The nihilistic frustration of the class essentialist left continues to bubble up in articles like these, and it has gone from an annoyance to rage inducing. Articles like this are unmasked...
The nihilistic frustration of the class essentialist left continues to bubble up in articles like these, and it has gone from an annoyance to rage inducing. Articles like this are unmasked accelerationist flailing.
But so do our opponents believe liberalism is a poor tool for achieving their aim — a society ordered in accordance with God’s law.
For a writer who claims to be an expert on his ideological opponents, this seems to me an insanely and perversely bad read of the modern conservative movement. The American liberal-left alliance proudly proclaimed for years that a generational shift would occur as the baby-boomer generation slowly began to pass, and that the capability of American conservative coalition to replenish itself had been diminished. It was hubris - there is an entire new generation of young conservatives flourishing in our country, breathing new life into culture-war flash points I thought for certain we would never need re-litigate. How does the author explain the growth of young, irreligious social-conservative movements like Gamer-Gate? How does the author read the Trump era - which both polling and a pair of eyeballs can attribute to anti-immigrant sentiment - as a push towards religiously ordered society? The GOP's consultant class had once dreamed that new Latin-American families might be persuaded to join their cause in service their imagined common traditionalist values. Instead, their party is now commanded by a president who on a good day can muster a taco bowl as a show of good faith to the South and Central American immigrants he spends much if not most of his hours maligning.
Articles like this serve as masturbatory fuel to a progressive ideologue class that is increasingly interested in framing daily politics as an irrelevant distraction until The Hour of Revolution inevitably arrives. These people are frustrated because the collapse of the conservative coalition that was promised to them appears to have drifted out of their reach - the things they imagined would be inevitable are not coming to pass. And so, they must preach not to the huge portion of the electorate that has moved away from their view and back towards conservatism, not to the still present and loud baby-boomer generation who views progressivism with contempt. They have turned inward so that they can assure their faithful that though The Prophecy did not come to pass when expected, it will come eventually - just perhaps not peacefully.
It’s possible (likely) the world we want can only be achieved outside liberal institutions — that is, beyond the ballot box —
This person is not interested in changing the world we have. The world we live in. This person is only interested in assuring the faithful. One day, the wicked will be punished, and utopia will be ushered in.
I don't know if this is rhetorical, but if it isn't, it's because disaffected boys and young men, largely white, were targeted by the likes of Steve Bannon and radicalized. They, like a lot of us,...
How does the author explain the growth of young, irreligious social-conservative movements like Gamer-Gate?
I don't know if this is rhetorical, but if it isn't, it's because disaffected boys and young men, largely white, were targeted by the likes of Steve Bannon and radicalized. They, like a lot of us, feel isolated and with little sense of community or belonging thanks to a bunch of aspects of modern society.
How does the author read the Trump era - which both polling and a pair of eyeballs can attribute to anti-immigrant sentiment - as a push towards religiously ordered society?
Maybe this is rhetorical too, but I'd say both religious and secular conservatives want order and hierarchy, where they as white men are above women, people of color, and LGBT people.
I think they're right in that voting every election isn't enough to save ourselves from climate and social collapse. I'm not going to claim that some vague revolution is the answer, but what we're doing now isn't working fast enough. Climate change has been a known thing since the 80s at least and yet deniers still make up a decent chunk of American government. We don't have 30 years to completely phase out emissions and yet that's the best we're getting in a lot of cases right now.
That is not the same as being driven by religious motivation. This is a new, different movement and pretending it's the same as what came before is a failure to recognize the new challenges we're...
They, like a lot of us, feel isolated and with little sense of community or belonging thanks to a bunch of aspects of modern society.
That is not the same as being driven by religious motivation. This is a new, different movement and pretending it's the same as what came before is a failure to recognize the new challenges we're going to face.
Maybe this is rhetorical too, but I'd say both religious and secular conservatives want order and hierarchy, where they as white men are above women, people of color, and LGBT people.
To suggest that most branches of modern conservatism favor order and authority is reasonable, to suggest that they desire a a society ordered in accordance with God’s law is not accurate or descriptive of what is driving these movements in our present reality. If these were the Evangelical backed religious-right that had come before, they would not be attracting the new audience that they've been given.
