Even in one of the country’s bluest metro areas, the potent seeds of Trump’s MAGA movement are scattered about.
byJohn Wilmes
You may have heard of Nick Fuentes recently. A longtime character in the extended Manoverse of the Internet, he is especially shrill, sanctimonious, and vile in his approach to the purported problem of what ails the modern man. On election night, as the majority of votes went Donald Trump’s way, Fuentes introduced himself to his largest audience yet by tweeting: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” He was subsequently doxxed and revealed to be a resident of the near west Chicago suburb of Berwyn. In the following week, angry visitors went to his home, and one of them was met by Fuentes with a bottle of pepper spray in hand.
There is much to chew on here, but when looking at the viral photo of this encounter, you may have an especially local thought: “Damn, that is a very Chicago doorway.” A brown brick three-flat with a wooden entry, built before most readers were born, it is the kind of home that Al Capone would’ve been familiar with during his Cicero years. Much of this cluster of suburbia looks this way: so midcentury provincial that one wonders how much of the area has even digested the political developments of the 1960s. Maybe that understanding could have occurred if the country had taken a more bountiful, inclusive turn over the past half-century, but instead, deindustrialization, deregulation, and hyperfinancialization have alienated society from itself.
If you’ve grown up in broader Chicagoland, like myself or Fuentes (who’s from nearby La Grange and graduated from the same high school as my father), it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that potent seeds of the MAGA movement are scattered about—even in one of the country’s bluest metro areas. Throughout the western suburbs, which stretch from Cook County into DuPage, there is a vision of suburban idyll often found in digital “trad” culture. Here, you can easily imagine suffering housewives managing the largesse of their two-faced husbands, who wine and dine downtown before feigning nobility back at home—standard Mad Men stuff.
To be sure, the architecture and civic planning of Chicago’s western suburbs are beautiful and not by accident. In the 1950s, the U.S. was riding high after the defeat of European fascism and the conquest of international business, and visionaries around the nation were still emboldened by the vast creative subsidies of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Hang around the area where Fuentes grew up and you’ll be struck by the fruits of this 20th-century moment. Riverside, one of the first ever planned suburbs, imagined by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1860s after he sculpted New York City’s Central Park, completed its development process during the baby boom of the 1950s and remains one of the country’s most exquisitely quaint villages.
But Fuentes and other young men have not in their lifetime seen the construction of a positive myth; only the expiration of that past one. This is hardly an excuse for their reactionary worldview, which mourns the loss of the wrong things—violently lopsided gender dynamics, harsher discrimination, narrower cultural expression.
Grieving the fading of these gross advantages is the habit of the losers to which Donald Trump’s GOP speaks. They are shut out by history and capital from a warmer and lovelier sense of community and see only the old bones of it. The new affluence for them is chillier and more exclusive: glass and steel high-rises, Cybertrucks, and imaginary Internet money. Trump won’t bring the ghosts that haunt Fuentes back to life—the president-elect will only further enable the austerity and predation that push the inventive prosperity of postwar America further into the dustbin of time.
Another Chicagoland right-wing influencer, Charlie Kirk, is more savvy about the powerful arbitrage he enacts. Kirk is from Prospect Heights, a northwest hamlet for the city’s swollest late-capitalist players with its country clubs and golf courses. When I was part of a wedding party at one of these bourgeois event halls a decade ago, a group of wealthy men told us that the groom was about to ruin his life. They cackled with menace as they offered this unsolicited nonwisdom. Their perspective would be welcome in the comment section of any video made by Kirk—who, after hacking his way into the busted U.S. media system as a high schooler by alleging liberal bias in public classrooms, went on to drop out of college to focus on his successful think tank, Turning Point USA.
Squaring the roots of both of these ascendant propaganda clowns is Russian-funded podcaster Tim Pool. Evidenced by his international investment, Pool is an itinerant hustler who grew up near Midway Airport. He left his Catholic high school before graduating and started his career in media by getting involved in Occupy Wall Street protests that he either didn’t understand or didn’t care to understand. Over time, his gimmicky video activism on the front line of rowdy scenes turned into bog-standard Republican talking points. From a chunk of Chicago where industry comes and goes freely and rapidly—currently home to perma-clogged corridors of Amazon trucks from nearby fulfillment centers—Pool is no stranger to shifting what he does to meet the money where it’s going. Should his ideology change in the coming years, we won’t have to wonder why.
Pool’s corner of the city is far from the only place in Chicagoland—or the country—where things used to be made but no longer are, where forgotten glories lose more of their luster daily. Even here, where the end of big U.S. manufacturing has not hit quite as hard as in other midwestern cities, there is decay in plain sight and little reason to believe that renewal is on the way. Some large part of Trump’s appeal is in recognizing these diminutions, somewhere in the savage miasma of his relentless and unedited speech. Trump promises chaos as the antidote to this bleak nihilism, a final epicurean blast after everything that once made us proud is over.
Rather than beginning the hard work of solving the country’s deep fractures and inequalities, the U.S. has chosen a man who capitalizes on these deficits, who speaks best at the pulpit deep within the chasms between us—and between us and the better past. He’s not the only one: Fuentes, Kirk, and Pool have all gotten rich by looking at the dissatisfaction in their sectors of Chicagoland and forging that yearning into a broadcasted ideology. Like most political figures, nationally and right here, they lack a persuasive pitch for the future, so they strip the wreckage of the past and stasis of the present for rhetorical parts to sell.
It makes sense that these spiteful junkers are homegrown. In a 21st-century political world that still hasn’t sorted through the previous century, the story of Chicago—where the national dream has thrived, died, and recovered too insufficiently—is one worth studying.
