I also come from an immigrant family and was never fully exposed to wokeness until college.
I find that anti-woke people are often driven by ragebait. Matt Walsh shows them something, they get mad at it and want to boycott Bud Light or whatever. There’s no positive message being offered. There’s no alternative moral framework they offer. Wokeness offers a moral system and is very appealing to people that don’t have close communal bonds, which is why it’s so popular among people that are uprooted from their hometowns (like them going to college).
Anti-wokes need a unifying message other than “woke is bad”. This used to be Christianity, but non-immigrants are leaving Christianity at high rates, and a lot of the ones that stay are infusing wokeness with Christianity.
Very few liberals and centrists in wealthy inner suburbs or poorer urban areas actually trust the "social conservatives" to critique our woke-ass neighbors because with their next breathe a significant fraction are inevitably going to rail against the existence of the cities, or our hardworking legal immigrant neighbors, or the universities which still drive an innovative, world-beating economy, or whatever the fuck bugaboo the reactionary right has come up with this week to virtue signal about how horrible the folks who don't agree with them in every particular are. Walsh is a particular example; Chicago votes in a way that displeases him and he immediately rants against the whole city, including the literal 49.5% of it which agrees with him on the narrow issue of public safety.
As an anti-woke liberal, the obvious course for anti-woke conservatives is, well, should be anyway, obvious. If the right wants to win on this issue (and it's not clear they actually do want to win, so much as whine endlessly), they need to start hammering, relentlessly, a series of variations on the same theme: Embracing post-liberal conceptions of equity on matters of family relations, work and remuneration, public safety, health and physical fitness, etc... it hurts people, not helps them.
Stay away from gender, stop attacking people, and just start hammering downstream effects, preferably using the language of equality and opportunity. "We're leaving the most vulnerable behind in crime-ridden neighborhoods, forcing poor folks to save up to move away and rent, instead of improving the home they own or starting a local business." No discussion of the racial make-up of offenders, no comments about hellholes, etc.
Just a basic presumption that the marriage of compassion and logic lead inevitably to this conclusion, and only an excess of pathos and no logos would lead to the "woke" position.
And you can repeat this across basically all of the issues, and it will win you the mushy middle.
This is human psychology 102. Anger and fear are powerful motivators. It's the mirror image to why the left media are always on the hunt for some viral video of a black person being wronged, and aren't much interested in writing about black people doing well (unless it also involves an Overcoming story element).
Right, and this is why media and especially political media are never gonna be perfect and innocent, but in any media system there's a dynamic balance between people's animal-like fascination with compelling images of threat, power abuse, sex, or whatever, and the fact that they are actually not *mere* animals and do have some level of reasoning and discernment available to them. This tension is why you have e.g. Reddit threads where the picture is highly upvoted, but then the comments fill up with people complaining that it's just a mediocre drawing of great boobs, and in the end it gets downvoted away again.
Even when left media *does* end up acting just as badly as conservative media, it's often recognizably the case that the left media is getting drawn into it by audience demand, while the right media is eagerly pushing at all times to see how far it can go in misleading people. MSM playing the George Floyd tape over and over on a loop was in one sense just as vicious and dishonest as Fox playing the New Black Panther Party tape on a loop, but the fact is that normal people did find the Floyd tape overwhelmingly more compelling and disturbing. The MSM is also much less overtly *partisan* than the conservative media, so that both "Joe Manchin is a scumbag" and "Susan Collins is a scumbag" are coded as liberal. If anything, the MSM is frequently guilty of mounting baseless, dishonest, full-on-insane attacks against Democrats to show how tough and independent they are, as in the Hillary e-mails fiasco, or their insane and indefensible coverage of Obama's foreign policy (which is of course the root of a huge amount of obvious self-serving conservative nonsense about how they're fighting the deep state to end the forever wars or whatever.)
"it's often recognizably the case that the left media is getting drawn into it by audience demand, while the right media is eagerly pushing at all times to see how far it can go in misleading people. "
?? "Misleading" vs "audience demand" are in no sense incompatible. I can't think of a significant instance of the RW media acting to "mislead" the audience where the audience also isn't eating it up. RW media are also trying to get clicks and eyeballs.
The thing is that this is just clearly not true and I used the specific example of Fox with that knowledge in mind. It's also been established for Sinclair. These organizations do not optimize for viewership or short-term profit alone, but willingly forgo these things to some extent in order to focus on promoting unpopular conservative causes. They are more principled and less opportunistic, in a sense, than we give them credit for.
The dance with Trump during the primary, and again after he lost the election, also makes no sense unless you believe this.
Oh, understood completely. The GOP has gerrymandered its way to an easily-led, mainly low-SES primary electorate for 70% of its politicians, which suits the goal of passing donor-favorable tax law and facilitating rampant rent-seeking under the guise of pro-market policy, but the cost is that there's now a massive ecosystem of grifting idiots pandering to those people all the time, and you have to be prepared to bend like a willow bough on all issues except for taxation and rent-seeking.
Being Democrat Lite on social issues is also a losing game in the long term because people who want compassion - people who believe the role of the state is "helping people", as you put it - are just going to vote Democrat because Democrats will say these things and mean them.
Yeah, and women are on average more compassionate than men, especially to "marginalized groups". Since women have biologically been caretakers, this natural empathy is passed down to groups they think need to be nurtured. That's why high-empathy ideologies like wokeism are popular among women and low-empathy ideologies like libertarianism aren't.
I always go back to this classic Scott Alexander article:
I disagree - I think there is a large constituency who'd like to see some middle ground between the hostility of the GOP and wokeness. Hanania wrote an earlier piece on his "slippery slope" theory of voting and I think he is right. I really hate wokeness but despite that the religious right seems to me the worse slippery slope. I don't like thoughtless and non-evidence based regulatory or welfare interventions, but that slippery slope is better to me than the Ayn Rand slippery slope. If the GOP could present something else besides Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell, I'd consider them.
This is strange to me because I don't perceive the religious right as having any real power beyond being a declining but moderately influential voting bloc. Meanwhile woke is dominant in art and entertainment, academia, business, in the federal bureaucracy, and even now has a significant presence in the military and intelligence services.
They just overturned Roe V Wade without a majority of the country supporting the anti-abortion position. Fuck running some BS University. I want the Supreme Court. As you can see, woke power achieved through undemocratic BS is an inch deep and easily undone - what I've been screaming at my fellow PMCs for a decade. Set a precedent that universities are about activism youll see new activists take them over. Most anti-woke have a strange idea of why this shit seems dominant. It isn't because most people or even most Democrats believe transwomen are women. It's because of moral tribal incentive dynamics. Kathleen Stock explains in a brief lecture here. https://youtu.be/TURRApCLJ9U?si=i_S_qd1ngEOovqJi
Without digging into policy specifics, as we're not going to agree on any of them...
Were the right to do this, the point wouldn't be to win for all time on every issue, it'd be to win on this particular one. Any good conservative should understand that the issues of a few decades down the line are impossible to predict and that, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. So again, do you want to win, or whine?
If you really think you have a better playbook for counteracting the vitriol and bile that your side's grifters are spewing, go for it, but my grasp of the situation points to "turn their crippling surfeit of compassion back on them and stuff it down their throat, politely" in dealing with the post-liberals.
I'm very wary of this for two reasons: one, I don't think accepting the woke frame is wise. That is, framing (for example) criminal justice as "helping people" and "breaking the cycle of crime and poverty" has created very poor outcomes when done on the Left, so I expect the Right to also do it badly, only even more badly. And that leads to the second reason: it's not (as you put it earlier) that the Left doesn't have a logos; it's that their logos is often antithetical to reality and trying to do it like them, only based, ends in failure.
No Child Left Behind is what happens when this approach is tried in real life. The Right jettisons all ideas of rigor and hierarchy and objective achievement and decides that all children can and indeed must be "proficient" in core subjects, and the only thing holding them back are those dastardly, useless teachers, who just need the carrot of economic incentive and the stick of defunding if they're to turn every single child into Einstein. Two things then occur: one, nobody believes the Right is actually committed to this (because they're obviously not), and two, it then fails because it couldn't have succeeded in the first place, the root causes are never examined, and the Left regains ownership of public education, and vows to keep going, only with more money for them programs.
Long story short: nobody believes the Right when they say they want to elevate the downtrodden, not even the Right, and they prove this by failing to do it. The Left then comes in and governs the rubble. Tale as old as time.
Ehhh. I don't think it's really "accepting the woke frame" to say "the state has a responsibility to provide security of persons and property, all else flows from that and we must do it for all." I think it's also a very credible claim for the right to make, that they care about this.
Frankly, I think it's a cop-out for so-called "conservatives" to fail to remember that the vast majority of their electoral and policy success has been to come in after lefty pathos makes a hash of things and say "look, here's how we're going to achieve this good policy outcome that the electorate supports." This reminds all of the reactionary nutjobs that the GOP's most successful historical role for the last century and a quarter has been to moderate the pace of change and modulate its implementation, rather than call a halt.
The other major point would be that, on the decades-long timescales on which this shit plays out, if you solve the crime problem then a lot of urban centers are going to become less poor and more integrated, which takes the wind "disparate outcomes" from the sails of "systemic racism."
The demographics are on your side on this one; Hispanic and Asian immigrants are demographically dynamic and believe in America as a land of opportunity. They are already ill at-home in any coalition with a bunch of doomer post-liberals. Come help them save their homes from those (mostly white, educated, blah blah) post-liberals and see them swing to your side of a lot of other issues over time, while also pulling the GOP back from some of its rural, low-SES influences.
While I'm on record as favoring the GOP as returning to a more middle-class friendly party, a lot of this is really wishful thinking. Where's the evidence that high-SES voters are worried about the Left's lack of commitment to "security of persons and property"? It's not showing up in polling to any meaningful extent and it's barely showing up at the ballot box. People of high SES tend to be high in conscientiousness and open to experience; even when they might accept that things have gone a bit too far, they will vote for a moderate Democrat rather than a law-and-order candidate. This holds true for most of the country, barring a few elderly areas like suburban New York state.
It's just flat-out untrue that solving the crime problem leads to a denial of systemic racism. I don't know how you can look at the history of New York City from 1980 to today without concluding that the exact opposite is true. I genuinely don't understand how you can be so directionally wrong on this. By virtually every measure to be a minority in the US is to occupy a space of immense privilege, yet the racial grievance industry hit its high mark in 2022.
Asians vote for prestige and Hispanics vote for free stuff, in the main. I'm not saying the GOP can't make some gains around the margins but in both cases you're chasing a small portion of the electorate (the latter of which doesn't even bother showing up to vote in the first place) at the risk of alienating the White core of the GOP.
No thanks, the centrist liberals should attempt to influence the far left rather than moving the right to their side. Achieving whatever the far left wants in 4 years time instead of 2 is no victory. There is no point to that. Would much, much prefer total annhilation to this "victory". Would rather be the last pagan living in 10th century Harran than becoming a Shia instead of a Sunni because they have more pagan influence or something.
How many people vote out of compassion? Certainly some do, abolitionists are the best example I can think of. The thing is, compassion is usually alloyed with other emotions, often unpleasant ones. For instance, most people who feel compassion for fetuses being aborted also think the women doing the aborting are improvident sluts. It’s easy to feel compassion for Ukrainians, but I also fear and dislike the Russian government, so compassion for Ukrainians is an easy ask emotionally. I feel compassion for murder victims, but also fear and hatred of the perpetrator.
A straight appeal to compassion will fail to engage many motivationally salient emotions!
Yep. Even if the positive message was just "be normal, get married, have a family", that probably feels out of reach for the kind of person who is attracted to anti-woke in the first place (someone who almost by definition feels alienated from mainstream society, and is probably an overthinking misfit in a lot of ways, and is probably quite oppositional by nature, hence their asking why the emperor has women's clothes.)
I and pretty much all my friends from college and professional life who aren't from Oppressed Classes are "anti-woke" because we see it as stacking the odds against us and our children, and we just have brains.
We don't spend all day browsing Libs of Tik Tok or whatever, but yes, it is important to us that our bosses and HR departments, and the colleges we eventually hope our kids will want to go to, see us as minuses because we don't add to Diverse % scores.
I think people exaggerate the extent to which this woke identity politics stuff actually does put a finger on the scale for oppressed people in any way that aggregates. Its tokenism, as it has always been. It doesn't do anything about group disparities. It basically gives a tiny nudge to someone who would do fine anyway at best, at worst it just moves diversity from one place to another. There isn't like wholesale widespread reverse discrimination that is showing up in like aggregate data.
It moves Oppressed People who wouldn't be getting jobs in Field X into the lowest tier of Field X, then the lowest tier into the second-lowest tier of Field X, so and so forth. The qualifications gap I see in my field when recruiting black vs white students is pretty shocking, and we are paying the price to satisfy diversity pressures from woke institutions.
What I see in academia is no acknowledgment of a pipeline problem then claiming a diversity win for your department when someone in that smaller pipeline chooses your field over another they could have chosen. Or using BIPOC as the metric of oppression so Indian Americans or Korean Americans count as fighting the real historical oppression for black Africans for some reason. I can honestly say in my academia adjacent workplace we have no such racial preparation gap. We are just good at claiming an outsized share of the smaller pipeline
I certainly believe you. I'm in a professional field, not an academic one, with a degree and licensing requirement (I'm being purposefully vague). And here, many (not all) of the large clients who might hire us have extremely stringent DEI requirements that won't let us get away with playing word games to redefine diversity. Given that my employer is not at the absolute top of the pack in this profession, we don't get the cream of the crop of the Diverse Candidates pool, and so have to settle for being either Too White and Hetero (disqualifying us from being hired by some clients who have a diversity quota) or compromising on quality for Diverse Candidates who then require hand-holding by their superiors to not screw things up. That, in turn, creates resentment as they can tell they are at the bottom of the talent heap here.
Hmm. But the difference in SAT scores between college admitted Asians, admitted whites and admitted African Americans belies the phrase "marginal effect." And often, When a job is supposed to be filled by a qualified minority applicant, it takes months to find a suitable candidate and the search needs to be widened. Meanwhile, dozens of other qualified applicants are turned away. I have seen this happen many times. I am not saying it is the wrong thing to do, but the effects are often not marginal. And if you are the youth who needs to score 150 points higher on admissions tests and have a much beefier resume just for the chance to go to the college of your dreams, this marginal effect can become insurmountable. Same for the dozens of applicants who are turned away from a job they are highly qualified for.
Again, I understand arguments for it, but I also empathize with those who are affected adversely by these policies. Young people wanting to go to college or get good jobs did not create the world they live in, but they are forced to pay the price for the sins of their fathers.
Yes, a minority will struggle more in most cases, but tell this to the poor Asian immigrant who has been studying and volunteering every day since fifth grade who not only does not gain admission to a top twenty college but also does not get a scholarship to the best schools they are admitted to. Just because they are poor and Asian rather than a qualifying race.
Sometimes, these policies hurt already marginalized people. That needs to stop. A poor immigrant child who works their hardest for years should be rewarded. No matter the color of skin.
I think it is having real consequences, but not any consequence of transferring wealth and opportunity from white people to others in ways that register in any kind of aggregate data. White people aren't broadly losing market share to black people because of any of this stuff. That is part of the fraud of the whole DEI obsession - for every individual black person that gets into Harvard making a more qualified white person go to Cornell (gasp! how downmarket!) you have every more GDP going to capital rather than labor and making up for any slight token diversification of flourishing opportunity. DEI is and will always be tokenism - annoying and unfair in the individual instance, but not systemic in any way that redistributes flourishing broadly. I work in academia - I see this every day. If you truly have less qualified people getting in to better schools on DEI criteria, they will just create majors to accommodate them and the next tier down will improve their reputations and graduates. The idea that one will escape actual evaluation forever is absurd. I mean, this is just easy to look at - can someone show me that black people are controlling more and more wealth and that white and white adjacent people are losing it? I think "white people are the real victims" is a lame, lame, lame way of objecting to victimhood culture.
