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"Cringe" is a super useful word, IMO. So is "creep". These words occupy the space that "gay" and "lame" used to occupy before they were cancelled.
The best way to defeat a label, of course, is to own it. You want to call me a Yankee Doodle Dandy? That's cool. I'm the gayest, lamest, Yankee Doodle Dandy you ever saw.
Still, in 2023, no one wants to be cringe or creepy. These words still have power.
You know what was cringe? Alt-right people dressing up in Hawaiian shirts and carrying Tiki torches. You know what's not cringe? Bill Ackman waging a crusade against Harvard wokists.
Wait a second, you say. Who gets to decide what is cringe, and what isn't?
Answer: The Elite. The elite gets to decide who is
lame and gaycringe and creepy and who is not. Control of the narrative is what defines the elite.Do you see where I'm going with this? Richard Hanania does. In one of his less annoying pieces he makes a great point about the possibility of a Jewish realignment.
When you correct for IQ, when you correct for tribalism, Jews are something like 30-50% of the elite population in the US. Look at university presidents, look at cabinet members, look at Nobel Prize winners. You're bound to notice something.
Jews are under attack in the Western World right now. We are seeing the largest outbreak of anti-semitism since WWII. And it's the far left that is responsible. If, and it's a big if, this results in American Jews abandoning the left, it could end with the biggest political realignment since the 1970s. Already we see the the strands of a nascent movement among the cognescenti. Is an intellectual, philo-Semitic conservative movement possible? I think, surprisingly, the answer is yes.
Populists are cringe and creepy. Elite realignments are cool and edgy. The fashion barber pole has made another rotation and the mustaches are slightly less ironic.
You're using "correct for" in the exact opposite way it is normally used. Unless you're saying Jews actually make up 80% of the elite population, but half of it can be explained by their IQ and tribalism.
You're right. Embarrassing mistake on my part.
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Boomers are the age bracket that supports Israel the most, are boomers going to become cool?
Is Ben Shapiro cool? Bari Weiss?
This supposed realignment looks like oppurtunism and internal jockeying. The right is embarrassing itself and will continue to be the wipping boy after this flare up is over.
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This was cringe because of the selectively-edited presentation of the event by journalists, some of whom are Jewish but most of whom are not. “Elites” factor in only insofar as the elites influence the biases of journalists. There’s actually nothing aesthetically unpleasing about your typical yard torch (2), but the journalists focused on “tiki torch” because it has feminine diminutive alliteration, and a connotation of out-of-fashion Hawaiian parties (which obviously conflicts with the European-centered aesthetic). This focus was so strong that you believed they all wore Hawaiian shirts. Then the journalists chose the ugliest photos of the ugliest people there. We pretty much expect them to do this for negative-valence events, but imagine them doing this at an Obama rally and you immediately see that it’s rooted in bias (they would do the opposite, usually panning to the most attractive young people, and the smartest interviewed people, and so on).
The “elites” theory, by the way, totally conflicts with the black culture currently in vogue among white people, unless you think that black criminals who rap about robbing Versace are the elites.
Yes, that is why the elite are elite. They get to decide what's cringe and then selectively edit to share their viewpoint. The first step of any successful protest march is to have sympathetic media on hand. Not doing so is, dare I say, cringe.
That's a good point and not totally solvable, IMO. To steelman the elites theory:
Blacks are two levels down the status pole from elite whites. No one's ever going to confuse a high-status white with a ghetto black guy. But they might confuse the high status white for a low-status white. Therefore, high status whites must signal constantly to avoid that confusion. Me? I'm not a Republican, scoff. But liking black people is okay because there's no confusion.
But it could also be that blacks are just legitimately cooler in many ways.
It could, but they are not. The "black culture" being shilled to the mainstream is a choice being made by people with a fetish for it.
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Pretty convenient that elite realignments are cool and edgy (edgy though really?...VC and non-profit realignments as edgy?) given that's the easiest thing to get behind. Relatedly, inequality soars... inequality is actually cool!
And how about simply being not anti-semitic, not philo-semitic? In fact philo-semitism seems a good way of generating more anti-semitism.
