CrispyFriedBarnacles
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User ID: 2417
CrispyFriedBarnacles
13d ago
I'm pretty sure there's a fascinating generational divide at play in things like this.
Here's my folk theory on that. Because of the particular circumstances Boomers were born into, many of the more artistic ones were raised in a much more conservative environment, then had a massive crisis of faith / trust / belief in the late 60s through the 70s, and then had to figure out a way to reintegrate themselves into society and make art about it. And because of that, whatever their other flaws, they were often VERY good at making entertainment that could talk to actual moderates and conservatives, because in many cases, they were the black sheep who had charted an overt path away from where they had started. They were the prodigal sons, but when they returned, they intended to remake culture with what they had found.
If you were a conservative, trying to maintain a traditional culture, these people were like the pied piper of Hamelin. They were really good at targeting younger members of your home communities, seductively you might say. They were legitimately good at representing things you recognized while also undermining it with a certain kind of criticism or nuance, at their best. Or even when they were provoking, they were good at signaling that they were provoking from within a shared tribe, so to speak.
Gen X didn't have the formative experience of the draft, and they grew up in the shadow of both this artistic explosion as well as the backlash, the stagflation of the 70s, and the rise of the religious right, and the cold war of the 80s. They saw the huge excesses of the divorce revolution and the drug culture and AIDS as-it-was-experienced and various miserable, alienating radical activist movements. They were, perhaps, particularly attuned towards cynicism about politics and messy ambiguity in art as a result. The best Gen X (at least when they were young) was often provocative, knowing exactly how to needle a conservative majority, but rarely preachy... (although if I go back and listen to, say, Eddie Vedder now, I can recognize the west coast SJW inclinations there the whole time). And also, the left of center counter culture got stomped down so incredibly hard in the 80s that they legitimately recognized themselves as outsiders, a kind of marginalized dissent. And Gen X got irony.
I think (when it comes to art and communication), everything kind of went to hell with the combination of the collapse of conservatism in the George W Bush years, the rhetorical success of, especially, Jon Stewart, and the messianic rise of Obama. Because it ushered in a kind of generational change, and that meant that a lot of the Millennials, especially, developed their early political identities during the Bush years and then experienced a conversion experience with Obama, all while internalizing the worst elements of Jon Stewart's frequent stance of "we, the smart ones, don't even need to refute the arguments of these moral monsters and intellectual imbeciles, and so we will use a condescending sneer at them instead". And I mean, I liked that tone during the Bush years too - it was very fun and self-satisfying. But it mixes with thoughtful art really, really poorly, it doesn't do nuance or ambiguity, and it really only works when you're preaching to the choir. And once Obama swept it, it turned out that being against something legitimately lousy was easy mode, and when you're for things (like high speed rail in California, or a really aggressive trans agenda), and you leave a giant trail of wreckage in your wake, sneering at your opponents simply isn't enough. That doesn't persuade. It doesn't take reality seriously, or your own failures. Everything that made those messy dissident Boomers so effective had dried up. And I really do think radically different life experiences played a major role here. I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts, the aristocratic power that stands in perpetual judgement due to intellectual merit and thus moral merit. And... that just really sucks for sophisticated art. And then the radicalization that happened in the lead up to Trump has just made everything vastly worse, of course. I've noted it before, but the run up to the 2016 election was the first time in my life that I had EVER seen artistically cooler, non-cringe media from Republicans than Democrats. It felt, at the time, like that was an important bellwether of something.
I've seen Freddie de Boer bemoan what he calls the "We are already decided" stance (or something like that). I think if you're in communities that have already adopted that stance, it becomes very difficult to make sophisticate, nuanced art that can reach out to people with other life experiences.
I remember early on in cancel culture Chris Rock (I think) talking about how he couldn't play colleges anymore. And he had some statement that was like, "You can't be wrong anymore on your way to being" - suggesting, I think, that even if you were going to tell a joke that ended up with an approved morality, you weren't allowed to even play around rhetorically with the unapproved morality, or give it is due, or take it serious, as a rhetorical technique before ending up where you were supposed to. I think I'm paraphrasing that roughly right. And I think (if I am) that that captured some of the specific tension I find so interesting here.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
15d ago
I think one of the really frustrating aspects of these conversations in the broader public sphere, particularly when strong progressive voices are present, is that so often this conversation devolves into a litany of scolding for young men, while young women are treated as victims, and at the same time, caricatures of traditional societies are still held up as the thing to be avoided. Which is to say, there is an insistence on both a kind of rights based liberal individualism as well as somewhat incompatible oppressor-oppressed dynamics for the male and female classes. It seems like a total dead end.
