"Turn! Turn! Turn!"
To everything there is a season*
Happy New Year, rarely certain people ...
When you get political/cultural shifts like the one we're undergoing now, it begs the question of who are the 'reactionaries'.
And what 'reactionary' really means.
This sets up an interesting question for the present period.
Usually 'reactionary' is interchangeable with 'conservative'. Someone who pushes back on change and wishes to preserve what has been, rather than embrace 'progress'.
For a long time now I've thought that the current conservatives and reactionaries are the liberal leftish of my generation and older millennials. Those of us who have known nothing but movement in one particular direction.
Back during my Twitter attention and chatter addiction I remember a typical member of the liberal leftish professional-managerial-knowledge-class-mum-and-dad brigade reacting badly to a tweet I'd sent out to annoy everyone.
I'd observed that being determined to stop Brexit was emblematic of 'centrist authoritarianism' and he had smugly responded that this proved my ignorance because by definition 'centrist' could not mean 'authoritarian'.
Lol.
How times have changed. I don't think there are many serious people (without a class membership identity to protect) who don't recognise the authoritarianism running through our educated, technocratic elders and betters.
But what's more interesting to me is how old fashioned they suddenly seem.
How conservative and reactionary, if you will.
They seem just like the parents and grandparents of my youth who railed against the lax morals of the 'permissive society' and how the fashion for long male hair and impossibly wide trousers meant nobody could tell who was a bloke any more.
For today's 'fuddy duddys' the complaint is that lots of people aren't listening to them any longer, but thinking and doing Bad Things instead, like believing that reproductive sexual class is binary and voting for anti-immigration parties.
I never thought I'd see the Right looking cooler and more current than the Left, but we are where we are and it does.
There is a season to everything and it looks like the autumn of overbearingly enlightened academic leftish liberalism and its stupid radical offshoot, Wokeism.
In the aftermath of Trump's comeback this was the meme that sealed it for me.
So many references, in less than a minute, that you had to get.
Or you were 2024's version of a 1970s grandparent. Missing the significance of the collage of references in that skit is like not understanding why Noise music is not just noise.
This won't stop dismayed midwit leftishists from opining in hoity toity fashion, though, because they're good at it; having superior verbal articulacy, strong convictions and unshakeable faith in their intellectual and moral superiority.
What's changed is that it looks like the Right doesn't care now. It has broken through the cloud base.
I’m admiring this version of the Right. The one with a bit of swagger and not much throat-clearing. The kind of swagger I once had, along with all the other leftishists who went to university and thought that we had ascended to a higher mode of cognitive plane enabling us moderns to look down on all the ... reactionaries.
There's still plenty of people still regurgitating the leftishist talking points of 2016-2020 but they seem so old when they do it at this point.
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I spent a slightly uneasy weekend with a friend recently. It seemed quaint to hear her spontaneously bringing up 'incels' (in the context of actual societal threats) twice over the course of 3 days, as if incels are a significant thing. And to hear incessant references to the 'patriarchy' and even 'toxic masculinity'. It was just like being in 2017.
She is an archetype. Successful, clever, in her early 60s, a senior knowledge worker role in (you guessed) the compliance field and carrying what seems to me a huge chip on her shoulder about men. Men in general, it seems. I spent much of the time mentally ticking the bingo card.
I silently called 'full house' when she announced her disappointment in local female hunters for betraying the sisterhood by shooting things to eat alongside people who have XY chromosomes.
That seemed like a lonely and dispirited place to be. But also a hopeless place, fighting non-battles that were never real battles in the first place. Just theory-led intuition-based positions on pervasive injustice in society (injustice which seems always to be most strongly perceived by those who have thrived in a society geared specifically toward elevating their particular set of traits and achievements).
She would probably be aghast to read this. And explaining what I'm getting at would be like trying to explain to my late father (despite his generally sophisticated appreciation of music) why the Sex Pistols were so necessary and invigorating.
I have the sense of many people being overtaken by events.
If you're in the middle of an ocean it's easy to believe that water is all there is (with apologies to the memory of David Foster Wallace) let alone notice discrete currents.
And when you have a determinedly fixed moral compass differing opinions and desires are typically seen simply as objectively faulty.
