CrispyFriedBarnacles
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User ID: 2417
CrispyFriedBarnacles
22d ago
Brenden Eich had to step down as the CEO of Mozilla in the spring of 2014 because he had donated to (according to wikipedia) $1000 dollars to Proposition 8 (anti-gay-marriage proposition) 6 years before, and had then donated $2000 dollars to the campaign of a politician who supported Prop 8 between 2008 and 2010, and then there was an extremely high profile, extremely noisy pressure campaign to force him to lose his job as a result, and it was supported by all the online goodthinkers.
I'm in tech, I'd been reading hackernews and such forever, and I watched that very closely. For me, that seemed like totally unprecedented and shocking escalation. In fact, that was really the straw that broke the camel's back for me, the event (although it took a while to sink in emotionally) where Progressives went from a "we" to a "them" for me, although there had already been a million little signals I'd been trying to ignore in the preceding few years.
I imagine everyone who cares about such things have their own memories of when a high profile scalping was the one that grabbed their attention, but I personally feel like Damore was somewhat late in the whole cycle, and the outrage over him did not seem shocking and out of left field at all. It seemed like ever more brazen versions of the same stuff that had been going on.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
22d ago
I think that's true, but I think with a giant asterisk.
On the one hand, I do think a lot of conservatives have just flatly given up on the idea that they can contest the morality and "normalness" of gayness in a shared public square and have any hope of winning that argument for, again, some shared American political consensus, at least in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, I have definitely gotten the impression that, for a very big subset of more traditional Christians specifically, this recognition has mostly made them read the sign of the times and recognize that broader America is overtly hostile to their values, worldviews, and especially the moral formation of their children, and that a kind of internal divorce is necessary - their immediate future, as they relate to the broader American culture, is more like the Jews in captivity in Babylon. That mindset is... not what it looks like to make peace with the new social norms. Instead, it is, I guess, exit and schism instead of voice and support.
I've recently read Aaron Renn's "Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture", Jonathan Rauch's "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy", reread George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief" (specifically the last chapter of that book about pillarization), and am now reading George Yancey's "One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America", and lurking in the background of all those works is the complexities of this split; it's hard to see how, exactly, more traditional Christians can actual participate in a shared consensus whose moral self-justification hinges, at least in part, on the public moral progress that comes with confining traditional Christian sexual ethics to dustbin of history and then social raising the bloody flag, so to speak, about that victory as a constant reminder of public moral legitimacy.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
29d ago
There is a theory I've seen floated around by Louise Perry (author of "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution") that, as a practical matter, a lot of women really don't actually like the fruits of the sexual revolution. As much as the manosphere theories float around about women generally loving riding the "the cock carousel" with Chad before settling down or whatever with some beta cuck, in actual fact, that's not really a great description of a very broad slice of women and what they really would prefer (see the jokes about lesbians bring a U-Haul the first date, or the phenomenon I've been seeing discussed more recently of successful professional well-educated women getting trapped in a sequence of serial monogamous relationships over the course of their fertile years that never results in a proposal from the men they're with or children, and these women eventually having to end it and move on and getting really frustrated and eventually never producing families and children - obviously progressive discourse frames these women as victims of misogyny, but there is an interesting phenomenon in the background).
But Perry's theory is something like, ideologically, these women are heavily socialized into accepting the sexual revolution as progress, and as liberation, and as a key part of the freedom they have inherited, and so on. The sexual revolution is Progressive. Women having the freedom to have the same sexuality as caddish men = progress. So... well, at least in her telling, this disconnect ends up getting sublimated into all sorts of other social critiques that previously would have just been part and parcel of prior more restricted sexual norms for both men and women. I think she noted it especially about #MeToo - given the realities of sexual dimorphism in humans, it's extremely difficult to have sexual revolution behaviors and its "upsides" without having a lot of risk taking, overly assertive, overly optimistic male sexual initiation and gambling of a sort that will be hurtful and unwanted sometimes. And that's specifically what #MeToo was built to demonize the hell out of. And this applies more generally. We love sexual liberation, but men asking women out who they don't know is creepy. We love sexual liberation, but if a women "consents" to sex but then her friends convince her she didn't "consent" six months later, that's actually rape, because women are in an oppressed class and can't really ever truly give consent. We love sexual liberation, but "consent" is the highest moral good, and it can only exist in the most legally explicit, legible-to-the-world contexts, and so conceived, it requires social behaviors that are awkward, unpragmatic, and functional anti-erotic. We love sexual liberation, but any male-female age gap, or any possible social power differential, automatically makes "consent", the highest good", impossible. We love sexual liberation, but male heterosexual desire is dangerous and misogynistic and objectifying and intrinsically suspect. We love sexual liberation, but really we don't, and so expect these norms to be revised over and over and over, each time framed as progress, never resolving, with no stable norms for men, especially, to just count on. And on and on and on.
Obviously not everyone (or even most women, anyway) feel this way consistently, and I think everyone in this system ends up highly conflicted and confused... but I think the larger argument is that, on some level, many of these critiques are getting purchase because the actual reality is in conflict with this dominant ideology... Women want many things, but one thing many of them really, really want is to live in a world where female sexuality is treated as though it were really, really special and important, and they want to be treated that way especially by actual appealing men in their personal lives, and they want to live in a world where that leads to them being pursued and supported by worthy, desirable men with some sort of happily-ever-after stability attached to it. And the actual reality of the sexual revolution world, even with legal "consent" philosophies attached to it, is just fundamentally contrary to those desires.
It seems to me that a piece like this hinges on the assumptions that the concept of "fascism" exists in a way that rationality can show and then instances of it can be identified through the application of shared, dispassionate scientific evidence and logical argument, and further, that "fascism" is universally and obviously "evil" in some incontestable normative sense (also proven through the application of rationality, I guess?). You'd have to go along with these assumptions for this style of argument to even make any sense. And so, in this theory, if sufficient members of the Elect (to borrow the term from Joseph Bottum's "An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America") can thus show that something is "fascist", then the broad masses will have to accept, by those preceding assumptions, that it has to be rejected, fought, exiled, etc.
I've seen Freddie de Boer, long ago, inveigh against this habit from young Progressive activists as something like the "Magic Word" theory of politics; if you can just get the dreaded magic word to be applied consistently to the thing you abhor, then broader society will have to accept that you won the argument, and then Progressive social change will surely follow. He probably had some Marxist materialist complaints to go with it, but I think the observation and critique itself is really useful as a phenomenon I see constantly.
I'm actually open to all sorts of fact based critiques of various aspects of the Trump administration. But the moment the "Magic Word" stance is trotted out, I recognize myself on the receiving end of a rhetorical bludgeon that I can either choose to participate in or resist. This has already happened with a bunch of other "Magic Words", and it seems like we're reaching the point of running on fumes here for having any kind of theoretically shared moral vocabulary at all. I imagine I'm just not in practice the audience for this line of argument, but at a certain point I'm not sure what happens when the theoretically shared moral vocabulary is entirely exhausted for broader society.
And for what it's worth, I really appreciated Paul Gottfried's "Fascism: The Career of a Concept", for actually trying to wrestle with the history of the idea and its context in broader historical contexts more generally.
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