10/17/2021
Once upon a time, the establishment was culturally conservative. The establishment man was expected to marry the establishment woman, have 3 establishment kids, act in a muted, non-garish manner, and it was all normal. The corporations would mostly take the conservative side of any cultural issue, if they took a side at all. If Chrysler, for whatever reason, openly supported gay marriage during the launch of the all-new downsized 1962 Plymouth Belvedere & Dodge Polara, it would be a remarkable thing, making national news most likely, followed by a drop in support. “Mopar supports fags”, and the like.
Nowadays, if Chrysler (or Stellantis, or whatever they call themselves now), released a press release simply saying “We at Chrysler support white men”, and nothing else, it would make national news, followed by a drop in support and a wave of headlines and op-eds saying “Chrysler supports bigots”.
It is thoroughly unfashionable in the establishment to be any kind of conservative. This is just something we know. It’s so unfashionable that even merely being of an identity-group associated with any form of social conservatism (white, male, Christian, any kind of real religious devotion, even heterosexuality to an extent) is looked upon with disdain. The fact of the matter is: the modlibs are now the establishment. And they wield power like the establishment.
But there’s interesting phenomena afoot: They haven’t accepted the fact that they have become The Man. Go into a Fortune 500 HR department and you’ll be met by people who think they’re fearless activists and not just part of a corporate immune system dedicated to weeding out those who bring bad publicity. You’ve committed more of a countercultural act by merely reading the Stonetoss comic at the top than all of the diversity officers in New York have.
“Diversity officer”. Those two words as an actual position at major corporations are almost all the evidence you need that the cultural left wing is now the cultural establishment. If one of your holy virtues is diversity, the fact that major corporations have an officer for it should tell you that you’re the one with the reigns.
But still, the cultural left claps at the idea of the black bloc and the joggers burning down their neighborhoods, as if to revel in how groundbreakingly countercultural they are. But they aren’t. They are The Man. And that, I think, is going to be the current of the 2020s. The next ten years are going to bring some wild macro-level social shifts that most people aren’t even thinking about. I’m making my own predictions. Just now, I hammered out my thoughts on how on-the-ground politics will beget more and more assassinations. On the cultural front, the dominating factor will be the impending midlife crisis on the cultural left. We’re going to have to watch widespread left-wing acceptance that their cultural values have entered the DNA of Wall Street. Already, we see an implicit acceptance of power with the zeal that the left pursues the 1/6 rioters with, treating them as if they were war criminals who need to be hanged rather than hooligans who walked around a Masonic temple for a few hours, incited by feds.
That will be the reaction whenever the right steps out of line on anything. It’s fast becoming a snap response. Like a bad parody of the 2000s. Angry parents at schoolboard meetings? Domestic terrorists. People not wearing their masks? Domestic terrorists. Here are some people labeled “domestic terrorists” by modlib Trump-replygirl-shitheels that I pulled after a simple search on Twitter:
Boebert, Gaetz, Gosar, Greene (in that order)
The fact that these aren’t big accounts is telling. It means the “domestic terrorist” messaging has filtered down from the bluechecks and the papers, into the brains of your on-the-ground modlibs. Give it a year, and the “domestic terrorist” label will be applied to coal-rollers (because climate change), gun shop owners (because guns), and whatever cause is in vogue with the right wing. The entire expansion of “domestic terrorist” is ridiculous, but this is what the cultural left coming into power looks like. The people taking the reigns were reared in the 2000s, where anyone against the establishment was labeled as sympathetic to terrorists, so anyone against the new establishment is now a terrorist. “Domestic terrorist” will have the same weight in 5 years as “Nazi” has now. It’ll mean nothing anymore, and will serve merely to identify you politically. “Domestic terrorist” will become “anyone who isn’t establishment”.
This raises a greater and far more interesting question though. What is a right-wing counterculture going to look like. There’s nothing to really draw on here. Even when you have your economic left wing in power, culture at large used to generally remain conservative. There’s very little precedent for a right-wing counterculture, and a lot of cohesive forces that could become the right-wing counterculture. Will it grow out of bro culture? Gym culture? Weightlifting?
What it definitely won’t grow out of is your siloed right-wing establishment. You won’t find your right-wing Jack Kerouacs and Ken Keseys at The National Review, or even the newer right-wing sites like The Daily Wire. Alex Perez at IM-1776 (a very cool publication, by the way), sums up why thusly:
Gina Carano is a perfect example of the Right’s failures to properly seize cultural icons. The actress, after being ousted by Disney for wrong-think, became a rightwing cultural icon, but her political bona fides, and not her artistic talents, led to her rise as the Republican actor of the moment. She says the right things and retweets the right memes and so she is glorified by the right-wing media. In short, she passed the political purity test and is no longer problematic to the mainstream Right. Carano has now signed a deal with The Daily Wire — that paragon of artistic creativity! — and just like that, at the zenith of her cultural relevance, has become absolutely cringe, which is what the mainstream Right does to every artist it embraces. It is not that being right-wing is inherently cringe, but the fact that the right-wing ecosystem, so devoid of artists and the artistic sensibility for so long, is totally uncool and only worthy of mockery, that if you join their ranks, just like Carano — a charismatic screen presence, if nothing else — you will automatically transform into a cringe figure. If The Daily Wire, or any other right-wing outlet led by pundits and think-tankers, is producing your creative content, whatever is created will not be a cultural product but a hackneyed and preachy political puff piece consumable only to rubes and political obsessives.
And this really is where it’s going to get hairy: any kind of right-wing counterculture will not come from political publications and outlets. The culture part of “right-wing culture” has to come first, and your Daily Wires aren’t going to be able to do that. What the right wing desperately needs is not more National Reviews or Daily Wires, but rather, its own Rolling Stone (during its first few decades. Not Rolling Stone now. God no. Hunter S. Thompson & Tom Wolfe-era Rolling Stone). A magazine that’s new, unpretentious, fun, and produces actual good content. This is critical. It needs to create a body of work that’s both good, and right-wing. There’s nothing wrong with making a political work, but there is something wrong with thinking politics is a substitute for quality. This is why the header is a Stonetoss comic. He’s a fantastic example of fusing quality with politics, and actually executing it well. Even among the entire subreddits that try and fail to effectively mock him, you’ll hear the constant chant of “I don’t like him but he’s right on this one” or “This comic is actually pretty funny”. Why? Because he remembers to be both halves of a political cartoonist. Almost all of his comics have a strong right-wing message, but he consistently makes them snappy and funny, even when you discount the political message, all of which is bundled up in a memorable, bright, and visually pleasing art-style.
It’s edgy, funny, and the metaphorical “snap” that is never going to come from the establishment right wing.
There’s a coming midlife crisis on the left that will end up cementing the left’s cultural position as the annoying, uncool things that liberal arts majors in their 40s say & believe. With the left looking as if it’s going to embrace its new establishment position, the Right has an opportunity. It has the ability to make itself the dynamic politics of the avant-garde. So, to the entire Right, I have a message. Go make some art, make it good, and make it something that people want more of.