Empty Realm

This is an interesting article presenting the (rightist-marked) “NPC” meme as the natural heir to the Frankfurt School critical theory critique of mass culture as a dehumanizing force of control

One more point in favor of “current dynamics are not aberrant but rather return to the norm after the aberrant postwar Golden Age” – go back before WWII and America was ABSOLUTELY a country of overcrowded cities full of hobo jungles and pompous elites and henpecking scolds and hordes of ethnicized poor and nervous young college graduates scrambling to hold on and taking their nervous energy out on sex with a demimonde of lipstick and dresses and testicles and dicks, all surrounded by a sea of rural tedium and despair.

So maybe all that was just a Boomer bubble. One that started before The Sixties, though. The postwar right realized that kinda society was a breeding ground of communism though and the first step was throwing off the Popular Front culture.

“Stifling mass culture of the 50s” gets coded right these days, but remember that Ayn Rand (who’d lived through a national culture going commie and stifling before) had big counterculture (yes!) hits in the 40s and 50s with books where a pompous, clucking clique of “progressive” mediocrities dripping syrupy moralism dominated popular media and used it to suppress the liberatory potential of superior individuals and their ideas.

The scene in Atlas Shrugged where the protagonists blow up a bridge and send a trainful of them plunging to their firey comeuppance was the Day of the Rope of its day; in reality the payoff was the McCarthyite Second Red Scare cleansing them from positions of cultural influence, clearing the way for the Counterculture

Which rose, struggled, got overconfident, got knocked back, but returned in the 90s to devour Square Culture for once and all, and dissipated as people no longer realized it needed investment in maintaining

Or were devoured by, “selling out” was really a much higher-profile concept before say 2005. Why’s Gavin McInnes scrambling to build an apparatus of cultural influence? He already built one, with VICE! And sold it out. (For like a billion dollars split a few ways, and it’s not like “magazine from 2008 with a website and publishing arm and events w/ party photographers” is a powerful form rn)

Also, recent revelations are implying that many major figures stopped pushing boundaries in public too hard in return for a lifetime supply of 19±5 year olds soooo

But ANYWAY, does show that the theoretical energy is more on the upstart right these days. Maybe that’s ‘cause theory is what you do out of power – at the same time last decade’s efflorescence of left theory, Jacobin to n+1 to Rhizzome, is being increasingly discarded by a renascent left infatuated with its own dynamic action.