But (and I guess I'm going to get all Patrick Deneen "Why Liberalism Failed" here) insisting conversations get crammed into these dynamics does a grave disservice to the actual reality of why traditional societies actually worked, and why they worked the way they did. I grew up in a much more traditional religious subculture, and there was an overwhelming sense that people, from birth, were heavily invested in by the broader culture around them (especially by their own parents), and in some sense, they were acting as extreme free riders. And the way that these free riders transitioned from being takers to makers was to settle down, choose an appropriate mate, begin creating families, and pay forward all the ways they had been invested in by the strong, valuable culture that they had had the good fortune to be born into. And in that world, there was an overwhelming sense that young men AND young women who didn't make the transition were not really adults or people of esteem or worth in the community. They were damaging the loving people who had invested so much in them. There was severe cultural pressure for both young men and young women to fulfill that duty. And of course, there absolutely were gender roles that focused on high, distinct standards for both young men and young women, with a notion of complementarity to roles that, one assumed, were supposed to align favorably with existing biological differences between men and women, bolstered external pro-social needs, and help grease the wheels of those interactions, helping men and women find each other valuable and distinct... But in an important way, the specifics of the gender roles were less significant than the broader framework of the role of individuals in relationship to the larger community that had nurtured them.
And obviously, that kind of world can feel restricting. But it can also feel entirely sensible and worth investing in to all parties involved, because that fundamental relationship, between the individual invested in and that broader community that nurtured them, was something worth investing in. And there was absolutely a virtuous feedback loop, too - it might be restrictive to live up to hard pro-social ideals, but you get the benefit (ideally) of other people, especially mates, living up to hard, pro-social ideals too.
This is the framework I can't help but see and compare to when I look at the "young men need to be scolded, young women are always victims" public discourse, because at a basic human level, it just seems so totally anti-human and disconnected from reality. It has a strong "the beatings will continue until morale improves" vibe. Every time I hear it, all I can think is, why in the world would anyone think that young men are going to continue listening to this, taking it seriously, and accepting its authority? And indeed, I think my internal sense of that, for the last decade, is proving more and more well-calibrated.
I totally understand (neverminding questions of faith or metaphysics) how those more traditional societies are suppose to work, just in game theory terms. It's like joining the marines - you have to live up to hard, pro-social standards, and maybe that sucks, but then you get the benefit of being around other high trust individuals who also live up to hard, pro-social standards.
But I can't understand, at all, or figure out what's in it for young men to tolerate the current general public progressive world of atomized individual liberal oriented around rights and liberation (with a strong denial of basic cause and effect) plus oppressor-oppressed dynamics with young men as the enteral oppressor.
And as should be totally obvious from how I'm writing, my sympathies have very much drawn back to those older forms of cultural organization that I was raised in, despite my leaving it in my early young adulthood. I think I, and a lot of people like me, threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
27d ago
I think this fits into a more general pattern that I'm becoming more aware of.
There's this idea, from some irritated younger dissident right types (and others), that America's conservative party has long existed as something like a controlled opposition. And I get where that kind of frame is coming from.
But I think there's an alternative viewpoint that goes more like this, that I'm coming to think has a lot of explanatory power. From the 1930s on, a certain version of liberalism became so overwhelmingly dominant in America that its native conservative tradition was essentially sidelined into a permanent minority status, really, and given no public oxygen at all. And the New Deal state absolutely had a massive role in that (I've brought up Hoover under FDR inventing and promulgating the slur "isolationist" and pushing it hard to delegitimize the foreign policy of most American elites up to the point, for example, and the significant censorship campaigns that government employed against conservatives, as happened under JFK as well). But liberals of a certain sort really were so dominant, under the New Deal coalition, that in a two party system, it was inevitable that a lot of the differences within liberalism would inevitably, for game theory reasons, spill over into the other party and be given an airing there. You could call that bipartisan consensus, but I don't think really captures the dynamics at play. When Eisenhower ran for president in the 50s, both parties wanted him to run for them, and what came to be called paleo conservatism (I think the public fight with Taft captured that) became marginalized and sidelined. Groups like the John Birch society came to look fringe in part because a certain broad strand of liberalism was so dominant that everything normal looked like it, and all broadcast media reinforced it.
