Unfortunately, IME what the early 2020s showed us was that for some small core of people, the 2010s *sensibility*, whether you loved it or hated it, was meant to provide cover for real, meaningful policy differences, which turned out to be utterly horrible ("fiery but mostly peaceful protests" or "what did y'all think decolonization meant?") both in their effects on ordinary people in the moment and as long-run policy.
This comment makes me think that the real problem was that the white mainstream found out that this tendentious and far left tiny fragment of a polity, which has always existed and lived and died on college campuses, actually existed, and mistook its existence for an uprising. So much hysteria. So much abject cowardice. So much retrospective attempts at rationalizing.
I don't think the issue is that this fragment actually exist, so much as how much of institutional life they actually staff-up. It turned out that you could treat college campuses as a quarantine zone for ideological weirdos *or* you could make every important job or position of authority dependent upon having attended a prestigious, pedigreed college -- but not both.
(Now I think of it, Phoebe, is this less of a problem in Canada where the university system has less of an overt prestige hierarchy outside individual fields where, for instance, Waterloo or Toronto might have the leading department while Concordia doesn't?)
I think the main trick to staying sane in your politics is to limit exposure to sanctimonious woke types. I have voted down the middle democrat in elections since I was of voting age (the only exception I can think of is a Republican state treasurer position because the democrat candidate promised to subject all spending to an “equity” test) but the only way to maintain sanity is to mute the Facebook friends who post every day about systemic racism because they make me want to vote for Republicans.
It's funny how it's always the "woke" that's a problem for people like you, and never the Christopher Rufos being given the buzzsaw to set to higher education, or the tenure dissolution and state-mandated content and on and on. Seriously, do you think a bunch of whiners on Twitter were the most serious threat to democracy over Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott? If hearing people be "sanctimonious" "makes you want to vote for Republicans" than it sounds like you just want an excuse to vote for Republicans.
This is a strange reply to someone who said he votes Democrat! But it is telling that "make me want to vote for Republicans" is such a familiar phrase, and one I myself have said, not because I then go and do that thing but because it articulates the way progressive sensibilities of recent years can repel.
If your response to those sensibilities is to stomp your feet and say you're going to vote for the other side now, you are being childish or unprincipled or both.
Similarly, while I take at face value the claim that his (?sorry, don't want to assume, or is that too "woke"?) actual voting is for "down the middle democrat" but at the same time, those phrases, both the "down the middle" and the "makes me want to vote for Republicans," are also a shorthand for soi-disant "heterodox" thinkers who actually just think Bari Weiss is great and read the Free Press and FIRE press releases and stop there. I don't, broadly, accept that those are good faith positions anymore because of that. So maybe it's a little harsh towards Chris, but I am so. VERY. FUCKING.TIRED. of whining about "wokeness" and dislike for "equity" being seen as sufficient reason to vote for literal evil and the destruction of every national institution we have. If you have such a problem with other people's speech and nothing else enters into consideration then you don't actually have any respect for the principle of freedom of speech, hard stop.
That's a lifelong straight-ticket Democratic voter (with one exception). If you really do believe that voting matters, they're stopping evil... the problem is that nobody likes or really believes in voting and everybody likes and truly believes in online vibes
This is very true, and I feel like the specific mechanism of action of that sensibility, the actual thing it does, is not so much cause people to disagree or take moral umbrage, it's that it causes people to feel UNWELCOME in liberalism/the left/the Democratic Party in a way that doesn't really have an analog on the right.
People just feel in their bones a certain "you don't get to be here, you don't get to count among our ranks, we exclude your viewpoint" from 2010's flavored lefty discourse. The "cry much snowflakes? Fuck you" posing of the right wing is far from attractive, but it doesn't repel in the same way. I wish it did, it should, but it just doesn't and a political party is condemned to take the public as they come.
I like this as an explanation for why some “heterodox” and “politically homeless” types followed the post left into full on right-wing reaction and others didn’t, but I also wonder if sensibility and ideology are really that easily separable. Part of the 2010s ethos was to embed sentiment and sensibility tests into everything. To open all aspects of the self to question and surveillance (for the sake of kindness and inclusivity, of course). It was (and is) an ideology of sensibility, and that’s what made it so off-putting. No walls and doors allowed (they’re exclusionary!), which means everything is radically open to view and continual intervention.
