Right Wing Purity Culture

In a recent conversation I had with him, Carl Benjamin says:

I am honestly of the opinion that the right doesn't have this kind of purity culture, and that's definitely to their advantage. I'm not saying it doesn't ever exist or anything, but as a general rule, the right is less puritanical in this regard. 

This is in reference to the proclivity towards a highly doctrinaire and manichean world view that one often encounters in hard left circles, both in current year and throughout its history. Indeed, the decision of myself and my fellow Facebook page moderators to even have a conversation at all with the dreaded Sargon of Akkad would no doubt face heavy denouncement in typical left wing circles. And not "I disagree with Sargon on the following issues ... " but rather a "How dare you even think of speaking to so someone so racist, fascist, ignorant, stupid etc" kind of response.

Were they to discover that I found Mr. Benjamin to be a reasonable and cordial fellow with whom I would have some ideological disagreements as well as some areas of overlapping concern, that'd be treated as nothing short of blasphemy. And this includes many of the sorts of leftists who advocate a retreat from identity politics in favor of more class struggle. Get the pitchforks and light the burning pyre. We have a witch here. Conversing directly with demons, no less.

I was a youthful target of the Satanic Panic in the late 1980s, so it wouldn't be the first time.

While I realize that Sargon has his detractors and those who've claimed to have had bad experiences with him, that doesn't involve myself and my fellows who took part in the discussion. I felt I'd get that out of the way, because I know what the comments are going to say where ever I post this. You have a problem with Sargon, take it up with him. I'm no one's attack dog, and I'm not getting involved in YouTube drama.

With that all said, I did not follow up with Sargon on this idea of there being far less of a purity culture on the right, but upon reflection, I don't really agree. I suspect it looks that way because the purity culture on the right manifests itself differently from the one on the left. But that doesn't mean it's not there. It comes down to this:

The left's main concerns are with oppression, exploitation and discrimination. And that's perfectly reasonable. But progressives are vulnerable to the idea that any deviation from the established party line on any given issue will inevitably open the door to and enable, if not outrightly perpetuate, oppressive treatment of marginalized peoples. As such, rather like a religious fundamentalist who fears that the edifice of his religion will collapse if any element of the canon is called into question, unquestioning obedience to established orthodoxies is demanded on much of the left wing. Marxist Leninism, feminist theory, critical race theory and queer theory are almost unequivocal on this. These doctrines are the maps and blueprints that one must follow - to the letter - if a just society is to be achieved.

The right's main concerns are with degradation and loss of cultural and economic vitality, and that this would be bad because those things contribute to the strength and health of the polity. Again, well and good. But this likewise lends itself to conservatives fearing that any attempt to reform culture, politics or economy in a way to make them more inclusive or to provide a safety net for those in need will end up enabling behaviors and activities that cause a dilution of both personal morality and relationships that uphold the integrity of society. Right wing theories: neoreaction, libertarianism, white nationalism and religious fundamentalism are all underwritten by this kind of fear. A "camel's nose, once in the tent, the body is sure to follow" kind of mindset prevails in any discussion of either regulating the free market economy, or becoming more permissive regarding social norms and mores. Integrating between the races will dilute the purity of whichever race is superior. Allowing religious pluralism will cause the one true faith revealed by God to be diluted or lost, etc. You get the picture.

The contrasting concerns of social justice and social protectionism result in the respective purity cults of the left and right manifesting in different ways. The purity cult of the left is decidedly ostentatious and demonstrative, in keeping with the nature of the leftist narrative as themselves as some kind of last ditched resistance effort against an encroaching fascist tyranny. Convinced of the powerlessness of the purported targets of this tyranny, stark raving terror actually becomes a "reasonable" result. It's more visible because protest and civil disobedience are much more front and center in leftist theory.

The cringe factor here comes from the fact that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, while having politics vastly different than mine, are not quite what the hysterical left echo chambers make them out to be. Accusing these men of wanting to "erase" marginalized peoples or believing that women, people of color, LGBTQ people and others "should not exist" actually pushes them beyond being "literally Hitler" and makes them out to be something out of the darkest of speculative fiction, like the wicked Emperor Palpatine or the Dark Lord Sauron. It need not be said that this is hyperbole, not reality.

