A Nation of Snowflakes
Bear with me, I'm getting a lot of shit off my chest.
Is [POP STAR] a feminist?
Is [CORPORATION] a queer ally?
Does [COMEDIAN] do the non-fascist kind of comedy?
Does [TV SHOW] make social commentary I agree with?
What is [PRODUCT]’s stance on race?
There is something magical about Pride Month that brings out the duller and more dour aspects of American consumerism. All it takes is a rainbow flag filter laid over a corporate logo to prompt a proffered dollop of the lorem ipsum grievance that is both the currency and sole tenant of contemporary conservative politics. The most gormless and grift-susceptible libs, I guess, are still lapping up the vague corporate appeals to diversity and inclusion and will defend these obviously facile and cynical marketing gambits—even as these same companies donate to the GOP in greater sums than Democrats. As much as horseshoe theory is a braindead framework to analyze ideological differences, in the context of online culture war, these two sides are saying more or less the same thing; the energetic and vibrational differences are entirely cosmetic, and each equally off the rack. The result is two perfectly parallel economies and realities that are reducing self-expression to politicized and performative acts of consumption—and the things being consumed are, both in form and content, not just unsatisfying, but the product of an immense disdain for the very idea of satisfaction.
Even as the culture war runs on fumes, it is, in both manifestations, a sort of liberated and free-floating distaste for the whole rest of the world, and the urge not so much to dominate it as to make it stop, to bring it to heel, to shut it up and send it inside. This next sentence comprises what we in the biz call the to be sure statement, as I will make clear that while the two sides are soiling discourse and reducing political struggle into policing other people’s mannerisms, the worst of liberal culture war amounts to prissy Twitter hectoring about the value of saying “unhoused” while the dregs of the right have mutated into some grotesque book banning and horrid hate-crimes.
Conservatives decisively won the defining macroeconomic conflict of the 20th century, and did so with such spectacular totality that there is no functional mainstream left-of-center party in the West that does not at least partially concede to their view of the world. Republicans passed their policies and waged their wars with no resistance outside of Democrats trailing behind with their polite concerns. They governed with an impulse, a single sour instinct with a bunch of other variously servile and vengeful reflexes firing through it. As Republicans have hurt millions of people with impunity, in the service of every ancient power relationship that currently exists, they have to be at least subconsciously pissed that the world they built fucking sucks.
Despite their hamfisted attempts to dismiss the failures of neoliberalism by qualifying the “corrupt” forms of capitalism with words like crony or corporate or woke, there is a distinct sense that the right doesn’t deserve the it wasn’t real socialism cope that the left can somewhat plausibly claim. Conservatives had the chance to remake the world in their image and it turned out rotten. Unable to resolve the logically untenable positions of supporting economic and social conservatism, or the fundamental schism between capitalism and nationalism, Republican acolytes and apparatchiks are grasping to act like their complete and totalizing victory was somehow a defeat so they can rationalize the hollowness of their dreams and the weakness of their vision. At least leftists, even at their cringiest, still dream of a better world. I can’t tell you what a conservative future looks like that isn’t another self-conscious iteration of the past.
Within this impulse, there is room for a wide presentation of revenge fantasies and constant victimhood, and precisely nothing and no one else. Since the days of the “silent majority” and the Reagan Revolution, Republicans have gotten comfortable in their hermetically sealed bubble of studiously cultivated arrogance and ignorance. They perceive their subjective worldview as the de facto reality that all other thought deviates from rather than a set of contestable ideas. It is, in a sense, a form of what political scientist Matt McManus calls “postmodern conservatism” that—despite its posturing as a purveyor of FACTS and LOGIC—argues that abstract reasoning is to be distrusted and that tradition, feeling, and identitarianism are the bulwarks against the soaring cosmic perfidy of the liberal cosmopolitan elite. It is about an obsessive taxonomy of enemies and a fixation on problems. To them, politics is a power struggle, not an arena of debate, argumentation, or policy. In his essay, “The Emergence and Rise of Postmodern Conservatism,” McManus writes:
“Postmodern conservatives increasingly regard strong truth claims about knowledge and morality with active suspicion and even hostility. This is because they regard the intellectual and cultural ‘elites’ who produce knowledge and popularize moral norms as progressive, abstract, and unlikely to sympathize with their concerns. Rather than attempting to formulate alternative claims about knowledge and morality which might have some epistemic and meta-ethical tenability, postmodern conservatives reject even these standards. Instead, they largely appeal to identity as the locus for epistemic and moral validity. This is, in turn, used to rally political support for a given agenda designed to restore that identity to power.”