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Mostly. But there's also an uptick in rhetoric at least from the anti-Semitic alt-right, probably entirely opportunistic. It brings to mind the Stonetoss tug-of-war comic, with an Israeli flag guy and establishment figure on one side, pulling against a Swastika and a Pride Flag figure on the other, the Israeli flag guy going "huh?".
By definition, yes, because they're opposed to the elite. Populists can sometimes win because they appeal to the people who don't give a shit if the Mean Girls say nasty things about them.
The Italian School-loving New Right which seems to have a lot of sway here is quite overt about putting status and cool above any kind of lame moralistic principled considerations. There is only health, wealth, power, consequences, and demographic blocks determined by great men, not corny meditations on the morality of any given act - in war, or backroom political dealings - driven by resentful leveling.
Of course whenever it clashes with the east coast journalistic establishment it's shown up to be quite cringe and uncool. Maybe the tech/coastal crypto-right being so adjacent to edgy and cool - unlike the flyover populists who are distant and hopeless - makes them value it more than even the official culture industry, who take it for granted because they're directly at the center of it.
Yeah I wouldn’t necessarily describe the Red Scare podcast crowd as uncool, and they’re adjacent to figures like BAP and part of the also cool LES art / ‘Dimes Square’ scene, which is itself adjacent to actually cool art and culture scenes and the international party / society circuit via Miami, Tulum and Cannes/Monaco (and that, in turn, is adjacent and sometimes overlapping with actual Hollywood).
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It’s more like 20% than 30-50% if you include the whole elite. Hollywood is probably the only place where it’s 50%+, and even that’s changing slowly with Netflix, Sony and Comcast/Universal all being run by gentiles. SCOTUS is now 1/9 Jewish. The cabinet is pretty Jewish, in a relatively historically anomalous fashion, but it would be incorrect to overcorrect from that (and ultimately the president and VP are gentile). Of the West’s 8 most important financial institutions (the bulge bracket banks), only one, Goldman Sachs, has a Jewish CEO. True, 5 of the 10 richest Americans are Jewish, but if you zoom out, the 11-20 bracket has just one Jewish person (Michael Dell), so it largely reflects inflated tech valuations for Ellison, Zuck, Larry and Sergei specifically. (The richest Jew, Ellison, is a Republican and Trump supporter.)
Hanania’s post does make a good point, though, which is that a lot of the reason many major political donors are Jewish isn’t that Jews have most of the money - 83% of America’s billionaires are (overwhelmingly white) gentiles. It’s that, whatever their ideology, Jews disproportionately care about politics compared to gentiles. Scrolling through the Forbes billionaire list, the Walton family ($210bn), the Mars family ($80bn) and many others have great wealth that could vastly influence American society, but though each has members that are a little involved in politics, the capital they deploy is a tiny proportion of what they have compared to figures like Soros and Ellison.
This also explains why Jews are eg. overrepresented on the radical right as well as the radical left. As Hanania says, a substantial proportion of very rich Jews, once they pass the point on having enough money to do what they want, think about how to use their wealth to shape their environment, to have agency. This isn’t necessarily in politics, but it often is. By contrast, a much higher proportion of gentile billionaires are content to essentially leave politics to politicians, only intervening in a few categories of narrow interest to them personally (eg the Mars family’s extensive lobbying on estate taxes).
This is probably accurate. Hanania's formulation was something like this:
"Jews have +1 standard deviation IQ and also +1 standard deviation in caring about politics". Therefore, among individuals who are +3 standard deviations in each category, Jews comprise an absolute majority.
His +1 in caring about politics is the squishy piece here. He's grasping for something. There's clearly something going on beyond just IQ. Perhaps we could explain it with clannishness or, framed more positively, "working together".
High IQ isn't enough to explain Jewish dominance of industries like Hollywood (or smaller ones like diamonds). An extreme in group bias is also necessary. This would probably also explain other market dominant minorities such as the Chinese in Malaysia.
I think Hanania's characterization there (the +1 in caring) is definitely pointing at a thing that exists, but I'd phrase it more like "argues about ideas." There has been a longstanding trend in Jewish communities to engage in an especially lively debate about abstractions, and this has been handed down through the generations by (IMO) mutually-reinforcing genetics and culture. Politics is all about picking which ideas get resources, so this is one context where a tendency to ideological combativeness is a natural fit. (This argument extends to the scientific method and Anglo-American jurisprudence, both of which are formed around the core concept of ideas and advocacy in conflict. Jews have also tended to do particularly well in those areas.)
