Great piece, Joshua. My mind immediately went to One Battle After Another, where the question of “what time is it?” is the secret password asked by a current left-wing revolutionary to an ex-revolutionary (who doesn’t know the answer, of course). So much of that movie is about the absurd shibboleths/jargon/rituals of both the radical left and counter-revolutionary right, both of which are notably situated apart from “apolitical normies.” I’d love to hear your thoughts on that film if you’ve seen it.
One of the questions that I struggle with is how this world of online radicalism will translate into the real world. I don’t know the answer, but it seems like there needs to be a way to think about it that exists between “we should be terrified of this” on the one hand, and “the internet isn’t real life” on the other. I don’t know exactly.
Lastly, your point about forbearance also makes me think of the Palestine solidarity movement, and how a non-negligible portion of the US left has offered its uncritical support to a movement that is often deeply illiberal, rejects civility, and fantasizes about turning back the clocks to some imagined glorious national past, rather than confronting the inconvenient realities of the present. But that’s probably a discussion for another time!
I’ve definitely also gotten the sense that for a lot of people on the hard right Obergefell was the moment when they started thinking of liberalism as morally evil and culturally suicidal, “playing Russian roulette with a semi automatic” as Anton‘s famous phrase goes I think.
Remembering Andrew Sullivan's comment of 10 years ago that "For a Constitutional Republic like ours, a Trump Presidency would be an extinction-level event," and seeing, as it seems to me, the reality about to overtake us, I would argue that "Do you know what time it is" is appropriate as we watch a craven and somnolent Congress and an astonishingly perverse Supreme Court cede more and more power to Trump. If Trump were not so decrepit, I am convinced he would try to for another term in '28, and I'm not sure who would stop him, if anyone would.
Having said that, I would also be inclined to say, to my progressive friends, in a moment of candor that they might not welcome, "Sorry, folks--you kind of brought this on yourselves.
"You did it, first, by pro-choice rhetoric in the mouths of some speakers that treated abortion as of no more moral moment than getting a haircut. As John Leo once wrote in US News and World Report, 'If you want it, it's a baby--if you don't want it, it's a fetus.'
"You did it, second, by arguing that gay marriage would affect no one but gays and would be no hindrance to anyone else--and then turning around and suing florists, wedding photographers, and cake bakers who didn't want to participate. Finally, you perversely denied that this had amounted to a bait and switch.
"You did it, third, by the wave of notorious instances in which average joes lost their jobs by accidentally saying the wrong thing or making the wrong gesture, including the would-be school superintendent whose offer was withdrawn and whose contract canceled for the sin of addressing his future colleagues as 'ladies.'
"You did it, finally, by creating the impression in the minds of many, including me, that there might come a time when holding one's job depended on declaring one's pronouns in his or her email signature at work.
"You had some good ideas, but you went berserk with them and appeared ready to force them on everyone in the most impudent and intrusive ways."
I hate the dominance of MAGA and live for the day that Trump will be in an orange jump suit, though that may never happened, but I believe I understand some of the reasons that it came about.
It's a bit of the same energy as in Moore's From Hell: "Who will help the widow's son?" Except I think they're consciously trying to evoke that. As you say, their self-conception is strong and weak at the same time.
When 50 percent of us read below a sixth grade level and don't attend to politics, "the rhetoric of fear and grievance do mobilize a much larger and more diverse group of people." While it's nice to see approval polls shift now that folks have been reminded who Trump was and seen how badly he handles everything, much of this might be unique to Trump: is he a post-liberal or just a desperate, declining, deeply disturbed grifter? His apparatchiks seem comfortable justifying their policies in the shameless, abusive manner of the Reabois, drafting off Trump's core cultish appeal to push and normalize Schmittian themes. As for this: "Post-liberals will regularly point to the political order as the source of their fears. But this position is belied by the way Trump won two close elections, Republicans control Congress, and conservative justices dominate the Supreme Court," I think the Post-liberals would say that Trump's wins show the power of manipulating the low-info rubes who stew in and resonate to reactionary media, and that they do not need much in the way of democratic legitimacy beyond getting their foot in the door before proceeding to utterly reconstruct the house. They don't even claim to need more than a small vanguard of insiders, ultimately. I think the evidence of SCOTUS' conservatism feeds the Post-liberal narrative (Obergefell aside, though it also feeds parts of the reactionary rhetoric), as it shows how long infiltration of institutions positions them to enact much of what they desire now, or soon. Does it all run contra to "Americans’ culturally libertarian revealed preferences"? Yes, but whole swaths of government can be destroyed (as we've seen), and SCOTUS can overturn signature pillars of precedent and advance long-desired dreams of unitary executives on the one hand and major questions on the other. If there are shoals to wreck Post-liberal fantasies, I think they will be revealed by the ineptitude and graft of this administration pushing too far too stupidly, but they can still advance the Post-liberal causes a great deal despite that.
