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The Origins of Woke has not become a best seller. As of this writing, the top non-fiction book on both the Publishers Weekly and NYT best sellers lists is The Democrat Party Hates America by Mark R. Levin. While I haven't read Levin's book, I'm sure it's as disposable as any other political tract by a Fox News host, while The Origins of Woke is legitimately the most important conservative book of the last 20 years.
Argument: It's not selling well because of the Huffington Post article that exposed his old blog posts to the masses. Counterargument: Conservatives are the target market, and they tend not to "cancel" people over things like this.
Argument: It's not selling more copies because the name is cringe. Counterargument: Donald J. Trump Jr's book "Triggered" became a best seller.
Argument: It's not selling more copies because Hanania isn't a celebrity. Counterargument: Andy Ngo doesn't host anything or do many public appearances, but his book was still a best-seller.
I don't care whether Hanania is personally successful, but I really, really want the ideas in this book to gain widespread recognition. Hanania offers provide a plausible-enough plan to defeat not only wokeness, but also all of the ideologies that have gained popularity in the wake of Conservative Inc's failure to stop wokeness, including white nationalism and NRx. Speaking as a former white nationalist (or whatever you wanna call VDare readers), people with moderate temperaments adopt extreme beliefs because the mainstream hasn't offered any believable alternative.
Ben Shapiro says that we should just argue people into adopting our views because it'll suddenly work, even though we've been trying for years and it hasn't worked. Peter Brimelow says we should close the border and have white babies. Curtis Yarvin says that we should put a dictator in charge, or at least whatever FDR was. Caldwell says that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act, even though it's as much a part of our national identity at this point as the Constitution.
Hanania's proposal is essentially a modification of Caldwell's that takes political realities into account. Instead of repealing the Civil Rights Act, we should just re-interpret it in an originalist light and repeal the modifications made in the decades afterwards.
I can't say for certain why this book isn't making bank, but I theorize that it has to do with the fact that no mainstream conservative figure like a Ben Shapiro or a Steven Crowder has reviewed it or interviewed him. They're ignoring him, even though his politics are totally aligned with theirs, because they don't want to platform someone who was once a racist. National Review hasn't even reviewed The Origins of Woke.. and they reviewed Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement!
So, here are three questions I have in no particular order.
Hanania is too much of an intellectual, he's bad at the politics game. He doesn't know how to be tactfully silent. He constantly goes around attacking people's sacred cows, often somewhat disingenuously: 'look at how South Korea has porn bans, tight abortion restrictions and the lowest fertility rate on the planet - checkmate trads'. As if South Korea could be described as having 'traditional gender roles', it's one of the most feminist countries on the planet.
He constantly goes around irritating people, calling conservatives low IQ. The tone of his writing is often excessively confrontational or it'll have a clickbait title that goes further than what the text argues. He's a smart troll IMO.
I agree that the Origins of Woke is useful and could be effective if implemented but Hanania has not been good at marketing himself except to the small set of intellectual, contrarian rightwingers who follow him. He even apologized and backed down on the Huffington matter, when that was possibly the one time he should've lashed out against a leftward enemy. Strategically speaking, apologizing to enemies and attacking allies gets you sidelined by the rest of the team.
It was the right thing to do because it made the author of that hit piece look worse and like a bully, and probably otherwise the book deal may have been cancelled. Hanania came off as magnanimous. Apologizing is not always a mistake. Even Trump apologized a few times.
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Certainly not by the standards of the OECD, which is is a reasonable comparison for the US. The current President was in large part propelled forward by an anti-feminist youth movement, something basically nonexistent throughout the west, all countries with better birthrates than Korea.
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What do you base that on? Korea has a very active feminist movement, but they're very different from Western feminists, often complain about Western feminism's irrelevance to their issues, and "radical feminism" in South Korea could basically be described as WGTOW - in response to the very patriarchal gender norms in that society, a lot of women see no benefit to getting married. In comparison to places like Africa and the Middle East, or even South America, sure, Korea is quite "feminist," in the sense that significant numbers of women have the option of opting out. But compared to the West? No, not so much.
This is like the distinction between Maoism and Stalinism. There are practical and ideological differences but they're still different kinds of Marxism-Leninism. Different kinds of feminism are still feminism. WGTOW is feminist, just as MGTOW is anti-feminist.
How can SK be a very patriarchal society if the women refuse to marry because they don't see benefits to it??? Women are half of society. In real patriarchal societies, women absolutely do see benefits to marriage - having protection, being genuinely accepted by society (including other women), higher status, all kinds of things. There's a genuine consensus on the roles of men and women. In real patriarchal societies you don't see legal equality between the sexes, let alone ministries of gender equality.
