Duke’s election was an embarrassment for the Republican Party and was viciously opposed by its mainstream members. He had, however, successfully co-opted the aesthetics of that mainstream. Now, this dynamic is at play in the Republican Party once more, except this time those in power have discovered an unprecedented tolerance for extremists. Duke was quickly hustled out of political life, the centrist machinery cranking up to eliminate a poisonous anomaly. But in Donald Trump’s second term, the courting of those with extremist views has become not only accepted, but an asset.

The ultras need not hide anymore. Americans have surpassed the age of the “perfect media candidate”, of crisp suits and Persilschein; what they want now is a firecracker whose madness and badness is well and truly on display. This is how they ended up with the leader of a government department doing a Nazi salute, something Duke would never have dared — but with this new crop of Republican livewires, the volatility is the point.

Duke’s ascension had much to do with race — he stood in the dystopian-sounding District 81, where 99.6% of the population was white and many resented the black population of nearby New Orleans. Trump, conversely, was elected by a broad sweep of Americans, surprising commentators with his victory across racial lines. This time around the biggest zealots are the misogynists, and the divide is between men and women.

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So much of MAGA is about reclaiming masculinity, dusting off a Mussolini-esque credo of virility crumpled by decades of feminization. In practice, the population of the White House mirrors the generic high school cafeteria. Trump’s MAGA superpower is based on his embrace of three distinct “crowds”: the jocks, the nerds and the bullies. These are no easy alliances: Trump himself represents that first class, the winking American patriarch surrounded by blonde women and strapping men. His brand of masculinity is a departure from the patrician, family-man Reaganism; here is a president known, to put it generously, for his red-bloodedness, who has been caught on hot mic bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy”, and who told an Apprentice candidate that her offer to drop to her knees to beg judges would “be a pretty picture”. His is a Seventies sleaziness, that of an executive who gooses secretaries — and despite his advancing years and, well, job title, it shines through undimmed. So it is that he compliments Britain’s prime minister on his “beautiful wife”, adding that he is “very impressed” by Victoria Starmer. Props, dude — how’d you bag that! Trump, you see, is the quintessential jock.

But even jocks must sometimes associate with nerds. For the freakish excrescences of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk and his teen hacker henchmen at DOGE, have proved generally useful to Trump. These unsexy, unslick, and unelected neurodivirgins are the alleged brains behind the operation. But perhaps these bucktoothed mathletes might fail at slashing departmental spending. They might instead make a complete hash of it, as happened during Musk’s toe-curling admission that DOGE had “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention initiatives as part of USAID cuts. But Trump’s assumptions about Musk within the mythos of the American high school make sense: accounts of Musk’s actual schooldays draw him as a member of the chess team, thrown down staircases by popular kids, put in hospital by the beatings of bullies. He makes a strange bedfellow of the macho MAGA crowd, one might think — but his presence makes sense when seen through the lens of Trumpian masculinity.

Burnished by their sudden importance as titans of social media, the nerds can for the first time bag all the babes and kudos they might once have dreamed of. Musk, a pronatalist father-of-14 with a herd of babymamas, has been linked to Talulah Riley, Grimes, Amber Heard and many more besides. His first wife, Justine, wrote in 2010 that she had been his “starter wife”; he told her, on their wedding day, that he would be the “alpha” in their relationship, and later that if she was his employee, he’d sack her. He banned teddy bears for his sons once they turned seven, and later on, he fathered twins with a mutual friend while the surrogate (who else?) was pregnant with his and Grimes’s third baby.

But he is no Andrew Tate; if manipulative, he is not honest about it, and this is no harem. Tate would not be caught telling an interviewer he was a “fool for love”. Instead, Musk is a romantic technocrat — that aforementioned mutual friend was not a lover but a woman, Shivon Zilis, in need of a sperm donor; “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” she told Musk’s biographer. “I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children.” Though Musk’s borderline incontinent fecundity might seem threatening to the conventional American family — modeled by Vice President JD Vance — it also helps his case as a nerd doing the popular kids’ homework.