"get married, have a family" also probably feels out of reach for the person who's attracted to wokeness. Really unattractive young men who aren't straight and white are in this group for obvious reasons, but so are a ton of young women; on the average college campus, the 57-43 F:M sex ratio implies that at least 1 out of every 4 women is structurally excluded from a monogamous relationship with any of the men on her campus.
Women (and the small number of very-high-status men) have the advantage regardless of gender ratio. Women can go on online dating and get way more matches than men. The issue is trying to date men of their caliber, which is harder as less men go to college compared to women.
That's true, but with a 50:50 sex ratio a woman who keeps her hypergamy in check can likely find a man on her campus who's willing to invest seriously in her. At 57:43, there are many average women - not just the fat or ugly types - who won't be able to pair off.
I’ve been wondering about this. My daughter is looking at colleges and we’ve been shocked to see some have as much as a 60:40 F:M ratio. I really don’t think it’s wise for her to choose a college with those kinds of stats.
Steve Sailer always raises a chuckle whenever he posts mugshots from Portland: the Antifa people there, as he puts it, are mad at the world because they came out funny-looking. I do think there is a physiognomy impact here for sure and it really shows itself the further towards woke extremes you get.
But I do think it is just that - at the extremes. Most people who are into woke are going along to get along, I think, and they tend to be quite normal. Pronoun use among successful young professionals in my field is really, really high, and it's not because they're deformed freaks.
"Pronoun use among successful young professionals in my field is really, really high, and it's not because they're deformed freaks."
High among both men and women, though? I have yet to come across a man using pronouns (except on LinkedIn where it's plausible that it was an accident), but a lot of women seem eager. Two of the very nice fitness instructors at our gym have their pronouns on their name badge, even though it's in like 8 point and invisible to their average client.
Now that you mention it, it's slightly higher among men, but this is a small field and this is really anecdotal anyway. I wouldn't call this indicative of anything much.
Didn't read all your replies, but in response to this:
"Anti-wokes need a unifying message other than “woke is bad”."
In my experience, the unifying message is "return to the values of the Enlightenment" or "classical liberalism." That may be too broad to be effective by your estimation, but I think its a recurring theme of nearly all the "anti-woke" or "non-woke" writers and publications I read.
That is one of the messages, yes, but there are also a lot of anti-wokes that reject liberalism altogether. You have theocrats like Sohrab Ahmari that advocate Christian-nationalistic ideas, "neoreactionaries" like Curtis Yarvin that advocate a rule by monarchial CEOs, right-populists like the people that write for American Affairs that want a big-government conservatism, and white nationalists like "frog twitter" that want, well, a white ethnostate.
True, though most people voting for candidates have no clue who Ahmari, Yarvin, Julius Krein, or Nick Fuentes are. I'm not sure banning books in school libraries and picking on Disney, for example, is a winning campaign platform. And BLM riots and mask mandates are going to fade in voters' minds, but the fact their daughters can't get an abortion if something happens won't.
Point of order, Sohrab Ahmari actually wants a Catholic empire, not a Christian nation. He and most of the Integralists would like to see a world government, governed only by Catholic leaders, of course (Protestants would be a step above the secular but only second-best).
I see. So he wants basically what white nationalists call "globohomo", except with Catholics as the rulers.
Is Ahmari still an influential voice in right-wing Christian discourse? I know that he gained a lot of publicity with that First Things post attacking David French, but how is he doing now?
He has a column at The American Conservative and helped found some new "postliberal" journal called Compact which has made a splash. As far as I can tell, he's the main Integralist operating outside academia (the others are all professors - Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, Patrick Deneen).
This is true, but I don't know that he's personally said or written anything since then that has generated as much conversation.
One thing about Ahmari, when he got into that dispute, is that he was only 3 years removed from a conversion from atheism. Perhaps we could call him "cage stage" at that point even if that's more of a concept among the Reformed. I also recall at least his Twitter being needlessly dismissive, combative, and needling towards (among others) conservative Protestants, for someone who presented himself as wanting to be a broader leader in social conservative thought and not simply a Catholic apologist.
At some point he annoyed me with all this and I stopped following him, but it seems these days perhaps he has matured in his communication.
Ah yes, then I would say whether or not "anti-woke" is their defining politics or not. There's a column of writers who have no distinct politics besides some vague centrism, but make ragging on woke-ism central to their shtick.
I would say each of the folks you listed has a defined, unique politics - which also are at odds with woke-ism. Semantics, perhaps, but I think of say, Yarvin, by his unique politics first and not as principally anti-woke (though he is).
Not sure it's fair to expect such a broad coalition to have shared objectives besides "something other than this, please."
Many anti-wokes do have a message often promoting beauty, families, healthy living, nature, etc. You see this among the trad catholic communities, RW pagans, etc. But these messages will still be suppressed until elites start promoting them.
That's probably the most convincing thing about Yarvin's dark elves hypothesis; that the elites need to be seduced or conquered, and that traditional Hobbits aren't capable (or willing?) to conquer. Best to let the dark elves seduce elites instead.
The tradcath LARP is weird to normies, though, particularly those of non-catholic backgrounds, and the RW pagans are just weird to everyone. A positive message of normality shouldn't have to rely on esoterica like this.
Sure, but that's the issue: there really isn't much agreement among anti-wokes. If one anti-woke thinks normality is when women primarily stay in the home rather than working a career, and another anti-woke thinks normality is how things were twenty years ago, these people probably won't have the same values and goals. But they can agree on being anti-woke. So you get a coalition that falls apart whenever someone tries to come up with a positive message.
Sure but women's rights or LGBT or trans or whatever all started out as being even more weird to normies than tradcath larp(which was more or less the normal 2-3 generations ago) but each got normalized faster than the other. How does the left manage to achieve this but the right cant?
1. The left has the schools, the media, and academia--all the opinion-forming institutions.
2. The weird part of tradcath LARP isn't when you want to live like in the 50s, it's when you get into the theology (which most people have no clue about--logos? what's so great about brand logos?) and tell people it's the One True Way. Up until recently America was about Doing Your Own Thing.
I'd disagree that it's mainly theology, it's really the liturgy that makes Catholicism so alien to normies, and that goes double or triple for the TLM. American normies (who have an extremely 21st century frame of reference and little regard for anything old) never convert to Catholicism. Conversions among normies only run from Catholicism to Protestantism. People who go the other way are, basically without exception, eccentric intellectuals with a love of medieval or classical history.
It's not the theology itself, it's internet geeks going on about it. Most people aren't terribly concerned about predestination, justification by works or faith, or the filioque clause--they want a place to go on Sunday where they can be with other people with moral values and hopefully give their kids a reason to stay out of trouble. I think the Catholic Church's biggest problem is child molestation. Nobody wants their kids to be sexually abused. I remember reading Rod Dreher's account of converting from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, and what finally did it for him was a priest being found molesting a kid near where he was. One of the most amusing things about intellectual conservatism is people finding convoluted justifications for behaving like normal human beings. But, you know, at least they wind up in the right place personally, unlike a lot of progressives.
FWIW, I'm an atheist who believes religion is an evolved trait of Homo sapiens that meets social and personal needs, so I don't buy it but don't try to talk people out of it.
I disagree, as the ideology of wokeness arose from a purely negative/critical place--it started off as, and remains centered on IMO, destroying traditional moral norms, including of course, traditional Christianity. Whatever positive message you might think it has came later and grew out of that as a starting point.
The bottom line dividing factor between woke and anti-woke is that woke serves the state. It's not popular because of any sort of abstract stuff about having a "positive message," it's because powerful people support it. That's what it comes down to. I guess you could posit that those powerful people support it because its positive message or whatever convinced them to, but I think "it's useful to them socially/politically/etc." is a far more plausible narrative, as this framework tends to do well at explaining political norms for people in general, powerful or otherwise.
Does anyone think the kings of Europe in the 800s, being Christians, cared any more about "the meek will inherit the earth" or any of that coddling the poor stuff that their religion taught in practice than the Roman Emperors did? If an alien came down and observed the Plantagent kings govern, they wouldn't recognize in how the acted any difference in them and Cyrus the Great or Julian the Apostate with regard to the moral teachings of the New Testament. Christianity pioneered the "victims of evil elites" stuff and the primacy of introspection as a way of knowing (what else is faith if not that?) and then immediately, like wokeness, just became a way to distract the rubes with happy talk. Exactly how did wholesale adoption of The Gospel change the social order from 320 to 1000 AD in ways the average person would notice? The average person from 1000AD if plopped down in 320AD wouldn't have known the difference in their day to day life. Everyone still knew who had status in 1000AD just as they did in 320AD despite the "meek shall inherit the earth" stuff. In 900AD Christians were still slaughtering captives on the field if they couldn't be ransomed, still worked serfs, had slaves, kings, nobility, etc. The main changes Christianity caused were largely organizational/church policy stuff far more than anything morally taught in scripture.
"Does anyone think the kings of Europe in the 800s, being Christians, cared any more about "the meek will inherit the earth" or any of that coddling the poor stuff that their religion taught in practice than the Roman Emperors did?"
Of course they did. Ever heard of hospitals? Foundling houses? Orphanages? Those were expensive institutions created in Christendom and aimed at helping the poor that were funded by the wealthy with inextricably religious motives. Pagan Romans would've thought it completely perverse to expend so much money on helping the downtrodden.
Medieval European kings certainly engaged in power politics and brutality in wars, but they also were confronted by the Church to conform their values towards the Bible in ways that make no sense to pre-Christian minds.
Right, there were similar pressures on Muslim rulers, and Chinese emperors had Confucius to tell them being a total tyrant was bad. It took some of the edges off, though medieval kings would have seemed unthinkably barbaric and selfish today. (Much like the Saudi ruling family.)
Yea, the only sensible way to judge religious matters is to try to understand what the real-world effects are going to be. But that's a crapshoot. Who in 100 CE would have said "Christianity's sometimes-honored prohibition against marrying cousins will eventually break the extended family structures and clans which hold sway in politics globally, allowing the state to extend its remit within Christian Europe and ultimately helping spark a prolonged period of economic and technological advancement that will make a half-dozen small European nations and one rather larger European appendage into world-spanning global powers"?
That is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind! And none of that is remotely scriptural! Catholicism exerted its effects on Europe more through a multi-national organizational structure than through anything doctrinal or moral. This kind of functionalism and hermeneutics of utility is even more obvious when you consider the Protestant Reformation. You can pretty much track wokeness to Luther in this focus on introspection as a way of knowing (Faith vs works), individualism, etc. Tradcons are really strange to me as they claim to be realists but aren't realists enough - it never occurs to them that people abandon cultural structures right around when they stop delivering the goods in return for the tradeoffs. Constantly conflate selection effects with treatment effects. The cultural norms that produced wokeness are probably the better tradeoff structure for lots of people just like the cultural norms that produced protestantism were. Conservatives act like if everybody just went to church and had nuclear families everything would be better without wondering if maybe those things just don't deliver the goods without excessive costs like they used to and the only people still doing it are the ones it does still work for. This is as bad as liberals who act like it would be good for everyone to stop doing that stuff. People don't get easily brainwashed out of what is good for them - they brainwash themselves with what rationalization for what is.
Yep. If we want to choose a less modern and therefore hopefully less controversial example than the current bifurcation between tradcath and woke, let's go with "black Protestant church" vs "white Catholic church" in the 20th century. You see the former solidify, especially after the Great Migration, around a conception of Christianity centered on solidarity and mutual aid, because that's what brings home the bacon for newly transplanted, struggling, working-class blacks. Donate some of your spare income to the church, which provides help to folks who find themselves unemployed, organizes the congregation to vote if at all possible, arranges for mutual and self-defense in really bad times, sends the church's best and brightest to an HBU and maybe even law school so they can return to lend a hand and maybe aspire to influence the wider course of events, and a host of other mutual insurance programs. That's only now fraying as the more upwardly mobile folks self-select out and greater numbers of "new" African and Caribbean immigrants arrive.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church is, at the same time, getting *out* of that same exact business as prejudices against Catholics fade, their congregations are accepted and assimilated into the wider white communities nearby, their members climb the ladder into the middle and professional classes... and you end up with the position where the American Cardinalate are basically so out of step with Rome on social and economic issues that they should be excommunicated, but no one wants a schism.
Sometimes people will choose what "delivers the goods" but I'd argue that many times people choose poorly. Do they even know what goods they want delivered? How would they, when they reject all tradition, when they refuse hard work, long term planning or investment of effort. Then you're left with just choosing whatever seems to satisfy your most immediate, basest desires in the moment. Which is what wokeism offers. Immediate moral superiority without actual effort, a release from all norms or checks on your individual desires ("just be yourself!"), entitlement based on victimhood and an underlying narrative dividing the world into easy black and white, good and evil categories. Sure it "delivers the goods" in the short term but these goods end up being pretty toxic in the long term. Not just on an individual, but also on a sociatal level.
"How would they, when they reject all tradition, when they refuse hard work, long term planning or investment of effort." Do they really reject all those things or situationslly reject them? For example long term planning cam have short term costs - does long term planning for, say, people in the bottom half of the cognitive distribution pay off for the costs that ot once did? Short life history is the better strategy for some people. Imagine some metric you truly suck at has now become the inreasingly winner takes all metric for success? How smart is it to invest in that? And it is super clear that traditional morality at many points in history is cast aside as the cost benefit analysis changes. Why do tradcons love "traditional values" that are less than 200 years old rather than 2000 years old? The conservative "people don't know what is good for them" is just another lame "false consciousness" argument the Left used to love.
I think that some of your expectations about the way a Christian society ought to be in 800-1000 would not have made sense to anyone around at the time. Islam and Judaism had pretty well-organized ideas about how a state is supposed to function and how a society ought to be organized. That didn't happen with Christianity. Jesus had a very small following, and Paul was writing to a few small churches scattered around the Mediterranean. So "how should a Christian king behave?" or "how should a Christian society be organized?" were not questions that any Christian really had occasion to think about before the fourth century of the church's existence. The way the kingdom of God was supposed to be ushered in was via the end of the world, which early Christians believed to be imminent. In the meantime, Christian writings recognized the existence of earthly hierarchies, slavery, etc. Jesus famously said to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's, and while Paul seems to strongly suggest that Philemon should free his Christian slave, he doesn't order to him to. It's kind of hard to see how some of Jesus's admonitions could be applied to a king. If he's invaded by another king, should he turn the other cheek? Should he sell all he has and give it to the poor? Given that, I don't think many Christians in 1000 would be surprised to find kings, nobles, or serfs still around (the Lord having neglected to return). Similarly, when the Moors invaded Spain, I don't think they were surprised or disappointed that the Christians fought back. All that said, of course there were big changes in how society was organized and how people thought and felt. For a possibly excessively pro-Christian but very interesting account, see Dominion by Tom Holland.
" just became a way to distract the rubes with happy talk". The "happy talk" was what Christianity was about, from the beginning. "My kingdom is not of this world." One important thing to bear in mind about ancient people, Christian, pagan, Jewish, Muslim, whatever, is that they believe their own religion. Bret Devereux on the great increase in church power in the eleventh century onward: "This vast increase in the institutional power of the Church was made possible, not by armies or shrewd real-politic (though both were involved), but by belief. The primary weapon wielded by Popes in this effort was the threat of excommunication, which (under Catholic doctrine) cut off the excommunicated individual or community from salvation, potentially damning them for all eternity. But of course that threat is only real if you believe the Pope has that power. And therein is the key point: most of Europe did believe. As I tell my students, it is safe to assume, as a general matter, that people in the past believed their own religion. Of course there are exceptions, but the general rule remains." https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-ii/
The fact that one "needs to think about" things for hundreds of years thar were allegedly revealed in a perfect revelation shows the whole process is post hoc proof- texting intuitions had for other reasons.