Did remind me of Hofstadter's "paranoid style" - it's kind of impressive and logical that these folks could be allowed to gestate within the Conservative movement for so long. All it took was a little persistence on their part to emerge triumphant 60 years later.
The "middle American radical" and "indigenous American berserk" appear to be permanent voting blocs in the American political order; a defect in the American character. We can expect after they get put back in their box - if that's even possible any longer - that it won't be the last we'll see of them.
> Both of these arguments – jeopardy and imminent-danger – are faulty. They overstate their cases (history is not nearly so linear) and are unfalsifiable (how can one argue against a prediction about the future?). The longer the time drags out without a progressive tyranny, the less convincing it becomes.
> And since the future is unfalsifiable, the demand we know what time it is must always be a claim about the present. It is the current, everyday cultural conditions that post-liberals deplore...
> ...Post-liberals will regularly point to the political order as the source of their fears. But this position is belied by the way Trump won two close elections, Republicans control Congress, and conservative justices dominate the Supreme Court. Instead, I think the real source of post-liberal fear – what has shifted the clocks, so to speak – is the totality of this cultural shift.
If I understand the post-liberal right correctly I don't think they would really dispute this: they feel the "tyranny" is already here, that the constitutional order has already been subverted, etc, and that cultural changes are inseparable from that development. For instance in the Reaboi piece you link his claim, insofar as he articulates one, is that
> Well, now the woke are in control of so much of our institutions—from government to business, to entertainment, to fill in the blank, to the show Jeopardy, for crying out loud. They're like, “okay, we're in charge now. We don't want free speech. We want to cancel you.” If you say anything that is against the whatever the Zeitgeist says this second—if you did not support required government funded trans surgery for three-year-olds one year ago, well, you should be canceled because that's obviously out of step with what the great almighty party thinks now.
i.e. that "the woke" are culturally hegemonic, here and now. Of course this isn't true of American society as a whole, but in some circles it feels truthy and if you think "politics is downstream from culture" then that means it feels like a threat. The postliberal right is "all culture all the time" on purpose - or rather, they consciously refuse the distinction.
Great piece, Joshua. My mind immediately went to One Battle After Another, where the question of “what time is it?” is the secret password asked by a current left-wing revolutionary to an ex-revolutionary (who doesn’t know the answer, of course). So much of that movie is about the absurd shibboleths/jargon/rituals of both the radical left and counter-revolutionary right, both of which are notably situated apart from “apolitical normies.” I’d love to hear your thoughts on that film if you’ve seen it.
One of the questions that I struggle with is how this world of online radicalism will translate into the real world. I don’t know the answer, but it seems like there needs to be a way to think about it that exists between “we should be terrified of this” on the one hand, and “the internet isn’t real life” on the other. I don’t know exactly.
Lastly, your point about forbearance also makes me think of the Palestine solidarity movement, and how a non-negligible portion of the US left has offered its uncritical support to a movement that is often deeply illiberal, rejects civility, and fantasizes about turning back the clocks to some imagined glorious national past, rather than confronting the inconvenient realities of the present. But that’s probably a discussion for another time!
I’ve definitely also gotten the sense that for a lot of people on the hard right Obergefell was the moment when they started thinking of liberalism as morally evil and culturally suicidal, “playing Russian roulette with a semi automatic” as Anton‘s famous phrase goes I think.
Remembering Andrew Sullivan's comment of 10 years ago that "For a Constitutional Republic like ours, a Trump Presidency would be an extinction-level event," and seeing, as it seems to me, the reality about to overtake us, I would argue that "Do you know what time it is" is appropriate as we watch a craven and somnolent Congress and an astonishingly perverse Supreme Court cede more and more power to Trump. If Trump were not so decrepit, I am convinced he would try to for another term in '28, and I'm not sure who would stop him, if anyone would.
Having said that, I would also be inclined to say, to my progressive friends, in a moment of candor that they might not welcome, "Sorry, folks--you kind of brought this on yourselves.
"You did it, first, by pro-choice rhetoric in the mouths of some speakers that treated abortion as of no more moral moment than getting a haircut. As John Leo once wrote in US News and World Report, 'If you want it, it's a baby--if you don't want it, it's a fetus.'
"You did it, second, by arguing that gay marriage would affect no one but gays and would be no hindrance to anyone else--and then turning around and suing florists, wedding photographers, and cake bakers who didn't want to participate. Finally, you perversely denied that this had amounted to a bait and switch.
