I’m in UnHerd on what to make of Heritage bending the knee to Groyperdom.
Things are happening much more rapidly than I expected. My article focuses on the comparison to wokeness, and why Groyperization might actually be much more powerful and long lasting in the end.
We’re at the start of something, not the end of it. This is more like wokeness in 2014 than wokeness in 2022. And to make a comparison to wokeness might be underselling it. I would point to three factors that potentially make Groyperism stronger.
First, the appeal of wokeness was always largely astroturfed. The woke relied on censorship and nonstop propaganda from elite institutions. Relatively few Americans bought into the craziest ideas about race and gender. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility may have sold more than a million copies, but Carlson has nearly five million subscribers on YouTube. I asked ChatGPT how many podcast downloads he gets per episode, and it came up with a figure somewhere in the range of 4 million to 8 million (8 million to 15 million, if you include video). Candace Owens is in the same ballpark. And these are actual fans, not people encouraged to buy a book for a class or HR seminar.
We’ve never seen numbers like this for anything affiliated with wokeness, which was a hysteria driven by individuals in the rarefied fields of journalism, academia, and activism. They were always outnumbered in the rest of the country, and relied on being able to control powerful institutions and the informational ecosystem.
The second point is related: namely, that Right-wing radicalism taps into human nature in a way that wokeness never could. From a historical perspective, large numbers of young people wanting to experiment with a different gender is quite odd. Usually, males and females seek to portray and cultivate traits that are attractive to the opposite sex. Members of a majority group supporting discrimination against themselves is likewise unnatural, but this has always been core to DEI and the ideology of white guilt. One of the reasons that cancel culture was so intense was that proponents were always pushing against people’s preexisting inclinations; we were bound for a correction…
Finally, the Right lacks the institutional guardrails to contain Groyperization. The culture of the Left is shaped by elite institutions, like universities and major media outlets, in addition to labor unions, professional associations, and nonprofits. During the Great Awokening, these institutions were often taken over by aggressive upstarts speaking the language of academic seminars, and their leaders would repeat the magic words demanded by identity-focused activists. At the same time, the institutional framework in which these battles took place allowed for pushback from within. The New York Times editorial board is capable, for example, of gently shifting away from trans extremism. Universities can adopt free-speech policies, as many have done, in response to both internal and external pressure.
In contrast, it is unclear in what format moderates on the right would take on the fringes. Individuals like Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson — in addition to countless lesser influencers — get their power directly from the audience and, as a result, place real pressure on politicians. There is no Groyper faculty senate where people can get together and vote to condemn anti-Semitism in the same way that leaders of the University of Michigan decided to take a step back from DEI. Robin DiAngelo is no longer cited in the media, and Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracist center was closed down. Without institutional support, their power and influence have waned. By contrast, the podcaster who reflects and shapes the minds of the most engaged GOP voters can’t in a similar way lose his place at the center of political discourse.
Read the whole thing here.
Everyone was like oh we’re sick of this liberalism stuff, we’re sick of elites telling us what to do, sick of gatekeepers. Social media should treat all views equally. We don’t cancel! The answer to bad speech is more speech. Well, ok. We’re running that experiment. I’ll admit to being one of those people who wanted something like this, but at this point I don’t know how any reasonable person can fail to understand that creating a true culture of free speech that included the proles was a mistake.
If you’re a conservative now who isn’t an ethnonationalist, you’re just completely outmatched. The other side has the numbers and the energy, and there is such a thing as the internal logic of a movement. Democrats once made their entire moral universe center around oppressed minorities, so one couldn’t expect them to stand up to pushy black trans activists around 2020. The equivalent for the right now is the young male who is racist, angry, and sexually frustrated – the Groyper. People like Trump and Vance can’t denounce them, nor can supposed intellectuals like Yoram, because Fuentes is just the undistilled version of what they’re selling, which is white grievance, showmanship, and anti-liberal posturing.
Groyperization is the natural endpoint of what the entire Trump era has been about. And there’s no guarantee that it will burn itself out. The combination of Low Human Capital, the decline of gatekeeping, and news as entertainment model is a powerful one.
I’ll admit to having some admiration for Nick, in the same way I can admire Trump. It’s right-wingers who want to submit to such people who truly repulse me. See me on Trump Supporter Derangement Syndrome. As conservatives were creating a cult of Charlie Kirk, Fuentes was attacking Erika as a girlboss fed. And they’re still all afraid of him! As with Trump’s rise, there is just a will to submit to the biggest and most charismatic buffoon that goes deep to the core of who conservatives are these days. Fuentes attacking Erika and still getting people like Heritage eating out of the palm of his hand reminds me of Trump making fun of captured war heroes in 2015. Understand that this was fresh off the heels of the War on Terror, during which Republicans made admiration and gratitude towards the American soldier a cultural lodestar. Trump’s takeover of the conservative movement feels inevitable in retrospect, and I’m getting the same vibe with regards to the process of Groyperization.
The die has been cast regarding the immediate future of the Republican Party. The more interesting questions at this point are what does this mean for the country as a whole, and whether the US is just early to something other countries are going to get their own versions of. More on that in the future.
Your analysis is spot on. But it should be clear that you, and people sharing your worldview, asked for this. Now that you're getting it, and getting it good and hard, whining about it isn't going to help.
I'm a bit suspicious that this really is the long term because so much of Groyperdom is so riven with interpersonal weirdness, and lacks the kind of animal magnetism someone like Trump has which allow people to project onto him whatever they want.
The point you make about scale of listenership is correct, though - it can't just be dismissed as the Very Online, the fact that Heritage is jumping onboard means that, like any institution which ultimately exists on the basis of donations, they see something there.
Ultimately right of centre voters will go with whatever they find the most compelling at the lizard brain level and adjust the ideology to go along with that, but I don't think its guaranteed to be Groypers. Right of Centre voters are oppositional-defiant in the American political context, and the salience of issues is what drives micro changes to ideological beliefs. The bizarre spectacle of, for example, getting really interested in the territorial claims of the Russian Federation, is entirely driven by this - if CBS and ABC say one thing, we must say the opposite, etc
In 5 years, the issues on this front are hard to predict.
One thing I will note - the Groypers really don't seem to have much to say, or at least don't seem to care much, about the spectre of libertinism enabled by drug legalization, sports gambling's explosion, or the proliferation of online porn. The leaders of the movement might say things that social conservatives would agree with on those, but the juice isn't in the squeeze for them on it, as opposed to Jew Baiting. It may be interesting to see if that continues