Unlike Islam, Christianity (and even Judaism - see the shifts between Moses to Judges to the Davidic dynasties to being a province of the Babylonian and Persian empires) has never prescribed one single regime as divinely mandated. The Bible certainly has things to say about how rulers ought to behave, but it is primarily about divine matters, and only secondarily about sociopolitical arrangements. And of course, the conditions of the 1st century Greco-Roman world were quite different from those of even the 4th century, let alone the Middle Ages.
Moses and David were probably myths (Moses, definitely. David probably). And the Bible definitely has things to say about how rulers should behave, but contradictory from book to book and instance to instance, as one would expect from a book cobbled together from separate books all with different theologies, time periods, outlooks, etc. The books of the Bible - NT or OT - are not remotely all saying the same thing nor do they presupposed the same theology. Its syncretism and change at every point. There is no "traditional religion"- just snapshots in time in a constant evolution dictated by what social and cultural norms need reinforcing at a given time.
The historicity of Moses and David is not determinative of the points here. Even if they were mythical, my point is that the Biblical authors regard them both in a very positive light, even though their regimes were quite different. Judaism and Christianity don't prescribe a single regime, so it shouldn't be taken as a weakness of the religions that their adherents had debates about church-state relations and other sorts of sociopolitical issues.
I don't think deep into the comments section is a great opportunity (and I'm not the best interlocutor on the subject) to debate higher criticism readings of the Bible, so I'll just note my disagreement.
..or a revelation at all. Once you admit to it not being a perfect revelation, its obviously not one at all because anyone can become a revealer to fill in the gaps. Theological hermeneutics has the intellectual flavor of post-modern theorizing. Once you admit there is no authoritative pope on the seven hills in Rome you end up with a pope on every hill in Tennessee (to paraphrase Mencken).
Very well said. In the 20th and 21st centuries, it's become increasingly common to project our age's own skepticism and suspicions towards religion back into the past and think "Well, I find religion ridiculous, and people in the past had many instances of not obeying their religion, ergo they must also have found their religion ridiculous too." But that's really not consistent with their behavior.
Agreed. Man needs positive values so much that people will eventually choose a bad positive over a negative. Thus the sustainability of religious conservatism over nihilism. See _DIM Hypothesis_ for that and the third, rational,alternative.
They're often just conservative liberals, aren't they? So, the moral alternative they would be offering isn't very mysterious. It's the older form of liberalism which promoted ''colourblind'' attitudes, & ideals of fairness & tolerance regardless of race or creed
"No one truly feels a pretty athletic college girl who has to settle for second place in a swim meet is more of a victim than a trans athlete..."
A vast majority of people/women are not pretty athletic college girls settling settling for a second place in a swim meet. There is a lot of status to be had between an Upton and a Lizzo. And there are plenty of people in there who are going to feel (and most likely are) leapfrogged by Lizzos and similar. High status liberals feel sorry for the strange and weird precisely because status distance between them is large.
Yes, ultimately the bullying always comes from mid-status people who are going to be very very conscious about their place in the hierarchy and feel they need to defend it at all costs. The ONLY thing they have going for them is “at least I’m not overweight.” Take away that status from them and they have nothing.
This was a lot of the less-discussed aspect of hostility to gay marriage. Being married is a status symbol and if you don’t have that much status, “well at least I am married, unlike those gays” is an important thing to protect for yourself.
The number of gay marriages is pretty low. Of course, the trend is that there are less and less weddings over time, particularly among lower-SES Americans. This comment reminds me of a recent criticism I've heard. It might be that for those of us who came of age during the gay marriage debate, the debate really colored our view of what marriage is and made it less desirable. Some people say it's just for the religious, some people say it's just government paperwork, and all the while we've seen the word "marriage" associated with the word "gay" so many times that for the latently homophobic, a wedding might even feel more emasculating than it would have earlier.
This is a good piece, and one I generally agree with (and I know this piece wasn’t necessarily directed at me, but my tweet was used to illustrate the idea analyzed in the piece).
It is indeed human nature to confer status to what you naturally like (e.g., physical attractiveness).
But it is also human nature to confer status to behavior you want more of, tendencies that don’t necessarily come naturally to people (positive examples include hard work and moral character but can include negative behaviors too).
My tweet was primarily about this second type of status.
It’s true that being attractive and so on will get you better treatment in interpersonal interactions. No argument from me there.
However, publicly celebrating unappealing choices and behaviors will have an effect on what people do. A simple example: Most guys don’t like tattoos on women, yet 50 percent of millennial women have tattoos.
Most people in general don’t like obesity, but it is rising. No doubt due to cheap food, lack of exercise, etc. But as Richard has noted elsewhere, dismantling stigma around fat shaming is misguided and may consequently contribute to an increase in the number of overweight people.
Publicly conferring status to unconventional behaviors and choices will increase them, even if people generally understand those things are undesirable.
Rod dreher recently made the point that there’s a distinction between embracing eccentrics when they’re in the periphery of society vs when they are driving society. From his perspective, we are far from the former limit Ina lot of cases, related to your comments here.
Also what to make of the high rate of children of celebrities going trans? Are these the ugly ducklings of the elite who know by age seven their lot in life and choose the path of pity status, or is it that the elite truly value trans status at this point?
"However, publicly celebrating unappealing choices and behaviors will have an effect on what people do. A simple example: Most guys don’t like tattoos on women, yet 50 percent of millennial women have tattoos."
Correct. I'll add that for most women today, getting tattoos is their way of saying "you can't fire me, I quit" to the vast majority of men who don't find them attractive in the first place.
I agree with you that the hot chick is a higher status than the fat chick, but I also ask, "so what?" I don't think anyone would disagree with your thesis, but your thesis is also aside from the point.
Only in the University class is something like "status" debated. The "body positivity" or "fat acceptance" movements are negative forces in our society has nothing to do with how they rank obese people in the status hierarchy against other subjective human measures; it is harmful because of the behavior it encourages.
Being fat leads to more detrimental health outcomes than being skinny, and yet in a country already being crushed by healthcare costs, Lizzo says, "I would like to be body-normative..I want to normalize my body. And not just be like, 'Ooh, look at this cool movement. Being fat is body positive'." The issue with this has nothing to do with the theoretical point of "status," and everything to do with the fact that we not only are actively encouraging an immensely harmful trait to metastasize throughout our society under the guise of not only being inclusive but that trait should be perceived as optimal.
How to push back against this trend is a separate matter, but the issue is not simply one of "status."
I wrote about this exact issue a couple of weeks back on my Substack-
Richard, you make an interesting point here; it illustrates how vitalism can be misinterpreted, and how we should navigate this potential misperception. It is a helpful article, and my comment here is not to negate your point, but only to clarify ours.
Your perspective here is an accurate depiction of the perspective of a woke person, but it is a huge misunderstanding of what you refer to as "anti-woke" ideology.
"Anti-woke autists," as you more-or-less call us, understand that wokesters don't actually believe ugly is beautiful, and that their tokenization of ugliness comes from their pity-based activism: everyone they look down on should be glorified. As soon as they stop looking down on them, they won't glorify them anymore. This is a "communism of the soul," which boils all motivation down to the emotion of pity. You are entirely correct that they think they're stopping bullies, and it's about damn time somebody did. And, in a way, they succeed in this mission. Lizzo really does receive a consolation prize, where before she received nothing.
What you miss is that, to us, a beautiful society is an end in itself. We're not sitting around believing that woke people don't want to be beautiful—we know they do—or that beauty doesn't confer status. What we're reacting against is the elites proliferation of transgression as the object of society. When you put something on a billboard, you both elevate it as a societal aspiration AND you quite literally create the aesthetic nature of the society in which you live. Billboards are manmade trees AND manmade guideposts, the physical manifestation of our table of values, and of our creative power.
A society that glorifies ugliness is equally terrifying and dystopic regardless of why they're doing. It is more or less the definition of hell—the endless cycling towards "uglier uglier uglier" and ever increasing pain, mutilation, fear. It's pure Lord of the Flies, Sodom and Gomorrah. Imagine a society where women with masectomy scars are emblazoned on every public square. This is literally hell. And it's literally the world we live in. (Here it is: https://www.neuehouse.com/neuejournal/marcel-pardo-ariza-hollywood-mural-trans-awareness/)
We know full well why they're doing it, we know humans can't force ugliness to actually be beauty, and they know that deep down. It doesn't matter. You fight fire because its fire, not because of how it was lit. Stopping public derangement and ugliness is an end in itself—it needs to reasoning or rationality to justify. Every ugly billboard removed is society closer to God. What you're referring to as "autism," is simply the unwillingness to allow ones visual world to descend into hell.
The way you poke hole at conservative dogma and forces me to rethink some of my stances (that probably does qualify as "autistic anti-woke") is extremely refreshing. Keep up the great work!
I think your perspective here is correct but requires an enormous caveat: Lizzo does have more privilege than Kate Upton if politics get activated against Kate Upton. If Kate Upton says she likes Trump, Lizzo now has more status than her. Kate Upton only retains her status so long as she conforms to the wishes of the regime. She is allowed to enjoy the advantages nature has bestowed on her but only if she makes sure to keep the Bad People at arm's length.
>But I don’t think this stuff is that convincing to third parties, who don’t see trans as bullies, but very disturbed people they should feel sorry for.<
They're both, of course. Many "transgender" people are indeed more worthy of pity than anger or scorn. But to pretend that there aren't some transgender activists who are extremely aggressive bullies is obviously absurd. And it's that latter category who are the most dangerous because they are out in the public political space punching far above their weight.
>But anti-wokes misunderstand what they’re up against when they take their opponents too literally, and forget that underneath all the lies, human nature still finds a way.<
Again we need to distinguish. I think you are identifying and correctly talking about the large mass of poorly-informed left-leaning "regular people" who tend to vote Democrat and such. Then there are the committed activists. Yes, reality still constrains the activists, but again it would be willfully ignorant to try and pretend that the activists aren't doing any damage by pushing against it as hard as they can. You even admit as much near the end of this post.
And the activists are the problem. If the activists go away, if they lose power, all the regular people who are so easily swayed to support them will just as easily forget that woke was ever a thing at all.
I still see young woke women on social media simping for the latest heart-throb Leonardo DiCaprio look-alike. Woke men still like the busty blondes. You're right, wokeness is more of a pity prize to those who can't make the grade.
Yep. People always say college-educated white women are the wokest...but they'll still date mostly white men. And all the women of color that hold power in America: AOC, Kamala, Ketanji Jackson, Ilhan Omar, Michelle Wu, etc. are married to white men. People can virtue signal about minorities, when when it comes down to it the status-climbing women will still go for high-status men.
I think that is more a mate market problem than a ideological hypocrisy. Just a much lower concentration of black men with the proper status and the ones that do enjoy a great mate market and have lots of options. I live in a state capital with a large HBCU and there are way more educated black women than men here and the black men are attractive to white women, but black women less often find white men attractive. I think the gender skew in mixed race relationships is like 4:1 black male/white female.
True, but the very idea of a mate market is an awkward subject for woke folks, as love and romance cannot be influenced by affirmative action programs. It might be "unfair" that college-educated women don't want to date men with only high-school educations. You can even call it classist, but you can't force a woman to date down.
It might be "unfair" that skinny people are more successful in dating than fat people. You can say it's size-ist. But no amount of DEI programs can force people to like fat people.
And, of course, race. The most uncomfortable subject in dating. Everyone knows racial preferences exist. But you can't change how people really feel. So while it sucks for highly-educated black women that they can get affirmative action anywhere but the dating market, it is the cold, hard reality.
I replied to the comment in which you ID’ed as born into an immigrant family so I figured, but my point was merely that culture can play a role within certain bounds. The answer is “significantly more popular than would otherwise be the case.”
Morbid obesity no, but a certain degree of lushness in women is probably closer to most men’s ideal than an androgynous bundle of sticks as was briefly the fashion in the early aughts.
Hmm, I am not sure "racial" preferences exist in some dark way so much as there are group data differences in things like obesity rates (I think this is big!...excuse the pun) or education rates by race where race is selection bias for other assortative things and people just tend to not be in the same social circles, but interracial dating is frequent when they do. And when there are overt racial preferences, they seem to be mediated more by what women prefer than what men prefer. Never blame on male intransigence what is better explained by female mate selection. Sailer should do a followup to his 1997 piece as I think much has changed, but some has stayed the same. https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/color/articles/sailer.html
I'm college-educated and have dated interracially for much of my life. Most of the women I've dated are on the same educational caliber as I am, and it's clear that education can trump race, especially at the higher echelons of education. I can find plenty of Asian man-White woman and Black woman-White man couples at Ivies and other elite colleges, even if they are less common outside of those very-filtered areas. So yes, education matters a lot, but for those that don't have high education, they still look at things like race. It depends a lot on what is considered high-status in one's social circles.
I live in a metro area that's about 2/3 white, 1/3 black, and what I've noticed here is that in more upscale areas, there are more white man - black woman couples, but in poorer areas, it goes the other way. I suspect the root cause is that black women are outperforming black men educationally and professionally, which (in upscale areas) overrides the usual HBD-sphere dogma that black men are more sexually attractive to women than black women are to men.
1. I'm also an autist* and I guess I agree with this piece. More generally, I wish someone had explained to me, when I was younger, that status competition is a thing that normies care a lot about for [insert your preferred reasons].
2. As far as I know, no one's observed that the 57-43 F:M sex ratio among American college students implies that 14% of the average student body consists of young women whose options are a) date off-campus, assuming that's even an option for them, b) put up with a man who isn't going to commit to them, or c) end up lonely. It would be amazing if that didn't have a bunch of profound negative effects, and it's obviously going to be the low-status women bearing the brunt of them.
3. More generally, it really sucks to be low status in America today compared to 75 or 100 years ago when the high status people at least gave lip service to the importance of marital fidelity, work ethic, and all that.
*Not clinically diagnosed, but I once sent a Google poll to the friends and family who knew me at a young age wherein I asked them to rate how much some descriptions applied to me as a kid. I didn't tell them until much later that the descriptions were taken verbatim from the DSM-5 criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder.
1. Oh God, yes. I knew all the liberal stuff was BS growing up but then went and read a whole bunch of conservative BS. Some of it cancelled out the liberal BS, some of it had its own ill effects. A lot of us really have trouble figuring out social stuff and even if we realize we're being lied to we still have to figure out what the truth actually is.
2. True, though I'm not sure if that's going to pan out the way feminists want.
3. It sucks in the sense that the people on top are effectively lying to you. But most blue-collar people want their kids to get married and have kids in wedlock and own a home, just none of them can pull it off anymore. I think lower-status people were better off in the New Deal era, which would be 75, but not 100, years ago.
"2. As far as I know, no one's observed that the 57-43 F:M sex ratio among American college students implies that 14% of the average student body consists of young women whose options are a) date off-campus, assuming that's even an option for them, b) put up with a man who isn't going to commit to them, or c) end up lonely."
Sure. Women don't seem to choose that option in significant numbers, though, judging by reported rates of same sex behavior (e.g., one recent survey reports that 54% of self-identified *bisexual* women under 30 only had sex with men in the prior 5 years, and the number is surely much lower for self-identified straight women).
"LGBT is the new goth, or emo, and most people don’t want to be part of a political movement of bullies." - actually, Queer is the new goth or emo - the identity you can opt into without any skin in the game just so you can opt out of an oppressor identity without doing anything at all. LGB you actually have to do something that is tough to do if you don't actually like it. T is Q for people with psych comorbidities.
I've met at least one person who called themselves trans without actually changing anything about their lifestyle: they still went by the name they were christened with, they wore the same clothes, they didn't start wearing makeup, they didn't undergo or seek out medical transition (or even talk therapy), they weren't even particularly insistent on the pronoun thing. In some contexts, identifying as T can be just as identifying as noncommittal as NB or bisexual.