South Korea is not as feminist as Sweden but it is still very feminist.
Because the women we're talking about, who opt out, are a very small percentage. The vast majority (of men and women) do conform to Korea's very traditional gender norms.
Again, what do you base this on? And by that I mean, do you have any actual knowledge of what you are talking about?
I'm asking how you count Korea as "one of the most feminist country on the planet." Have you lived in Korea? Do you have any engagement at all with Korean politics and society? I have, and do. I do not claim to be an expert and I haven't been there in a while, so if you have more recent information, update me, but you seem to be just throwing that out there because, like, some Korean women complain about patriarchy and they have a (mostly toothless and on the chopping block) cabinet position that gave lip service to women's rights. I do not think you know anything about Korea or how feminist it is other than maybe you saw some Youtube videos about Korean women opting out of marriage and you had a kneejerk reaction to learning that they created a "Ministry of Gender Equality and Family" in 1998. But prove me wrong and tell me more about Korean feminism.
They clearly don't. Remember that the context here is that Hanania points out 'SK's fertility is so incredibly low'. This is in direct opposition to the notion that it's a patriarchal society, which necessarily implies that women's role is in the home, raising children! If it were a patriarchal society, women would be at home, raising children. Not merely expected to be at home raising children but actually raising children like they did 30-40 years ago. Raising children requires having children, which South Koreans don't do anymore. You cannot have a 'norm' if people don't follow it.
I don't care if you've been to South Korea, that doesn't matter a bit. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of South Koreans who would of course declare that it's a very patriarchal society. They've lived there their whole lives. Do you doubt that millions of South Koreans would also agree with me, saying that it's a very feminist country? Experience is not helpful here.
South Korea has intense, radically feminist websites like Megalia or Womad. They have the 4B movement. They have extremely low birthrates. It's a feminist country.
Experience and first- and second-hand knowledge is always superior to hot-takes gleaned from the Internet. Do you actually know anything about Megalia or Womad, besides the fact that they exist?
So basically you don't know anything about Korea, except that based on declining birthrates, it's very feminist. That would make Japan also one of the "most feminist countries in the world." You define "very feminist" as "having declining birthrates," dismissing any other factors.
I think you are unwilling to walk back a dubious claim you made based on spurious evidence.
Stop putting words in my mouth. Birthrates can decline for other reasons than feminism. Go have a look at Japan's fertility rate, it fell for a while during the chaos of the Meiji Restoration. But then it absolutely plummets immediately after WW2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033777/fertility-rate-japan-1800-2020/
Guess what kinds of social changes happened in Japan after WW2, relating to the role of women in society?
If there was a massive plague in Korea that was sterilizing people, I'd ascribe the fall in birthrates to that. If there was a huge famine, a war... but there isn't a huge famine or a war. What else could possibly be happening than feminism to explain this effect? Urbanization and industrialization? Urbanization and industrialization that only suddenly and drastically decrease fertility after full equality of the sexes is inserted into the Japanese constitution (and Korean constitution for that matter)? Urbanization and industrialization are important and do effect fertility but so does feminism, to a greater extent.
See the exact same trend in Korea - something clearly happened in 1945 where the trendlines changed massively: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070601/crude-birth-rate-south-korea-historical/
We see the Korean War, a brief post-war baby boom and then constant decline. Note that Korea and Japan were industrializing prior to 1945, with very limited effects on fertility.
Japan is also a very feminist country. I have been there. The status of women is very high in Japan (that much is visible from anime), wives feel free to spend their husband's money, ghost them, disrespect them and so on.
Is it western, girlboss feminism? No. But that's not the only kind of feminism. Different cultures can express feminism in different ways. Surely you could imagine a world where men have great economic power but minimal social power, are you going to say that's a patriarchy?
Glad we agree.
Yes, that modernization, entry of women into the workforce, birth control and other factors has generally resulted in declining birthrates in industrial countries is not in dispute. Whether or not that is a good thing is certainly debatable. But your specific claim was that Korea is "one of the most feminist countries in the world." It's not.
I cannot tell if you're serious.
Wives have traditionally controlled the household purse strings since long before Westernization. That is a very traditional gender role in Japan and Korea.
As for "ghosting and disrespecting," I'm sure that happens, just as there is a catalog of abuses and grievances about how typical Japanese men treat women.