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Many of us were unawarely shaped by the postwar reaction to totalitarianism and its costs.
We were subliminally programmed to embrace the ideals of a brotherhood of mankind, redistributive material wealth and no disadvantages for anyone under any circumstance of birth; a kind and fair world where nothing bad ever happens. A world where all ills can be controlled away with the right principles, fantastic logistics, engineering and faith.
A world controlled by technocratic government and all of us grateful to be watched over by experts of loving grace.
We think we thought deeply about all the beliefs we hold and that they are justified by a combination of evidence and objective moral truths. A curious combination of university and church influence (albeit a Godless form of Christianity and a strangely gnostic strand of enlightenment thinking from people labelled as academics and scholars).
The notion that the rejuvenation of the Right is a departure from the arc of history is constantly reinforced at the moment, if you aren't paying close enough attention.
It's why you see news headlines all the time about 'new' shifts in public attitudes manifesting around Europe - and of course the US. It is always depicted as a 'lurch to the Right'. It is never depicted as one particular class losing some of its control and influence in shaping our culture because another class is finally paying attention to the results of that.
It is never reported as a growing scepticism among rational normaltons about utopian ideals.
I have never once seen a news headline reflecting the obvious fact that there are many people who simply prefer to feel anchored to something that doesn't keep dissolving under their feet, like the cultural characteristics of their country or the shared understanding of what men and women are.
It is not depicted as people who were once quiet and happy to go along with whatever people in the ivory towers and the 'technocratic elites' were working on, until they began to notice where it was leading and are beginning to speak up a bit.
The pushback we're seeing to the grandiose liberalising project is inevitably positioned as 'reactionary' and 'conservative' by people who are themselves reacting against changes demanded by normaltons.
That these people are so keen to conserve what they've known all their lives is never considered as a paradox in this moment.
It's a time for which the word 'liminal' works well. Liminal moments are always confusing like this. Like how it's harder to focus your eyes on things at dusk than when it's daylight or dark.
Not spotting what's going on has nothing to do with intelligence per se. You can be highly intelligent but not really get some things. And, of course, higher intelligence is often likely to mean more liberally leftish but also more cognitively rigid.
I've been there. There have been many things I didn't get until long after, when it finally dawned. Musical things, psychology things and things like people voting for Brexit and Trump.
You can see the confusion among an intelligentsia who grew up self-sorting into the highest-achieving groups, reinforcing each other's ideals and falling for powerful theoretical rhetoric turbocharged by high verbal articulacy (2nd and 3rd wave feminism, Marxian anti-Capitalist ideas, socially and biologically deconstructivist post-modernism) because they think that stupid insignificant things like incels matter in this world. Or - frankly, pathetically - that this kind of nonsense is actually news.
None of this is to say that what is happening is good or right as such. Just that it is simply happening and mostly not being reported for what it really is.
A lot of energy goes into depicting it as a departure from the norm. Never a 'correction' for some things that basically don't work and often annoy people who can see where - and who - they're coming from.
You might as well lament the falling of the leaves as a departure from the norm of longer, brighter days.
It's clear that the leftish is so out of juice at this point that without something to unite them like a deep hatred of Jews for not taking any more shit from barbarous enemies few of us would want to live among, it has nothing but retreads to sell. They want to go back to something that a lot of people have rejected.
People that they think are reactionary and conservative, rather than just ordinary rational people who didn't buy what they were selling.
See the proposition developed more fully here, in which
sees this time as an era decisively ending.
All that remains is coping.
Copes will come in familiar shapes.
I know them all, because I've coped this way, in the past, under the duress of a disappointing decision on Brexit, the shock of 2016 Trump and many British General Elections.
People are being manipulated into believing in Bad Ideas
People need better educating
People are voting against their own interests
People don't know what they're voting for
People don't know what's best for them
People are greedy
People are inherently mean, selfish and ignorant
People need taking in hand
People need forcing to understand their betters
People are resisting a Better World
People are ... reactionary and conservative
People are reactionary and conservative, of course.
It's just different people now.
*We have Pete Seeger to thank for adding six words to a rearranged passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes and The Byrds for recording the transcendent version of Turn! Turn! Turn!