Yeah, that is a weird thing and my guess is it will hasten the recognition of the philosophical absurdity of gender identity theory. The rapid proliferation of gender identity theory reminds me of the rapid proliferation of Premillenial Dispensationosm in evangelical Christianity - both extremely strange, very recent, and poorly sourced hermeneutics that quickly rose to the level of primary doctrine required of believers who were previously in good stead within their respective belief systems without it.
After you read the most effective theses, you think to yourself, "Yes, that is what I always believed," even if you never believed it before then. That's what reading Richard Hanania's substack is like.
Very interesting. But I find it extraordinarily difficult to tell when it's "fake status" and when it's "real status." For instance, you write
"But I don’t think this stuff is that convincing to third parties, who don’t see trans as bullies, but very disturbed people they should feel sorry for."
Very few actual lgbt activists/supporters see it that way. They genuinely appear to perceive transgenderism as equally normative as cis-genderism. We're talking about the left wing of the democratic party, but not just the fringe. This idea has real currency and it's incredibly disorienting trying to feel out when people are just lying to be nice versus when they are actually that confused.
Similarly with the "law and order is racism" stuff. I was tempted to see that as just a throw away line nobody really believed, but then I saw people really acting on it and causing all kinds of mayhem. So this stuff is "fake status" right up until the moment a switch flips in the zeitgeist and things start going haywire.
Isn't it possible that both anti-wokes and wokes both believe that fat/LGBT/minority etc are genuinely higher status, despite your probably correct observation that the majority doesn't act that way in practice? e.g. With 20-30% of college kids identifying as LGBT, many of those kids must think they are gaining some status by identifying this way.
Yeah, "everyone knows wokeism is pity on the grotesque so conservatives should stop talking about it" seems like a cop out. I think the kiddos have been successfully convinced to like the inferior and unhealthy product.
There's a big difference between "I can gain social status by identifying as X" and "I can gain social status by actually being X".
Go on TikTok and see how many teenagers there are who claim to be suffering from some mental illness, typically self-diagnosed. In real life, there's nothing high-status about having a serious mental illness: you are disproportionately likely to end up homeless or in an institution, you will be unable to look after yourself, people will find you unpleasant to be around etc. But teenagers and young people CLAIM to be suffering from this or that mental illness anyway, because it makes them seem quirky or interesting, or confers some victim status upon them they haven't really earned.
Likewise with LGBT: identifying as straight seems dull and basic. Better to call yourself "bisexual" because you kissed another girl at a party once, but otherwise lead your life in a manner indistinguishable from any other heterosexual woman. The actual lesbians, meanwhile, are no higher in status than they ever were. (LGBT identification in Gen Z is overwhelmingly concentrated in the murky "bisexual" and "non-binary" categories.)
The same is true of "autists". Not sure why it's suddenly cool to self-identify this way. Outside of the internet autism has a pretty clear definition, and it doesn't mean "articulate intellectual who enjoys provoking people", it means someone who flaps the arms in endless stimming behavior, someone who will need lifelong care.
Yeah, we need a better word for "not great at reading social cues, not very concerned with social desirability, preferring to follow rules over intuition, but basically functional outside of romance if you get a job where they don't care." There was Asperger's but they took it away for some reason.
Asperger's was subsumed under "autism spectrum disorder" as an assumed variant of the same problem (autism). Interestingly, there was a bunch of controversy about Hans Asperger in recent years because he had some ties to the Nazis or something, which may have played a role in getting rid of the name.
I've been looking at online groups about autism, and that's been my sense. There's been a distinct rise in the number of people self-diagnosing as autistic or shopping around to find a psychiatrist who will give them a diagnosis. The recent expansion of the definition in the DSM-5 hasn't helped. Not that the definitions of any mental health disorders precise to begin with
Yeah - I think that's exactly what Richard is arguing. That anti-wokes think that just because society blasts these ideas at us that these ideas actually shape our interpersonal interactions, which Richard points out - of course they don't. A high status, successful "woke" man may share all sorts of "you go girl" body positivity stuff on social media, but you can bet his girlfriend is traditionally attractive.
Interesting point on LGBT. I wonder if that is part of the phenomenon. Like "I'm not sure what sense to make of these feelings" and you hear this big, social megaphone blasting these *messages* but are in the cocoon of high school / college and therefore, can't see the reality that this does not confer extra status. You just get the message that this is cool. And perhaps in that "cocoon" it is extra status. So instead of staying confused and patient, you start leaning into some of the thoughts that suggest LGBT.
I've raised the example on other Substacks of Gavin Newsom, who governs in an extremely socially liberal way and has never seen a woke cause he didn't like. He also has a traditional marriage - complete with traditional troubles, such as alcohol and the occasional indiscretion - with a beautiful wife, and they have clean-cut, polite, hard-working, educated kids. Almost everyone involved knows that this is perfectly normal and natural and that he's in no way a "hypocrite" for being woke while having all the trappings of classical morality and beauty in his relationship. It's what's expected of him and what's expected of the office. It's perfectly natural.
Similarly, I've long shared your suspicion that *most* people very active in this sphere - either pro- or anti- woke - do really understand that it's a bit kayfabe, and that the "Stunning and brave" meme from the Right never really landed because most intelligent people on the Left can say, "Yeah, so? It's the cost of doing business." It's a conferral of status as a consolation prize, not something truly elevating.
It happens at other levels of politics, too. I don't think the people making the Republican robocallers *really* think Joe Biden is a radical Marxist. I don't think most people at the Washington Post *really* think Donald Trump is a literal fascist. What they do think is that it's useful to say it is. I remember seeing this crystallized a few years ago when I saw a random tweet by a slightly anguished overweight bald guy about how his anti-white nationalist podcast wasn't getting many listens despite its hugely important, civilization-defining importance. After all, he had been assured that white nationalism was an ever-present specter in the US. Many such cases!
Exactly. It reminds me a bit of how Republicans like to talk about Black people being fooled into staying on the "Democrat plantation" even when it's against their interests. They've never talked to a middle class Black person, ever. It's all caricatures.
Here is a maxim you can live by and it works for Left and Right - the frequency and volume of pronouncements on what black people should do, what they should think, or what they want is in inverse proportion to the minutes one has spent interacting with black people. It also works for black people.
Support for Trump seems to be strongest and most concentrated among the White nationalists, the hitherto overlooked activist block. Yes, some of them oppose Trump because they go to greater extremes, but not many, and they are not the representative cherries to pick. Go to 4chan's /pol/ or StormFront. There is no spinning it away. I didn't believe in the concept of the "dog whistle" until Trump.
Even if this was true - and I very much have my doubts - the number of White nationalists in this country surely can't break the six figures. The modal and average Trump supporters take great pains to be 'inclusive', however clumsily they do so. The Trump campaign would surely reject the activism of White nationalists.
Yes, good point. They are not many, but they most certainly tend to be Trump supporters. Only a small trifle of voters and activists would openly adhere to White nationalism, but millions of voters are subconsciously sympathetic to it, as they would not abandon their own people, in spite of their stated beliefs.
Yes, I agree. The most plausible motive for the strict border policy that was Trump's platform is indeed White nationalism. The explicit justification is that border crossers are criminals. But, I expect it wouldn't make so much a difference if Hispanics tended to be law-abiding. One way or the other, Whites do not want the USA to be transformed into another Latin-American nation, whether they explicitly know it or not. That is not a shameful way to think--that is a natural and expected way to think.
And by that token people who call wokeness Marxism seem to not notice the loudest voices denouncing that stuff are the few Marxists left out there. I think we have just gotten to the point where "Marxism" is to the Right what "Racism" is to the Left. Basically just demonizing words to tar anything you don't like.
It's hard to not see the influence of Marxism in *most* left-coded intellectual thought downstream of Marx. But calling it all "Marxism" is like calling every car a "Model T."
The anti-Woke often do make a distinction from orthodox Marxism by calling it “cultural Marxism”. You can see the seeds of Wokeism in Marcuse et al. But Wokeism is it’s own thing--in the words of the libertarian philosopher Jan Lester, it’s “inverted fascism” .
I think one of the things is a lot of us spergs tend to be more affected by the official line than reality, because we can't perceive social reality as well. So we're more likely to get worked up believing that Lizzo really would have higher status than Kate Upton. Which she does if there's a Twitter beef, but that's not relevant to most people, I think. Sure some un-PC tweet or Facebook post could go viral, but in practice that's a tiny risk for most people.
Similarly, I held off dating way too long because I believed both the MRA paranoia about false rape accusations and the radical feminist arguments I was getting fed from school and work that everything was rape. (Try to figure out from reading them exactly what would be an acceptable way to initiate a relationship as a man seeking a woman. Pretty much the biggest takeaway I got was "if you don't want sex, you're OK.") It's kind of like trying to figure out the world by reading Communist and Nazi propaganda--the most important bit is some secret force is destroying the world and responsible for all its evils, is it capitalists or the Jews?
I do think feminism is especially bad for autistic guys because they basically expect you to read social cues all the time, and we're bad at that. Also, as autistic men are the least desirable personality type for women, the more power you give women, the worse it is for us. Non-autistic men can read the signals and know where the BS is, women gain benefit from the preferences feminists are putting in (though they may be less likely to get the long-term committed relationships they usually crave).
I genuinely do think a lot of lower-class white guys are getting screwed coming and going, though. They're last for any corporate jobs because of their race and gender (meanwhile the white guys at the top who got there through connections don't have a problem), and they don't have enough money and connections to get anything through social circles (do you think Lachlan Murdoch is worried about affirmative action taking his job away?)
1. Great piece but its unconvincing to call the affect anti-woke activists give as is anything resembling autism even in the way you have used (socially analytical without being socially aware or wanting to be well liked). Plus it reminds me of the way autism is used in 4chan/troll RW lingo. There must be a better way to phrase it like the mistaken world weariness of the anti-woke or something like that.
3. What you refer to autism "Matt Walsh videos where he DESTROYS transwomen with FACTS and LOGIC" is not even new or unique to anti-woke RW messaging. It's a continuation of the way social media videos and clips from the YAF foundation were titled when Ben Shapiro used to go around college campuses.
4. The biggest problem with the forces of anti-woke isn't their weakly defined "autism" but their lack of consensus on what they actually believe in. For example establishment conservatives are united in what they like but divided in what they stand for when discussing transgenderism. In this tweet https://twitter.com/TheOmniZaddy/status/1652196147174203393 you see Noah Rothman of National Review does not know how to refer to Zephyr so he keeps using her name instead of using a pronoun. Anti-woke activists haven't even come to a consensus on whether deadnaming trans is acceptable or whether to refer to trans by their biological pronouns. How could this be a successful political movement? What do these activists say to a parents who says my kid says he/she is trans. What is their plan? What should the parents, the schools and the government must do? So much of what anti-wokes should do to resist wokeness is under-theorized and lacks consensus. When this question is posed to Mitch McConnel or Gov Youngkin what will they say? Even for a simple question like should a trans person be called using her real pre-trans name or trans name? Not a single elected can give a good answer.
Funny, I would actually say it's the other way around. It's the left that's under-theorized and lacks consensus. Have you missed the nasty feminist ("TERF") vs trans activist wars? These are people who were marching in lockstep just yesterday.
This becomes apparent when you look at the words that are used to describe the respective ideologies. On one side we have words like capitalism, libertarianism, conservatism. Notice how all these words describe the core of what they are about. Capitalism is the theory of capital movements and ownership. Libertarianism is about liberty. Conservatism is about conserving the status quo against radical social change.
On the opposing side, what words do we see? Leftism, wokeness, political correctness, Marxism. None of these words actually describe the core of what these people believe. The closest you can get is communism, but even that doesn't really describe any core theory of what communists want hence the endless claims that "xyz isn't real communism" that are basically irrefutable because real communism isn't well defined to begin with. And anyway, what modern leftist would be caught dead admitting they're communist?
The reason these words don't actually refer to a concrete thing or idea is because there is no particular theory underlying left wing thought. Libertarians in 2023 are extremely similar in what they think to libertarians from 1923. That's because they have a stable core of economic and social theory that they're united around. Modern leftists, on the other hand, would be unrecognizable to leftists of the 20s. They long ago stopped caring about the working classes, for example. They no longer use words like proletariat. Their strategies have changed from violent revolution to the Long March. But then a frequent sentiment is that modern leftism isn't even the same as it was 20 or 40 years ago! A 1970s leftist has a very different view on government, free speech and the ruling elites as a 2020s leftist, for instance.
Your argument about the non-left being under-theorized is nonsensical because it revolves entirely around trick questions on arbitrary social conventions the left itself is in the middle of trying to change, largely one suspects simply to identify ideological enemies. But now try asking a leftist simple questions like "does printing money cause inflation" - something with simple and robust theoretical roots, which has a great influence on everyone's lives - and watch them refuse to talk about it.
If anything the left is over-theorized--queer theory, critical race theory, Marxism, various forms of feminism, and some I no doubt forgot. The theories don't agree totally (except that white cishet men are bad), and they produce bad government, but there are plenty of them and they've written volumes on them.
Yes, the left produces a lot of things that claim to be theories, but what actually _are_ they and why are there so many? I argue that the left loves the idea of theory, hence the criticism above that the right is "under-theorized", but when you try to nail down what the core of left wing theory actually is it's all just a pile of very shallow, surface level ideas which is why there's so much infighting and ideological instability (working classes -> feminism -> islamophobia -> racism -> trans -> ???).
Marxism doesn't agree with that white cismen are bad, for example. It's fine with men. It's all about some hypothetical class conflict.
If you get two libertarians in a room and ask them to talk about the theory of their philosophy, I think they'd be able to reach very similar and pretty deep answers without communicating. If you do that for two typical leftists they may agree on what they believe, but explaining why they believe that, what theoretical framework justifies it and the other things they believed over the years, will be much harder. At least, going by personal experience.
I would say all of those theories are compatible and share one vital axiom: egalitarianism, aka blank slatism. When it is applied to race, it's called CRT. Sex-wise it's called feminism. Sexual identity egalitarianism= queer theory. Class egalitarianism= Marxism. All individuals and groups have identical potential in all areas of life and are thus interchangeable and deserve equal outcomes, respect, status, etc. White straight men have been the most influential group(s) to repudiate it in recent history, so they are the only group that can be and must be hated, and are not equal to all the others, creating a kind of inverted hierarchy compared with the old traditional European hierarchy.
I think hereditarianism (i.e., being a Human biodiversity believer) is the most important singular belief that will predispose you to be far-right instead of far-left. Maybe ethnocentrism/racial nepotism is the second most important.
You are confusing leftists being stupid with them having under-theorized their beliefs. The leftist (including the supposed smart ones like E Warren) refuses to acknowledge printing a lot money caused inflation and says greed caused inflation because the leftist is dumb.
I also come from an immigrant family and was never fully exposed to wokeness until college.
I find that anti-woke people are often driven by ragebait. Matt Walsh shows them something, they get mad at it and want to boycott Bud Light or whatever. There’s no positive message being offered. There’s no alternative moral framework they offer. Wokeness offers a moral system and is very appealing to people that don’t have close communal bonds, which is why it’s so popular among people that are uprooted from their hometowns (like them going to college).
Anti-wokes need a unifying message other than “woke is bad”. This used to be Christianity, but non-immigrants are leaving Christianity at high rates, and a lot of the ones that stay are infusing wokeness with Christianity.
Very few liberals and centrists in wealthy inner suburbs or poorer urban areas actually trust the "social conservatives" to critique our woke-ass neighbors because with their next breathe a significant fraction are inevitably going to rail against the existence of the cities, or our hardworking legal immigrant neighbors, or the universities which still drive an innovative, world-beating economy, or whatever the fuck bugaboo the reactionary right has come up with this week to virtue signal about how horrible the folks who don't agree with them in every particular are. Walsh is a particular example; Chicago votes in a way that displeases him and he immediately rants against the whole city, including the literal 49.5% of it which agrees with him on the narrow issue of public safety.