This is very interesting! I had always assumed (on no real evidence) that the distinguishing factor was something to do with the health of each person’s social hinterland, ie., whether separating from your political friends really meant you weren’t left with many friends of any kind at all, or not. Where it really did mean that, I feel like I can pretty easily imagine wanting to plunge fully into a new and different circle of welcoming political friends, and overlooking gradually more and more of their views.
Speaking as a fellow sensibility uh, person who, as it now appears in retrospect, reached maturity when the “sensibility” sensibility was taken for granted and not just among the sophisticated but more generally, I was NOT prepared for what was a lighting culture-wide shift away from the “sensibility” sensibility. Who could have seen it coming? All of a sudden—“in the twinkling of an eye” in fact (ahem, Luke 4:5)—otherwise sensible educated folk turned themselves into a mad tribe of backwoods low Protestants, babbling, shrieking, speaking in tongues, summoning God’s Wrath with which to smite their enemies. The fact that they were able to carry the day and put themselves in charge for a good long while is a fact worth puzzling over …
The sensibility aspect may be a hook, but it seems insufficient to account for the intensity of our problems. My guess is that the sensibility nudged some people to consume media from the right wing media industrial complex and they just got sucked in. So the YouTube or TikTok algorithms just kept feeding them more and more and they got deeper and deeper. We've never had algorithms that could respond in near real-time to consumer demands by serving up Rogan or Fuentes and everything in between, so we've never really had to reckon with the strength and plasticity of those consumer demands.
There's this Walter Benjamin quote that's relevant
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
Because what you're talking about was an anti aesthetic, an attack on personal aesthetics because "the personal is political", and humor was just one of the victims. Turned out the other side wasn't all that either of course.
Unfortunately, IME what the early 2020s showed us was that for some small core of people, the 2010s *sensibility*, whether you loved it or hated it, was meant to provide cover for real, meaningful policy differences, which turned out to be utterly horrible ("fiery but mostly peaceful protests" or "what did y'all think decolonization meant?") both in their effects on ordinary people in the moment and as long-run policy.
This comment makes me think that the real problem was that the white mainstream found out that this tendentious and far left tiny fragment of a polity, which has always existed and lived and died on college campuses, actually existed, and mistook its existence for an uprising. So much hysteria. So much abject cowardice. So much retrospective attempts at rationalizing.
I don't think the issue is that this fragment actually exist, so much as how much of institutional life they actually staff-up. It turned out that you could treat college campuses as a quarantine zone for ideological weirdos *or* you could make every important job or position of authority dependent upon having attended a prestigious, pedigreed college -- but not both.
(Now I think of it, Phoebe, is this less of a problem in Canada where the university system has less of an overt prestige hierarchy outside individual fields where, for instance, Waterloo or Toronto might have the leading department while Concordia doesn't?)
I think the main trick to staying sane in your politics is to limit exposure to sanctimonious woke types. I have voted down the middle democrat in elections since I was of voting age (the only exception I can think of is a Republican state treasurer position because the democrat candidate promised to subject all spending to an “equity” test) but the only way to maintain sanity is to mute the Facebook friends who post every day about systemic racism because they make me want to vote for Republicans.
It's funny how it's always the "woke" that's a problem for people like you, and never the Christopher Rufos being given the buzzsaw to set to higher education, or the tenure dissolution and state-mandated content and on and on. Seriously, do you think a bunch of whiners on Twitter were the most serious threat to democracy over Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott? If hearing people be "sanctimonious" "makes you want to vote for Republicans" than it sounds like you just want an excuse to vote for Republicans.
This is a strange reply to someone who said he votes Democrat! But it is telling that "make me want to vote for Republicans" is such a familiar phrase, and one I myself have said, not because I then go and do that thing but because it articulates the way progressive sensibilities of recent years can repel.
