we’re all dogs in trump’s america

The great void at the center of American life is lined by the belief that politics won’t happen to you. The American Dream, more than anything else, is a life lacking entirely in friction, where you always have everything you need, and politics never enters the realm of your everyday existence. In this illusion, politics happens far away; it is a sport played by other people; it never intersects with daily life; we spectate but do not participate; in fact, spectatorship is often conflated with participation.

In this order of things, politics is a niche interest for a relative few fanatics and an industry for ladder-climbers, opportunists, sycophants, and eternal optimists. I’ve written before about the moment at a Rosh Hashanah dinner around the time of the 2016 election when someone asked disappointedly and exasperatedly whether we’d just talk about politics forever. Behind that question is the very same sentiment behind the “if Kamala were president we’d be at brunch” protest signs: that as long as one holds up their part of the bargain with the status quo—going to work, paying their bills and taxes, abiding the law—politics should remain far away; that a normal life is one premised on willful blindness toward all of the ways in which politics does, indeed, touch one’s life.

This is the social pact at the heart of American society, and despite the fact that American institutions have only been failing the vast majority of Americans for decades, that same vast majority has not managed to rid themselves of the illusion that their existence at the heart of empire is apolitical. (This is no one’s individual fault or responsibility, and American culture makes sure that lots of other illusions step in to fill the void created by that great, big one at the very center—but more on this at a different time.)

Cut to: New York City comptroller Brad Lander getting arrested at immigration court today. He yells at the ICE agent that he’s not allowed to arrest a U.S. citizen, a statement of fact which works doubly: first to show just how far outside the law ICE is acting, and second to show how little it takes to lose one’s protected status. How little it takes for politics to enter permanently into the realm of one’s daily life.

I’m lately fascinated by what I have been calling in my head the dogification of women. There’s the Sabrina Carpenter album cover, where she appears on all fours, looking at the camera, a fistful of her hair in some faceless guy’s hand. The title of the record is Man’s Best Friend. There’s also Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, lapping up milk from a dish after crawling across the floor, and Mother in Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and its film adaptation. In all of these cases, total submission—becoming a dog symbolically, performatively, or literally—is a way out of an impossible bind. Carpenter is wiggling from under the pressures of having to come up with some new way to make art about sex or womanhood, and of the heartbreak of having to accept degraded status as a woman; we’re supposed to do as she does and believe her self-awareness is somehow novel and cancels out her self-objectification. Kidman’s Romy is unburdened, if momentarily, of the pressures and demands she’s placed on herself, or that a certain type of feminism has placed on her. When Mother turns into a dog, she’s liberated, if also momentarily, from the impossible, contradictory bind of being an artist and a mother at the same time.

I’ve been thinking about these cultural moments because I believe that they reflect something about the current state of women and womanhood. They must. But right now, I think that, more than anything, they reflect the very essence of the American Dream: freedom through submission.