The terrifying and fuming derangement that Fox News sought to embed in its viewers, mostly to keep them pliable and on the hook through commercial breaks, has mutated into a coalition of outrage addicts, with ambitions both vague and vast. They have come to understand that the dizzy righteousness of that derangement is the point. For a political movement so grounded in both dealing out and taking offense, it fits that the most meaningful, or at least consequential, tenant of this vain and annihilating and wildly metastatic politics is to always accuse the enemy of doing what they’re doing. They will, for example, describe the idea of gender fluidity as “gender ideology” being imposed on American society, but it has never occurred to them that rigid gender binaries and the foisted expectations of traditional manliness and feminity are their versions of imposing gender ideology.
For all their clammy and overdetermined machinations, they are ultimately too full of their own shit to realize they exhibit all of the same behavior and pathologies they claim to hate about liberal SJWs. Movement conservatism exists in a country that they despise and a majority of Americans reciprocate the feeling. In a recent interview, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito spoke about the challenge of living in a country where people who believe different things are allowed to just go about their lives believing those things. “I mean, there can be a way of working—a way of living together peacefully,” he allowed. “But it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised.” It is useful, I guess, to see this belief laid out in such plain and oafish terms, without the residual smarmy pomp of bygone “respectable” Republican rhetoric: Everything that exists outside of their control and outside of their permission must be defeated.
This has led to some truly baffling displays of avant-garde mutancy. Bow-tied Young Republican types wearing diapers to protest college safe spaces. Tucker Carlson seething through horny rants about “less sexy” green M&Ms. Ben Shapiro DESTROYING the song “Wet Ass P-Word” by admitting to all of Twitter that he can’t get his wife wet, and more recently, fuming through a 45-minute video about a fucking doll movie made for teenage girls that no one is making him watch. It all centers the notion of this all-pervasive, all-powerful threat to free speech called “cancel culture,” which has become an endless pissy grievance for middlebrow pundits. They celebrate their “silencing” on Fox News, speak on sufficiently supplicant conservative talk shows, start a MAGA podcast with billionaire backing, write an NYT best-selling novel that is an endless screed about all the important conversations that cannot be had, go on a tour to promote their awful book about how they are unable to publicly voice their opinions, then get a weekly column where they type the same drivel and dreck about radical leftist fascism suppressing the diversity of opinions.
As I have previously written, these self-pitying dullards have convinced themselves of their own oppression while glorying in their uniformity. Their perception of freedom hinges on how unrestrained they are to bully others, and their ability to enforce their conformity of belief through unimpeded domination, all without the blowback of scolding or social consequences. The internet has democratized this sense of entitlement, but it cannot be truly universal because it is incompatible with their desire to assert their own hermetic and hegemonic culture. It all amounts to a rising army of self-stylized “free-thinkers” who all happen to share the same thoughts, towing the line of conservative orthodoxy and bitching endlessly about wokeism. These based patriots will claim the mantles of freedom and personal responsibility, but they have never considered the option to disengage from something they dislike: Instead of, say, reacting to Bud Light posting a video with a trans influencer by simply purchasing a different beer, they rallied behind a video of Kia Rock trotting out to a swamp with an AR-15 and assassinating a six-pack.
It may be useless as a rhetorical device to call out rank Republican hypocrisy since all these armchair genocidaires care about is power and punishment, but it is worth noting that the same people who cry about cancel culture literally obliterated the Dixie Chicks from the country music industry and remained silent as the NFL blackballed Colin Kaepernick. Alex Nowrasteh has described this phenomenon as “patriotic correctness” in a Washington Post piece:
“… conservatives have their own, nationalist version of [political correctness], their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. … It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.
Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.”
Their vision for free speech is grandiose and obscure. The GOP ousted Liz Cheney from leadership for her very tepid opposition to Donald Trump. Chris Christie was audibly booed at a primary debate for refusing to flatter the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. For all of their luridly corny extravagances, the right has always been defined by their deficits. They want to be funny and edgy, but they are manifestly neither. They want to be seen as brilliant and heterodox and subversive, but they have the opinions and tastes and politics of a dull suburban bigot from 1972. On the right, you can say whatever you want about gay and trans people from TikTok to Patreon, and you can moan about the horrors of DE&I and pronouns from podcasts to the governor’s office of Florida. But if you ever speak out against Donald Trump, the MAGA movement will reveal itself as a cretinous mob on the hunt to purge its ranks of dissenters.