As an anti-woke liberal, the obvious course for anti-woke conservatives is, well, should be anyway, obvious. If the right wants to win on this issue (and it's not clear they actually do want to win, so much as whine endlessly), they need to start hammering, relentlessly, a series of variations on the same theme: Embracing post-liberal conceptions of equity on matters of family relations, work and remuneration, public safety, health and physical fitness, etc... it hurts people, not helps them.
Stay away from gender, stop attacking people, and just start hammering downstream effects, preferably using the language of equality and opportunity. "We're leaving the most vulnerable behind in crime-ridden neighborhoods, forcing poor folks to save up to move away and rent, instead of improving the home they own or starting a local business." No discussion of the racial make-up of offenders, no comments about hellholes, etc.
Just a basic presumption that the marriage of compassion and logic lead inevitably to this conclusion, and only an excess of pathos and no logos would lead to the "woke" position.
And you can repeat this across basically all of the issues, and it will win you the mushy middle.
But that's not actually Matt Walsh's goal.
Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder, etc. follows the money. Making fun of Dylan Mulvaney and smashing Bud Light? Lots of clicks, lots of things purchased.
Saying "Hey, maybe we should offer something positive instead of just being angry all the time?" No clicks, no revenue.
This is human psychology 102. Anger and fear are powerful motivators. It's the mirror image to why the left media are always on the hunt for some viral video of a black person being wronged, and aren't much interested in writing about black people doing well (unless it also involves an Overcoming story element).
Leftists are angry when whites kill blacks but silent when blacks kill blacks.
Right, and this is why media and especially political media are never gonna be perfect and innocent, but in any media system there's a dynamic balance between people's animal-like fascination with compelling images of threat, power abuse, sex, or whatever, and the fact that they are actually not *mere* animals and do have some level of reasoning and discernment available to them. This tension is why you have e.g. Reddit threads where the picture is highly upvoted, but then the comments fill up with people complaining that it's just a mediocre drawing of great boobs, and in the end it gets downvoted away again.
Even when left media *does* end up acting just as badly as conservative media, it's often recognizably the case that the left media is getting drawn into it by audience demand, while the right media is eagerly pushing at all times to see how far it can go in misleading people. MSM playing the George Floyd tape over and over on a loop was in one sense just as vicious and dishonest as Fox playing the New Black Panther Party tape on a loop, but the fact is that normal people did find the Floyd tape overwhelmingly more compelling and disturbing. The MSM is also much less overtly *partisan* than the conservative media, so that both "Joe Manchin is a scumbag" and "Susan Collins is a scumbag" are coded as liberal. If anything, the MSM is frequently guilty of mounting baseless, dishonest, full-on-insane attacks against Democrats to show how tough and independent they are, as in the Hillary e-mails fiasco, or their insane and indefensible coverage of Obama's foreign policy (which is of course the root of a huge amount of obvious self-serving conservative nonsense about how they're fighting the deep state to end the forever wars or whatever.)
"it's often recognizably the case that the left media is getting drawn into it by audience demand, while the right media is eagerly pushing at all times to see how far it can go in misleading people. "
?? "Misleading" vs "audience demand" are in no sense incompatible. I can't think of a significant instance of the RW media acting to "mislead" the audience where the audience also isn't eating it up. RW media are also trying to get clicks and eyeballs.
The thing is that this is just clearly not true and I used the specific example of Fox with that knowledge in mind. It's also been established for Sinclair. These organizations do not optimize for viewership or short-term profit alone, but willingly forgo these things to some extent in order to focus on promoting unpopular conservative causes. They are more principled and less opportunistic, in a sense, than we give them credit for.
The dance with Trump during the primary, and again after he lost the election, also makes no sense unless you believe this.
Oh, understood completely. The GOP has gerrymandered its way to an easily-led, mainly low-SES primary electorate for 70% of its politicians, which suits the goal of passing donor-favorable tax law and facilitating rampant rent-seeking under the guise of pro-market policy, but the cost is that there's now a massive ecosystem of grifting idiots pandering to those people all the time, and you have to be prepared to bend like a willow bough on all issues except for taxation and rent-seeking.
Being Democrat Lite on social issues is also a losing game in the long term because people who want compassion - people who believe the role of the state is "helping people", as you put it - are just going to vote Democrat because Democrats will say these things and mean them.
Yeah, and women are on average more compassionate than men, especially to "marginalized groups". Since women have biologically been caretakers, this natural empathy is passed down to groups they think need to be nurtured. That's why high-empathy ideologies like wokeism are popular among women and low-empathy ideologies like libertarianism aren't.
I always go back to this classic Scott Alexander article:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-mostly-not-due-to-offensive-attitudes/
And I wrote my own analysis:
https://societystandpoint.substack.com/p/why-wellesley-women-are-erasing-womanhood
Women are often incredibly cruel. I get tired of hearing how compadsionate they are.
I disagree - I think there is a large constituency who'd like to see some middle ground between the hostility of the GOP and wokeness. Hanania wrote an earlier piece on his "slippery slope" theory of voting and I think he is right. I really hate wokeness but despite that the religious right seems to me the worse slippery slope. I don't like thoughtless and non-evidence based regulatory or welfare interventions, but that slippery slope is better to me than the Ayn Rand slippery slope. If the GOP could present something else besides Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell, I'd consider them.
This is strange to me because I don't perceive the religious right as having any real power beyond being a declining but moderately influential voting bloc. Meanwhile woke is dominant in art and entertainment, academia, business, in the federal bureaucracy, and even now has a significant presence in the military and intelligence services.
They just overturned Roe V Wade without a majority of the country supporting the anti-abortion position. Fuck running some BS University. I want the Supreme Court. As you can see, woke power achieved through undemocratic BS is an inch deep and easily undone - what I've been screaming at my fellow PMCs for a decade. Set a precedent that universities are about activism youll see new activists take them over. Most anti-woke have a strange idea of why this shit seems dominant. It isn't because most people or even most Democrats believe transwomen are women. It's because of moral tribal incentive dynamics. Kathleen Stock explains in a brief lecture here. https://youtu.be/TURRApCLJ9U?si=i_S_qd1ngEOovqJi
Without digging into policy specifics, as we're not going to agree on any of them...
Were the right to do this, the point wouldn't be to win for all time on every issue, it'd be to win on this particular one. Any good conservative should understand that the issues of a few decades down the line are impossible to predict and that, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. So again, do you want to win, or whine?
If you really think you have a better playbook for counteracting the vitriol and bile that your side's grifters are spewing, go for it, but my grasp of the situation points to "turn their crippling surfeit of compassion back on them and stuff it down their throat, politely" in dealing with the post-liberals.
I'm very wary of this for two reasons: one, I don't think accepting the woke frame is wise. That is, framing (for example) criminal justice as "helping people" and "breaking the cycle of crime and poverty" has created very poor outcomes when done on the Left, so I expect the Right to also do it badly, only even more badly. And that leads to the second reason: it's not (as you put it earlier) that the Left doesn't have a logos; it's that their logos is often antithetical to reality and trying to do it like them, only based, ends in failure.
No Child Left Behind is what happens when this approach is tried in real life. The Right jettisons all ideas of rigor and hierarchy and objective achievement and decides that all children can and indeed must be "proficient" in core subjects, and the only thing holding them back are those dastardly, useless teachers, who just need the carrot of economic incentive and the stick of defunding if they're to turn every single child into Einstein. Two things then occur: one, nobody believes the Right is actually committed to this (because they're obviously not), and two, it then fails because it couldn't have succeeded in the first place, the root causes are never examined, and the Left regains ownership of public education, and vows to keep going, only with more money for them programs.
Long story short: nobody believes the Right when they say they want to elevate the downtrodden, not even the Right, and they prove this by failing to do it. The Left then comes in and governs the rubble. Tale as old as time.
Ehhh. I don't think it's really "accepting the woke frame" to say "the state has a responsibility to provide security of persons and property, all else flows from that and we must do it for all." I think it's also a very credible claim for the right to make, that they care about this.
Frankly, I think it's a cop-out for so-called "conservatives" to fail to remember that the vast majority of their electoral and policy success has been to come in after lefty pathos makes a hash of things and say "look, here's how we're going to achieve this good policy outcome that the electorate supports." This reminds all of the reactionary nutjobs that the GOP's most successful historical role for the last century and a quarter has been to moderate the pace of change and modulate its implementation, rather than call a halt.
The other major point would be that, on the decades-long timescales on which this shit plays out, if you solve the crime problem then a lot of urban centers are going to become less poor and more integrated, which takes the wind "disparate outcomes" from the sails of "systemic racism."
The demographics are on your side on this one; Hispanic and Asian immigrants are demographically dynamic and believe in America as a land of opportunity. They are already ill at-home in any coalition with a bunch of doomer post-liberals. Come help them save their homes from those (mostly white, educated, blah blah) post-liberals and see them swing to your side of a lot of other issues over time, while also pulling the GOP back from some of its rural, low-SES influences.
While I'm on record as favoring the GOP as returning to a more middle-class friendly party, a lot of this is really wishful thinking. Where's the evidence that high-SES voters are worried about the Left's lack of commitment to "security of persons and property"? It's not showing up in polling to any meaningful extent and it's barely showing up at the ballot box. People of high SES tend to be high in conscientiousness and open to experience; even when they might accept that things have gone a bit too far, they will vote for a moderate Democrat rather than a law-and-order candidate. This holds true for most of the country, barring a few elderly areas like suburban New York state.
It's just flat-out untrue that solving the crime problem leads to a denial of systemic racism. I don't know how you can look at the history of New York City from 1980 to today without concluding that the exact opposite is true. I genuinely don't understand how you can be so directionally wrong on this. By virtually every measure to be a minority in the US is to occupy a space of immense privilege, yet the racial grievance industry hit its high mark in 2022.
Asians vote for prestige and Hispanics vote for free stuff, in the main. I'm not saying the GOP can't make some gains around the margins but in both cases you're chasing a small portion of the electorate (the latter of which doesn't even bother showing up to vote in the first place) at the risk of alienating the White core of the GOP.
No thanks, the centrist liberals should attempt to influence the far left rather than moving the right to their side. Achieving whatever the far left wants in 4 years time instead of 2 is no victory. There is no point to that. Would much, much prefer total annhilation to this "victory". Would rather be the last pagan living in 10th century Harran than becoming a Shia instead of a Sunni because they have more pagan influence or something.
How many people vote out of compassion? Certainly some do, abolitionists are the best example I can think of. The thing is, compassion is usually alloyed with other emotions, often unpleasant ones. For instance, most people who feel compassion for fetuses being aborted also think the women doing the aborting are improvident sluts. It’s easy to feel compassion for Ukrainians, but I also fear and dislike the Russian government, so compassion for Ukrainians is an easy ask emotionally. I feel compassion for murder victims, but also fear and hatred of the perpetrator.
A straight appeal to compassion will fail to engage many motivationally salient emotions!
Yep. Even if the positive message was just "be normal, get married, have a family", that probably feels out of reach for the kind of person who is attracted to anti-woke in the first place (someone who almost by definition feels alienated from mainstream society, and is probably an overthinking misfit in a lot of ways, and is probably quite oppositional by nature, hence their asking why the emperor has women's clothes.)
I and pretty much all my friends from college and professional life who aren't from Oppressed Classes are "anti-woke" because we see it as stacking the odds against us and our children, and we just have brains.
We don't spend all day browsing Libs of Tik Tok or whatever, but yes, it is important to us that our bosses and HR departments, and the colleges we eventually hope our kids will want to go to, see us as minuses because we don't add to Diverse % scores.
I think people exaggerate the extent to which this woke identity politics stuff actually does put a finger on the scale for oppressed people in any way that aggregates. Its tokenism, as it has always been. It doesn't do anything about group disparities. It basically gives a tiny nudge to someone who would do fine anyway at best, at worst it just moves diversity from one place to another. There isn't like wholesale widespread reverse discrimination that is showing up in like aggregate data.
It moves Oppressed People who wouldn't be getting jobs in Field X into the lowest tier of Field X, then the lowest tier into the second-lowest tier of Field X, so and so forth. The qualifications gap I see in my field when recruiting black vs white students is pretty shocking, and we are paying the price to satisfy diversity pressures from woke institutions.
What I see in academia is no acknowledgment of a pipeline problem then claiming a diversity win for your department when someone in that smaller pipeline chooses your field over another they could have chosen. Or using BIPOC as the metric of oppression so Indian Americans or Korean Americans count as fighting the real historical oppression for black Africans for some reason. I can honestly say in my academia adjacent workplace we have no such racial preparation gap. We are just good at claiming an outsized share of the smaller pipeline
I certainly believe you. I'm in a professional field, not an academic one, with a degree and licensing requirement (I'm being purposefully vague). And here, many (not all) of the large clients who might hire us have extremely stringent DEI requirements that won't let us get away with playing word games to redefine diversity. Given that my employer is not at the absolute top of the pack in this profession, we don't get the cream of the crop of the Diverse Candidates pool, and so have to settle for being either Too White and Hetero (disqualifying us from being hired by some clients who have a diversity quota) or compromising on quality for Diverse Candidates who then require hand-holding by their superiors to not screw things up. That, in turn, creates resentment as they can tell they are at the bottom of the talent heap here.
Hmm. But the difference in SAT scores between college admitted Asians, admitted whites and admitted African Americans belies the phrase "marginal effect." And often, When a job is supposed to be filled by a qualified minority applicant, it takes months to find a suitable candidate and the search needs to be widened. Meanwhile, dozens of other qualified applicants are turned away. I have seen this happen many times. I am not saying it is the wrong thing to do, but the effects are often not marginal. And if you are the youth who needs to score 150 points higher on admissions tests and have a much beefier resume just for the chance to go to the college of your dreams, this marginal effect can become insurmountable. Same for the dozens of applicants who are turned away from a job they are highly qualified for.
Again, I understand arguments for it, but I also empathize with those who are affected adversely by these policies. Young people wanting to go to college or get good jobs did not create the world they live in, but they are forced to pay the price for the sins of their fathers.
Yes, a minority will struggle more in most cases, but tell this to the poor Asian immigrant who has been studying and volunteering every day since fifth grade who not only does not gain admission to a top twenty college but also does not get a scholarship to the best schools they are admitted to. Just because they are poor and Asian rather than a qualifying race.
Sometimes, these policies hurt already marginalized people. That needs to stop. A poor immigrant child who works their hardest for years should be rewarded. No matter the color of skin.
I think it is having real consequences, but not any consequence of transferring wealth and opportunity from white people to others in ways that register in any kind of aggregate data. White people aren't broadly losing market share to black people because of any of this stuff. That is part of the fraud of the whole DEI obsession - for every individual black person that gets into Harvard making a more qualified white person go to Cornell (gasp! how downmarket!) you have every more GDP going to capital rather than labor and making up for any slight token diversification of flourishing opportunity. DEI is and will always be tokenism - annoying and unfair in the individual instance, but not systemic in any way that redistributes flourishing broadly. I work in academia - I see this every day. If you truly have less qualified people getting in to better schools on DEI criteria, they will just create majors to accommodate them and the next tier down will improve their reputations and graduates. The idea that one will escape actual evaluation forever is absurd. I mean, this is just easy to look at - can someone show me that black people are controlling more and more wealth and that white and white adjacent people are losing it? I think "white people are the real victims" is a lame, lame, lame way of objecting to victimhood culture.
"get married, have a family" also probably feels out of reach for the person who's attracted to wokeness. Really unattractive young men who aren't straight and white are in this group for obvious reasons, but so are a ton of young women; on the average college campus, the 57-43 F:M sex ratio implies that at least 1 out of every 4 women is structurally excluded from a monogamous relationship with any of the men on her campus.
Women (and the small number of very-high-status men) have the advantage regardless of gender ratio. Women can go on online dating and get way more matches than men. The issue is trying to date men of their caliber, which is harder as less men go to college compared to women.
That's true, but with a 50:50 sex ratio a woman who keeps her hypergamy in check can likely find a man on her campus who's willing to invest seriously in her. At 57:43, there are many average women - not just the fat or ugly types - who won't be able to pair off.
