In the aftermath of this week’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the keyboard warriors of the Left have been meme-ing the sh*t out of the absurdity of Trump’s remarks. Among the numerous absurdities, two statements, in particular, have become viral. (1) “[Immigrants] are eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people who live there.” (2) “[Kamala Harris] wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”

Of course, the meme-ification of Trump’s statements is funny. Underlying the jokes, however, is a pursuit I’d argue is pretty noble: to neutralize Trump’s xenophobia by means of absurdist mocking — the notion that “these statements are so nonsensical that the only way to properly engage with them is to sublimate the statements into absurdist humor.”

When I first got involved in social justice activism in 2011, my fellow student activists and I often found ourselves challenging the prevailing norms. We’d argue, “Sure, Obama is black, and he’s a Democrat. But what do those facts matter if he’s deporting more immigrants and bombing brown countries more than his Republican predecessors?” Back then, our task was to deconstruct racism — with the cultural consensus being that overt racism was unacceptable.

Somehow we’ve regressed. Today, it’s mainstream to support statements like “immigrants are eating your pets” and to use lines like “they want to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prisons” as a fear tactic. Unlike the more subtle, postmodern racism of the Obama era, Trump’s brand of racism is cruder, more id-driven — and I say ‘id-driven’ very deliberately. It certainly seems to me that the current state of American politics is a projection of Freud’s theory on the structure of the psyche: Trump embodies the id, Harris represents a superego injunction, and the American electorate is a fractured ego struggling to mediate between the two. If indeed the contemporary electorate is a projection of the structure of the ego, perhaps it is entirely appropriate, then, that the polls show Trump and Harris neck-and-neck. How regressive and disappointing.

Yet, I would argue that part of this regression is the fault of the 2010s-era Left.

One of the significant theoretical shifts that the 2010s-era Left popularized was the rejection of the sanctity of ‘freedom of speech.’ The argument went something like this: “Individual expressions of racism are merely projections of a larger structural racism. This structural racism is fundamentally inequitable, making any attempts at ‘civil, equal’ discourse almost impossible. Moreover, individual expressions of racism are violent, causing real human harm, so we should be cautious about engaging with racists. Instead of debating them, we should really consider shutting them down and focus instead on dismantling the fundamental structures that enable racism.”

While I agree that we live in a structurally racist society, and that this structural inequity makes individual conversations extremely difficult, the move towards just ‘shutting down’ any racist speech never made sense to me. Yes, engaging with racists is challenging and potentially harmful. But what is the alternative? I worried back then — as I do now — that while you can momentarily silence someone with enough pressure, repressing deeply held beliefs only makes them fester. Psychoanalysis teaches us that repression of strongly held, sincere drives doesn’t eliminate them; it merely warps them into something ten-times stronger and much more monstrous.

Isn’t this precisely what we’re seeing now in the 2020s? After decades of the xenophobic Right being unable to express itself in mainstream discourse, its repressed energy has returned with a stronger, more monstrous vengeance. Now, the Right is screaming absurdities like “immigrants are eating your pets” at the top of its lungs and in unison.

The signal of what has been repressed is not subtle. Perhaps it is precisely the xenophobic Right’s fixation with the “woke mind virus” that is out to “cancel them” that psychologically enables them to spout or otherwise agree with a bunch of racist sh*t constantly.

To be clear, I’m not saying that the xenophobic Right isn’t causing death and harm — they most certainly are. I’m also not saying that the 2010s-era Left’s desanctification of ‘freedom of speech’ wasn’t a necessary world-historical development with noble intentions. My point is this: if you tell a devout Catholic going through puberty that sexual thoughts are the literal devil, you may very well end up with a grown adult who’s into some kinky sh*t.

One final observation. Like most people who don’t like Trump, I think that the statement “immigrants are eating your dogs” is pretty wild. On a more general level, the Left has been watching in horror as Trump has been spewing a truly endless, endless stream of nonsensical absurdity of wild sh*t for years and years. When the xenophobic Right watches the Left react to this absurdity, the xenophobic Right has labeled these anti-Trump reactions as ‘Trump derangement syndrome.’

One common explanation that Trump supporters offer for their support of Trump is that it is precisely Trump’s unfiltered, “truthful” nature that they like — and when enough people agree that a pathology is what unites them in a positive sense and then negatively projects that pathology outwards, you can pretty much guarantee that the agreement is part of the pathology, i.e., an unconscious defense.

The bug in the computer system is not a bug. The bug is the feature.

If it is indeed the case — as 2010s-era Leftists argued — that the fundamental nature of social/power relations is flawed, what use is it then to engage in “meaningful, civil dialogue”? Could it be that the contemporary xenophobic Right has adopted this key tenet of the 2010s-era Left — that the contemporary xenophobic Right is under the understanding that words are empty and that power is everything?

For all this time, the Left has been horrified that Trump’s statements haven’t led to the xenophobic Right’s horror.

Here’s one last psychoanalytic possibility, a possibility that I haven’t seen explicitly brought up: perhaps Trump’s absurd statements are not the point. When you’re dealing with pathology, the “point” is never the point. In the aforementioned Catholic adult hypothetical, it is not that the hypothetical Catholic adult does some “devious” sex act and then feels shame. Rather, he feels shame precisely so that he may allow himself psychically to engage in the sex act — and this is important — that he wanted to do in the first place.

Let those last two sentences sink in.

What if Trump doesn’t enact horrible political change because he’s unhinged? What if he says absurd sh*t precisely so that he may enable that change?