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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30240 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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The debate over what terminology to call the woke right reminds me a lot of the controversy around what to call the woke left. This article, if you reverse all the partisan valences from left to right, would be highly pertinent.

But any stable term the woke right would accept would almost immediately become tainted with negative connotations, and would thereby become "uncool". Thus, members of the group have collectively decided that they'll allow no words at all to describe their movement, so you have tons of individual definitions like were used to describe the left (progressive, woke, wokist, SJW, social justice leftist, etc etc).

The debate over what terminology to call the woke right reminds me a lot of the controversy around what to call the woke left. This article, if you reverse all the partisan valences from left to right, would be highly pertinent.

I don't see how it would, and I'd like you to try and defend that position, because literally nothing fits here for me, and I don't see how you could possibly come this conclusion.

In the case of the "woke left" what happened was that people noticed the raise of a certain intellectual / political movement, wanted to criticize it, and in response said movement deployed a series of diversionary tactics in hopes of hiding it's own existence, and evaded all debates where they could clarify and defend their positions. This is why they were opposed to the term "woke", or there being any term at all - because if you can label something, you can confront it.

In the case of the "woke right" no one is hiding from a confrontation (well, except the critics themselves). Whether the term is meant for people like Nick Fuentes, Auron MacIntyre, or both, neither of them is trying to hide their political views, avoid being labelled, or pretend their movements don't exist, or aren't separate from the mainstream right. They might think the term is "cringe", but I doubt any of them would protest too much if you insisted it's useful for you, as long as you agreed to actually debate the substance of their argument (well, I guess that applies to MacIntyre more than to Fuentes, who seems to be little more than a scandalist).

If anything it's the centrists deploying leftist tactics here. Specifically, this looks like the exact same thing the far left used to do, back when they tried to make "neoliberalism" a boogeyman. They claimed it's a dominant ideology of the western economic elites that tries to push deregulation and free markets, and remained completely unfazed when people pointed out everything is only getting more regulated. They tried to claim the ideology was invented by a set of now-deceased intellectuals, but somehow it didn't matter that these intellectuals argued against the ideas and policy decisions critics of "neoliberalism" tried pinning on them. They avoided slapping the label on any living intellectual, because if you say "X is a neoliberal" then X can turn around and say "well, if I'm a neoliberal, than your portrayal of neoliberalism is completely false, because that's not what I believe".

The end result was a pretend-debate with some disembodied phantom, where we never got to hear the other side of the argument. It's people like Kisin and Lindsay who are playing games with labels here, and this is the specific game they tried playing.

Like Scott, he obfuscates a few specific descriptive beliefs about black people. Are you mad he doesn't provide a neat framed quote for the decentralized cancellation and lawfare apparatus to hone in on him?

The dissident right makes no bones about the fact it's distinct from the mainstream right and will list out the ways they differ. There is no "pay no attention to the party behind the curtain, I don't know what you're talking about, it's just called being a decent regular person" routine of the woke left. The fact they have a name for themselves should make the difference abundantly clear.

Uh, there’s definitely overlap between the dissident right and right wing republicans, even if IQ-maximalism and outright racism are more common among the DR.

I don't know what to tell you, MacIntyre and the entire Dissident Right sphere is quite explicitly branded as "too spicy for the mainstream right" (it's literally in the name). As for who someone hangs out with - couldn't care less. No one takes this argument seriously when it's applied to someone they like.

I mean, part of the problem if you want to make a big umbrella term is that there are extremely-clear fault lines among the online right - some of them big enough to make people sometimes "cross the floor" - which mean the people on opposite sides of those fault lines have no real interest in an umbrella term.

The two biggest ones are probably HBD - specifically whether one subscribes to it at all, and then whether one who subscribes to it is specifically a neo-Nazi. Lots of online rightists are still repulsed by HBD, and a lot of HBDers are repulsed by the particular package of Nazism (note how there are a ton of HBDers here who still yell at SS).

But on a broader level, there isn't exactly a unifying ideology to the online right; there's a unifying experience of "I got censured/punished for questioning SJ", but because SJ enforces orthodoxy on a wide variety of topics there's no requirement to have even one factual holding or policy preference in common between any two members of the online right, let alone all of them; they just wind up in the same haunts and often in coalition by default, because alt-tech mostly takes everyone and SJ's a bigger threat than each other.

And yet, there are still umbrella or umbrella-ish terms. "Based", "dissident right", "alt-right" (the racial meaning of the last has somewhat been worn away). There is a dizzying variety of more-specific terms because these people disagree with each other on a lot of things and it's useful to have words for the different subgroups.

Thus, members of the group have collectively decided that they'll allow no words at all to describe their movement, so you have tons of individual definitions like were used to describe the left (progressive, woke, wokist, SJW, social justice leftist, etc etc).

A major difference specifically with the phrase "woke right" that makes this new term extra confusing is that "woke" was never a term used by any rightists to describe their rightist ideological positions. This is in contrast to terms like "progressive," "woke," "social justice warrior," and even "identity politics," which were terms brought into the mainstream by their strongest proponents who were proudly labeling themselves and their ideology as such.

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