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“Asabiyyah” works well here.
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Higher IQ at the far right tail also exacerbates even ‘normal’ levels of in-group nepotism (such as nepotism within families) since the people doing the nepotism are disproportionately successful and the nepo hires are more likely to succeed in the role than the average nepo hire from a less able population.
Reversion to the mean means that 2 150IQ Jews are much more likely to have a 150IQ child than 2 150IQ gentile whites.
Nepotism entropy is therefore reduced.
It makes sense. Jews hire a Jewish doctor because he's likely to be better. And Christians hire a Jewish doctor for the same reason. (Or would, if they knew any).
There's also another factor. Hollywood and diamonds are industries in which trust is paramount, so would naturally tend to be dominated by a close-knit group.
There’s a bit in Curb where Larry David gets displeased with his Swedish-American lawyer for misleading others into thinking he was Jewish, like a form of stolen valor.
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Maybe it's just my own online milieu but my impression is lots of people are already "owning" "cringe" as a label. I see memes about embracing being cringey. When I read stories people tell about some third party X cringing or feeling embarrassed at the behavior of some third party Y it's generally made clear X is a bad person for reacting this way. This seems, to me, like a label that is already well on its way out.
That aside, I'm not sure I agree that there is some "Elite" that decides what things are "cringe." Things being cringe seems much more like a subculture-relative inter-subjective agreement. What is cringey to one subculture may not be to another. I rarely see anyone I think of as "Elite", in either a subcultural context or a broader social context, deciding what is cringey and other people seeming to take their cues from them. The notion of what is or is not cringe seems like a much more bottom-up phenomenon. Something is cringey when that something causes you to feel embarrassed for the person doing the thing, or to think they ought to feel embarrassed or ashamed. It's necessarily a subjective evaluation.
As to Jewish re-alignment, I think it's remarkable Hanania cites polling data for so many parts of his piece but not for what American Jews actually think of Israel. For example, here's an NPR article summarizing a poll from the Jewish Electorate Insitute:
If Jews are concerned about anti-semitism the evidence as of last month suggests they will become more Democratic, not less.
60-22 Biden-Trump is much less favorable to Biden than their vote at the last election, surely.
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A very big if. Look at the favorability by religions, of religions as of 2022: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/03/15/americans-feel-more-positive-than-negative-about-jews-mainline-protestants-catholics/pf_2023-03-15_religion-favorability_00-08/
Everyone seems to like Jews (Muslims are not included in this chart as observers), while Jews hate Evangelicals (their biggest non-Mormon supporters) and prefer atheists to any other religious group. Just look at that staggering +39, -40 gap! Truly a case of unrequited love. I can't stress enough how much normal rules of friend-enemy distinction do not apply here.
What happens once the fighting stops? There was the Second Intifada as well, from 2000-2005. That didn't seriously shake the commitment of US Jews to progressivism, or apparently cause Jews to favour Evangelicals (their staunchest defenders) over Muslims, who were suicide-bombing them. Maybe for a brief time they did but they soon returned to base tendencies. Or consider any of the other (numerous) Arab-Israeli conflicts. This latest Hamas-Israel war is not an unprecedented event. We've seen this many times before.
So what if Mr Altman tweets that he's unhappy and confused about the US left? We can pull up DALLE-3 or GPT-4 and observe how they insert 'ethnically ambiguous' as a search prompt to brown up Swedish bathhouses. Actions speak louder than tweets. He's no conservative.
And finally, what kind of Jewish intellectual conservativism might we hypothetically get, if Hanania is right? An end to mass migration or Neoconservatism 2.0, Back to the Sandbox? The former has much more evidence behind it, that's the kind of thing Jews tended to support in the past.