"You did it, third, by the wave of notorious instances in which average joes lost their jobs by accidentally saying the wrong thing or making the wrong gesture, including the would-be school superintendent whose offer was withdrawn and whose contract canceled for the sin of addressing his future colleagues as 'ladies.'
"You did it, finally, by creating the impression in the minds of many, including me, that there might come a time when holding one's job depended on declaring one's pronouns in his or her email signature at work.
"You had some good ideas, but you went berserk with them and appeared ready to force them on everyone in the most impudent and intrusive ways."
I hate the dominance of MAGA and live for the day that Trump will be in an orange jump suit, though that may never happened, but I believe I understand some of the reasons that it came about.
It's a bit of the same energy as in Moore's From Hell: "Who will help the widow's son?" Except I think they're consciously trying to evoke that. As you say, their self-conception is strong and weak at the same time.
When 50 percent of us read below a sixth grade level and don't attend to politics, "the rhetoric of fear and grievance do mobilize a much larger and more diverse group of people." While it's nice to see approval polls shift now that folks have been reminded who Trump was and seen how badly he handles everything, much of this might be unique to Trump: is he a post-liberal or just a desperate, declining, deeply disturbed grifter? His apparatchiks seem comfortable justifying their policies in the shameless, abusive manner of the Reabois, drafting off Trump's core cultish appeal to push and normalize Schmittian themes. As for this: "Post-liberals will regularly point to the political order as the source of their fears. But this position is belied by the way Trump won two close elections, Republicans control Congress, and conservative justices dominate the Supreme Court," I think the Post-liberals would say that Trump's wins show the power of manipulating the low-info rubes who stew in and resonate to reactionary media, and that they do not need much in the way of democratic legitimacy beyond getting their foot in the door before proceeding to utterly reconstruct the house. They don't even claim to need more than a small vanguard of insiders, ultimately. I think the evidence of SCOTUS' conservatism feeds the Post-liberal narrative (Obergefell aside, though it also feeds parts of the reactionary rhetoric), as it shows how long infiltration of institutions positions them to enact much of what they desire now, or soon. Does it all run contra to "Americans’ culturally libertarian revealed preferences"? Yes, but whole swaths of government can be destroyed (as we've seen), and SCOTUS can overturn signature pillars of precedent and advance long-desired dreams of unitary executives on the one hand and major questions on the other. If there are shoals to wreck Post-liberal fantasies, I think they will be revealed by the ineptitude and graft of this administration pushing too far too stupidly, but they can still advance the Post-liberal causes a great deal despite that.
Excellent.
Did remind me of Hofstadter's "paranoid style" - it's kind of impressive and logical that these folks could be allowed to gestate within the Conservative movement for so long. All it took was a little persistence on their part to emerge triumphant 60 years later.
The "middle American radical" and "indigenous American berserk" appear to be permanent voting blocs in the American political order; a defect in the American character. We can expect after they get put back in their box - if that's even possible any longer - that it won't be the last we'll see of them.
> Both of these arguments – jeopardy and imminent-danger – are faulty. They overstate their cases (history is not nearly so linear) and are unfalsifiable (how can one argue against a prediction about the future?). The longer the time drags out without a progressive tyranny, the less convincing it becomes.
> And since the future is unfalsifiable, the demand we know what time it is must always be a claim about the present. It is the current, everyday cultural conditions that post-liberals deplore...
> ...Post-liberals will regularly point to the political order as the source of their fears. But this position is belied by the way Trump won two close elections, Republicans control Congress, and conservative justices dominate the Supreme Court. Instead, I think the real source of post-liberal fear – what has shifted the clocks, so to speak – is the totality of this cultural shift.
If I understand the post-liberal right correctly I don't think they would really dispute this: they feel the "tyranny" is already here, that the constitutional order has already been subverted, etc, and that cultural changes are inseparable from that development. For instance in the Reaboi piece you link his claim, insofar as he articulates one, is that
> Well, now the woke are in control of so much of our institutions—from government to business, to entertainment, to fill in the blank, to the show Jeopardy, for crying out loud. They're like, “okay, we're in charge now. We don't want free speech. We want to cancel you.” If you say anything that is against the whatever the Zeitgeist says this second—if you did not support required government funded trans surgery for three-year-olds one year ago, well, you should be canceled because that's obviously out of step with what the great almighty party thinks now.
i.e. that "the woke" are culturally hegemonic, here and now. Of course this isn't true of American society as a whole, but in some circles it feels truthy and if you think "politics is downstream from culture" then that means it feels like a threat. The postliberal right is "all culture all the time" on purpose - or rather, they consciously refuse the distinction.