Loser Behavior

Or, What Trump really reveals about our great and terrible nation

The only thing that ultimately matters in life—the only thing that makes life meaningful—is being a sincerely good person. That is the core insight of every ethics worthy of the name. They obviously have different ideas of what that looks like in practice, but the agreement on that core point is what grounds the debate. (And, to start a fight I don’t intend to finish in this post, I might suggest that utilitarianism’s distinct lack of any coherent attempt to propose what a good person would be, aside from a pass-through for the hedonic calculus, means that it is not even an ethical position, that it fails to cross the threshold into the territory of morality.)

Lately I have been reading Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, which is primarily concerned with the relationship between religion and being a genuinely good person. He proposes that the purpose of religion, properly understood, is to provide us with a kind of social and intellectual infrastructure that can help us along the (for him, exceptionally arduous) path to being a genuinely good person. Hence ideas like God or the immortality of the soul function to give us a sense that there is some final authority on who is a good person and that the apparent mismatch between good personhood and worldly honors and wealth will ultimately be resolved, while the notion of a “church” represents a free association of individuals to support each other in becoming better people. For Kant, there is a great deal in Christianity that can be translated into moral terms like this—in fact, he proposes that if you have to start from a concrete historical religious tradition, Christianity is the best available option.

Nonetheless, every historical faith, even Christianity, poses a danger: namely, that it will give people the impression that they can attain the status and rewards of being a genuinely good person without actually being a genuinely good person. They get the idea that what will make them good in the eyes of God—the final authority on the value of human activities, after all!—is assenting to arbtirary assertions, or performing certain rituals, or “cashing in” on a deposit of abstract good personhood that has been stockpiled on their behalf. At its very worst, this attitude can produce pathologies like those seen in my former tribe of Christians, who proudly declare, “I’m not perfect, just forgiven” (a slogan that now sounds to me like a threat), habitually spit out the phrase “good person” as though it’s an insult, and remain absolutely entranced by the most worthless human being ever to live.

I personally find Kant’s account of what a sincerely good person looks like to be both excessively demanding and emotionally unrealistic, but I think we can make use of his notion of somehow wanting to “cheat” one’s way to being regarded as a good person without actually being so. It’s something everyone has done at one time or another. What is distinctive about our era is how absolutely pervasive this type of behavior is, and to grasp what is going on in contemporary culture, we need to go beyond Kant’s focus on the hypocrisies of traditional religion. I propose that the most effective framework for applying Kant’s insight to our godforsaken world is the category of loser behavior.

Let’s start with my own confession and self-analysis. I admit that, like presumably everyone, I have sometimes been caught up in the emblems of respect and recognition more than the qualities that would warrant that respect and recognition. As I related in my post about my professional trajectory, I suffered for a long time from the mismatch between my “official” academic standing and what I regarded as my achievements and reputation. On one level, that complaint was fair and justified, but on another level, my fixation on it over the years, my continual return to the topic for outraged venting, was loser behavior. No one who really knew me or my work cared about any of that, and anyone who did use those factors to demean or dismiss me was not anyone I should have been worried about anyway. Instead of obsessing about the symbolic trappings of academic success (of which one can never finally have “enough”), I should be focusing on what really matters: my teaching, research, and writing. Those are the things that are in my control, and those are what really determine my worth in the eyes of anyone worthy of my respect. But I lose sight of that from time to time, because complaining is easy and satisfying and getting down to work is hard.

With that framework in mind, let’s now direct our gaze to the commanding heights of world politics. Trump’s decision to sideline the Venezuelan opposition leader María Machado because she received a Nobel prize that he believed he deserved was loser behavior, and his acceptance of Machado’s (pathetic! sad!) gesture of actually giving him her Nobel medal was even moreso. It fits into Kant’s definition perfectly—he wants to be recognized as a brilliant, world-shaping statesman, and he believes that he can achieve that by bullying his way into the prize that certifies people as such. He wasn’t able to bully the actual committee, but he was able to bully the actual recipient who—much like Zelinskyy after their infamous blow-up—probably felt she had to swallow her pride and placate this man who holds her country’s fate in his hands. What he did was evil, but it was also pathetic. Who could hear the story of Trump stealing her Nobel medal without thinking, “What a fucking loser”?