The purity cult on the right is harder to see because it's less ostentatious. For one thing, the individualism espoused by the right makes them far less likely to organize and protest, and when they do, their predilection for order and personal discipline makes these protests far less rowdy and prone to acts of hysteria. But they do happen, as Tea Party protests against Obama's attempts to bring in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act demonstrate.

More significantly, however, the right's belief in the underlying unity of strength and virtue lends itself to the right wing purity cult expressing itself in displays of strength, not weakness. Thus, rightist denounciation of leftists has about it a definite macho swagger. Hence its denunciations of leftists as snowflakes, cucks, degenerates, too stupid to learn about economics, etc. While the right attacks communism in some of the same terms that the left attacks fascism: condemning its historical brutality and totalitarianism, and the same kind of cringy comparisons of leftist figures like Bernie Sanders with historical tyrants like Josef Stalin as exist on the left comparing Trump to Hitler etc, the right tends to express contempt at the notion that such manly men as themselves would ever need a social safety net or protection from being exploited as a worker, consumer or investor. A crucial difference, perhaps the definitive difference, between left and right.

For the right, the answer is always very simple. Find another job. Start your own business. Don't do stupid stuff. Don't get sick or injured. Be Superman. Predict the future with pure accuracy. Were you as manly as themselves, you wouldn't need no namby-pamby social safety net, union representation or government regulations to protect you from hardship and exploitation. Well, too bad for them that actual human beings in the real world are not made of such stern stuff.

This isn't to say there isn't a place for conservative or libertarian questioning of leftist policy proposals. Sometimes they really are untenable. But the problems arise when pressed for specifics, the rightists resort to their own brand of emotionalism as opposed to reasoned argument. You're too degenerate, cucked, stupid to understand economics, etc. And then they'll go on to sneer the ironically labeled "tolerant" left. Such self awareness.

Much of the US right's entire ideological shtick lies in a constant onslaught of propaganda saying that any government interference in the economy at all is basically tantamount to socialism. Distinction is not made between the light interventions of neoliberals a-la Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, the more heavy interventions advocated by Keynesians, welfare liberals, new dealers and social democrats - think Roosevelt or Attlee, the far reaching but incomplete control advocated by democratic socialists or regimes like Allende's Chile or Chavez's Venezuela and the total control practiced by Stalin and Mao. And where would they stand on small government or even stateless models advanced by some kinds of leftists: anarcho communism/syndicalism, mutualism or the like? These are obviously enormous theoretical differences and yield very different outcomes, but you'd never guess that by reading conservative sources or the responses that right leaning people make in any kind of social media platform, in their own attempts to deplatform their political opponents by implying that they are weak, stupid or degenerate.

Well, you know what? If your precious free market is so fragile that it will collapse if any attempt is made to tinker with it, perhaps it's not that strong either, and maybe libertarians descend into being their own brand of hysterical SJWs for claiming taxation is theft or that regulations stopping them from dumping their pollution into the water or the air as they please constitute a lighter, softer form of the boot of socialism. A sort of economic microaggression, if you will. And notice how triggered they get when you tell them there are sound economic, political and social reasons for taxation and public spending. It's like you're "Marxsplaining" or "Keynesplaining" their oppression to them.

Poor guys.

If you can slow down anything recorded by Ben Shapiro to a pace at which it becomes intelligible, the whole idea being advanced is pretty straight forward. And it's the same with Turning Point and a host of other conservative ideological sources. Bernie Sanders = Joseph Stalin. Obama's America = Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.  Obamacare = Stalinist collectivization. Keynesianism and Marxism are described as being one in the same. Despite the fact that demand management policies have been part and parcel of how all of the world's most successful economies have operated at least as far back as the second world war.

Such hysterical and stupid phrases are not being shrieked aloud for all to hear by outraged women and college students taking to the streets, but they are no less hysterical and stupid for that difference. Any government intervention in the economy, any provision of social welfare, any protection of workers rights reveals a "lack of understanding of economics" and surely won't work despite the fact they have been working for decades now across the developed world. All presented by some wannabe tough guy whose macho swagger implying that he can beat you up so that makes his views correct. This looks different than the SJW's displays of emotional hysteria and terror at even the most tepid step away from his ancap or intersectioal feminist dogmas, but does not alter the fact that, at heart, it's the same thing.