We don't have 30 years to completely phase out emissions and yet that's the best we're getting in a lot of cases right now.
That could be the case - I'm not a fortune teller nor do I have a PhD in any environmental science. But I do know that any response to the causes and symptoms of climate change will require massive state - and almost always international state - scale response. And I know that for an effective state response, you need a strong and stable nation state environment. And I know for certain that any 'revolution' that breaks down the lawful institutions established in the United States will absolutely under no circumstances create a stable enough state to tackle these issues at this scale within thirty years. To throw our hands to the heavens and pray for revolution is to pray for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at very least, and to pray for a fractured and ineffective United States that will not be able to participate in the global community at the scale that would be necessary to negotiate co-operation towards mitigating the causes and impact of climate change.
And I know that the kinds of people who are most fiercely advocating for an abandonment of electoralism in favor of violent overthrow are a) not the most likely parties to win a violent revolution b) not the kinds of people I would trust to lead a stable nation state.
We are facing very real problems right now. We can't succumb to nihilistic behavior because the apocalypse might be starting in thirty years. We have to do the best we are able legislatively. And to have stronger legislative impact, the left needs to become more compelling, more convincing, to the groups that have either abandoned them or been purposefully driven out of the liberal-left coalition.
TBH in a lot of ways fascism is basically like taking all the communitarian and self-abnegation elements of religion and just replacing the theology with God at the center with something that puts...
That is not the same as being driven by religious motivation.
TBH in a lot of ways fascism is basically like taking all the communitarian and self-abnegation elements of religion and just replacing the theology with God at the center with something that puts "the nation" there instead. The nation can be defined as a primordial racial group, like with Nazis, or you can pick a religious identification like Islamists do.
Even with a lot of Evangelical Christians that's basically what they're doing, and the talk of "God" and "family" are mostly shibboleths to signal where their loyalties are. The focus is much more on living a prescribed lifestyle according to a prescribed social order than it is on anything spiritual.
These are all fair points. My only counterpoint / addition is that it's clear that religious conservatives are willing to put their principles (I'm being charitable in saying they had any in the...
These are all fair points. My only counterpoint / addition is that it's clear that religious conservatives are willing to put their principles (I'm being charitable in saying they had any in the first place) aside and wholeheartedly supporting Trump. They may say they want a society that follows God's law, but what they have shown they want is the same thing as the new brand of right-wing internet shitheads wants: to be on top, everyone else be damned.
and to pray for a fractured and ineffective United States that will not be able to participate in the global community at the scale that would be necessary to negotiate co-operation towards mitigating the causes and impact of climate change.
None of your points connect. It's hard to understand what you are talking about. It seems like you are conflating leftism and liberalism? There hasn't been a liberal and leftist alliance in the US...
None of your points connect. It's hard to understand what you are talking about. It seems like you are conflating leftism and liberalism?
There hasn't been a liberal and leftist alliance in the US for like half a century.
There are other options beyond electoral politics like organizing and building dual power structures.
The electorate has moved much to the left in the last few decades. This is no longer Reagan's America.
I would disagree, at least for gen Z. A significant majority of gen Z'rs are all extremely pessimistic about the future. There's climate change and a stagnating economy, to name just two problems....
This is bound tightly to the inclination of modern > peoples to believe that things simply "get better" > as time goes on, which is both unreasonable and > simply false.
I would disagree, at least for gen Z. A significant majority of gen Z'rs are all extremely pessimistic about the future. There's climate change and a stagnating economy, to name just two problems. Personally, I think this pessimism, combined with the slow death of religion, might mean enough people will act to fix all the problems.
this has literally never been proven by any source that i've ever seen, it's just farmer's almanac type political musing that was probably never true and if it was certainly is not anymore. all of...