All of this is pretty revealing of the baseline insanity level of mainstream political discourse. But it doesn’t help matters when the left also considers culture war bullshit as a package deal with actual material politics. There is a clear delineation between fighting for women’s reproductive rights and expanding the culture war’s terrain of battle to include comedy, movies, books, food, pets, hobbies. Everything must submit to a relentless moral dichotomy. Among contemporary liberalism’s most powerful cudgels is its ability to assert that any deviation from the most narrow reading of its current dogmas is necessarily support for Trump or enabling fascism.
In their world-historically dire sense of humor and its cohort’s metastatic sense of ambition, online liberals adopted increasingly moralizing tones about politics and pop culture. Now the idea is that good art must equate to “good” politics. There is something jarring about how seriously people take comedy and TV shows and movies and music in this moment. The specific way in which all of this sucks aligns neatly with other lousy trends in the culture—the rise of weirdly servile and reflexively combative fan cultures; treating entertainment as a degraded and degrading outgrowth of politics; the broader collapse of every single thing into joyless rote culture war riffraff. If a comedy special isn’t a TED Talk that’s specifically crafted to elicit clapter or generate glowing thinkpieces from liberal media outlets, then it’s deemed irredeemably problematic and must be removed from streaming platforms. Nothing can ever just be unfunny and unworthy of attention; to the online hall monitors, the vinegary “working edgelord” comedians aren’t servicing an already existing market demand for D-tier Family Guy gay jokes from 2005, they are enabling bigotry and poisoning America’s delicate sensibilities.
This trend of manhunting comedians rhymes with every other grim and sour thing in the broader left-liberal culture, like the weird grasping push to strike Huckleberry Finn from college syllabuses or the endless moral posturing of hating on Tarantino movies. It all scans as an inversion of the satanic panic, but with a progressive sheen. I wonder if the scolds and witch hunters have ever considered what kind of culture they’re producing, which is essentially a desire for the world to act like it’s governed by a corporate HR department. I also wonder if they have asked themselves how sustainable a political project can be if they categorically reject humor, sarcasm, metaphor, or just the idea that there is something universal in the human experience that art can communicate. Maybe this is just my cis white male opinion, but only a very unhappy person would opt to stan or cancel when they could just enjoy or ignore. Now that art has been completely subsumed into the market and politics, it is now a consumer product, a personal fashion expression, a desire to be affirmed at all times by pop culture.
A few months ago, the Starship Troopers discourse popped up again. On somewhat of an annual recurrence, some right-wing Twitter anon with a marble statue profile pic will praise the film’s depiction of a fascist utopia. “Look at how beautiful everyone is,” they will post. “Note their sense of purpose.” In response, some commie cosplayers will point out that the film is “obviously satire,” making specific reference to the army recruiter having lost all his limbs, the film’s implication that the main characters are descendants of Nazis who took refuge in South America, and that the antagonists are treated as absolutely inhuman but are entirely capable of real suffering. The lefty posters will bring up how the right lacks media literacy while the MAGA ghouls will say, “lol, you identify with literal bugs.” The discourse repeats itself, prompting everyone involved to cling to resentment for something that doesn’t matter.
The movie, as is most pop culture ephemera, isn’t important enough to warrant this frequent discussion. Sure, you can critique and dissect entertainment slop if you don’t care about alienating yourself from every well-adjusted person around you, but these debates usually begin with the premise of a piece of pop culture and are followed by partisan culture war talking points. To a certain person, a movie meant to satirize fascism will glorify it. Pete Davidson tried an SNL sketch that parodied Joe Rogan’s stance on vaccines, and to a lot of anti-vax cranks, its message was that NBC is owned by pharmaceutical companies.
As entertainment is filtered through the lens of our ideologies, most cultural analysis and criticism will tell you more about the person engaging with the art than it does about the work itself. There Will Be Blood is only a critique of capitalism if your ultimate wish is not to die alone in a mansion after having ostracized your disabled son and murdered the only person you've ever viewed as an equal; to an amoral striver, the movie is a guide. If Fight Club doesn’t uncritically endorse everything Tyler Durden says and does, then you can find the real secret of the movie by taking the opposite of everything Tyler Durden says and does. Whether you love order or empathy, Starship Troopers is either about the beauty of living in a military state populated by healthy Aryans or a world in which every character with a voice has been brainwashed.