An ideological purity cult.

Besides, there's plenty of precedent for very real and dangerous ideological purity regimens on the right: the various red scares, McCarthyism, the Satanic Panic, to name a few. If the right wing has done it before, why should I think they won't do it again? There's enough love for the likes of Augusto Pinochet among hard line libertarians and reactionaries these days for them to most certainly not have my trust. Perhaps they'd be amenable to a deal, wherein I won't send them to a gulag if they don't throw me out of a helicopter, assuming either of us ever had the chance. But I'm not holding my breath.

Not all right wingers are Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer Warriors or the like, some of you might say. Fine. Some of you are no doubt thinking "straw man" to everything I've said here. Fair enough. Some more conservative leaning people are reasonable, as my discussion with Sargon exemplified. But not all leftists are Antifa either. Rightists get annoyed whenever they're hysterically tarred as racists, nazis, misogynists and the like by the left. Okay, fair enough. Then don't tar the whole of the left as either violent ancom or tankie nutjobs or hysterical feminists with obvious mental health issues either. The right warns the left that its irrationality will drive more people to the right. Fair warning, but that's a two way street. At some point, after being called a cuck and offered enough helicopter rides, more people might start wondering if there's maybe something in Karl Marx's library that these right wingers and their paranoid cries of "cultural Marxism" don't want them to know, and the Streisand Effect takes hold from there.

Listen to myself and my fellow alt-left mods converse with Sargon of Akkad and the Secretary of Akkad here.

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Why the Left is Winning the Culture War: Hard Right

Previously, I wrote of the common notion that the progressives were winning the culture war, a brief and by no means complete survey of reactionary thought on the matter and proposed a number of explanations for and caveats to that idea. Now, I begin to look at the deeper reasons why the right, the reactionaries especially, have a difficult time even maintaining the status quo, let alone in turning back the clock, in modern civilization.

The right wing political message is harder. By harder, I mean that right wing political thought trades in both foundational principles and policy proposals that are less likely to be widely popular. Conservatives have always been the "party of no", the party-poopers of the political scene. They claim that we cannot achieve all of our legislative goals without punishing levels of taxation and government overreach.

Central to conservative thought as far back as Edmund Burke is the notion that human nature is not fundamentally perfectible, and indeed it's an uphill battle to improve it at all. Humanity is in need of some kind of higher set of moral and philosophical principles beyond the reach of his will to power in order to keep him on the right track. Religion is often touted as the source of this.

Overall, this is a less popular message than that peddled by reformist politicians and ideologies of boundless optimism. First classical liberalism, then socialism and today feminism promise if not utopia, at least a greatly improved way of life over what we have now. This is naturally a more attractive message. It is more attractive to believe that pressing social problems can be solved, than to view them as intractable and that trying to solve them will simply squander limited and valuable resources. We feel better about the left's message of a brighter future. It flatters our egos. We don't like being told that we have a naturally debased nature that makes social progress very difficult and even dangerous.

The left has a long history of offering up ideal classes of people: the proletariat, the 3rd world, women, the poor and marginalized, who if they were just given the reins of power, would guide us into a world free of exploitation, poverty and war. Being the sober voice in a climate of excitement and enthusiasm doesn't win popularity contests. And don't expect to be exonerated in hindsight when the project truly does go awry, just as you predicted it would, either. Of course, the right does sometimes enter its own politics of fervent hope and even utopianism, but these incidences occur in spite of, rather than because of, the underlying nature of conservative thought.

It is not that the left does not posit the need to make sacrifices for the achievement of its goals. But the left tends to ask more of those who are, at least according to leftist bodies of thought, able to give up more. Moreover, leftism offers hope of societal improvement when all is said and done. The sacrifices demanded by reactionaries, on the other hand, are mainly to stop things getting worse than they already are, and more often fall on those already on the less fortunate end of the social spectrum. This is in contrast to the deeply rooted Christian ethic otherwise so much touted on at least some segments of the left, which generally extols charity and concern for the less fortunate.

