Never Go Full Libtard

PART 3: A collective personality disorder expressing itself through social justice.

Artwork by Jace Avery

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The left-of-center in America is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place.¹ At some point during the Obama years, a bizarre form of linguistically radical but substantively conservative identity politics descended from elite universities and infected Tumblr and Twitter. This kind of “social justice politics” combines several schools of progressivism like intersectionality, trans-inclusionary feminism, and anti-racism with a focus on interpersonal relations and pop-culture ephemera as the primary battlegrounds for political activity; it also rejects economic class as an ideological lens and places an unwavering belief in the immutable prevalence of bigotry in America. All of this is expressed in convoluted faux-Antifa gobbledegook. It is led by synthetic progressives who are devoid of a sincere drive to positively change the world. It breeds a social culture of frustrated post-college urbanites who use progressive politics as a justification to act like petty and vindictive freaks; they turn to podcasters, influencers, and Twitch streamers to sell them formless and directionless anger packaged as anti-establishment posturing.

As an informal substitute for the Democrat Party’s kludge-y, insufficient, better-than-nothing half-measures, this “social justice politics” has been elevated and exalted into the mainstream, and now it influences the idea-and-story-generating power of movie franchises and corporate branding. If you query the effectiveness of distilling progressivism down to Hollywood entertainment and Fortune 500 marketing gimmicks, you will be greeted with canned and rote responses like the personal is political and representation matters. Since “social justice politics” asserts that the personal is always political, then all human interactions are injected with political valence, making everything aggressively politicized. This ethos looms over a lingering sense of defeat during these last few bottomed-out years, a span featuring the rapid demise of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, a pandemic that wound up killing over a million Americans, and a mass uprising that resulted in protestors getting maimed by police and a weird sartorial choice to wear Kenti cloth on Capitol Hill.

In all of this, “social justice politics” is a signal failure of a strikingly ineffective mode of politics: Its absolute inability to imagine fundamental and systemic change, its desire to be the wounded and self-righteous victim instead of the compromised leader, its allergy to power, its implacable dedication to being a whining chorus that laments the world instead of fixing it. The Online Left is hamstrung by a punishingly narrow range of acceptable opinions, a mass assumption of bad faith, misplaced priorities, and a stupendously distorted sense of scale. Regardless, they have written up a list of extravagant demands they can’t achieve, determined by the spats and obsessions of the glittering NYC/Beltway axis and deranged communist cosplayers who prioritize ideological purity over political efficacy.

This dynamic has bred a political and cultural affectation marred by self-importance and condescension, their half-baked activism wrapped in a layer of demographic pandering. This is a movement built on quicksand, swathes of people who ostensibly support a social justice agenda and yet are totally indifferent to whether its stated outcomes are ever achieved. Defund the Police felt less like an orienting goal than it did radical chic; semi-weekly child slaughterings have not inspired any meaningful gun control, but untold swarms of progressives put “Defund the Police #ACAB” in their Instagram bios anyway. Any concrete reform to policing practices seems less libidinally satisfying to them than appearing to be a Good Person.

As the predictable and obliterating failures pile high, the response is never to ask hard questions about goals, priorities, messaging, optics, or strategy. Social justice proponents have never developed any out-of-coalition arguments and seem indifferent to changing minds. Their only logical recourse is to direct impotent rage at those who express themselves outside the antiseptic presentation of woke language norms. If criticism is forbidden, it becomes impossible to recognize and address serious internal problems, meaning “social justice politics” is bereft of any sort of correction system.

This prohibition against criticism, no matter how mild, is enforced with the same instrument that the members of this community use to enforce all behavior: By directing absolute hellfire at the object of their ire. There is no probation, only the death penalty. The machinations of social media always reward escalation over restraint. Comprised of shameless mutants of appetite and ego, the Twitter-obsessed activist class leverages the overcaffeinated rhetoric of social justice as the perfect cover for waging bitter vendettas and blowsy feuds. This brutality is pious and self-replicating. The executioners subconsciously know the slightest misdemeanor could turn them into the condemned. The most reliable way to dodge retributive mob justice is constant vigilance, to be the most aggressive persecutor possible. This cycle proactively rewards a never-ending escalation of vindictive punishment and acrimonious bum fights.

The desire to find fault in everyone and everything distorts and disfigures your basic perception of the world and handicaps your ability to express your moral purpose. The minor-key tantrums of brittle blue-check dweebs are flabby and inert expressions broadcasted in performatively strident tones, fixating over manners so inconsequential that they barely register as a social issue. Progressivism is used to broadcast their personality disorders, their desire for society to kowtow to their insecurities. “Manspreading” was an epidemic that blocked vacant subway seats. John Oliver felt an urgent necessity to broadcast a 25-minute segment on Black hair. There is a proliferation of articles explaining why practicing self-care is a radical act. These politics are offputting, uncanny, arbitrary, arcane, alienating, and are expressed through esoteric and inscrutable jargon. This is an inability not just to speak, but also to think and act in forceful ways. The Trumpist brigade of lib-triggering, anti-woke pestering is devouring what has been revealed to be a fragile, superficial consensus reinforced through Twitter terror.