If your response to those sensibilities is to stomp your feet and say you're going to vote for the other side now, you are being childish or unprincipled or both.
Similarly, while I take at face value the claim that his (?sorry, don't want to assume, or is that too "woke"?) actual voting is for "down the middle democrat" but at the same time, those phrases, both the "down the middle" and the "makes me want to vote for Republicans," are also a shorthand for soi-disant "heterodox" thinkers who actually just think Bari Weiss is great and read the Free Press and FIRE press releases and stop there. I don't, broadly, accept that those are good faith positions anymore because of that. So maybe it's a little harsh towards Chris, but I am so. VERY. FUCKING.TIRED. of whining about "wokeness" and dislike for "equity" being seen as sufficient reason to vote for literal evil and the destruction of every national institution we have. If you have such a problem with other people's speech and nothing else enters into consideration then you don't actually have any respect for the principle of freedom of speech, hard stop.
That's a lifelong straight-ticket Democratic voter (with one exception). If you really do believe that voting matters, they're stopping evil... the problem is that nobody likes or really believes in voting and everybody likes and truly believes in online vibes
This is very true, and I feel like the specific mechanism of action of that sensibility, the actual thing it does, is not so much cause people to disagree or take moral umbrage, it's that it causes people to feel UNWELCOME in liberalism/the left/the Democratic Party in a way that doesn't really have an analog on the right.
People just feel in their bones a certain "you don't get to be here, you don't get to count among our ranks, we exclude your viewpoint" from 2010's flavored lefty discourse. The "cry much snowflakes? Fuck you" posing of the right wing is far from attractive, but it doesn't repel in the same way. I wish it did, it should, but it just doesn't and a political party is condemned to take the public as they come.
I like this as an explanation for why some “heterodox” and “politically homeless” types followed the post left into full on right-wing reaction and others didn’t, but I also wonder if sensibility and ideology are really that easily separable. Part of the 2010s ethos was to embed sentiment and sensibility tests into everything. To open all aspects of the self to question and surveillance (for the sake of kindness and inclusivity, of course). It was (and is) an ideology of sensibility, and that’s what made it so off-putting. No walls and doors allowed (they’re exclusionary!), which means everything is radically open to view and continual intervention.
And just remember Phoebe, *if you’re not posting, you are complicit*
This is very interesting! I had always assumed (on no real evidence) that the distinguishing factor was something to do with the health of each person’s social hinterland, ie., whether separating from your political friends really meant you weren’t left with many friends of any kind at all, or not. Where it really did mean that, I feel like I can pretty easily imagine wanting to plunge fully into a new and different circle of welcoming political friends, and overlooking gradually more and more of their views.
Speaking as a fellow sensibility uh, person who, as it now appears in retrospect, reached maturity when the “sensibility” sensibility was taken for granted and not just among the sophisticated but more generally, I was NOT prepared for what was a lighting culture-wide shift away from the “sensibility” sensibility. Who could have seen it coming? All of a sudden—“in the twinkling of an eye” in fact (ahem, Luke 4:5)—otherwise sensible educated folk turned themselves into a mad tribe of backwoods low Protestants, babbling, shrieking, speaking in tongues, summoning God’s Wrath with which to smite their enemies. The fact that they were able to carry the day and put themselves in charge for a good long while is a fact worth puzzling over …
The sensibility aspect may be a hook, but it seems insufficient to account for the intensity of our problems. My guess is that the sensibility nudged some people to consume media from the right wing media industrial complex and they just got sucked in. So the YouTube or TikTok algorithms just kept feeding them more and more and they got deeper and deeper. We've never had algorithms that could respond in near real-time to consumer demands by serving up Rogan or Fuentes and everything in between, so we've never really had to reckon with the strength and plasticity of those consumer demands.
There's this Walter Benjamin quote that's relevant
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
Because what you're talking about was an anti aesthetic, an attack on personal aesthetics because "the personal is political", and humor was just one of the victims. Turned out the other side wasn't all that either of course.
I think the simplest metric would be whether an individual got two or more Covid shots.
Metric of what? I’m half Covid shot at this point but too problematic for Bluesky.