And this, I think, is the broader social context where all sorts of 20th century laws and polices and Supreme Court rulings were developed. There were assumptions about the values and worldviews of anyone who would be wielding these laws or rulings or state power, because that broad strand of liberalism had been so dominant that it was easy to assume that surely anyone who had access to the highest levels of state power would be a liberal in that sense.
And this is the background for the rise of the Reagan coalition, which included (as thought leaders and political operatives) many more hawkish or more pro market liberals who left the Democratic party with the rise of the New Left, and with the turn towards more nakedly radical left politics, and the rise of antagonism to internationalist American foreign policy. You could call those people flooding in and bolstering the Republican party of the 70s, and 80s, 90s, and 2000s entryist or controlled opposition, but I think it's just as easy to see them as a natural consequence of a very dominant strand of liberalism reallocating itself between the two parties in a two party system, which, again, you should expect for game theory reasons. And those people (many of them really, truly elites) understood American state power, because it literally had been created by people like them, for people like them.
And thus, when Reagan came to power, he may have had some sympathies that point in some more populist conservative directions that sounds like the old, marginalized paleo conservatives, and there were important public voices like Pat Buchanan that pointed in that direction, but the coalition Reagan brought into power was still absolutely packed with those sorts of statist, more conservative liberals that existed in huge numbers in the original New Deal coalition, the ones that all state power and court rulings and so on had been written for in the first place, and the ones that were comfortable expanding the state power of Civil Rights regime and letting the CIA do whatever it is that it does. George H. W. Bush fits cleanly in this pattern.
I think part of what makes the current moment so messy and complicated is that between 2001 and 2008, those more hawkish, more internationalist, more market oriented liberals absolutely dominated the Republican party and got their way. They sidelined more traditional paleo conservative voices even more (again, bringing up Pat Buchanan is instructive here). And then Iraq happened, and the 2008 financial crisis happened, and they basically obliterated their version of conservative liberalism in the public eye (which was always much less popular with rank-and-file conservatives, who much more often were more religious and somewhat isolationist in a Jacksonian sense and more distrustful of the remote Federal state). That was the specific sequence of events that opened up the chain including the Tea Party, and the online rise of Ron Paul, (both of which were really important for making intellectual space, especially online, for younger disaffected types to start entertaining new ideas that weren't just more rehashes of conservative liberalism), and then eventually the rise of Trump. And the rise of Trump meant the rise of RINOs, who for the most part really were those older conservative liberals who suddenly found that they were losing their iron grip on those tools of state power.
The entire system of federal government power has been built with the assumption that some variety of liberal, from a certain very specific intellectual tradition, would always be given the reigns of state power. There were certain filters in place (especially through unelected credentialing bodies and universities and professional organizations) that would ensure that, regardless of party, the sorts of people who make their way to centralized power would hold certain world views and values.
And... now we're in an era where it looks like that's possibly no longer true. And that is clearly disruptive.
(And for this narrative, too, it's worth recognizing that the current 6-3 conservative Supreme Court is the first time America has had a Supreme Court that conservative since the 1920s. That, on its own, is a radical, radical shift, considering how much liberals of all stripes used their dominance of the court in the middle of the 20th century to remake America in their vision, and how central it has been to their moral story of progress)
Anyway, given that story, I think it's very likely we'll see many more examples of this, of liberals becoming shocked and horrified to discover what happens when the central state they built with the assumption of permanent broad liberal control falls into heretical hands. I'm not saying this with pleasure, exactly, because I personally would have preferred many of those tools dismantled long ago. But...
To be honest, I don't recall the details of the actual tale. I was just using the phrase in its usual metaphorical sense - I just double checked Wikipedia, about this, and it suggested that "The phrase "pied piper" has become a metaphor for a person who attracts a following through charisma or false promises.".
Skimming the Wikipedia page for this makes the tale, and its history, sound pretty interesting in its own right, but I don't have much to add to that.
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