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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.
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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