one must also recognize that the process of becoming older and more ingrained in the capitalist system naturally pushes people from the left to the center
this has literally never been proven by any source that i've ever seen, it's just farmer's almanac type political musing that was probably never true and if it was certainly is not anymore. all of the political trends we have suggest millennials break heavily liberal and are consistently the most liberal generation in identification, and there is no evidence that these people are aging out of that liberalism (the partisan gap among millennials has actually slightly increased with time), nor is there really evidence for the claim that conservatism is any more prominent among the gen z crowd than it is among millennials. aside from the fact that gen z is basically in lockstep with millennials on most social issues and party identification, gen z and millennial conservatives are more liberal than their older counterparts, and given that gen z'ers are comparably left-leaning to millennials, it's reasonable to extrapolate there are probably also less of them. this is to say nothing of the fact that across the board, 18-29s and 30-44s have also consistently gotten more democratic, and 18-29s specifically tend to trend heavily democratic as a group. it's not inconceivable--arguably, it's actually quite likely--that the next democratic candidate for president will win 18-29s by 30 or more, and 30-44s by 20 or more even in a relatively close race specifically because millennials and gen z have trended away from conservatism and toward liberalism as groups.
I completely agree; the structures that the past generations have made will still be around for decades past their death. The fact that gay marriage was legalized in the US only 4 years ago feels...
I completely agree; the structures that the past generations have made will still be around for decades past their death. The fact that gay marriage was legalized in the US only 4 years ago feels like a stark example of that. My hope isn't that these institutions will fix themselves, but that they are replace with better ones.
I would also say that the one significant difference gen Z has over older generations is that their are multiple, obvious existential threats to humanity in the near future, I.e. the next century. They also don't have a monolothic enemy to blame, i.e. the USA / USSR. Even "old, white men" can only go so far as an enemy; they are probaly not "other" enough for the vast majority of Americans.
I think there's a darker tinge to it than that. In a lot of cases I don't think the conservatives are moving away from their views towards conservatism so much as the fact that on the stuff that...
These people are frustrated because the collapse of the conservative coalition that was promised to them appears to have drifted out of their reach - the things they imagined would be inevitable are not coming to pass. And so, they must preach not to the huge portion of the electorate that has moved away from their view and back towards conservatism
I think there's a darker tinge to it than that. In a lot of cases I don't think the conservatives are moving away from their views towards conservatism so much as the fact that on the stuff that motivates conservatives to vote the hard leftists doesn't necessarily disagree. Anti-statism is a value they share. Fantasies about armed uprising likewise. And they think most "identity politics" issues are a distraction at best and would gleefully go back to saying denigrating slurs if the cultural zeitgeist around them wouldn't disapprove.
The main difference isn't whether they agree or disagree on these views, it's the salience of them. For conservatives they are highly salient and motivate their political action. For leftists they are not very salient in light of structural economic issues, but basically nobody cares about that because it's too big of a problem to just "solve" with a sweep of the hand and regular people need more concrete and actionable agendas. So all they can manage is sniping from the sidelines. The mass constituency for a socialist revolution is about as big as the mass constituency for radical libertarianism, which is basically non-existent. And unlike the libertarians, the M-Ls don't have billionaires to help the punch above their weight.
That was the longest article that seemed to say nothing. Can you tl;dr it for me so I can have a chance at understanding why they took the time to write that all out?
That was the longest article that seemed to say nothing. Can you tl;dr it for me so I can have a chance at understanding why they took the time to write that all out?
My friend Matthew Sitman, with whom I cohost a podcast about conservative thought, recently put it to me this way, “while the right wants to go behind liberalism, the left wants to go beyond it.” Ahmari, Reno, and their fellow travelers want to go back to a mystical pre-capitalist communal society where life had purpose, traditional bonds and obligations flourished, and collective energy was oriented toward the Highest Good, i.e. the veneration of God (and, incidentally, racial and sexual minorities, women, and other marginal or transgressive identities were crushed). Where as, the left wants to go beyond liberalism, to a political economy in which the best promises of liberalism — of dignity, autonomy, and fulfillment — are actually available to everyone.
So bog standard re-telling of what the right and left represent with left bias strewn about. This world is cannibalizing itself without Carlin and Hitchens bringing nuance to political/social...
So bog standard re-telling of what the right and left represent with left bias strewn about.
This world is cannibalizing itself without Carlin and Hitchens bringing nuance to political/social discourse.
The nihilistic frustration of the class essentialist left continues to bubble up in articles like these, and it has gone from an annoyance to rage inducing. Articles like this are unmasked accelerationist flailing.
