Honestly its good there are still people struggling against the culture turn, still trying to insist harder on the 2010s, they’re gonna be a source of cheap wins to elevate the next wave

For Decades, Southern States Considered Thanksgiving an Act of Northern Aggression

Although meant to unify people, the 19th-century campaign to make Thanksgiving a permanent holiday was seen by prominent Southerners as a culture war. They considered it a Northern holiday intended to force New England values on the rest of the country. To them, pumpkin pie, a Yankee food, was a deviously sweet symbol of anti-slavery sentiment.

So from the fall of the Soviet Union (and in retrospective memory but not at-the-time reality from Reagan’s first election) to a few years after the 2007 crash, we were basically in a stable politicocultural era. I was lucky and historically informed enough to to realize it was an era before it ended, but it was still all I ever knew plus the promise of all I wanted. But while its passing might be tragic, the fact that the transition to its degenerated “sick man” state failed and now no one expects stable continuity to tangent off from here means people can stop investing any energy in keeping up with shifts and reorient towards crafting a successor to their taste

Ah, I pick up a certain self-recognizing fondness about the “general intellectuals”, “secondhand dealers of ideas” whose adoption and promotion of ideas to the broad symbolic-manipulation class is planting 20-year seeds. That’s okay, me too.

Not to be too Marxian base-determines-superstructure but this cohort replacement model doesn’t seem to have a place for material forces at all.

It also doesn’t account for failed succession and counterrevolution. You want to talk American culture war? “The Sixties”, significantly in the 1970s really, was acknowledged as a case of cohort succession at the time. “Generation gap”, remember?

And okay maybe that could explain the shift from flag-waving pro-military patriotism to wariness, John Wayne macho to Alan Alda sensitivity, happy housewifery to strident feminism, Rotary small business to Great Society civil servants as the overseers of society.

Okay. But then the ‘80s happened. America-Fuck-Yeah, Bruce Willis, Andrew Dice Clay misogyny. WWF and porn stars (AND the Moral Majority), Wall Street takeovers the new hot scene. And it was not powered by a new generation of Alex P. Keaton teenagers. (Really, he was a viewpoint character for Boomers who parsed cultural change through youth culture.)

“America’s most popular party will be openly run by socialists” was a real belief in the Ford-Carter era and since then has been laughable. How’d that happen? It wasn’t because conservatives started pushing back on the 70s in the 40s!

My take on the American culture war as it stands

Over the 2010s the left side of that stuff expanded their base to the maximum size achievable (and then started to reverse and fracture a little)

And using that they might have set trends but didn’t really plant their flag in and institutionally solidify any gains past Obergefell v. Hodges, which it should go without saying is entirely compatible with Andrew Sullivan 90s Thought

Meanwhile they have been a sufficient known annoyance for long enough that institutional antibodies and society-wide reactive-repressive forces have developed in response

With the liberals peeling away from the left in the Biden era any further escalation of the intensity of the conflict likely constricts their coalition further and unlocks far more in the way of (repressive) options for the counter-coalition

The subjection of the cultural left could productively traded in exchange for other adjustments in the construction and legitimizing of a new order; the subjection of the cultural right would only be a stabilizing force on the far side of a great deal of radical restructuring

There are bad things out there but the worst now have no viable path to hegemony and the bad stuff has a narrowing path and you’ll find that a lot of dynamics were based on people thinking they might (or bluffed into certainty they would) have to accommodate them

As dumb as all the anti-“CRT” stuff must be, it is satisfying seeing the people whose output used to be “Here Is A New Demand We Will Make And Enforce” switch over to “Here’s Why It’s Totally Not Fair We’re Getting Our Asses Kicked”

The Dream of the 90s was a vision of The 60s Fulfilled where I guess the draft was over but mostly in retrospect it had been about Weed, Women, and Woodstock; where ghetto life unsurprisingly sucked but there was no reason people with dark skin couldn’t turn out as White as anyone once they went to college, that’s obviously the second

Like, I was just on the 2nd floor of the Fred Meyers at 39th and Hawthorne just looking down at the traffic and happy crying while Coldplay’s “Clocks” played in an appropriately normie-deep touch, because it’s really hitting me this week, it’s over

Like, the entire trend I noticed starting with “feminist blogging” in the mid-2000s, up through all whatever SJW, crybully, woke stuff last decade that’s over now. Maybe not surrendered and off the field yet, but they’ll never take any more ground, they don’t even have a path to stalemate, they’re in zugwang.

I don’t even know they could theoretically pull it together for a counteroffensive, all the intersectional all-for-one, always advance thing was great at channeling different energies together but there’s no hierarchy to coordinate a retreat and no expectation such diversity would have the same sense of where to fall back to and regroup, they’ll be routed

I trust some of you will be wary, I couldn’t convince you anyway, at best point you to things to help you convince yourself. (Does anyone have an unpaywalled version of that interview at the Silicon Valley substack last week where founders try to show off how best their practices are and they’re talking about actively cultivating a culture to weed out goodnice crusaders? It’s different from that one where guys said they don’t actually care about recruiting a diverse workforce.)

But to the extent my sensibility counts for something – I’m kontextmaschine, I have to assume some of you are here to watch me see things a few years ahead – and my confidence here reminds me of a handful of times before. Once in the mid-2000s when I started thinking the next step was a Republican pivot to white racial identity (by 2014 it was even clear how you’d do it, but on the brink of the Dems fully securing a corporatist-identitarian regime who could?); when at the turn of the 2010s I suddenly latched on to accounts of second-wave radical feminism and struggles over gender definition within fully post-Sixties culture; and back in the late ‘90s when I got fixated on the idea the next American war would rely on mercenaries. So.

