Thank you, Ross. This is the article I've been waiting for. The Social Justice in Everything Era was the most unpleasant era of my lifetime. I hated watching the Left, my home, become its own version of The Moral Majority.
Politics in art is totally fine; I've enjoyed many things with a lefty bent. But the moment you start DEMANDING lefty politics in art OR ELSE is the moment you alienate me.
I've been cutting my Substack subscriptions lately, but not yours. You've earned it.
"The Social Justice in Everything Era was the most unpleasant era of my lifetime. I hated watching the Left, my home, become its own version of The Moral Majority."
Yup.
The "Social Justice in Everything Era" hit peak po-mo at the point when the entire Democratic Party decided that "trans" "rights" was more important than the sum total of Women's rights, children's safety, basic material reality, and the ongoing capacity of the Democratic Party to actually win elections.
I'm surprised not to see this mentioned here, because "trans" "rights" rlly takes the po-mo to another level entirely.
The contrast is insanely sharp: Every other identity group in the DEI/CSJ mishmash is, at least, *an actual demographic group*:
• with a tangible existence;
• identifiable by third persons and, at least crudely, *defined*;
and
• ((imagine actually having to say this in previous decades!)) the same group, with the same people, today as it was yesterday or last month or last year. No opt-outs, no opt-ins, no "deeply held feelings".
"Transgender" (in the present-day, activist sense) is none of these things. It's a completely made-up, opt-in, hyper-privileged subset of the White upper middle class (which in turn is already the USA's hegemon class! It's privilege all the way down) that fundamentally just ISN'T REAL. Pure incorporeal fairy dust, with no material existence of any kind, inside an international bubble of censorship unlike anything that the Western free press has ever seen—with its own Red Guards ready to carry out domestic terrorism against anyone who happens to ask basic epistemological (...What IS a 'gender identity'? How can it possibly be 'innate' or 'born' when it's built around socially constructed stereotypes?), or teleological (...Who is funding TRAs and why? What carrots and sticks are keeping the ENTIRE mainstream news media in thrall to censorious racketeers? What are the next steps and the potential endgame?), questions that ANY reasonable person should ALWS be asking about basically everything.
Most American voters aren't interested enough—and/or aren't personally affected enough yet—to pore over the larger-scale questions above, but, ALL of us (even full-lunatic TRA zealots, deep down) know that "trans" is completely made-up, opt-in bullshit: somewhere in the badlands between cosplay and pure make-believe.
When the entire weight of institutional DEI started to be harnessed for a completely fake, opt-in group of people who were already marinated in systemic privilege to begin with... we were cresting the peak of institutional CSJ. Nowhere to go from here but down—although it's a long, long way down.
Very good. Although there may be more protests in the future over war, the media won't have as easy a time reflecting what's happening. Artists who want to match what's happening in the streets will need to be subtle, using metaphors, etc. What Brad Troemel calls literalism will be dead.
Even right-wing art like Tony Hinchcliffe and the Dimes Square stuff will be redundant if Trump is President.
I hope you're right, that art will untether itself from politics, but all the trends I've seen in the science fiction and fantasy genres are pointing in the opposite direction. The Trump 45 era saw a lot of Resistance(TM) fiction, and that's still dominating the major awards in those genres. For change to happen, editors and agents will have to acquire different kinds of stories. And that might take a top down push from the C suites of the Big Five because there's a lot of progressive ideological capture as far as I can tell.
Fauxgressive ideology—which is direly unpopular basically everywhere, and has ONLY been advanced through backroom dealing, censorship, domestic terrorism, sneering contempt for an informed public, and 999,999 circumventions of the democratic process—is both "top-down" and authoritarian in the purest sense imaginable.
EVERY pet cause of the 2020s spoiled-child left has been seeded from the VERY top down, by social-engineering + propaganda efforts that began with specific billionaires and/or the institutions corrupted by those specific billionaires' money.
To prove the "authoritarian" part, just consider: The total number of "trans" "rights" legislative or constitutional questions that have EVER gone onto a public ballot—anywhere in the entire world—is ZERO. Literally nobody on the entire face of the earth has ever been given the chance to ••vote•• on "trans" "rights", not even one time, not anywhere.
.