I’ve been wondering about this. My daughter is looking at colleges and we’ve been shocked to see some have as much as a 60:40 F:M ratio. I really don’t think it’s wise for her to choose a college with those kinds of stats.
Steve Sailer always raises a chuckle whenever he posts mugshots from Portland: the Antifa people there, as he puts it, are mad at the world because they came out funny-looking. I do think there is a physiognomy impact here for sure and it really shows itself the further towards woke extremes you get.
But I do think it is just that - at the extremes. Most people who are into woke are going along to get along, I think, and they tend to be quite normal. Pronoun use among successful young professionals in my field is really, really high, and it's not because they're deformed freaks.
"Pronoun use among successful young professionals in my field is really, really high, and it's not because they're deformed freaks."
High among both men and women, though? I have yet to come across a man using pronouns (except on LinkedIn where it's plausible that it was an accident), but a lot of women seem eager. Two of the very nice fitness instructors at our gym have their pronouns on their name badge, even though it's in like 8 point and invisible to their average client.
Now that you mention it, it's slightly higher among men, but this is a small field and this is really anecdotal anyway. I wouldn't call this indicative of anything much.
Didn't read all your replies, but in response to this:
"Anti-wokes need a unifying message other than “woke is bad”."
In my experience, the unifying message is "return to the values of the Enlightenment" or "classical liberalism." That may be too broad to be effective by your estimation, but I think its a recurring theme of nearly all the "anti-woke" or "non-woke" writers and publications I read.
That is one of the messages, yes, but there are also a lot of anti-wokes that reject liberalism altogether. You have theocrats like Sohrab Ahmari that advocate Christian-nationalistic ideas, "neoreactionaries" like Curtis Yarvin that advocate a rule by monarchial CEOs, right-populists like the people that write for American Affairs that want a big-government conservatism, and white nationalists like "frog twitter" that want, well, a white ethnostate.
True, though most people voting for candidates have no clue who Ahmari, Yarvin, Julius Krein, or Nick Fuentes are. I'm not sure banning books in school libraries and picking on Disney, for example, is a winning campaign platform. And BLM riots and mask mandates are going to fade in voters' minds, but the fact their daughters can't get an abortion if something happens won't.
Point of order, Sohrab Ahmari actually wants a Catholic empire, not a Christian nation. He and most of the Integralists would like to see a world government, governed only by Catholic leaders, of course (Protestants would be a step above the secular but only second-best).
I see. So he wants basically what white nationalists call "globohomo", except with Catholics as the rulers.
Is Ahmari still an influential voice in right-wing Christian discourse? I know that he gained a lot of publicity with that First Things post attacking David French, but how is he doing now?
I'd say he's still influential.
He has a column at The American Conservative and helped found some new "postliberal" journal called Compact which has made a splash. As far as I can tell, he's the main Integralist operating outside academia (the others are all professors - Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, Patrick Deneen).
This is true, but I don't know that he's personally said or written anything since then that has generated as much conversation.
One thing about Ahmari, when he got into that dispute, is that he was only 3 years removed from a conversion from atheism. Perhaps we could call him "cage stage" at that point even if that's more of a concept among the Reformed. I also recall at least his Twitter being needlessly dismissive, combative, and needling towards (among others) conservative Protestants, for someone who presented himself as wanting to be a broader leader in social conservative thought and not simply a Catholic apologist.
At some point he annoyed me with all this and I stopped following him, but it seems these days perhaps he has matured in his communication.
Ah yes, then I would say whether or not "anti-woke" is their defining politics or not. There's a column of writers who have no distinct politics besides some vague centrism, but make ragging on woke-ism central to their shtick.
I would say each of the folks you listed has a defined, unique politics - which also are at odds with woke-ism. Semantics, perhaps, but I think of say, Yarvin, by his unique politics first and not as principally anti-woke (though he is).
Not sure it's fair to expect such a broad coalition to have shared objectives besides "something other than this, please."
Those people are very much in the minority
Many anti-wokes do have a message often promoting beauty, families, healthy living, nature, etc. You see this among the trad catholic communities, RW pagans, etc. But these messages will still be suppressed until elites start promoting them.
That's probably the most convincing thing about Yarvin's dark elves hypothesis; that the elites need to be seduced or conquered, and that traditional Hobbits aren't capable (or willing?) to conquer. Best to let the dark elves seduce elites instead.
The tradcath LARP is weird to normies, though, particularly those of non-catholic backgrounds, and the RW pagans are just weird to everyone. A positive message of normality shouldn't have to rely on esoterica like this.
Sure, but that's the issue: there really isn't much agreement among anti-wokes. If one anti-woke thinks normality is when women primarily stay in the home rather than working a career, and another anti-woke thinks normality is how things were twenty years ago, these people probably won't have the same values and goals. But they can agree on being anti-woke. So you get a coalition that falls apart whenever someone tries to come up with a positive message.
Sure but women's rights or LGBT or trans or whatever all started out as being even more weird to normies than tradcath larp(which was more or less the normal 2-3 generations ago) but each got normalized faster than the other. How does the left manage to achieve this but the right cant?
1. The left has the schools, the media, and academia--all the opinion-forming institutions.
2. The weird part of tradcath LARP isn't when you want to live like in the 50s, it's when you get into the theology (which most people have no clue about--logos? what's so great about brand logos?) and tell people it's the One True Way. Up until recently America was about Doing Your Own Thing.
I'd disagree that it's mainly theology, it's really the liturgy that makes Catholicism so alien to normies, and that goes double or triple for the TLM. American normies (who have an extremely 21st century frame of reference and little regard for anything old) never convert to Catholicism. Conversions among normies only run from Catholicism to Protestantism. People who go the other way are, basically without exception, eccentric intellectuals with a love of medieval or classical history.
It's not the theology itself, it's internet geeks going on about it. Most people aren't terribly concerned about predestination, justification by works or faith, or the filioque clause--they want a place to go on Sunday where they can be with other people with moral values and hopefully give their kids a reason to stay out of trouble. I think the Catholic Church's biggest problem is child molestation. Nobody wants their kids to be sexually abused. I remember reading Rod Dreher's account of converting from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, and what finally did it for him was a priest being found molesting a kid near where he was. One of the most amusing things about intellectual conservatism is people finding convoluted justifications for behaving like normal human beings. But, you know, at least they wind up in the right place personally, unlike a lot of progressives.
FWIW, I'm an atheist who believes religion is an evolved trait of Homo sapiens that meets social and personal needs, so I don't buy it but don't try to talk people out of it.
I disagree, as the ideology of wokeness arose from a purely negative/critical place--it started off as, and remains centered on IMO, destroying traditional moral norms, including of course, traditional Christianity. Whatever positive message you might think it has came later and grew out of that as a starting point.
The bottom line dividing factor between woke and anti-woke is that woke serves the state. It's not popular because of any sort of abstract stuff about having a "positive message," it's because powerful people support it. That's what it comes down to. I guess you could posit that those powerful people support it because its positive message or whatever convinced them to, but I think "it's useful to them socially/politically/etc." is a far more plausible narrative, as this framework tends to do well at explaining political norms for people in general, powerful or otherwise.
Right, but they got big by mobilizing sympathy for the losers of the traditional order--black people, women who wanted to work, gay people, etc.
Does anyone think the kings of Europe in the 800s, being Christians, cared any more about "the meek will inherit the earth" or any of that coddling the poor stuff that their religion taught in practice than the Roman Emperors did? If an alien came down and observed the Plantagent kings govern, they wouldn't recognize in how the acted any difference in them and Cyrus the Great or Julian the Apostate with regard to the moral teachings of the New Testament. Christianity pioneered the "victims of evil elites" stuff and the primacy of introspection as a way of knowing (what else is faith if not that?) and then immediately, like wokeness, just became a way to distract the rubes with happy talk. Exactly how did wholesale adoption of The Gospel change the social order from 320 to 1000 AD in ways the average person would notice? The average person from 1000AD if plopped down in 320AD wouldn't have known the difference in their day to day life. Everyone still knew who had status in 1000AD just as they did in 320AD despite the "meek shall inherit the earth" stuff. In 900AD Christians were still slaughtering captives on the field if they couldn't be ransomed, still worked serfs, had slaves, kings, nobility, etc. The main changes Christianity caused were largely organizational/church policy stuff far more than anything morally taught in scripture.
"Does anyone think the kings of Europe in the 800s, being Christians, cared any more about "the meek will inherit the earth" or any of that coddling the poor stuff that their religion taught in practice than the Roman Emperors did?"
Of course they did. Ever heard of hospitals? Foundling houses? Orphanages? Those were expensive institutions created in Christendom and aimed at helping the poor that were funded by the wealthy with inextricably religious motives. Pagan Romans would've thought it completely perverse to expend so much money on helping the downtrodden.
Medieval European kings certainly engaged in power politics and brutality in wars, but they also were confronted by the Church to conform their values towards the Bible in ways that make no sense to pre-Christian minds.
Right, there were similar pressures on Muslim rulers, and Chinese emperors had Confucius to tell them being a total tyrant was bad. It took some of the edges off, though medieval kings would have seemed unthinkably barbaric and selfish today. (Much like the Saudi ruling family.)
Yea, the only sensible way to judge religious matters is to try to understand what the real-world effects are going to be. But that's a crapshoot. Who in 100 CE would have said "Christianity's sometimes-honored prohibition against marrying cousins will eventually break the extended family structures and clans which hold sway in politics globally, allowing the state to extend its remit within Christian Europe and ultimately helping spark a prolonged period of economic and technological advancement that will make a half-dozen small European nations and one rather larger European appendage into world-spanning global powers"?
That is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind! And none of that is remotely scriptural! Catholicism exerted its effects on Europe more through a multi-national organizational structure than through anything doctrinal or moral. This kind of functionalism and hermeneutics of utility is even more obvious when you consider the Protestant Reformation. You can pretty much track wokeness to Luther in this focus on introspection as a way of knowing (Faith vs works), individualism, etc. Tradcons are really strange to me as they claim to be realists but aren't realists enough - it never occurs to them that people abandon cultural structures right around when they stop delivering the goods in return for the tradeoffs. Constantly conflate selection effects with treatment effects. The cultural norms that produced wokeness are probably the better tradeoff structure for lots of people just like the cultural norms that produced protestantism were. Conservatives act like if everybody just went to church and had nuclear families everything would be better without wondering if maybe those things just don't deliver the goods without excessive costs like they used to and the only people still doing it are the ones it does still work for. This is as bad as liberals who act like it would be good for everyone to stop doing that stuff. People don't get easily brainwashed out of what is good for them - they brainwash themselves with what rationalization for what is.
Yep. If we want to choose a less modern and therefore hopefully less controversial example than the current bifurcation between tradcath and woke, let's go with "black Protestant church" vs "white Catholic church" in the 20th century. You see the former solidify, especially after the Great Migration, around a conception of Christianity centered on solidarity and mutual aid, because that's what brings home the bacon for newly transplanted, struggling, working-class blacks. Donate some of your spare income to the church, which provides help to folks who find themselves unemployed, organizes the congregation to vote if at all possible, arranges for mutual and self-defense in really bad times, sends the church's best and brightest to an HBU and maybe even law school so they can return to lend a hand and maybe aspire to influence the wider course of events, and a host of other mutual insurance programs. That's only now fraying as the more upwardly mobile folks self-select out and greater numbers of "new" African and Caribbean immigrants arrive.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church is, at the same time, getting *out* of that same exact business as prejudices against Catholics fade, their congregations are accepted and assimilated into the wider white communities nearby, their members climb the ladder into the middle and professional classes... and you end up with the position where the American Cardinalate are basically so out of step with Rome on social and economic issues that they should be excommunicated, but no one wants a schism.
Sometimes people will choose what "delivers the goods" but I'd argue that many times people choose poorly. Do they even know what goods they want delivered? How would they, when they reject all tradition, when they refuse hard work, long term planning or investment of effort. Then you're left with just choosing whatever seems to satisfy your most immediate, basest desires in the moment. Which is what wokeism offers. Immediate moral superiority without actual effort, a release from all norms or checks on your individual desires ("just be yourself!"), entitlement based on victimhood and an underlying narrative dividing the world into easy black and white, good and evil categories. Sure it "delivers the goods" in the short term but these goods end up being pretty toxic in the long term. Not just on an individual, but also on a sociatal level.
"How would they, when they reject all tradition, when they refuse hard work, long term planning or investment of effort." Do they really reject all those things or situationslly reject them? For example long term planning cam have short term costs - does long term planning for, say, people in the bottom half of the cognitive distribution pay off for the costs that ot once did? Short life history is the better strategy for some people. Imagine some metric you truly suck at has now become the inreasingly winner takes all metric for success? How smart is it to invest in that? And it is super clear that traditional morality at many points in history is cast aside as the cost benefit analysis changes. Why do tradcons love "traditional values" that are less than 200 years old rather than 2000 years old? The conservative "people don't know what is good for them" is just another lame "false consciousness" argument the Left used to love.
I think that some of your expectations about the way a Christian society ought to be in 800-1000 would not have made sense to anyone around at the time. Islam and Judaism had pretty well-organized ideas about how a state is supposed to function and how a society ought to be organized. That didn't happen with Christianity. Jesus had a very small following, and Paul was writing to a few small churches scattered around the Mediterranean. So "how should a Christian king behave?" or "how should a Christian society be organized?" were not questions that any Christian really had occasion to think about before the fourth century of the church's existence. The way the kingdom of God was supposed to be ushered in was via the end of the world, which early Christians believed to be imminent. In the meantime, Christian writings recognized the existence of earthly hierarchies, slavery, etc. Jesus famously said to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's, and while Paul seems to strongly suggest that Philemon should free his Christian slave, he doesn't order to him to. It's kind of hard to see how some of Jesus's admonitions could be applied to a king. If he's invaded by another king, should he turn the other cheek? Should he sell all he has and give it to the poor? Given that, I don't think many Christians in 1000 would be surprised to find kings, nobles, or serfs still around (the Lord having neglected to return). Similarly, when the Moors invaded Spain, I don't think they were surprised or disappointed that the Christians fought back. All that said, of course there were big changes in how society was organized and how people thought and felt. For a possibly excessively pro-Christian but very interesting account, see Dominion by Tom Holland.
" just became a way to distract the rubes with happy talk". The "happy talk" was what Christianity was about, from the beginning. "My kingdom is not of this world." One important thing to bear in mind about ancient people, Christian, pagan, Jewish, Muslim, whatever, is that they believe their own religion. Bret Devereux on the great increase in church power in the eleventh century onward: "This vast increase in the institutional power of the Church was made possible, not by armies or shrewd real-politic (though both were involved), but by belief. The primary weapon wielded by Popes in this effort was the threat of excommunication, which (under Catholic doctrine) cut off the excommunicated individual or community from salvation, potentially damning them for all eternity. But of course that threat is only real if you believe the Pope has that power. And therein is the key point: most of Europe did believe. As I tell my students, it is safe to assume, as a general matter, that people in the past believed their own religion. Of course there are exceptions, but the general rule remains." https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-ii/
The fact that one "needs to think about" things for hundreds of years thar were allegedly revealed in a perfect revelation shows the whole process is post hoc proof- texting intuitions had for other reasons.
Unlike Islam, Christianity (and even Judaism - see the shifts between Moses to Judges to the Davidic dynasties to being a province of the Babylonian and Persian empires) has never prescribed one single regime as divinely mandated. The Bible certainly has things to say about how rulers ought to behave, but it is primarily about divine matters, and only secondarily about sociopolitical arrangements. And of course, the conditions of the 1st century Greco-Roman world were quite different from those of even the 4th century, let alone the Middle Ages.
