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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.
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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