On Trump’s other flank are the school bullies, of whom Andrew Tate is surely the meanest. Tate and his brother Tristan flew to Florida on 27 February after being released from house arrest in Romania, where they are accused of human trafficking, with Andrew also accused of rape. A video of a 25-year-old Andrew which purports to show him whipping and sexually abusing a girl — reports about her age vary — has resurfaced on X since his arrival in America; outrage has been expressed, but nothing, predictably, has been done about it. Tate’s MAGA links go way back: Musk restored his banned X account upon taking over the website in 2022; Trump’s son Donald Jr has referred to the brothers’ Romanian arrest as “absolute insanity”; the Tates’ lawyer responded to a question about whether the President had personally helped in their release by saying: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”

The Trump administration’s covert courting of the Tates is not just about them. It’s about a vision of violent masculinity — specifically of the self-made man, who climbs to the top on a pile of women’s bodies. The Tates embody this aspirational misogyny. Trump’s own track record has been conveniently forgotten, but let’s not forget that he has himself been found guilty of sexual assault. His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, agreed a financial settlement with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017; Trump’s initial choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, was alleged to have “regularly” solicited prostitution, including from an underaged girl.

These are not coincidences: yes, gross men like company — but the implicit sanctioning of woman-hatred and abuse under the guise of swaggering machismo holds appeal for a generation of disenfranchised young men who feel hard done by with feminism and who split the Gen Z vote in November. These boys live in the ambient world of the podcast bro, with which Barron Trump encouraged his father to engage during his campaign. Almost all of the MAGA men, including Trump, Musk, and Tucker Carlson, have appeared, for instance, on the “Nelk Boys’” Full Send podcast, a prank channel-turned-Right-wing commentary hub. The show had Andrew Tate on last week, who bragged that “I would be in a jail right now” if Trump hadn’t won.

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Just like David Duke, bringing in Tate from the cold legitimizes repressed hatreds in voters, who feel vindicated in their resentment of a group (then, black people and Jews; now, women) by the presence of someone who has acted on that resentment in the most explicit and baroque way possible before shaking hands and smiling with the mainstream once more. Duke’s election is now looked upon as a dark period for the Republican Party; the MAGA associations with Sieg-Heiling Silicon Valley dork Musk and probable sex trafficker Tate may one day be viewed in the same way.

The alliance between the jocks, nerds and bullies of Trump’s new court may prove shaky. Elon Musk and Andrew Tate are dynamic disruptors of the type often seen in the early, anarchic stages of authoritarian regimes. But though united by “alpha” compulsions and trails of victimized women, they are not a natural union by any means. Either should expect a long knife in his back when he is no longer useful to Trump.

Until then, we must settle for the fact that we have lowered the accepted standards of public life beyond comparison, in service of a vision of masculinity which we know is already having real-life, and often fatal, consequences for women. The most frightening thing about this new crop of Trump-supporting men is that, rather than burying their radicalism in suits and euphemisms, they flaunt it — dog whistles have become overt provocations. MAGA machismo is about the spectacle of chaos and domination, a truly fascist vision of man. These acolytes’ raw unpredictability is their strength: it means nobody can look away.

Take Roberto Bolaño. When he first appeared on the American scene in 2003 with the English translation of By Night in Chile, he was hailed by Susan Sontag as a major voice of Latin American literature. But it wasn’t until the posthumous publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007 that he became a household name among the smart set. That novel, a towering work of literary virtuosity, would go on to be a national bestseller. Bolaño, who’d died in 2004 at the age of 50 from complications due to a liver condition, became that rarest of breeds — the writer who goes by a single name.

In 2008, his short stories began to appear in The New Yorker, and the same year saw the English translation of Bolaño’s masterpiece, the 900-page 2666, completing the cycle of his major works. But the publishing world was hungry for new Bolaño, whether he was around to write it or not. More than fifteen books have been published since 2666, the most recent in February 2021. Just when you think the last novella or half-finished short story collection has been unearthed from his hard drive, another one is announced. Like Charles Bukowski, Bolaño has found a fame in death he would’ve scoffed at during his life, which he spent as a struggling poet in Chile, Mexico and Spain.

Bolaño is worthy of his place in the canon, but he would’ve had a harder time earning it had he been an American. For the US literary establishment, Bolaño’s foreignness was central to his appeal. At a time when the literary Jonathans — Franzen and Safran Foer — and what remained of the old white males reigned supreme, here was a dead Chilean poet whose seedy, often macho stories of Latin American depravity offered white liberal readers a chance to wallow in grit and grime.