One thinks here also of Elon Musk. It’s not enough for him to be the world’s richest man, to be lauded as a visionary entrepreneur, etc., etc. He also wants to be regarded as a political kingmaker and public intellectual. He pursued the latter goal by reprogramming Twitter’s algorithm to boost his engagement, to the point where he is now apparently driving himself insane by cramming his brain full of right-wing memes and conspiracy theories 23 hours a day. Meanwhile, all his efforts to steer the great ship of state have been failures—most notably DOGE, whose only concrete act was to “feed USAID into the woodchipper” and consign thousands to suffering and premature death. Not only does Musk fail to understand the consequences of his actions, he even wanted to be patted on the back for deciding to spend his weekend destroying USAID instead of partying (this despite the fact that he was obviously on drugs the entire time). Again, what he did was evil, but it was also pathetic—arguably even more than Trump, Musk is the archetype of loser behavior.

What marks both these men is an absolutely failure to understand what life is about. They mistake fear—or anticipation of gain—for respect. In place of genuine relationships, they surround themselves with sycophantic yes-men. (This is what inspired my cover image, which is drawn from a Sopranos episode where Tony realizes that the uproarious laughter that meets his every quip is driven by some combination of fear and sucking up, never genuine comeraderie and mirth.) The result is that they inhabit a completely empty world where they are the only individual who exists, and all they can do is keep demanding acts of submission from the faceless crowd of humanity that they regard, using the parlance of video games, as “non-player characters” (NPCs). Their first-person experience of life must be almost unbearably miserable. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies—which they in fact are! They are truly evil, but as a normal empathetic person, I can see that they act the way they do in part because on some level they recognize that they are pathetic and can’t see a way out of it other than doubling down on precisely what makes them pathetic.

I’m not saying anything here that a viewer of sitcoms would not already know: every bully is a loser. In their quest for recognition and prestige—which everyone rightly desires!—they have chosen a method that can only guarantee alienation and resentment. The only way to right the ship is to repent and change their life, but that would represent an intolerable loss of face. And so most bullies wind up trying to pathetically bully their way through life. Most of them wind up bitter and alone, and presumably not a few end up in prison. But once in a while, a very special loser bully is singled out to ascend to the summit of global power, where his pathetic failure to be a human being suddenly becomes Everyone Else’s Problem.

As pundits constantly remind us, though, Trump could not have reached that great height without getting votes, and he could not have gotten those votes if he wasn’t offering something that resonates with voters. I think that’s right. Where the punditry makes their mistake, however, is that they attempt to come up with some rational, justifiable point of identification—economic anxiety, “legitimate concerns” about immigration, resentment of patronizing HR training webinars, etc. Such petty concerns are not equal to the magnitude of what Trump represents. Similarly, many pundits seem obsessed with the idea that Trump tells us some kind of Deep Truth about America. I concur, but again, the Deep Truths most often put forward are usually stupidly obvious (e.g., “a lot Americans are fucking racists”—wow, keen insight, do you have a TED Talk?).

In my view, the point of resonance with Trump and the Deep Truth he represents are one and the same: we are a nation of losers, each and every one of us. Liberals are losers because they imagine that they will be credited as good people for going through the motions—of “norms” that no one understands or cares about, of HR training webinars that are genuinely patronizing, of mouthing certain neologisms coined by activists or academics, of “showing their support” for the right things (which consists of essentially saying they “support” them), of posting awkward inscrutable signs about what they believe “in this house.” If they go through all the ritual observances of liberalism, their father who sees in secret will reward them—presumably with an NPR totebag. But meanwhile, they can continue to be mediocre-to-shitty people—pawning off the poor and needy on impossible bureaucratic systems, pushing relentlessly for their own child’s advantage over the public good, treating other people like garbage for not properly using the approved phraseology that will magically produce social justice, using therapized jargon to try to win every argument in advance by pathologizing the smallest social frictions or disagreements.