An explicit conclusion one must draw from “social justice politics” is that most people are inherently, if not irredeemably, bigoted. It is now normal for white guilt liberals—especially those who venerate Ta-Nehisi Coats and the 1619 Project—to endlessly flagellate themselves for their privilege and the original sin of American slavery. Instead of assailing the cultural and political violence that follows economic inequality and unfettered capitalism, it is more alluring to resign yourself to the idea that America is forever a cursed land, that bigotry persists as an ambient animus harbored by white people who uphold a structurally racist system. This seems to be the perfect display of empathy—an unguent for the poisoned soul—for a culture dominated by people who don’t have an interest in an agenda that would redistribute wealth and power, the well-heeled types who sit on the New York Times editorial board, who green-light entertainment, who set the tones for cultural debate, who define and describe the scope and scale of the possible.

If bigotry is indeed ubiquitous, inevitable, pernicious, it then engenders a profound fatalism, one that leaves no hope or imagination for a better society. There’s a strange obsessive fixation with Megan Markle and Megan Thee Stallion as victims of racist oppression, given that the Black communities of Flint, Michigan were drinking contaminated water for several years. Of course, rising to literal dynastic royalty or widespread celebrity does not free these women from lamentable racist cruelty. But one must consider: Is this a state of oppression so profound that it deserves to drown out a reckoning of, say, how health and economic inequities made Black Americans particularly vulnerable to COVID? If this is the case, what hope does a Black person have for racial liberation? The logical conclusion is to become blackpilled, a doomer. “Social justice politics” fashions itself as trendy revolution, but the minimum prerequisite of revolutions is a belief in the capacity for change.

Consultants and fundraisers and party apparatchiks have ruled the Church of the Blue Establishment in consequence-free perpetuity—a vast infrastructure of publications, think tanks, and consulting firms. As they exploit “social justice politics” for profit, status, and electoral success, tangible progress becomes a threat; success undercuts their prominence and influence. Permanent failure permits social justice influencers to make a cozy media perch out of righteous societal criticism, to substitute the tedious and arduous work of building an egalitarian world with crass gambits like cancel culture. For example, the transphobic undercurrents of Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special, “The Closer,” was marshaled to grave controversy, needless comedic analysis, and innumerable amounts of pharmaceutical-grade cringe. In exchange for superficial retribution and cathartic grousing, the special remained on air while anti-trans bills have been introduced in 28 states. Its ambitions are lavishly ornate, but the end goal of cancel culture remains bleary and incoherent, outside of exceedingly hazy notions of holding people accountable. This doesn’t create systemic change as much as it reinforces the capitalist logic of voting with your wallet. It is glorified customer service.

One problem with this fatalistic belief in the universality and inevitability of bigotry is the more an accusation is generalized, the less it has meaning. Words like “problematic” have become parodies of themselves because of their relentless and broad application; acts of great moral evil are weighed on the same scale as tweeting an off-color comment. The internet, especially left-of-center cultural commentary, has collapsed all distinctions in public interactions, narrowing and flattening our popular culture, which suits the crude and idle whims of various powerful interests. Every exchange of any degree of casualness is fraught with every possible shade of moral and intimate meaning. Disparities of influence and power are obliterated. Essentially, we’re all just people with hurt feelings.

Protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices is unacceptable, even if their decisions will immiserate millions of women and were brought upon, in part, by two justices nominated in a manner that’s delegitimizing this institution. But if a joke fails some sort of subjective humor test, then apparently that comedian should be power-bombed through a table. Getting dragged in quote tweets is literal violence. Paradoxically, this intense emotion erodes the distinctions of priority and practice, between what generates intense personal feelings and what generates practical real-world impact. This mindset is epitomized in a Roxanne Gay New York Times piece, “Jada Pinkett Smith Shouldn’t Have to ‘Take a Joke.’ Neither Should You.” which operates in a bizarre left/liberal discursive culture, which argues that anyone who is sufficiently offended is wholly justified in acting as petulant and psychotic they please, as long at these actions are dressed up in vague language about oppression.

The insistence that everything has political valence, that every last aspect of life is a political struggle of vast importance, makes “social justice politics” totalizing yet unserious, inescapable and mundane. It robs people of the ability to become uniquely motivated by political anger. Emploring people to direct outrage at a white girl wearing a prom dress inspired by traditional Chinese garb, to whine about the cultural appropriation of a college dining hall serving lo mein, is an assumption that everyone has an infinite supply of attention and emotional bandwidth. This is reserve energy that could’ve focused on how American media has been in an anti-China meltdown for months, laying the intellectual groundwork for an eventual, actual war. And the myopic emphasis on the gender semiotics of Wonder Woman over the quotidian realities of actual human inequality robs “social justice politics” of both moral clarity and the ability to focus on what matters to anyone who isn’t irredeemably Twitter-brained. It all stagnates from there, in all the cheesy, chiseling ways that every social justice-related outrage invariably goes nowhere. A running litany of shape-shifting demands dissipates from one blurt to the next.