We are a nation of adult infants incentivized to be the most selfish and awful version of themselves. Outrage is the engine of our modern media economy, and it manages to be exhausting without ever becoming interesting. But I reject the premise that this is a uniquely left-wing phenomenon: It’s coming from the left, from the right, from the Swifties, from the Disney Adults, from the YA enthusiasts, and it’s coming for anybody who dares to express an opinion about anything. We are not canceled or silenced or censored. We are surrounded by and inundated with more speech than has ever existed in all of human history, and it is weaponized by tiresome posters and hate merchants.
If we’re going to live in a world devoted increasingly to the opaque feuds of relentlessly vacant idiots, we should at least acknowledge an important distinction between stuff that looks and feels and sucks just like politics and actual politics as we all live it. Both are messy and loud, but only one means anything or can change our lives in the process. Everything seems not just politicized but also almost a sort of proxy politics. People vote by burning insufficiently cop-respecting Nikes and firing assault rifles at pseudo-beer that acknowledges trans people as worthy of basic empathy, or vice versa. They post it online to signal to their allies and infuriate their enemies, then wake up the next day and do it again. This is a twitchy and addicting ritual, but none of this is particularly fun, like inviting a cokehead to do coke.
The cultural options available to us are conservative individualism and social justice individualism. While the left and right seem totally polarized, they share a mutual desire to narcissisticly leverage any form of struggle and identity for personal flattery. A fair number of progressive causes have never been especially difficult to understand, although they have been swiftly and cynically instrumentalized by corporations through therapeutic language and bland #girlboss empowerment dada and the clod mysticism of yoga pants culture. These same causes have also been willfully misinterpreted and preemptively dismissed by hair-trigger goblins, and whatever they were once about has since disappeared into superheated grievance and meme.
Much of what these brands offer is specific and fundamentally blank virtues: ambition, courage, defiance, dominance. These are big and actionable words, and are generally held in high regard. But when they’re put to a more stringent use, they are inconveniently context-dependent. The fulfillment that companies like Lululemon or Disney or Chick-fil-A or Black Rifle Coffee sell people is individuated, and drawing a contrast to greater and more community-minded goals would make any of these mega-brands look as crude and silly as they actually are: Some people dream of ending the bloody predations of America’s carceral state, other people dream of burning down their local Target for selling rainbow shirts. The point is to be your best self.
There is no reason why any of this mundane human stuff needs to be wrapped up in all this thundering Manichean dumbassery, but this is our culture’s uniquely pathological way of talking to itself. The dominance of these sorts of overdetermined good-versus-evil binaries does not seem to reflect anything healthy in our culture, but our culture is not healthy. There is no appealing to the flimsy and negotiable principles that these frothing online culture war mobs hold. Their opinions on everything from social justice to patriotism are variable and change with the days and specific stupid controversies at hand. What remains fixed is their desire to appear virtuous, to be centered in the glowing spotlight of perpetual victimhood, to abdicate themselves from any responsibility as America’s institutions are gradually hollowed out by administrative parasites and our civic life succumbs to MBA enshittification.
Each side in this discourse is fighting a war to win the territory of pop culture because we view it as rightfully ours. Nobody is thinking about how little value this territory actually holds in the broader scheme of America’s stage-managed decline; it’s like watching your house burn down and then getting angry because your toaster is busted. One day, it’s a battle over which side of the political spectrum can lay claim to the 1996 acting efforts of Denise Richard and Neil Patrick Harris, then every June, it’s about whether Target is too gay or not gay enough for Pride Month. There are dozens of other essentially obtuse topics that supposedly politically-minded people fight over on an annual basis. Beatles contrarianism is more infuriating than any political journalist can ever be. There are those tired and insufferable thinkpieces about What Liking David Foster Wallace Says About You. There’s no utility in any of this. It’s pathetic. It’s boring. If anything, we should be arguing over the meaning of Groundhog Day because we managed to miss its message. We’re all stuck in a time loop because we’ve become hopelessly addicted to the experience of never growing as people.
"We’re all stuck in a time loop because we’ve become hopelessly addicted to the experience of never growing as people."
...which has resulted in the film and television business now being run by people who prefer to resurrect dated and hoary concepts from the past to make money, at the expense of reviving the creativity which should be driving those businesses.
Excellent rant. 👏