No, but I'm going to say you don't have a coherent idea of what feminism is, nor of Korean (or apparently, Japanese) society. You just see anime girls and some anecdotes you don't really understand and conclude "Super feminist country."
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What are they? Have Koreans just been having 1-2 children top for the last 300 years and now that a few 'feminists' have defected and had 0 children the balance tipped toward a shrinking population? Or what is the reason for such low birth-rates despite very traditional gender norms?
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I think Hanania embodies a lot of the frustration some people have with the online dissident right as a bandwagon-based ideology. Abortion is a great example. Nobody in NrX except some fringe tradcaths who weren’t even part of the main movement cared about abortion. Very few people on the “alt right” circa 2015-2018 cared about abortion. To almost every very online internet dissident rightist, abortion was either irrelevant or a good thing for various reasons. Then, as soon as Trump’s justices reversed Roe, suddenly it became “cool” to be anti abortion. The very same classical statue avatar types that didn’t care two years prior were reposting the “aborted gf” /pol/ (or was it r9k?) meme unironically and sending pretty vicious death threats to Hanania because he essentially said that abortion doesn’t matter, the hardcore pro-life position is unpopular with voters, and the whole thing is bad for the right in the long term. I doubt most of these guys are attending mass every Sunday, it was pure contrarianism, the right got one (pointless, backfiring) “win” and they had to ‘defend it’ by threatening Hanania for his milquetoast NrX opinions that were the default position in that very same movement not a few years before. Trump will be the same if he wins again, all the 2017 optimism will surge back until it turns out that again he will accomplish nothing.
And in truth there are a lot of issues that are similar. What I think Hanania is arguing for (poorly, sometimes) is essentially Steve Bannon’s 2015/2016 plan. And while Trump fucked it up, it is probably still the best plan the right has. At least it’s a realistic, possibly achievable plan to make some kind of positive impact on the lives of Americans. I feel Hanania’s frustration that there seem to be a lot of people on the online right who don’t really care about that anymore, and would prefer to retreat into esoteric shitposting and doomscrolling instead of doing anything, while hoping (as all failed radicals do) for some kind of crisis that will surely pave the way for their political ascension.
This is (in theory) a good instinct strategically, since it makes sense to be unified. Leninist organizations are actually politically effective in part due to democratic centralism. When the leadership decides something, that's it, they all go along with it. They don't get bogged down in endless debates and division like other radical socialist/anarcho-socialist groups. That never gets anything done.
Now in this case, there are serious problems because Trump became the effective leader of the right and was almost totally worthless for the right-wing cause as you say. He was 'monitoring the situation' and cutting taxes rather than making decisive blows to the deep state or patronizing supporters to build up a right-wing power base in the institutions. Even so, he's still really useful to the right, he's a figure they can rally around, he can bring boomers onside, he can unite the right against their enemies in the left, he can even serve as a martyr if imprisoned. Breaking the idols of the enemy is an important political function, it shows that you're strong and they're weak. Anyway, Trump's age means he won't be around for much longer.
Internal division is poison, even worse than ineffective leadership. Hanania is fine arguing for the Bannon plan, his book has good ideas - just don't introduce division and spark conflicts in a political movement.
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Is South Korea all that feminist? Their current president was elected on a platform that included a promise to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality, and his most committed supporters are vociferously anti-feminist. Hard to imagine such a man getting elected in, say, Sweden.
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Agreed it is nonsense to consider Korea an exceptionally feminist society, at least for the developed world, and they genuinely do have a very large anti-feminist movement that played a big role in the last election. It should be said though the Ministry of Gender Equality wore a lot of people's patience thin for non-ideological reasons, like their attempts to ban videogames, or reduce prostitution by issuing checks to anyone who promised not to visit a prostitute.
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The thing with SK is that the people you are talking about are a combination of the longstanding grievance about the men only mandatory military service and a reaction to a radical form of feminism holding significant power. Online communities like Megalia have had huge impact on the local incarnation of the movement and made it look (and sometimes be) insane.
Imagine if mainstream feminism was led by a women version of 4chan, goreposting, TND and all.
Not to say that the feminists don't have any good points, but rather that this is a very divided society when it comes to sex issues. The Korean Overton window is much more widely open than the Swedish one on this. Hardcore misandrists and misogynists are nontrivial political forces there.
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If you have a Ministry of Gender Equality in the first place...
I see Sweden has had such a Minister since the 1950s, so South Korea isn't competing with them. Even so, South Korea shouldn't be characterized as a country with traditional gender roles.
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