Moses and David were probably myths (Moses, definitely. David probably). And the Bible definitely has things to say about how rulers should behave, but contradictory from book to book and instance to instance, as one would expect from a book cobbled together from separate books all with different theologies, time periods, outlooks, etc. The books of the Bible - NT or OT - are not remotely all saying the same thing nor do they presupposed the same theology. Its syncretism and change at every point. There is no "traditional religion"- just snapshots in time in a constant evolution dictated by what social and cultural norms need reinforcing at a given time.
The historicity of Moses and David is not determinative of the points here. Even if they were mythical, my point is that the Biblical authors regard them both in a very positive light, even though their regimes were quite different. Judaism and Christianity don't prescribe a single regime, so it shouldn't be taken as a weakness of the religions that their adherents had debates about church-state relations and other sorts of sociopolitical issues.
I don't think deep into the comments section is a great opportunity (and I'm not the best interlocutor on the subject) to debate higher criticism readings of the Bible, so I'll just note my disagreement.
So...it wasn't a perfect revelation? Oh wow, man. Mind BLOWN.
..or a revelation at all. Once you admit to it not being a perfect revelation, its obviously not one at all because anyone can become a revealer to fill in the gaps. Theological hermeneutics has the intellectual flavor of post-modern theorizing. Once you admit there is no authoritative pope on the seven hills in Rome you end up with a pope on every hill in Tennessee (to paraphrase Mencken).
Very well said. In the 20th and 21st centuries, it's become increasingly common to project our age's own skepticism and suspicions towards religion back into the past and think "Well, I find religion ridiculous, and people in the past had many instances of not obeying their religion, ergo they must also have found their religion ridiculous too." But that's really not consistent with their behavior.
Agreed. Man needs positive values so much that people will eventually choose a bad positive over a negative. Thus the sustainability of religious conservatism over nihilism. See _DIM Hypothesis_ for that and the third, rational,alternative.
They're often just conservative liberals, aren't they? So, the moral alternative they would be offering isn't very mysterious. It's the older form of liberalism which promoted ''colourblind'' attitudes, & ideals of fairness & tolerance regardless of race or creed
"No one truly feels a pretty athletic college girl who has to settle for second place in a swim meet is more of a victim than a trans athlete..."
A vast majority of people/women are not pretty athletic college girls settling settling for a second place in a swim meet. There is a lot of status to be had between an Upton and a Lizzo. And there are plenty of people in there who are going to feel (and most likely are) leapfrogged by Lizzos and similar. High status liberals feel sorry for the strange and weird precisely because status distance between them is large.
Yes, ultimately the bullying always comes from mid-status people who are going to be very very conscious about their place in the hierarchy and feel they need to defend it at all costs. The ONLY thing they have going for them is “at least I’m not overweight.” Take away that status from them and they have nothing.
This was a lot of the less-discussed aspect of hostility to gay marriage. Being married is a status symbol and if you don’t have that much status, “well at least I am married, unlike those gays” is an important thing to protect for yourself.
The number of gay marriages is pretty low. Of course, the trend is that there are less and less weddings over time, particularly among lower-SES Americans. This comment reminds me of a recent criticism I've heard. It might be that for those of us who came of age during the gay marriage debate, the debate really colored our view of what marriage is and made it less desirable. Some people say it's just for the religious, some people say it's just government paperwork, and all the while we've seen the word "marriage" associated with the word "gay" so many times that for the latently homophobic, a wedding might even feel more emasculating than it would have earlier.
This is a good piece, and one I generally agree with (and I know this piece wasn’t necessarily directed at me, but my tweet was used to illustrate the idea analyzed in the piece).
It is indeed human nature to confer status to what you naturally like (e.g., physical attractiveness).
But it is also human nature to confer status to behavior you want more of, tendencies that don’t necessarily come naturally to people (positive examples include hard work and moral character but can include negative behaviors too).
My tweet was primarily about this second type of status.
It’s true that being attractive and so on will get you better treatment in interpersonal interactions. No argument from me there.
However, publicly celebrating unappealing choices and behaviors will have an effect on what people do. A simple example: Most guys don’t like tattoos on women, yet 50 percent of millennial women have tattoos.
Most people in general don’t like obesity, but it is rising. No doubt due to cheap food, lack of exercise, etc. But as Richard has noted elsewhere, dismantling stigma around fat shaming is misguided and may consequently contribute to an increase in the number of overweight people.
Publicly conferring status to unconventional behaviors and choices will increase them, even if people generally understand those things are undesirable.
Rod dreher recently made the point that there’s a distinction between embracing eccentrics when they’re in the periphery of society vs when they are driving society. From his perspective, we are far from the former limit Ina lot of cases, related to your comments here.
Also what to make of the high rate of children of celebrities going trans? Are these the ugly ducklings of the elite who know by age seven their lot in life and choose the path of pity status, or is it that the elite truly value trans status at this point?
"However, publicly celebrating unappealing choices and behaviors will have an effect on what people do. A simple example: Most guys don’t like tattoos on women, yet 50 percent of millennial women have tattoos."
Correct. I'll add that for most women today, getting tattoos is their way of saying "you can't fire me, I quit" to the vast majority of men who don't find them attractive in the first place.
I agree with you that the hot chick is a higher status than the fat chick, but I also ask, "so what?" I don't think anyone would disagree with your thesis, but your thesis is also aside from the point.
Only in the University class is something like "status" debated. The "body positivity" or "fat acceptance" movements are negative forces in our society has nothing to do with how they rank obese people in the status hierarchy against other subjective human measures; it is harmful because of the behavior it encourages.
Being fat leads to more detrimental health outcomes than being skinny, and yet in a country already being crushed by healthcare costs, Lizzo says, "I would like to be body-normative..I want to normalize my body. And not just be like, 'Ooh, look at this cool movement. Being fat is body positive'." The issue with this has nothing to do with the theoretical point of "status," and everything to do with the fact that we not only are actively encouraging an immensely harmful trait to metastasize throughout our society under the guise of not only being inclusive but that trait should be perceived as optimal.
How to push back against this trend is a separate matter, but the issue is not simply one of "status."
I wrote about this exact issue a couple of weeks back on my Substack-
https://www.sub-verses.com/p/my-big-fat-safety-on-airplanes
Richard, you make an interesting point here; it illustrates how vitalism can be misinterpreted, and how we should navigate this potential misperception. It is a helpful article, and my comment here is not to negate your point, but only to clarify ours.
Your perspective here is an accurate depiction of the perspective of a woke person, but it is a huge misunderstanding of what you refer to as "anti-woke" ideology.
"Anti-woke autists," as you more-or-less call us, understand that wokesters don't actually believe ugly is beautiful, and that their tokenization of ugliness comes from their pity-based activism: everyone they look down on should be glorified. As soon as they stop looking down on them, they won't glorify them anymore. This is a "communism of the soul," which boils all motivation down to the emotion of pity. You are entirely correct that they think they're stopping bullies, and it's about damn time somebody did. And, in a way, they succeed in this mission. Lizzo really does receive a consolation prize, where before she received nothing.
What you miss is that, to us, a beautiful society is an end in itself. We're not sitting around believing that woke people don't want to be beautiful—we know they do—or that beauty doesn't confer status. What we're reacting against is the elites proliferation of transgression as the object of society. When you put something on a billboard, you both elevate it as a societal aspiration AND you quite literally create the aesthetic nature of the society in which you live. Billboards are manmade trees AND manmade guideposts, the physical manifestation of our table of values, and of our creative power.
A society that glorifies ugliness is equally terrifying and dystopic regardless of why they're doing. It is more or less the definition of hell—the endless cycling towards "uglier uglier uglier" and ever increasing pain, mutilation, fear. It's pure Lord of the Flies, Sodom and Gomorrah. Imagine a society where women with masectomy scars are emblazoned on every public square. This is literally hell. And it's literally the world we live in. (Here it is: https://www.neuehouse.com/neuejournal/marcel-pardo-ariza-hollywood-mural-trans-awareness/)
We know full well why they're doing it, we know humans can't force ugliness to actually be beauty, and they know that deep down. It doesn't matter. You fight fire because its fire, not because of how it was lit. Stopping public derangement and ugliness is an end in itself—it needs to reasoning or rationality to justify. Every ugly billboard removed is society closer to God. What you're referring to as "autism," is simply the unwillingness to allow ones visual world to descend into hell.
that billboard is some creepy propaganda
The way you poke hole at conservative dogma and forces me to rethink some of my stances (that probably does qualify as "autistic anti-woke") is extremely refreshing. Keep up the great work!
Yes I don't always agree with Richard but he does make you think! It's amazing how hard it is to find writers like that
I think your perspective here is correct but requires an enormous caveat: Lizzo does have more privilege than Kate Upton if politics get activated against Kate Upton. If Kate Upton says she likes Trump, Lizzo now has more status than her. Kate Upton only retains her status so long as she conforms to the wishes of the regime. She is allowed to enjoy the advantages nature has bestowed on her but only if she makes sure to keep the Bad People at arm's length.
>But I don’t think this stuff is that convincing to third parties, who don’t see trans as bullies, but very disturbed people they should feel sorry for.<
They're both, of course. Many "transgender" people are indeed more worthy of pity than anger or scorn. But to pretend that there aren't some transgender activists who are extremely aggressive bullies is obviously absurd. And it's that latter category who are the most dangerous because they are out in the public political space punching far above their weight.
>But anti-wokes misunderstand what they’re up against when they take their opponents too literally, and forget that underneath all the lies, human nature still finds a way.<
Again we need to distinguish. I think you are identifying and correctly talking about the large mass of poorly-informed left-leaning "regular people" who tend to vote Democrat and such. Then there are the committed activists. Yes, reality still constrains the activists, but again it would be willfully ignorant to try and pretend that the activists aren't doing any damage by pushing against it as hard as they can. You even admit as much near the end of this post.
And the activists are the problem. If the activists go away, if they lose power, all the regular people who are so easily swayed to support them will just as easily forget that woke was ever a thing at all.
I still see young woke women on social media simping for the latest heart-throb Leonardo DiCaprio look-alike. Woke men still like the busty blondes. You're right, wokeness is more of a pity prize to those who can't make the grade.
Yep. People always say college-educated white women are the wokest...but they'll still date mostly white men. And all the women of color that hold power in America: AOC, Kamala, Ketanji Jackson, Ilhan Omar, Michelle Wu, etc. are married to white men. People can virtue signal about minorities, when when it comes down to it the status-climbing women will still go for high-status men.
I think that is more a mate market problem than a ideological hypocrisy. Just a much lower concentration of black men with the proper status and the ones that do enjoy a great mate market and have lots of options. I live in a state capital with a large HBCU and there are way more educated black women than men here and the black men are attractive to white women, but black women less often find white men attractive. I think the gender skew in mixed race relationships is like 4:1 black male/white female.
True, but the very idea of a mate market is an awkward subject for woke folks, as love and romance cannot be influenced by affirmative action programs. It might be "unfair" that college-educated women don't want to date men with only high-school educations. You can even call it classist, but you can't force a woman to date down.
It might be "unfair" that skinny people are more successful in dating than fat people. You can say it's size-ist. But no amount of DEI programs can force people to like fat people.
And, of course, race. The most uncomfortable subject in dating. Everyone knows racial preferences exist. But you can't change how people really feel. So while it sucks for highly-educated black women that they can get affirmative action anywhere but the dating market, it is the cold, hard reality.
“But no amount of DEI programs can force people to like skinny men.”
Forgive the presumption, but I’m going to take a stab and say you understand the term “小鲜肉”？
Whoops, I meant to write "fat people", not "skinny men".
And I've heard that term before. I don't live in China so I can't tell you how popular it is.
I replied to the comment in which you ID’ed as born into an immigrant family so I figured, but my point was merely that culture can play a role within certain bounds. The answer is “significantly more popular than would otherwise be the case.”
Morbid obesity no, but a certain degree of lushness in women is probably closer to most men’s ideal than an androgynous bundle of sticks as was briefly the fashion in the early aughts.
Hmm, I am not sure "racial" preferences exist in some dark way so much as there are group data differences in things like obesity rates (I think this is big!...excuse the pun) or education rates by race where race is selection bias for other assortative things and people just tend to not be in the same social circles, but interracial dating is frequent when they do. And when there are overt racial preferences, they seem to be mediated more by what women prefer than what men prefer. Never blame on male intransigence what is better explained by female mate selection. Sailer should do a followup to his 1997 piece as I think much has changed, but some has stayed the same. https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/color/articles/sailer.html
I'm college-educated and have dated interracially for much of my life. Most of the women I've dated are on the same educational caliber as I am, and it's clear that education can trump race, especially at the higher echelons of education. I can find plenty of Asian man-White woman and Black woman-White man couples at Ivies and other elite colleges, even if they are less common outside of those very-filtered areas. So yes, education matters a lot, but for those that don't have high education, they still look at things like race. It depends a lot on what is considered high-status in one's social circles.
I live in a metro area that's about 2/3 white, 1/3 black, and what I've noticed here is that in more upscale areas, there are more white man - black woman couples, but in poorer areas, it goes the other way. I suspect the root cause is that black women are outperforming black men educationally and professionally, which (in upscale areas) overrides the usual HBD-sphere dogma that black men are more sexually attractive to women than black women are to men.
1. I'm also an autist* and I guess I agree with this piece. More generally, I wish someone had explained to me, when I was younger, that status competition is a thing that normies care a lot about for [insert your preferred reasons].
2. As far as I know, no one's observed that the 57-43 F:M sex ratio among American college students implies that 14% of the average student body consists of young women whose options are a) date off-campus, assuming that's even an option for them, b) put up with a man who isn't going to commit to them, or c) end up lonely. It would be amazing if that didn't have a bunch of profound negative effects, and it's obviously going to be the low-status women bearing the brunt of them.
3. More generally, it really sucks to be low status in America today compared to 75 or 100 years ago when the high status people at least gave lip service to the importance of marital fidelity, work ethic, and all that.
*Not clinically diagnosed, but I once sent a Google poll to the friends and family who knew me at a young age wherein I asked them to rate how much some descriptions applied to me as a kid. I didn't tell them until much later that the descriptions were taken verbatim from the DSM-5 criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder.
1. Oh God, yes. I knew all the liberal stuff was BS growing up but then went and read a whole bunch of conservative BS. Some of it cancelled out the liberal BS, some of it had its own ill effects. A lot of us really have trouble figuring out social stuff and even if we realize we're being lied to we still have to figure out what the truth actually is.
2. True, though I'm not sure if that's going to pan out the way feminists want.
3. It sucks in the sense that the people on top are effectively lying to you. But most blue-collar people want their kids to get married and have kids in wedlock and own a home, just none of them can pull it off anymore. I think lower-status people were better off in the New Deal era, which would be 75, but not 100, years ago.
"2. As far as I know, no one's observed that the 57-43 F:M sex ratio among American college students implies that 14% of the average student body consists of young women whose options are a) date off-campus, assuming that's even an option for them, b) put up with a man who isn't going to commit to them, or c) end up lonely."
You left off d), date other women.
Sure. Women don't seem to choose that option in significant numbers, though, judging by reported rates of same sex behavior (e.g., one recent survey reports that 54% of self-identified *bisexual* women under 30 only had sex with men in the prior 5 years, and the number is surely much lower for self-identified straight women).
"LGBT is the new goth, or emo, and most people don’t want to be part of a political movement of bullies." - actually, Queer is the new goth or emo - the identity you can opt into without any skin in the game just so you can opt out of an oppressor identity without doing anything at all. LGB you actually have to do something that is tough to do if you don't actually like it. T is Q for people with psych comorbidities.
I've met at least one person who called themselves trans without actually changing anything about their lifestyle: they still went by the name they were christened with, they wore the same clothes, they didn't start wearing makeup, they didn't undergo or seek out medical transition (or even talk therapy), they weren't even particularly insistent on the pronoun thing. In some contexts, identifying as T can be just as identifying as noncommittal as NB or bisexual.