TL;DR: A "top-down push" AGAINST csj and other institutionalized bro-gressivisms would be a hair-of-the-dog cure—like having two stiff drinks at 8AM to dispel a hangover. Hoping to push out X with even more of X.
Writing this after the election - I am very much hoping that the untethering you predicted indeed comes to pass. It’s high time. Living as I was in Brooklyn during the last Trump presidency, the performative social justice was absolutely suffocating. I don’t want to have to endure that again. I dread a Resistance 2.0 as much as I do Trump himself.
I find this interesting. Thank you for unpaywalling and thanks to the feed for showing it to me, I point that out for a reason.
I think platforms will be important for everything you're talking about. Some group somewhere is going to complain about any art made ever, but will other people see that complaint and agree and amplify? I think the social media age of the 2010s made that really easy to do and people piled on in that way.
Facebook like that is dead today. Twitter is dying (on the left). TikTok is still growing but could change a lot due to Trump. I'm sure both sides will still find a way to find and amplify the stuff they don't like but I wonder if that's getting harder and if it's not a good thing.
What I keep turning over in my mind is which outcome next week will furthest delay the next re-awokening? On one hand, a Trump victory would not only force the dying movement to spin its wheels a little longer, delaying the period of rest before it can gestate again at a later decade, it would stop the Resist™️ movement from going down in history as a total victory, removing the precedent for activists and institutions to hold all of the arts hostage until their political demands are met.
On the other hand, mainstream culture is still pretty woke, even if it’s no longer peak woke, as the Chappell Roan controversy proved. While we may not go all the way back to 2016 if Trump wins next week, the Activist Industrial Complex wouldn’t exactly be hurting if they were returned their Great Satan. We might have to then wait a few more years for the untethering to resume.
Don’t forget Bernie. Also, don’t forget DSA. I joined a newly formed DSA chapter in Duluth, MN when Trump was elected. Eight years later, we have about tripled in size (not huge, 105 dues current members). We have three endorsed member city councilors, an endorsed member state senator, and an endorsed member county commissioner. We keep plugging away, kind of under the radar these days, but still here.
Thank you, Ross. This is the article I've been waiting for. The Social Justice in Everything Era was the most unpleasant era of my lifetime. I hated watching the Left, my home, become its own version of The Moral Majority.
Politics in art is totally fine; I've enjoyed many things with a lefty bent. But the moment you start DEMANDING lefty politics in art OR ELSE is the moment you alienate me.
I've been cutting my Substack subscriptions lately, but not yours. You've earned it.
"The Social Justice in Everything Era was the most unpleasant era of my lifetime. I hated watching the Left, my home, become its own version of The Moral Majority."
Yup.
The "Social Justice in Everything Era" hit peak po-mo at the point when the entire Democratic Party decided that "trans" "rights" was more important than the sum total of Women's rights, children's safety, basic material reality, and the ongoing capacity of the Democratic Party to actually win elections.
I'm surprised not to see this mentioned here, because "trans" "rights" rlly takes the po-mo to another level entirely.
The contrast is insanely sharp: Every other identity group in the DEI/CSJ mishmash is, at least, *an actual demographic group*:
• with a tangible existence;
• identifiable by third persons and, at least crudely, *defined*;
and
• ((imagine actually having to say this in previous decades!)) the same group, with the same people, today as it was yesterday or last month or last year. No opt-outs, no opt-ins, no "deeply held feelings".
"Transgender" (in the present-day, activist sense) is none of these things. It's a completely made-up, opt-in, hyper-privileged subset of the White upper middle class (which in turn is already the USA's hegemon class! It's privilege all the way down) that fundamentally just ISN'T REAL. Pure incorporeal fairy dust, with no material existence of any kind, inside an international bubble of censorship unlike anything that the Western free press has ever seen—with its own Red Guards ready to carry out domestic terrorism against anyone who happens to ask basic epistemological (...What IS a 'gender identity'? How can it possibly be 'innate' or 'born' when it's built around socially constructed stereotypes?), or teleological (...Who is funding TRAs and why? What carrots and sticks are keeping the ENTIRE mainstream news media in thrall to censorious racketeers? What are the next steps and the potential endgame?), questions that ANY reasonable person should ALWS be asking about basically everything.