For a writer who claims to be an expert on his ideological opponents, this seems to me an insanely and perversely bad read of the modern conservative movement. The American liberal-left alliance proudly proclaimed for years that a generational shift would occur as the baby-boomer generation slowly began to pass, and that the capability of American conservative coalition to replenish itself had been diminished. It was hubris - there is an entire new generation of young conservatives flourishing in our country, breathing new life into culture-war flash points I thought for certain we would never need re-litigate. How does the author explain the growth of young, irreligious social-conservative movements like Gamer-Gate? How does the author read the Trump era - which both polling and a pair of eyeballs can attribute to anti-immigrant sentiment - as a push towards religiously ordered society? The GOP's consultant class had once dreamed that new Latin-American families might be persuaded to join their cause in service their imagined common traditionalist values. Instead, their party is now commanded by a president who on a good day can muster a taco bowl as a show of good faith to the South and Central American immigrants he spends much if not most of his hours maligning.
Articles like this serve as masturbatory fuel to a progressive ideologue class that is increasingly interested in framing daily politics as an irrelevant distraction until The Hour of Revolution inevitably arrives. These people are frustrated because the collapse of the conservative coalition that was promised to them appears to have drifted out of their reach - the things they imagined would be inevitable are not coming to pass. And so, they must preach not to the huge portion of the electorate that has moved away from their view and back towards conservatism, not to the still present and loud baby-boomer generation who views progressivism with contempt. They have turned inward so that they can assure their faithful that though The Prophecy did not come to pass when expected, it will come eventually - just perhaps not peacefully.
This person is not interested in changing the world we have. The world we live in. This person is only interested in assuring the faithful. One day, the wicked will be punished, and utopia will be ushered in.
I don't know if this is rhetorical, but if it isn't, it's because disaffected boys and young men, largely white, were targeted by the likes of Steve Bannon and radicalized. They, like a lot of us, feel isolated and with little sense of community or belonging thanks to a bunch of aspects of modern society.
Maybe this is rhetorical too, but I'd say both religious and secular conservatives want order and hierarchy, where they as white men are above women, people of color, and LGBT people.
I think they're right in that voting every election isn't enough to save ourselves from climate and social collapse. I'm not going to claim that some vague revolution is the answer, but what we're doing now isn't working fast enough. Climate change has been a known thing since the 80s at least and yet deniers still make up a decent chunk of American government. We don't have 30 years to completely phase out emissions and yet that's the best we're getting in a lot of cases right now.
That is not the same as being driven by religious motivation. This is a new, different movement and pretending it's the same as what came before is a failure to recognize the new challenges we're going to face.
To suggest that most branches of modern conservatism favor order and authority is reasonable, to suggest that they desire a a society ordered in accordance with God’s law is not accurate or descriptive of what is driving these movements in our present reality. If these were the Evangelical backed religious-right that had come before, they would not be attracting the new audience that they've been given.
That could be the case - I'm not a fortune teller nor do I have a PhD in any environmental science. But I do know that any response to the causes and symptoms of climate change will require massive state - and almost always international state - scale response. And I know that for an effective state response, you need a strong and stable nation state environment. And I know for certain that any 'revolution' that breaks down the lawful institutions established in the United States will absolutely under no circumstances create a stable enough state to tackle these issues at this scale within thirty years. To throw our hands to the heavens and pray for revolution is to pray for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at very least, and to pray for a fractured and ineffective United States that will not be able to participate in the global community at the scale that would be necessary to negotiate co-operation towards mitigating the causes and impact of climate change.
And I know that the kinds of people who are most fiercely advocating for an abandonment of electoralism in favor of violent overthrow are a) not the most likely parties to win a violent revolution b) not the kinds of people I would trust to lead a stable nation state.
We are facing very real problems right now. We can't succumb to nihilistic behavior because the apocalypse might be starting in thirty years. We have to do the best we are able legislatively. And to have stronger legislative impact, the left needs to become more compelling, more convincing, to the groups that have either abandoned them or been purposefully driven out of the liberal-left coalition.
TBH in a lot of ways fascism is basically like taking all the communitarian and self-abnegation elements of religion and just replacing the theology with God at the center with something that puts "the nation" there instead. The nation can be defined as a primordial racial group, like with Nazis, or you can pick a religious identification like Islamists do.
