset by certain pleasures, chief among them the relative absence of responsibility. If children misbehave they can be punished, but in moral and legal terms they are not accountable for their actions to the same degree as adults are. When people feel nostalgic for their childhoods, even when they had bad childhoods, this is what they miss: to be carefree.
The desire to be carefree is integral to the psychic allure of Trumpism. It is pleasurable to disinter one’s deepest resentments, to worship power, to go berserk with rage, to be floridly conspiratorial, to know nothing, to hallucinate Marxists under the bed, to picture the people you hate in tears and in chains. But the unifying principle, the rind that envelops and coheres these delights, is the abdication of adulthood’s defining obligation: to take responsibility for oneself and others. It is precisely this responsibility that Trump and his set refuse. They are carefree in the face of catastrophe. And they give their supporters permission to take the same flight from responsibility—indeed, their political appeal depends on it. They want more babies in the United States of America.
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Reactionary infantilism is not original to Trump. He is not, after all, an especially original figure. His specific genius lies in taking long-festering inflammations within the Republican mind and aggravating the swelling to the point of rupture. Back in 2012 the editors of n+1 identified “the personality type and cultural style of the contemporary right-wing commentator” as “Big Baby.” Rush Limbaugh was the first Big Baby, followed by Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Bill O’Reilly. Trump sits easily in this lineage. Big Baby, the editors explained, was not merely “juvenile, impish, and wounded,” but a devoted hater of women. One of his favorite enemies was the Nanny State, the government imagined as a woman:
Contemporary Big Baby conservatism relies on the conceit that there is someone who wants to legislate against trivial and immature pleasures, who doesn’t want you to have fun — a giant Nanny (with Nancy Pelosi’s face) who regulates for regulation’s sake. Again, as with real babies, it’s only the rule standing between Me and cookie that seems real — not the rationale, nor the collective good that could come of mutual restraint. The future can’t be kept in view. Cookie is too big!
Trump inherits and intensifies this legacy. Meanwhile, the acceleration of environmental breakdown has simultaneously made the escape from adulthood more appealing and given Big Baby new limits to transgress. Lockdowns, vaccinations, electric vehicle “mandates”: Mommy has never been so mean. Fortunately, the joy of defying her grows in proportion. Usually my kids will wait until I’m in the room before they eat some forbidden nub of chocolate.
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No picture of Trumpism would be complete without the Democratic Party bumbling about in the background, and here too the logic of Big Baby finds a foothold. The counterpart to the feral puerility of American conservatism is a senescent American liberalism whose grandees are well into their second childhood. Watching Biden’s smooth, uncomprehending face at the debate, as Trump snickered Bart Simpsonishly beside him, we came into possession of a perfect emblem of Democratic babyhood.
It cannot be banished by banishing Biden, as it is a more general condition. The party is run by sundowning seniors who refuse to cede the driver’s seat even though they pose a danger to themselves and others: recall Dianne Feinstein berating a room full of literal children for politely asking her to do something about climate change. But liberal infantilism is not solely a product of physical decline; it afflicts functionaries of all ages. Think of the attendees of the 2024 Democratic National Convention plugging their ears like grade-schoolers as protesters read aloud the names of children killed in Gaza. These are the symptoms of another party in flight from responsibility, but having far less fun along the way. The Democrats have staked so much on being the adults in the room, but they are actually something much worse: those hated children who think they are adults. At recess, they would be bullied.
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Nobody went to jail for the Iraq War or the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In a time of mass criminalization, when children can be tried as adults, the worst adults are never punished. Creating a culture of elite impunity has been a bipartisan affair, and it has bred the cynicism on which Trumpism feeds. Equally bipartisan is the state’s decades-long divestiture from the obligation of caring for its citizens, a process that the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.”
Earlier generations of social movements were able to force the creation of institutions that, however imperfectly, bore a degree of responsibility for our collective wellbeing. The story of the last half-century is the corrosion of those institutions, with prisons, private equity, and other toxins oozing through the cracks. It is a sign of how antisocial our society has become that the basic values one learns in kindergarten—to share, to be kind, to tell the truth, to reciprocate and cooperate—are so vilified in our political life. More than once I have had the thought that I am raising my children for a world that does not exist.
Responsibility is not a concept we typically associate with the political left. But it was one of Grace Lee Boggs’s favorite words. The philosopher and activist, together with her husband James Boggs, believed that revolutionaries must take responsibility for creating a new society in which people take responsibility for one another. Protest is good, and often required, but the Boggses believed that it carried a risk. When we protest injustice, we put the onus of restitution elsewhere. A revolution, they believed, is less about making demands on those in power than building new power from below. This is a daunting but exhilarating prospect: millions of people acting as architects of a social order that endows them with the freedom to cultivate their broadest selves, a commonwealth of the grown. When Big Baby sleeps, these are its nightmares.
