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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   33821 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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However what's driving me insane about the deployment of the label is either it's laziness, or if you want to be more cynical, it's deliberate use to obscure the nature of the conflict. "Woke Right" implies something like "these right-wingers are substantially the same as the left-wingers we've just finished fighting", and so there's no need to investigate what they want and where are they coming from.

Per Josh Neal, this is an old tactic going back at least to Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics:

Lindsay’s ‘Woke Right’ polemic is a high-stakes confidence game, premised on the style of regime polemic authored over sixty years ago by arch-architect of the consensus view of history, Richard Hofstadter. Allow me to expand on this.

…

Published in 1964, Hofstadter’s essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ detailed the problems posed by the John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, McCarthyism and the various Red Scares, as well as the broader development of populistic ‘pseudo-conservatism’. Deliberately employing psychoanalytic language in a pejorative manner, Hofstadter reduced the legitimate political and existential concerns held by large swaths of the American electorate (a demographic Sam Francis would later term ‘Middle American radicals’) as nothing more than neurotic and provincial irrationality. By accomplishing this, Hofstadter provided hegemonic progressive liberalism with the rationale it needed to guiltlessly dispossess White America.

Just as Lindsay would later do, Hofstadter rooted his theory of the paranoid style in Janus-faced descriptive analyses, superficial comparisons and false equivocations, technical inaccuracies, pejorative language, and outright mockery. I shall begin with the first charge before moving swiftly into each subsequent one – demonstrating along the way precisely how James Lindsay fits into this intellectual tradition of ‘regime polemics’.

…

The very real clash of civilizations between Protestantism and Catholicism, for instance, is treated as a tit-for-tat exchange of paranoid delusions. McCarthyite anti-communism is similarly held up as a fiction of the mind despite the well documented history of socialist and communist maneuverings inside the American government. Hofstadter’s passing reference to the biopolitical use of fluoride is pathologized as well; he argued that even if fluoridization of the water supply was performed to achieve certain political aims, that middle Americans ought still to be considered paranoid and delusional for conceiving of such a thing before evidence came to pass. Hofstadter cited the People’s Party’s belief that bankers used bribes to influence 19th-century monetary policy as proof of a long-running paranoid style in American politics. Unfortunately for Richard Hofstadter, this paranoid delusion was proven to be a matter of factual occurrence (we may credit the 2011 article entitled ‘Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver’ written by Samuel DeCanio for providing the receipts necessary to disprove Hofstadter’s fallacious argument). Throughout the essay, Hofstadter detailed the nature of competition between groups, sometimes getting deep into the details of a given rivalry, before declaring the entire debacle to be a fanciful and irrational artifact of the mind. His ‘artful appropriation’ of psychiatric language, which is – inexplicably – not intended to be understood in conventional terms, allows him to psychologize away the legitimate political concerns of the American population, effectively reducing such insights to mere spooks in the mind of an unsophisticated rabble.

When Lindsay describes the cultivation of a postwar liberal consensus, or how Buckley’s National Review overtook the conservative movement, and so on, he similarly puts together a factual narrative of history only to declare the facts invalid by labeling such an intellectual exercise as ‘woke’ (and therefore illegitimate). A coherent (and accurate) narrative is laid out only to be discredited using appropriated, pejorative language (for Hofstadter, ‘paranoia’ and ‘anxiety’ being appropriated from psychiatry and psychoanalysis; for Lindsay, ‘woke’ being appropriated from popular culture).

Hofstadter attempted as well to delegitimize the inductive conclusions of folk Americans (to be understood synonymously with White America and middle America) by superficially comparing their cognitive and behavioral habits to those of their rivals, thereby ‘eliminating’ any difference between the two, thus reducing a very real political conflict to the level of petty envy and feelings of inferiority (or insufficiency). The Ku Klux Klan donned ornate uniforms and organized hierarchically just like the Catholics. Members of the John Birch Society operated clandestinely and fought a zero-sum ideological war just like the communists. Christian anti-communists were as psychically and intellectually vigorous as their communist foes – wow, what profound insight! Such trifling arguments are only given weight and credibility by the fact that they are supported by a dominant regime.

There's more from Neal on this in his appearance on the J. Burden show. And I'm also reminded of a bit from this decades-old blog post about Gandhi:

World War Two exposed one major flaw in Gandhi's strategy: Gandhi never opposed Britain's defense of India during the war, but he never really supported it either. He seemed to think that because Nazis and Brits both had guns and fought wars, they were pretty much the same.

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