Hanania values intelligence too highly. I bet David Frum, Richard Perle and so on are really intellectually sophisticated, so what? Their ideas were extremely harmful, they got us into disastrous wars that mainly benefitted their co-ethnics in Israel. Just because someone is high IQ or well-educated, it does not follow that they're going to be helpful to you. IQ is only a measurement of talent, not of benevolence or even correctness. People here love to worship Von Neumann's intellect - he was amongst the strongest voices in favour of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the USSR. If people had listened to him on this single most important issue, way more important than anything else he did, how many megadeaths would it have been? A bloody, unnecessary war with perilous long-term consequences in terms of precedent-setting... Sound familiar? Better a wise, cautious conservative than a clever, aggressive progressive.
Do we expect sponsorship of social conservativism from the people who were pushing the complete opposite for many decades, based on... no evidence at all, just Hanania's hunch that elite Jews might be turning on progressives? This seems very unlikely. Restriction of mass immigration is also very unlikely. Maybe we get some restrictions on Muslim immigration which is better than nothing. But even so, why would that happen now and not before, given the very long history of Arab-Israeli wars? The http address below speaks for itself:
https://hias.org/news/why-a-jewish-organization-is-suing-to-stop-the-muslim-ban/
More freedom? Probably not. For example, Jews tend to favour gun control: https://www.jewishelectorateinstitute.org/september-2022-national-survey-of-jewish-voters/
The Jewish demographic simply is not conservative. Highly urban, highly progressive, nationalist-towards-Israel-before-others (see Pollard and his defenders), wealthy assetholders in a great position to make gains from mass immigration, plus ideologically inclined towards mass migration. At best we get faux-conservatism, RINO conservatism like the Republican party of yore, which is not really desirable IMO. Rubber-stamping social progressivism with a short time lag, lowering taxes for the wealthy, steady movement towards the total state, mass immigration and futile foreign wars is not very conservative.
Jews turning conservative is an inevitability based on demographic trends, but it's unlikely to happen in the near term future, and relevantly a lot of them may not vote conservative- democrats have historically been more than capable of cutting deals with not-progressive groups for support, relevantly including ultra-orthodox Jews, who have, uh, personal reasons in opposing a reduction of the welfare state(although I suppose if there's republican dominance of a place, they're probably capable of picking the strong horse to get the best possible deal- it's just that they mostly live in New York, not Texas).
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Those are very good points and I think pretty much destroy Hanania's arguments.
If Jews started voting for Republicans, does it follow that Jews would also start supporting lower taxes for the middle class, less bureaucracy, less immigration, fewer wars, restrictions on abortion, etc... No, of course not. They are capable of defending their own narrow interests without changing their belief structure. If anything, it's the Republican Party that would change.
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In the modern West, the elite only partly define what is cool. And it's not the political elites who do it, it's media elites - people like music journalists, influencers, and marketing professionals some of whom are elite in their fields, but who are not elites in the traditional sense of "super-rich people who have a lot of direct political power".
But cool also often emerges from organic movements. For example, rock in the 1950s, hip-hop in the 1980s, and grunge in the 1990s were organic movements that got accelerated significantly by music journalism and marketing, but were not created or made cool by those things. Journalism and marketing played a role in making those things popular, but journalism and marketing only latched on to them after they had already become popular at least in some subculture.
Watching the past couple years unfold has made me very skeptical about the organic nature of anything that makes it to the mainstream. Them not creating it is irrelevant, and in my opinion they absolutely did make it cool. The fact that it was popular in some nieche begore that doesn't change the fact that they made it cool. Christian Rock was popular too (kind of massive, in fact) but it was cringe, while Ggrunge was cool. I see no reeasosn to think it couldn't be the other way around, if this is what the elites wanted.
Cool is relative and both temporal and location-limited. There were almost certainly circles (maybe large parts of the country) where Christian rock was in practice considered more cool than grunge. Similarly, wearing avant garde fashion to a suburban Nashville stay-at-home-mom meetup is extremely cringe and uncool, but wearing the kind of skinny blue jeans and tan cowboy boots uniform that was cringe in NYC a decade ago is perfectly normal.
There were never circles where Christian rock was cool. I get your point you're trying to make and your misunderstanding as a trans Atlantic coastal elite, but it's misunderstanding both the concept of cool and the concept of Christian rock and indeed the concept of rock.