This mentality has long been deeply discordant, if not unappeasable and deluded. The left side of this culture war is singularly episodic, frustrating and exhausting. They chase interpersonal feuds and pick weird food fights with room-temperature IQ idiots melting down over disposable minutiae, like a Black lead in The Little Mermaid. It is, of course, patently absurd to be emotionally invested in the ethnicity of a half-woman/half-fish. While racism powered this response, it also reduces libs who think they are So Above It into guileless pawns of a #GIRLBOSS marketing ploy. Hooting chuds fall into the daily drumbeat of gloating and grievance, and progressives who compulsively assert their moralism take to the ramparts to defend a consumer product under the illusion that they’re fighting for social progress. These people are convinced they’re the Pol Pot of posting.

If “social justice politics” is a matter of intense emotional importance and profound moral value, one that insists on a reductive and binary view of morality and establishes harsh reprisals for any violation of its orthodoxy, the movement’s validity is profoundly undermined if there is any whiff of hypocrisy or contradiction. In 2020, many social justice leaders were aggressive and enthusiastic promoters of the Biden campaign. Joe Biden was credibly accused of rape and has admitted to inappropriately touching many women. Joe Biden was a key architect of racist tough-on-crime policies, including championing the infamous sentencing disparities between cocaine and crack. There is a realpolitik calculus to backing an uninspiring candidate who was, at the very least, a milquetoast vessel for ousting Trump from the Oval Office. But this makes a mockery of a movement led by people who will lambast the use of the word “crazy” for being insensitive to the neurodivergent, but will strap you to an iron maiden if you don’t giddily vote for a doddering putz who helped perpetuate the myth of the welfare queen.

Bernie Sanders came under fire during his 2020 campaign for accepting Joe Rogan’s endorsement—at that point, the prominent podcaster had been criticized for his inflammatory comments about a trans MMA fighter. Rogan is a dull and airless meathead and a parody of a free thinker, but even if he is the absolute furthest media caricature of an Evil Person, the same liberal news outlets have spent the last countless gilded and blustering news cycles laundering the reputation of a president with a legacy of bloodshed and monstrous shipwrecks. If George W. Bush is allowed to drift back into mainstream respectability, but Joe Rogan is irredeemably problematic, it belies an utterly warped concept of morality and civility. In this world, madness crawls on dagger-pointed claws, one that rejects people who didn’t go to college, didn’t learn the right words to express themselves, haven’t gone through the literal social conditioning that values being anti-racist or trans-positive as foundational personality traits.

Many liberals suffer from a brain-rot that prefers to lose as an exclusive moral clique than win as an unpolished populist coalition. This antagonism is existential, a weird strain of mutated Puritanism. It operates on a cloudy optimism based on the idea that our actions are not influenced by our socio-economic circumstances, but solely by our moment-to-moment decisions on how to behave. Liberals who stand for a Manichean worldview, one that permits no deviation from white-hat/black-hat morality, watch Americans drift into and pissily out of their good graces. This creates an insider-outsider conundrum, one that grows evident when phrases like “bodies in spaces” are wielded as if they have talismanic power. In reality, this is an example of insider jargon that is confusing to anyone outside of select discourse bubbles. This confusion is not incidental, but by design. While the appeal of becoming an insider can attract converts, this status is maintained by outsiders vastly outnumbering the insiders, providing direct incentives to exclude large tranches of Americans from a progressive coalition. How this distorts our politics is depressingly enervating.

Despite its radical self-branding, the contemporary social justice movement fundamentally serves to empower the status quo. Effective progressive politics build mass movements by convincing various people who are unalike that they have a shared common interest, that society can do best for them when we do best for others. This would suggest a certain predisposition to forgiveness and equanimity in human affairs, a communal understanding that life is complicated and all of us are sinners. But any attempt at a rational conversation is drowned out in a cacophonous rage of shrieking neurotics, skronking bombast about all the injustices in the world. This manic cant of faux-revolution gives the illusion that the Democratic Party is moving too far left, but its main problem is that its messaging and attendant culture are based on belittling the struggles of anyone who doesn’t fall into a protected identity class.

It seems as though people are acting out of a rich vein of familiar learned helplessness running through the Blue State psyche. Scoping out the cascading political violence in front of them, the easier option was an inevitable tactical retreat born of pure hubristic laziness, like calling each other “psyops” or “fake leftists,” or further fracturing into internet-only tendencies like repeating three-year-old Twitter takes, unfunny normcore jokes, and preachy lib/left choir groupthink bullshit. Everyone on social media can point to their validated posts and their Very Correct Opinions and their taste in Good Entertainment as irrefutable proof of themselves being in the proper company and the correct milieu. But people like this do not exist to be looked at so much as they exist to be seen, or noticed. They can distract themselves and tell themselves lies because it is the only way to square what is actually happening with what they would prefer to be happening. In that case, “social justice politics” seems almost designed to make progressivism strange and alienating to most people. It cannot build a better world, but it can do great damage.

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1. This essay groups liberals and leftists together because they are functionally on “the same side” in the broader context of the culture war.