Most American voters aren't interested enough—and/or aren't personally affected enough yet—to pore over the larger-scale questions above, but, ALL of us (even full-lunatic TRA zealots, deep down) know that "trans" is completely made-up, opt-in bullshit: somewhere in the badlands between cosplay and pure make-believe.
When the entire weight of institutional DEI started to be harnessed for a completely fake, opt-in group of people who were already marinated in systemic privilege to begin with... we were cresting the peak of institutional CSJ. Nowhere to go from here but down—although it's a long, long way down.
You make a compelling case for the untethering, and I hope you are right.
Same here. Exacly what I was thinking.
Very good. Although there may be more protests in the future over war, the media won't have as easy a time reflecting what's happening. Artists who want to match what's happening in the streets will need to be subtle, using metaphors, etc. What Brad Troemel calls literalism will be dead.
Even right-wing art like Tony Hinchcliffe and the Dimes Square stuff will be redundant if Trump is President.
I hope you're right, that art will untether itself from politics, but all the trends I've seen in the science fiction and fantasy genres are pointing in the opposite direction. The Trump 45 era saw a lot of Resistance(TM) fiction, and that's still dominating the major awards in those genres. For change to happen, editors and agents will have to acquire different kinds of stories. And that might take a top down push from the C suites of the Big Five because there's a lot of progressive ideological capture as far as I can tell.
"A top-down push" is how we got here.
Fauxgressive ideology—which is direly unpopular basically everywhere, and has ONLY been advanced through backroom dealing, censorship, domestic terrorism, sneering contempt for an informed public, and 999,999 circumventions of the democratic process—is both "top-down" and authoritarian in the purest sense imaginable.
EVERY pet cause of the 2020s spoiled-child left has been seeded from the VERY top down, by social-engineering + propaganda efforts that began with specific billionaires and/or the institutions corrupted by those specific billionaires' money.
To prove the "authoritarian" part, just consider: The total number of "trans" "rights" legislative or constitutional questions that have EVER gone onto a public ballot—anywhere in the entire world—is ZERO. Literally nobody on the entire face of the earth has ever been given the chance to ••vote•• on "trans" "rights", not even one time, not anywhere.
.
TL;DR: A "top-down push" AGAINST csj and other institutionalized bro-gressivisms would be a hair-of-the-dog cure—like having two stiff drinks at 8AM to dispel a hangover. Hoping to push out X with even more of X.
The odds seem very long.
Writing this after the election - I am very much hoping that the untethering you predicted indeed comes to pass. It’s high time. Living as I was in Brooklyn during the last Trump presidency, the performative social justice was absolutely suffocating. I don’t want to have to endure that again. I dread a Resistance 2.0 as much as I do Trump himself.
I find this interesting. Thank you for unpaywalling and thanks to the feed for showing it to me, I point that out for a reason.
I think platforms will be important for everything you're talking about. Some group somewhere is going to complain about any art made ever, but will other people see that complaint and agree and amplify? I think the social media age of the 2010s made that really easy to do and people piled on in that way.
Facebook like that is dead today. Twitter is dying (on the left). TikTok is still growing but could change a lot due to Trump. I'm sure both sides will still find a way to find and amplify the stuff they don't like but I wonder if that's getting harder and if it's not a good thing.
You’re a good example of the sleep walking masses that are in for a very rude awakening
What I keep turning over in my mind is which outcome next week will furthest delay the next re-awokening? On one hand, a Trump victory would not only force the dying movement to spin its wheels a little longer, delaying the period of rest before it can gestate again at a later decade, it would stop the Resist™️ movement from going down in history as a total victory, removing the precedent for activists and institutions to hold all of the arts hostage until their political demands are met.
On the other hand, mainstream culture is still pretty woke, even if it’s no longer peak woke, as the Chappell Roan controversy proved. While we may not go all the way back to 2016 if Trump wins next week, the Activist Industrial Complex wouldn’t exactly be hurting if they were returned their Great Satan. We might have to then wait a few more years for the untethering to resume.
Don’t forget Bernie. Also, don’t forget DSA. I joined a newly formed DSA chapter in Duluth, MN when Trump was elected. Eight years later, we have about tripled in size (not huge, 105 dues current members). We have three endorsed member city councilors, an endorsed member state senator, and an endorsed member county commissioner. We keep plugging away, kind of under the radar these days, but still here.
A Lost Generation for the 21st century.