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Yes, but not in the way you describe. No high-status person ever thought, "shit, better up my Christian game, or I'll look cringe". Some did that for the money, but not for the coolness.
Yeah, because (high) society is based around the culture of the richest and most powerful cities (NYC and to a much lesser extent LA) where most elites haven’t been religiously Christian for 70+ years.
I don’t doubt that, say, a sole Jewish kid at a heavily Christian suburban high school in a deep red part of a red state might start listening to Christian rock.
I mean, there's plenty of Christian rock that's generally accepted as decent enough to have a large secular fanbase, the idea that Christian rock is entirely the kind of cringefest niche market it was in the 80s is just not up to speed. And most Christians listen to secular rock music nowadays, too- even in Tyler, Texas(where Greg Abbott relocates to to sign particularly controversial bills), there's not a public school demographic that will only listen to Christian rock- they homeschool.
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Then there's no way to call it organic. Local elites are going to block hostile culture from becoming cool, no matter how popular it is at the bottom.
I do doubt that, actually. Why wouldn't the Jewish kid hang out with the nerds and geek out about Star Wars, instead of trying to fit into something he obviously isn't a part of?
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I think post internet, the chances of organic discovery and development more or less died. The gatekeepers can simply downgrade a music type or movie or TV show in streaming services and never ever talk about it in journalistic articles, and suppress social media posts to quash new trends before they even start. In previous eras, you could pass around physical media like mix tapes and introduce your friends to a cool band. You could tape a show and hand it around.
Post-Web 2.5, anyways. It used to be that "going viral" had a fairly organic component to it. Yes, in an age where algorithms power everything, the platform owners reserve the right to put their thumbs on the scale, and only weird, brand-unfriendly shit is the kind of stuff that you could argue becomes organically memetic. But back in the days of early YouTube? Not so much.
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I don't see how these alternative methods of distribution give you an edge over uploading something to Odysee, or Rumble. At the end if the day for something to go from the underground to the mainstream, it had to get the green light from some suit. This is why there were, and still are, things stuck in the underground for all intents and purposes, despite being popular.
I think the bigger factor here is the recent concentration of media ownership, there used to be more competition in the past.
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
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I like Uniquenameosaurus's [definition of cringe](https://youtube.com/watch?v=L0jhV4mLwmU. Something is cringe when it has two features:
So, applying that to your example, alt-right people dressing up in Hawaiian shirts and carrying Tiki torches are trying to be impressive. The point of marching in uniform is to send a message like "We're a unified block! We're coordinated! Be impressed and afraid!" An actual Torchlight Procession would be frightening as a river of coordinated, uniformed people marched through a city. Evil? Sure. But the river of torches is going to leave an impression.
The tiki torches were an attempt to look impressive. But, in contrast to a big coordinated block of uniformed germans, the photos of the Unite the Right show a scraggly line of a few hundred people in street clothes. They lack the coordination and numbers of the earlier demonstration.
So, since the Unite the Right rally was trying to be impressive (and/or frightening), but missed core features to make them actually impressive (and/or frightening), they're just cringe.
The elite can certainly put their finger on the scale; it's always tricky to argue with people who buy ink by the barrel. But I the ability to call people unimpressive only goes so far. So I disagree that the elite can actually make arbitrary determinations.
So you're saying we need to up our intimidation factor when it comes to torchlight processions? Got it! 😀
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And what about the people that were (pretending) to be scared of them? They were even cringier or more pathetic for me back in the day.
sure, but being less embarrassing than a bunch of actual scaredy cat crybabies doesn't win you many points.
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A random musing:
At least so far as the media presented it, Unite the Right was comprised of... the ugly. That made them substantially less impressive/scary/worthy of respect. Which is intellectually stupid, and I know that, but I simply couldn't take them seriously. It changed the entire vibe from "we have power and can change the world" to "we are pathetic whiners."
I genuinely believe that a protest a quarter the size but a standard deviation more attractive would have been far more threatening to the status quo than what actually happened.
Unless you specifically recruit only rich PMCs or models it’s unlikely any standard American protest is going to be particularly attractive. Maybe like Japanese Americans or some other (much) lower obesity population, but otherwise it’s the fat that’s responsible for the ugliness.
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