That is all loser behavior. Devoting your whole life to carting your child around to endless extra-curriculars so you can beat the other parents at your children’s Game of Life is loser behavior. Thinking you’ve scored righteousness points by finding yet another thing that can be brought into a strained analogy with ableism is loser behavior. Putting up a liberal “in this house” yard sign is loser behavior. There is nothing in the concrete practices of mainstream liberal culture that anyone can or should find admirable or attractive. It is a complete failure as an ethos for human beings.

But at least it has some ostensible connection with morality! At least the politically correct jargon has some intention of creating mutual respect and understanding. At least the patronizing webinars are trying to prevent genuinely negative behavior. At least the people who (inscrutably) profess to believe that “water is life” want the world to be a better place in some sense. Hence there is a seed there that can be cultivated, so that, for example, one might be able to convince an earnest white liberal that treating the Black people in their work and social circles with respect as individuals may be more important than intoning fatalistic slogans they read in a guide to how to be anti-racist.

There is no such seed of truth in the right’s truly loserly response to all this loserly liberalism. The only sliver of insight that we can grant them is a recognition of liberal hypocrisy—not a high bar. But instead of responding to that hypocrisy by cultivating the authentic values liberal culture is failing to meaningfully uphold, the right rejects both the virtue and the signal. For instance, the convoluted ways that liberals try to show respect to disadvantaged groups are signs that we must not show those groups respect—indeed, that insulting and degrading them is a morally salutary act.

The emptiness of the gesture at good personhood means that good personhood simply does not exist, that the only non-hypocritical attitude is sheer self-seeking domination. This is the mindset of a bully who concludes from his failure to secure true friendship that there just isn’t any such thing as a friend—that all the kids with friends, all the kids who inspire genuine admiration in their peers, are just more effective bullies. The only answer is to either become a better bully or to become part of a bully’s entourage.

In this framework, we might analogize the decision-making process of the much-lauded “swing voters”—those inconsiderate losers who can’t be bothered to take their duty as citizens seriously enough to make a clear decision between two very different parties (i.e., two types of losers)—in 2024 to the deliberations of the lovable loser Tom Wambsgans from Succession when Kendall invites him to join his faction against the family patriach Logan Roy. In response to Kendall’s impotent entreaties (filled, like much liberal rhetoric, with some combination of whining entitlement and incoherent ideas that one can’t figure out whether to take seriously), Tom responds simply that he’s seen Kendall get fucked constantly, but he’s never seen Logan get fucked. From a loser perspective, that math checks out. There is ultimately nothing but fucking and getting fucked, and if you know you are destined for the latter, you might as well try to hide behind the one doing the fucking to stave off the inevitable.

The question for me is whether that mass of losers who decided to join the bully’s entourage is reachable—and, honestly, whether it even matters anymore. By all appearances, these people are repeatedly, intentionally, freely choosing to destroy their own intellect and moral sense—all to lord it over some fictitious “lib” that exists mainly in their own tortured fantasies. Do they really value whatever Trump is giving them more than they value their own friends and family? Do they love their Fox News hosts and their favorite podcasts more than they love their own grandchildren? After being so thoroughly trained in contrarian doublespeak and deliberate provocation for its own sake, are they even capable of recognizing an attempt to have a genuine conversation about any important matter, much less participating in it in any meaningful way?

Kant held out the theoretical possibility that everyone is reachable, that anyone who has chosen evil as their maxim (for him, basically everyone who’s ever lived) can still freely choose the good. To imagine otherwise is to imagine a kind of diabolic will that can will nothing but evil. In other words, to imagine that our fellow citizens are irrevocably beyond the pale is to demonize them. That certainly feels appropriate sometimes, given the magnitude of what they’ve talked themselves into. And it may even be true! But by cutting off contact, by giving up on any attempt to reach them, we run the risk of turning our own demonic diagnosis into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t know that I’m a good enough person yet to act on this insight. There are people in my life that I’m holding at a distance, and plenty more whose contact I am distinctly no longer seeking out. But at the end of the day, even if we somehow manage to stave off the worst disaster and seize the reins once again, we have to live in a society with these fucking losers—and the only way to make that prospect livable is to stop being such fucking losers ourselves.