It is not that right leaning people are unwilling to be charitable. But they're far more likely to balk at the encoding of charity into our political, economic and social structures in the way that leftist calls for reform advocate for. Rightism would prefer that charity be a private, individual decision, and don't like the notion that there are structural inequities and injustices in the way that wealth and resources end up being distributed. Most people know, or at least suspect how inadequate this will be in the face of the real need out there. Right wing people may sneer at how easy it is to be generous and charitable with other people's money, and that's precisely the point. It is easier. It is easier to at least advocate for redistributive taxation and social spending, even if the threat of capital flight and investment strike make those programs tricky to implement.

Up until very recently, the right was seen as the side of the prudish, the censorious and the puritanical. Say no to drugs. No sex until marriage. Abstinence only. Contraception and abortion are bad, murder even. Every sperm is sacred. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were seen as the gateway to Sodom and Gomorrah. Not among all right leaning people, but those who thought that way did lean right.

That is not the path of least resistance to which people are naturally inclined. While we can hew to very straight and narrow lifestyles in times of shortage and hardship, or else when in tight knit social environments that share the same values, once modern levels of affluence and technological development made less stringent ways of life attainable with reduced social costs, that's naturally what most people did. Who would naturally deal with the shortage and hardship of marrying young and having a mess of children once this ceased to be economically necessary or socially mandated? If there's no real reason not to enjoy sex, drugs and rock and roll once we stop believing that they'll make the baby Jesus cry and your parents, boss and neighbors won't object to it, it's easier to do so than not to, however real the very real problems of addiction and abuse are, at least for some people.

Over the last decade or so, the cultural left has introduced its own culture of austerity, with privilege checking, broadening definitions of sexual harassment and rape, speech codes, avoidance of bad words that might trigger someone with a marginalized identity, deconstruction and critique of movies, music, video games and so on for sexist and racist content and so on. This goes back a bit further on college campuses, to the late 1980s approximately. And even here, they are not so much suggesting that we "just say no" but rather that we merely get informed, enthusiastic and affirmative consent. In triplicate, and you'd better cross all the t's and dot all the i's. And still hope that no one cries rape or harassment, since the zeitgeist demands that the accuser be given the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, this new stringency doesn't seem to apply to historically "marginalized" groups: women, ethnic minorities, trans folks etc.

Still and all, this is an altogether different message than abstinence only, at least until marriage. An option that is increasingly beyond many people's price range, and not likely to be entered into until after the long period of education and preparation needed to secure the kinds of middle class jobs you can raise a family on. Whatever flaws exist in hook-up culture so called, and there are many, people will simply not revert back to the sexual morality that prevailed in agricultural societies where for all intents and purposes, you were an adult at fifteen.

So while not completely equivalent, the emergent social justice warrior (SJW) is sometimes mentioned as the leftist counterpart to the stuffy Christian conservative. Hard leftists - Marxists, Stalinists and Maoists and the like, have had a similar sort of tough mindedness, but these have never been significant even on what's considered left wing in the 1st world. What's relevant here is that the last few decades wherein second wave feminism gradually gave way to the SJWs are a wink of an eye in the face of the history of western civilization overall, wherein it has been religion and conservatism that has eschewed creature comforts in favor of stoicism and stern morality.

Moreover, reactionaries propose some genuinely harsh measures. Who is going to tell women - the majority of the population and currently united and galvanized by feminist ideology - that their place is at home, barefoot and pregnant after all? This seems like political suicide, and so not surprisingly is backed away from even by those on the right who actually do think this way. In a similar vein, it is the right wing that is proposing that worker's rights be curtailed or even done away with entirely, and employment for mid to low skill workers with little bargaining power reduced to something comparable to serfdom. It is the right wing that proposes that much of the populace lose access to health care, public education, or a social safety net in times of need. Outside the United States, these messages unsurprisingly do not resonate with working and middle class people. And conservatives within America must go to great lengths and expense to gain working class buy-in for their frankly sado-masochistic kinds of policies.

So it is that the right wing presents a harder path for individuals and societies to follow, and not always with a long term payoff to make it worthwhile, other than the suggestion that the left will lead us to a still worse place. This is a handicap for the right. As a reason for progressive dominance in the culture war, I'd say it's relevant, significant even but not central.

For one thing, the right's message of austerity doesn't always fail to resonate. While they haven't convinced most to just say no or wait for marriage, they've convinced many more, particularly in the English speaking world, that harsh cutbacks to social services, infrastructure and the like, along with weakening the power of the unions and the state to affect wages and working conditions were necessary to preserve the long term economic health of the 1st world nations.