Wokeness wasn’t yet a factor then, but the winds were blowing in that direction. Bolaño offered an outlet for New Yorker readers who wanted some of the “toxic masculinity” — sex, violence, and machismo — that they’d previously gotten from the likes of Roth and Mailer. Bolaño, a foreign noble savage, was the perfect guy for the role.

Bolaño’s stature has only grown over the past 20 years, even as the literary world became increasingly feminised; both readers and editors are now mostly women. It’s a trend that’s been picked up on, and even lamented, by the Times, the TLS, and the Observer. It’s almost impossible to find debut novels by American men, and especially white men, about the plight of heterosexual males.

With foreign writers, it’s a different story. Like Bolaño, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq and his Norwegian contemporary Karl Ove Knausgård, have epitomised the rise of the literary noble savage. These two have built careers on “problematic” subject matter that would get an American-born writer cancelled. Why are imports allowed to thrive?

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A European like Knausgård, perhaps the whitest man in existence, can still be embraced by the publishing industry. His autobiographical My Struggle novels, which chronicle his everyday life in tedious and often brilliant detail, are almost pathologically self-indulgent. They are also, to put it lightly, controversial. The narrator, a Knausgård stand-in named Karl Ove Knausgård, rants against political correctness and feminist parenting, describes his attraction to his students while teaching at a high school, relates his anger at being falsely accused of rape, and, in general, details his sexual proclivities and hang-ups in all their quotidian repulsiveness.

But one gets the sense that the books are popular among elites not in spite, but because of the way they muck around in male sexuality. Take one look at the grizzled and handsome Knausgård and it’s obvious that there is a psychosexual element at play here. Wokeness requires a degree of repression, which in turn necessitates an outlet for release. The sexual itch must be scratched in a non-problematic manner, and since the noble savages are foreign curiosities who can’t be expected to internalise the progressive ways of America, they get a free pass. The elite reader can be titillated by Knausgård’s grubby masculinity while keeping his or her conscience clean.

The American male novelist, by contrast, is despised not for his toxic masculinity but because he ought to know better. Unlike the noble savage, the American male is expected to understand what is and isn’t problematic — he went to college, after all. For him, masculinity is something to be condemned and renounced. The embodiment of this emasculated ideal is Ben Lerner, a master of self-flagellation whose 2019 novel The Topeka School “decodes white male rage”. Pull up any picture of Lerner and he looks just about ready to weep.

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American men who deviate from the Lerner school are treated like Callan Wink, whose debut, August, a coming-of-age novel set in Montana and Michigan was panned in the New York Times in no small part due to its flirtations with masculine bravado. “Despite his abundance of literary talent,” the reviewer teases, “we’ll be sure not to mistake [Wink] for some effete literary type.” The reviewer’s problem, of course, is that Wink, who lives in Montana and writes about Western men, is far too close to the American savages of old. Wink graduated from an MFA program and has published stories in The New Yorker. That means he got the memo, which makes his defiance unforgivable.

The case of Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz is another cautionary tale: this time about what happens to writers who make the leap from noble savage to upstanding member of the American literati. Diaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic, became a celebrity in 1996 with the publication of Drown, a short story collection documenting the gritty island life of his homeland. But as his fame grew, and especially after he won the Pulitzer for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, something funny happened: he was civilised. He landed a teaching gig at MIT, and even if he still spat out his patented Dominican slang at readings, it was clear that he’d been domesticated. Diaz was an American writer.

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But with Americanisation comes cancellation. In 2018, Diaz became the subject of a #MeToo campaign, led by former students and writers whom he had mentored. He was accused of overstepping boundaries, pushing himself on female writers and getting handsy. Blinded by the awards and the fawning press, Diaz failed to realise that the sort of behaviour that was indulged in a Dominican was off-limits for a Yank.

Bolaño is still pumping out books nearly two decades after his death, but many a noble savage has joined him in recent years, including his countryman Alejandro Zambra and the Argentinian César Aira. And they just keep coming. The latest in the genre, The Women I Love, by the Italian Francesco Pacifico, came out in December, and is described by the publisher as “a provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity”. That’s publicity speak for: a noble savage Italian dude fucks around for 300 pages, magnificently unafraid of committing a microaggression.

For American novelists, the news is bleak but not hopeless. You may need to neuter your writing. You may need to show exquisite sensitivity to the ever-shifting rules around race and gender. You may need to conduct your personal life with the utmost progressive decorum. But if you change your name and flee the country, you can write whatever you want.