Yeah, that is a weird thing and my guess is it will hasten the recognition of the philosophical absurdity of gender identity theory. The rapid proliferation of gender identity theory reminds me of the rapid proliferation of Premillenial Dispensationosm in evangelical Christianity - both extremely strange, very recent, and poorly sourced hermeneutics that quickly rose to the level of primary doctrine required of believers who were previously in good stead within their respective belief systems without it.
After you read the most effective theses, you think to yourself, "Yes, that is what I always believed," even if you never believed it before then. That's what reading Richard Hanania's substack is like.
Very interesting. But I find it extraordinarily difficult to tell when it's "fake status" and when it's "real status." For instance, you write
"But I don’t think this stuff is that convincing to third parties, who don’t see trans as bullies, but very disturbed people they should feel sorry for."
Very few actual lgbt activists/supporters see it that way. They genuinely appear to perceive transgenderism as equally normative as cis-genderism. We're talking about the left wing of the democratic party, but not just the fringe. This idea has real currency and it's incredibly disorienting trying to feel out when people are just lying to be nice versus when they are actually that confused.
Similarly with the "law and order is racism" stuff. I was tempted to see that as just a throw away line nobody really believed, but then I saw people really acting on it and causing all kinds of mayhem. So this stuff is "fake status" right up until the moment a switch flips in the zeitgeist and things start going haywire.
Isn't it possible that both anti-wokes and wokes both believe that fat/LGBT/minority etc are genuinely higher status, despite your probably correct observation that the majority doesn't act that way in practice? e.g. With 20-30% of college kids identifying as LGBT, many of those kids must think they are gaining some status by identifying this way.
Yeah, "everyone knows wokeism is pity on the grotesque so conservatives should stop talking about it" seems like a cop out. I think the kiddos have been successfully convinced to like the inferior and unhealthy product.
There's a big difference between "I can gain social status by identifying as X" and "I can gain social status by actually being X".
Go on TikTok and see how many teenagers there are who claim to be suffering from some mental illness, typically self-diagnosed. In real life, there's nothing high-status about having a serious mental illness: you are disproportionately likely to end up homeless or in an institution, you will be unable to look after yourself, people will find you unpleasant to be around etc. But teenagers and young people CLAIM to be suffering from this or that mental illness anyway, because it makes them seem quirky or interesting, or confers some victim status upon them they haven't really earned.
Likewise with LGBT: identifying as straight seems dull and basic. Better to call yourself "bisexual" because you kissed another girl at a party once, but otherwise lead your life in a manner indistinguishable from any other heterosexual woman. The actual lesbians, meanwhile, are no higher in status than they ever were. (LGBT identification in Gen Z is overwhelmingly concentrated in the murky "bisexual" and "non-binary" categories.)
The same is true of "autists". Not sure why it's suddenly cool to self-identify this way. Outside of the internet autism has a pretty clear definition, and it doesn't mean "articulate intellectual who enjoys provoking people", it means someone who flaps the arms in endless stimming behavior, someone who will need lifelong care.
Yeah, we need a better word for "not great at reading social cues, not very concerned with social desirability, preferring to follow rules over intuition, but basically functional outside of romance if you get a job where they don't care." There was Asperger's but they took it away for some reason.
Asperger's was subsumed under "autism spectrum disorder" as an assumed variant of the same problem (autism). Interestingly, there was a bunch of controversy about Hans Asperger in recent years because he had some ties to the Nazis or something, which may have played a role in getting rid of the name.
Ah, thanks. It collapses 'socially obtuse' and 'nonverbal' though.
Named disorders (eponyms I think they're called) seem to be on their way out.
Freddie deBoer has an article on this topic which is worth reading: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-gentrification-of-disability
I've been looking at online groups about autism, and that's been my sense. There's been a distinct rise in the number of people self-diagnosing as autistic or shopping around to find a psychiatrist who will give them a diagnosis. The recent expansion of the definition in the DSM-5 hasn't helped. Not that the definitions of any mental health disorders precise to begin with
Yeah - I think that's exactly what Richard is arguing. That anti-wokes think that just because society blasts these ideas at us that these ideas actually shape our interpersonal interactions, which Richard points out - of course they don't. A high status, successful "woke" man may share all sorts of "you go girl" body positivity stuff on social media, but you can bet his girlfriend is traditionally attractive.
Interesting point on LGBT. I wonder if that is part of the phenomenon. Like "I'm not sure what sense to make of these feelings" and you hear this big, social megaphone blasting these *messages* but are in the cocoon of high school / college and therefore, can't see the reality that this does not confer extra status. You just get the message that this is cool. And perhaps in that "cocoon" it is extra status. So instead of staying confused and patient, you start leaning into some of the thoughts that suggest LGBT.
I've raised the example on other Substacks of Gavin Newsom, who governs in an extremely socially liberal way and has never seen a woke cause he didn't like. He also has a traditional marriage - complete with traditional troubles, such as alcohol and the occasional indiscretion - with a beautiful wife, and they have clean-cut, polite, hard-working, educated kids. Almost everyone involved knows that this is perfectly normal and natural and that he's in no way a "hypocrite" for being woke while having all the trappings of classical morality and beauty in his relationship. It's what's expected of him and what's expected of the office. It's perfectly natural.
Similarly, I've long shared your suspicion that *most* people very active in this sphere - either pro- or anti- woke - do really understand that it's a bit kayfabe, and that the "Stunning and brave" meme from the Right never really landed because most intelligent people on the Left can say, "Yeah, so? It's the cost of doing business." It's a conferral of status as a consolation prize, not something truly elevating.
It happens at other levels of politics, too. I don't think the people making the Republican robocallers *really* think Joe Biden is a radical Marxist. I don't think most people at the Washington Post *really* think Donald Trump is a literal fascist. What they do think is that it's useful to say it is. I remember seeing this crystallized a few years ago when I saw a random tweet by a slightly anguished overweight bald guy about how his anti-white nationalist podcast wasn't getting many listens despite its hugely important, civilization-defining importance. After all, he had been assured that white nationalism was an ever-present specter in the US. Many such cases!
Exactly. It reminds me a bit of how Republicans like to talk about Black people being fooled into staying on the "Democrat plantation" even when it's against their interests. They've never talked to a middle class Black person, ever. It's all caricatures.
Here is a maxim you can live by and it works for Left and Right - the frequency and volume of pronouncements on what black people should do, what they should think, or what they want is in inverse proportion to the minutes one has spent interacting with black people. It also works for black people.
Love it!
Their donors wouldn't like it if they did.
A socially conservative, economically liberal party could clean up, but the donors of both parties prevent that.
Support for Trump seems to be strongest and most concentrated among the White nationalists, the hitherto overlooked activist block. Yes, some of them oppose Trump because they go to greater extremes, but not many, and they are not the representative cherries to pick. Go to 4chan's /pol/ or StormFront. There is no spinning it away. I didn't believe in the concept of the "dog whistle" until Trump.
Even if this was true - and I very much have my doubts - the number of White nationalists in this country surely can't break the six figures. The modal and average Trump supporters take great pains to be 'inclusive', however clumsily they do so. The Trump campaign would surely reject the activism of White nationalists.
Yes, good point. They are not many, but they most certainly tend to be Trump supporters. Only a small trifle of voters and activists would openly adhere to White nationalism, but millions of voters are subconsciously sympathetic to it, as they would not abandon their own people, in spite of their stated beliefs.
If the vast white sea of this country is in any way racially aware and self-preserving, they have a funny way of showing it ;)
Yes, I agree. The most plausible motive for the strict border policy that was Trump's platform is indeed White nationalism. The explicit justification is that border crossers are criminals. But, I expect it wouldn't make so much a difference if Hispanics tended to be law-abiding. One way or the other, Whites do not want the USA to be transformed into another Latin-American nation, whether they explicitly know it or not. That is not a shameful way to think--that is a natural and expected way to think.
And by that token people who call wokeness Marxism seem to not notice the loudest voices denouncing that stuff are the few Marxists left out there. I think we have just gotten to the point where "Marxism" is to the Right what "Racism" is to the Left. Basically just demonizing words to tar anything you don't like.
It's hard to not see the influence of Marxism in *most* left-coded intellectual thought downstream of Marx. But calling it all "Marxism" is like calling every car a "Model T."
Congressman Santos might put it, "I didn't say wokeness was Marxist, I said it was Marxist-ish".
The anti-Woke often do make a distinction from orthodox Marxism by calling it “cultural Marxism”. You can see the seeds of Wokeism in Marcuse et al. But Wokeism is it’s own thing--in the words of the libertarian philosopher Jan Lester, it’s “inverted fascism” .
Yeah, they have the same socio-sexual hierarchy as the 1950s, just turned upside down.
I think one of the things is a lot of us spergs tend to be more affected by the official line than reality, because we can't perceive social reality as well. So we're more likely to get worked up believing that Lizzo really would have higher status than Kate Upton. Which she does if there's a Twitter beef, but that's not relevant to most people, I think. Sure some un-PC tweet or Facebook post could go viral, but in practice that's a tiny risk for most people.
Similarly, I held off dating way too long because I believed both the MRA paranoia about false rape accusations and the radical feminist arguments I was getting fed from school and work that everything was rape. (Try to figure out from reading them exactly what would be an acceptable way to initiate a relationship as a man seeking a woman. Pretty much the biggest takeaway I got was "if you don't want sex, you're OK.") It's kind of like trying to figure out the world by reading Communist and Nazi propaganda--the most important bit is some secret force is destroying the world and responsible for all its evils, is it capitalists or the Jews?
I do think feminism is especially bad for autistic guys because they basically expect you to read social cues all the time, and we're bad at that. Also, as autistic men are the least desirable personality type for women, the more power you give women, the worse it is for us. Non-autistic men can read the signals and know where the BS is, women gain benefit from the preferences feminists are putting in (though they may be less likely to get the long-term committed relationships they usually crave).
I genuinely do think a lot of lower-class white guys are getting screwed coming and going, though. They're last for any corporate jobs because of their race and gender (meanwhile the white guys at the top who got there through connections don't have a problem), and they don't have enough money and connections to get anything through social circles (do you think Lachlan Murdoch is worried about affirmative action taking his job away?)
1. Great piece but its unconvincing to call the affect anti-woke activists give as is anything resembling autism even in the way you have used (socially analytical without being socially aware or wanting to be well liked). Plus it reminds me of the way autism is used in 4chan/troll RW lingo. There must be a better way to phrase it like the mistaken world weariness of the anti-woke or something like that.
2. I don't know if you (@Hanania) noticed but on far right anon twitter Zendaya has been getting bodied. Basically the backstory is that this (https://nypost.com/2023/04/15/zendaya-jennifer-connelly-focus-of-fierce-beauty-debate-a-7/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=nypost) tweet went viral within RW anon twitter circles. I too found the casting of Zendaya in what should have been an attractive Mary Jane offputting. But Jennifer Connely was neither a 7 nor common in every chain restaurant in the 90s. That tweet captured the dumb "autistic" nature of anti-wokeness perfectly. Anti-wokes are better off messaging like (https://twitter.com/FinDeNom/status/1652322207400353793) instead.
3. What you refer to autism "Matt Walsh videos where he DESTROYS transwomen with FACTS and LOGIC" is not even new or unique to anti-woke RW messaging. It's a continuation of the way social media videos and clips from the YAF foundation were titled when Ben Shapiro used to go around college campuses.
4. The biggest problem with the forces of anti-woke isn't their weakly defined "autism" but their lack of consensus on what they actually believe in. For example establishment conservatives are united in what they like but divided in what they stand for when discussing transgenderism. In this tweet https://twitter.com/TheOmniZaddy/status/1652196147174203393 you see Noah Rothman of National Review does not know how to refer to Zephyr so he keeps using her name instead of using a pronoun. Anti-woke activists haven't even come to a consensus on whether deadnaming trans is acceptable or whether to refer to trans by their biological pronouns. How could this be a successful political movement? What do these activists say to a parents who says my kid says he/she is trans. What is their plan? What should the parents, the schools and the government must do? So much of what anti-wokes should do to resist wokeness is under-theorized and lacks consensus. When this question is posed to Mitch McConnel or Gov Youngkin what will they say? Even for a simple question like should a trans person be called using her real pre-trans name or trans name? Not a single elected can give a good answer.
Funny, I would actually say it's the other way around. It's the left that's under-theorized and lacks consensus. Have you missed the nasty feminist ("TERF") vs trans activist wars? These are people who were marching in lockstep just yesterday.
This becomes apparent when you look at the words that are used to describe the respective ideologies. On one side we have words like capitalism, libertarianism, conservatism. Notice how all these words describe the core of what they are about. Capitalism is the theory of capital movements and ownership. Libertarianism is about liberty. Conservatism is about conserving the status quo against radical social change.
On the opposing side, what words do we see? Leftism, wokeness, political correctness, Marxism. None of these words actually describe the core of what these people believe. The closest you can get is communism, but even that doesn't really describe any core theory of what communists want hence the endless claims that "xyz isn't real communism" that are basically irrefutable because real communism isn't well defined to begin with. And anyway, what modern leftist would be caught dead admitting they're communist?
The reason these words don't actually refer to a concrete thing or idea is because there is no particular theory underlying left wing thought. Libertarians in 2023 are extremely similar in what they think to libertarians from 1923. That's because they have a stable core of economic and social theory that they're united around. Modern leftists, on the other hand, would be unrecognizable to leftists of the 20s. They long ago stopped caring about the working classes, for example. They no longer use words like proletariat. Their strategies have changed from violent revolution to the Long March. But then a frequent sentiment is that modern leftism isn't even the same as it was 20 or 40 years ago! A 1970s leftist has a very different view on government, free speech and the ruling elites as a 2020s leftist, for instance.
Your argument about the non-left being under-theorized is nonsensical because it revolves entirely around trick questions on arbitrary social conventions the left itself is in the middle of trying to change, largely one suspects simply to identify ideological enemies. But now try asking a leftist simple questions like "does printing money cause inflation" - something with simple and robust theoretical roots, which has a great influence on everyone's lives - and watch them refuse to talk about it.
If anything the left is over-theorized--queer theory, critical race theory, Marxism, various forms of feminism, and some I no doubt forgot. The theories don't agree totally (except that white cishet men are bad), and they produce bad government, but there are plenty of them and they've written volumes on them.
Yes, the left produces a lot of things that claim to be theories, but what actually _are_ they and why are there so many? I argue that the left loves the idea of theory, hence the criticism above that the right is "under-theorized", but when you try to nail down what the core of left wing theory actually is it's all just a pile of very shallow, surface level ideas which is why there's so much infighting and ideological instability (working classes -> feminism -> islamophobia -> racism -> trans -> ???).
Marxism doesn't agree with that white cismen are bad, for example. It's fine with men. It's all about some hypothetical class conflict.
If you get two libertarians in a room and ask them to talk about the theory of their philosophy, I think they'd be able to reach very similar and pretty deep answers without communicating. If you do that for two typical leftists they may agree on what they believe, but explaining why they believe that, what theoretical framework justifies it and the other things they believed over the years, will be much harder. At least, going by personal experience.
I would say all of those theories are compatible and share one vital axiom: egalitarianism, aka blank slatism. When it is applied to race, it's called CRT. Sex-wise it's called feminism. Sexual identity egalitarianism= queer theory. Class egalitarianism= Marxism. All individuals and groups have identical potential in all areas of life and are thus interchangeable and deserve equal outcomes, respect, status, etc. White straight men have been the most influential group(s) to repudiate it in recent history, so they are the only group that can be and must be hated, and are not equal to all the others, creating a kind of inverted hierarchy compared with the old traditional European hierarchy.
I think hereditarianism (i.e., being a Human biodiversity believer) is the most important singular belief that will predispose you to be far-right instead of far-left. Maybe ethnocentrism/racial nepotism is the second most important.
You are confusing leftists being stupid with them having under-theorized their beliefs. The leftist (including the supposed smart ones like E Warren) refuses to acknowledge printing a lot money caused inflation and says greed caused inflation because the leftist is dumb.
I like to say that a proper noun is never improper.