The message resonated deeply with many of the people who had the most to lose from it, because it appealed to a sense of heroic mission and sacrifice, as well as to a sense of individualistic masculine pride. The aforementioned Robert Conquest and John O'Sullivan, they who believed leftward drift inevitable in any but explicitly right wing institutions, would have been quite surprised by the direction that Tony Blair would take the British Labour party, and how this was the rule and not the exception in social democratic parties across the western world.

In my own jurisdiction of the province of Alberta in western Canada, it's very hard to win an election if one isn't running on a platform of economic austerity. The deep cuts to social spending implemented in the 1990s by then Premier Ralph Klein make him one of the best remembered premiers in provincial history among Albertans, and they elected United Conservative leader Jason Kenney as premier in April of 2019 in the hopes that he can repeat Klein's performance.

The trick to pulling this off, though, is that a LOT of long term investment into policy institutes, think tanks, alternative media and similar kinds of capital intensive ideological infrastructure was necessary to eventually gain mainstream buy-in. Not just investment, but long term strategic thinking that boiled down the message of austerity to three to four word sound bite slogans with which a compliant media could saturation bomb the public, until massive cut backs and privatization just became common sense.

Another example: to this date, the late David Koch and his brother Charles have financed libertarian minded organizations, with highly successful online outreach and thus right-libertarianism has a notable following among post-boomer generations, particularly of white males who've been excluded from the mainstream narrative of privilege and social justice, themselves rather infamously funded by rival billionaire "philanthropists" such as George Soros. While libertarianism has been, for reasons soon to be discussed, less successful than social justice overall, it does show that the more dour nature of right wing thought is not an insurmountable weakness, provided there's sufficient resources and organization behind it. Which there often isn't, for reasons to be discussed in future installments of this series.

Another weakness of leftism is that it's ideologies are more complex and systemic. The core of right wing thought can be boiled down to the idea that some people are naturally more gifted than others, or that good and/or smart people do good and/or smart things, and so succeed. When society goes astray, it's because bad people are gaining the reins of state power and implementing redistributionist policies. These ideas can range from relatively reasonable criticisms of center left politicians to bizarre conspiracy theories implicating the Illuminati, Elders of Zion or even reptilian space aliens.  As naive as these views are, they are also simpler and easier to understand for the uninitiated.

Leftist theories, by contrast, posit deeper, more complex, abstract and systemic views of the world, and come up with their own unsettling sorts of ideological claims. Leftist explanations of poverty and steep levels of inequality are systemic and therefore not as easy to grasp. They're also easier for the right to straw-man: "leftists are just jealous of people who are better than them and want to take their wealth and resources for themselves" or similar nonsense.

Moreover, leftist claims posit their own challenges that no shortage of people would like to duck or deny. If poverty and hardship have systemic causes and could happen to anyone, does this not then place a burden of responsibility upon the polity and its citizens? Should we not be willing to pony up more in taxes to help the poor, raise the minimum wage or even be prepared to roll up our sleeves and take to the streets because, after all, the means of production aren't going to seize themselves? Is it not easier to simply suggest that the poor are just stupid and lazy and leave the tough job of managing the economy and the polity to the smart fellas willing to put in the time and effort to do it? And if they get paid a lot more money to do so, aren't they deserving of it? This isn't so easy a line of argument to refute as the left would like it to be. It's not completely and entirely untrue either.

Of course, the outcomes of this kind of thinking don't always rebound to the benefit of the right, as "woke" dominance in cultural spheres imposed by incorporated cultural institutions make clear. Cultural leftists did an effective job of organizing and strategizing in order to increase their influence in academia and the media, as any paleoconservative willing to talk about "cultural Marxism" would be only happy to tell you. The thing is, the whole "long march through the institutions" thing isn't simply a right wing conspiracy theory. There's something to it and it goes a long way towards explaining current progressive cultural dominance in cultural spheres, because the right was so poorly equipped to deal with it.

So the right's core political message is tougher overall to accept, though there's plenty of qualifications and exceptions to this. This is one reason for progressive dominance in the current culture war, but by no means the most significant one.

Continued in Part 3: Left Alone

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