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Direct confrontation happens in progressive spaces frequently; the most typical example would be a black woman haranguing some hapless white “ally” for transgressing some implicit taboo. (In fact, I have a theory that one reason PMC white women worship and defer to black women so thoroughly is because they envy black women’s comfort with direct confrontation.)
Similarly, “bravery to go against the crowd” and “immunity to personal attacks and shaming” are key pillars of the 21st-century worldview and ethos! That’s what “pride parades” and “letting your freak flag fly” are all about! Transgression of “bourgeois norms”, garish expression of difference, etc.
Now, of course I’m familiar with the counterarguments. “When transgression is the norm, the people who think they’re transgressing are actually conforming!” “We’re not talking about the weird antifa freaks, we’re only talking about professional-class white-collar workers who profess progressive politics as a tribal signifier!” Okay, then people need to speak more precisely. Because conservatives can’t simultaneously be the party of normal middle-class people with conventional folkways on the one hand, and on the other hand attack progressives for being too conformist.
Direct confrontation happens, if you have numbers behind you and you are positioned appropriately on the progressive stack. But shaming and personal attacks only go in one direction. I think you're completely wrong that white women envy black women's comfort with direct confrontation. They are afraid of it. That's why white women (and progressives, more generally) lose against cancel culture. Because they are afraid to say "No" (or more pointedly, "Fuck off with your bullshit").
No, those are key parts of a popular delusion. Everyone (including here!) imagines himself a brave iconoclast, not afraid of speaking truth to power, not going along with the sheeple, definitely not an NPC. I totally worked out all my beliefs carefully from first principles and examine all evidence and do my own research and don't just take anyone else's word for it, especially not so-called "experts"! And I totally don't care what people think of me, ima gonna speak my truth!
This is bullshit, of course, for 90% of men and probably 99% of women. But we all like to imagine ourselves brave little cockerels strutting around unintimidated by popular opinion.
Yes, conservatives are delusional when they claim progressives are the conformist ones. But you (soy blue-tribe ex-progressive, by your own description) still seem perversely fond of the mythology you claim to have left behind, that progressives are the "radical" ones who aren't afraid to stand up and thrown down. The confrontation and conflict you describe is mostly petty infighting. No progressive would be brave enough to become a centrist or a heterodox classical liberal (like a lot of us here on the Motte) because he'd be booed, shamed, and forced to grovel unless he actually goes on the "I left the Left" grifting circuit (which requires basically leaving your entire social circle behind). Progressives don't do direct confrontation unless it's a struggle session (a bunch of people ganging up on the designated scapegoat) or in solidarity against an approved enemy (Trump, Israel, heteronormative late stage capitalism, whatever).
Gay pride parades are, exactly as you say, not even remotely transgressive anymore! They imagine themselves to be so- which is why you see people wearing S&M puppy gear or spreading their cheeks to show their rectums on Folsom Street, to try to retain some sense of actually "shocking the normies." But yeah, the early pride movement might have had some claim to be transgressive and brave, when they actually risked bottles and arrests. The vast majority of participants today would fold like cheap suits if threatened with physical danger or actual social disapprobation.
@TheDag's point (which I largely agree with) is that Trump appeals to the voter who wishes he could say "Fuck you" to his HR department and to DEI hires. Here's a guy who is constantly being called Literally Hitler and he doesn't care! Politicians don't do that anymore! The average Republican, even really conservative Republicans, will fold if accused of sexism or racism and mumble something about how unfair such accusations are. Trump doesn't care! He'll laugh and say "I love women! I love black people!" And then keep doing what he's doing.
I have literally made this exact same point before! (I’m not going to try and sift through this site’s awful search function to try and track down the comment, but I know it made the AAQC list.) The reality is that it’s both! They are terrified when black women’s “righteous anger” is turned on them, absolutely. However, I believe that white women see black women as their avatar - their “anger translator” - who can say to the powerful white men in their lives the things that the white women themselves are too acculturated, too bourgeois, too timid to say themselves.
I work in a pink-collar setting (I’m literally the only man on my team) and I can tell you that the number of “sassy black woman” GIFs shared by the white women on my team daily is staggering. Each of them seems to want to believe she has a little “black woman” inside of her - the unrestrained, unabashedly emotional part of her personality - and that only black (and to a somewhat lesser extent Latina) women are able to reliably access. Note that white women almost never want to actually be black women themselves; they just want to have one (1) black woman around for when some white man is being unpleasant or unreasonable, so that somebody can say to his face what all the white and Asian women have been saying behind his back.
I’m not fond of it, because I don’t think that the “brave iconoclast” is an unambiguously admirable figure. I think that being a contrarian is very often overrated (I say this from experience, because being a contrarian has largely wrecked my life in many ways) and that actually our society would be far better off if we stopped valorizing the archetype of the “individual genius standing alone against the close-minded majority”. Our culture has a dearth of social harmony. Even if the progressives of today were still the real transgressive nonconformists, I’m not sure that would speak positively of them!
This absolutely still does shock the normies! The whole “groomer” discourse on the right demonstrates conclusively that the queer left is still successfully scandalizing normal people. Yes, obviously the ratchet has turned significantly since the 70s in terms of how vulgar something has to be in order to shock people. Maybe in fifteen years we’ll be saying, “Man, I wish gays could just go back to the time when all they did was expose their gaping anuses to people.” Maybe we haven’t seen the true depths of depravity people are willing to stoop to in order to maintain shock value. Will every pride parade in 2040 be indistinguishable from a GG Allin concert? Perhaps!
Yes, but note that the normies pretty conclusively don't give a damn outside of that temporary shock. You can get them to give a damn once the left starts explicitly defending rapists, but they don't press the issue. It's the "well, why aren't Republicans bombing abortion clinics any more?" argument all over again.
The "groomer" discourse is a failure for the same reasons the longhouse is inevitable: simply put, Western society is unwilling and unable to control female bad actors. The LGBTQuestion is just the latest instantiation of "man bad woman good", after all, and the HR and education departments responsible for pushing it are majority female.
European society (that does this) is significantly less wealthy and its individual citizens less powerful than in American society. And that didn't save them from progressivism; in fact, it made them more vulnerable to it due to lacking the inoculation that American society has against that very thing.
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