Yeah, it looked real bad for like a decade, but that’s the thing, they’re gonna be paying for that until we’re old now

Like, I have not been kidding about how big this backlash is gonna be, we’re going to have to wrap our minds around the fact that as ::gestures:: as he was, “elect Donald Trump to fight back and win the culture war” was a critical success

Like, I continue to be startled by the ferocity of “kink at pride” 2021 discourse, all the people I’ve come to think of on the 2010s “SJW” side all “Oh, shut up, kids are fine with sexuality if not actively thrilled, and you’re just using 'consent’ ideology to get in the way of a sexy fun time for everyone, worthless loser!”

I don’t think they even realize they’re buying absolution by pivoting back to Something for Everyone-ism, but the more they go in on that, the more they orient their public position around it, the more they pick allies off of it (and that includes just “oh, this person reblogged my tweets! they’re my friend, on my side”) the deeper they’re embedded

Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law

I was wondering when this shoe would drop. With the new Supremes, a realigned GOP and more wealth held and applied through “closely held” corporations where the boss is the actual princely power and not a disposable, replaceable mercenary, expect a legal assault on “hostile environment” and other liberalgenic employment regulation.

As a bonus, it’ll position the GOP as the ones defending workers from employers trying to control their lives even as they move to weaken union and laborite power.

Oh yeah. It’s thrilling to watch right now because it turns even the worst fucks sniffily disdaining it as beneath their attention when all that is right and proper is desecrated into petulant fools stomping around the tracks while a freight train bears down, but keep in mind that now that’s resolved the issue is gonna be overshooting the other way and fouling what was actually valuable in that last swing.

When the thing driving you to this is realizing that it doesn’t work anymore…

If you’d told me the whole wave since 2010 was going to finally break around now that would’ve seemed right and “the issue in question will be youth transition” is believable

argumate:

Sady Doyle is well and truly nonguynary now

I mean, I can’t imagine a more on-the-nose sign that the leading edge of the culture war dialectic is emerging from thesis and antithesis to new synthesis than Sady Doyle writing an essay about how Dudes Rock

If we’re super-lucky the combination of the plague and every social institution’s sharklike need to keep operating to hold its position in the firmament will conspire to resolve the culture wars by implacably shaving off the most conscientious, high-scrupulously elements (not to mention the legacy oldest and least resourced)

and then some element of them will launch some last grasp on control that’ll be fatally undermined by the fact they have *other* factions against their victory but ultimately swamped by the fact everyone else just wants to grill (at a rager with hot chicks) and they just become irrelevant

and posterity will remember the 2010s as we once remembered the 1950s, as an undifferentiated mass of grumps American culture had to fight! for the right! to paaaaaaarrrty!

Who even remembers Polio?

kontextmaschine:

…huh

On the one hand I’m ticked we might not get a 2-year Lover era, I liked it even better than Red

On the other she is VERY aware of the cultural context she works in, and after Reputation as the failed flirtation with 2010s minority-led pop culture and Lover as the summing-up of her entire body of work offering the way she resolved her personal struggles as a model for resolving our cultural struggles…

Cutting that era short to release an album called “folklore” with a Kinfolk magazine cottagecore aesthetic, kind of a maturing of the mason-jar-wedding-reception Americana aesthetic she dropped after Red, in July 2020 is FASCINATING

Like, ok, it’s black and white and it’s not wheat but this

is absolutely a white girl with braided hair and a folk dress in a field

Authors quit JK Rowling agency over transgender rights | JK Rowling | The Guardian

Well, it’s nice to remember that if American cultural intermediaries go wokemad and try to bottleneck control culture by boycotting anyone outside their cult there’ll be British outfits purged and toughened in the TERF wars waiting to grab that bag

Oh shit, I see, you don’t get the fundamental issue!

I didn’t see the rewards I hoped for for my rebel-but-within-a-comfortable-elite-idiom pose, but they didn’t even get the rewards – reliable, respectable career; comfortable workaday life as a backdrop for their private interests – they expected by selling out!

Our expectations were last reset in the 90s Silver Age when we had a won-the-Cold-War-also-the-Internet-and-cannibalizing-pre-Reagan-society economic boom (and that’s significant because everything that relies on having noun-objects or people performing verb-actions is fungible with money) and things were lined up in a mutually reinforcing way to limit the expectation of their fulfillment to a pacified, massified, white suburban “polity that matters”, economically, culturally, and politically

And the culture war, the ::gestures around:: all this, it’s because it’s finally sunk in that there’s not gonna be enough mojo to satisfy everybody, and someone is gonna have to win at the expense of someone else being disappointed and made to accept it.

And by at least realizing that I’m miles ahead

Watching all the purged Deadspin-as-voice-of-a-downwardly-mobile-woke-professional-generation types as they notice their attempt to solidarity-boycott the new regime means that the new writers aren’t tied to that identity and the vibe’s drifting towards Barstool’s “Sports Radio Call-In Guys: The Next Generation” model

And as much as they screenshot and scorn, and commiserate, those guys are getting paid to write their thoughts into Kinja posts, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

To return to my recurring comparison of the timelines of GamerGate and the Dreyfus Affair, at this point Dreyfus is officially guilty but free after a second trial, still 6 years before he is officially exonerated and 8 before Zola is interred in the Panthéon