Even with a lot of Evangelical Christians that's basically what they're doing, and the talk of "God" and "family" are mostly shibboleths to signal where their loyalties are. The focus is much more on living a prescribed lifestyle according to a prescribed social order than it is on anything spiritual.
These are all fair points. My only counterpoint / addition is that it's clear that religious conservatives are willing to put their principles (I'm being charitable in saying they had any in the first place) aside and wholeheartedly supporting Trump. They may say they want a society that follows God's law, but what they have shown they want is the same thing as the new brand of right-wing internet shitheads wants: to be on top, everyone else be damned.
We're already there.
None of your points connect. It's hard to understand what you are talking about. It seems like you are conflating leftism and liberalism?
There hasn't been a liberal and leftist alliance in the US for like half a century.
There are other options beyond electoral politics like organizing and building dual power structures.
The electorate has moved much to the left in the last few decades. This is no longer Reagan's America.
Etc.
I would disagree, at least for gen Z. A significant majority of gen Z'rs are all extremely pessimistic about the future. There's climate change and a stagnating economy, to name just two problems. Personally, I think this pessimism, combined with the slow death of religion, might mean enough people will act to fix all the problems.
this has literally never been proven by any source that i've ever seen, it's just farmer's almanac type political musing that was probably never true and if it was certainly is not anymore. all of the political trends we have suggest millennials break heavily liberal and are consistently the most liberal generation in identification, and there is no evidence that these people are aging out of that liberalism (the partisan gap among millennials has actually slightly increased with time), nor is there really evidence for the claim that conservatism is any more prominent among the gen z crowd than it is among millennials. aside from the fact that gen z is basically in lockstep with millennials on most social issues and party identification, gen z and millennial conservatives are more liberal than their older counterparts, and given that gen z'ers are comparably left-leaning to millennials, it's reasonable to extrapolate there are probably also less of them. this is to say nothing of the fact that across the board, 18-29s and 30-44s have also consistently gotten more democratic, and 18-29s specifically tend to trend heavily democratic as a group. it's not inconceivable--arguably, it's actually quite likely--that the next democratic candidate for president will win 18-29s by 30 or more, and 30-44s by 20 or more even in a relatively close race specifically because millennials and gen z have trended away from conservatism and toward liberalism as groups.
Thank you for the links! I'll have to read up on this more, evidently.
I completely agree; the structures that the past generations have made will still be around for decades past their death. The fact that gay marriage was legalized in the US only 4 years ago feels like a stark example of that. My hope isn't that these institutions will fix themselves, but that they are replace with better ones.
I would also say that the one significant difference gen Z has over older generations is that their are multiple, obvious existential threats to humanity in the near future, I.e. the next century. They also don't have a monolothic enemy to blame, i.e. the USA / USSR. Even "old, white men" can only go so far as an enemy; they are probaly not "other" enough for the vast majority of Americans.
I think there's a darker tinge to it than that. In a lot of cases I don't think the conservatives are moving away from their views towards conservatism so much as the fact that on the stuff that motivates conservatives to vote the hard leftists doesn't necessarily disagree. Anti-statism is a value they share. Fantasies about armed uprising likewise. And they think most "identity politics" issues are a distraction at best and would gleefully go back to saying denigrating slurs if the cultural zeitgeist around them wouldn't disapprove.
The main difference isn't whether they agree or disagree on these views, it's the salience of them. For conservatives they are highly salient and motivate their political action. For leftists they are not very salient in light of structural economic issues, but basically nobody cares about that because it's too big of a problem to just "solve" with a sweep of the hand and regular people need more concrete and actionable agendas. So all they can manage is sniping from the sidelines. The mass constituency for a socialist revolution is about as big as the mass constituency for radical libertarianism, which is basically non-existent. And unlike the libertarians, the M-Ls don't have billionaires to help the punch above their weight.
That was the longest article that seemed to say nothing. Can you tl;dr it for me so I can have a chance at understanding why they took the time to write that all out?
I think it sums itself up near the end
So bog standard re-telling of what the right and left represent with left bias strewn about.
This world is cannibalizing itself without Carlin and Hitchens bringing nuance to political/social discourse.