With the rise o’ uneducated & illiterate but pragmatic & down-to-earth neofascists & breadtubers my nerdy ass sometimes gets nostalgic for the good ol’ days of out-o’-touch laissy libertarians & so-called liberals — truly hipster atheist & gay conservatives, like the writer of our current subject o’ mockery, Jonathan Rauch, who reject liberalism’s historical radicalism o’ the French Revolution in favor o’ a fanaticism toward the American tradition o’ legalism or “rationalism” founded on slavery & imperialism ( but unlike communism, which is intrinsically tied to its crimes, we can tidily separate slavery & imperialism from the history o’ American liberalism just like that ), who lists Edmund Burke, 1 o’ the most influential conservatives as 1 o’ his biggest inspirations, next to James Madison, 1 o’ the mo’ authoritarian o’ founding fathers largely responsible for the mo’ authoritarian “federalist” aspects o’ the US Constitution. So with a bit o’ youthful giddiness I was feeling like taking a break from the game I’ve been programming for nearly a decade @ this point grinding for bells & junk, like any good capitalist, in the oldest version o’ Animal Crossing to bring out my poisoned pen gainst this article titled, “The Woke Right Stands At the Door”, from a website called Persuasion, a substack with the tagline, “The community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for” — ’cept just like the modern leftists they hate as much as neofascists, their idea o’ “fighting” is bitching online gainst strawmen. That use o’ the word “woke” is, embarrassingly, not ironic: as stated, this author conflates the modern right with modern leftists as being equally “illiberal”, while ne’er describing what he means by that because despite constantly begging you to think he’s a rational debater this article is mainly based on emotional ties to vague 18th century “enlightenment” vibes & this author is such a shit debater that he’d get trounced by e’en e’eryone’s favorite equinophiliac debate bro. But let us hear him out:

In November, James Lindsay—an independent scholar, author, and sometime prankster —

If you click that link you will see that Mr. Lindsay’s “pranks” are the cliché troll o’ sending inane articles that throw together progressive buzzwords to journals & being butthurt that they weren’t censored but published & how terrible it is that humanities & social sciences aren’t looking for some imaginary objective truths round famously subjective & complex human societies like one would for hard sciences. So Mr. Lindsay is a social incompetent who can’t distinguish ’tween humans & robots. Good to know. Also, “independent scholar” is a nice way to say “crank”.

He grabbed verbiage from the Communist Manifesto, changed left-wing valences to right-wing, and submitted the result to an online conservative journal. He did not have high confidence in going undetected; after all, his opening sentence (“A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right”) is a blatant rip-off of one of the most famous sentences in world literature

E’eryone knows Marx’s greatest controversies aren’t his influence o’er self-described communist totalitarian regimes or his so-called labor theory o’ value or his theory o’ falling profit under capitalism, but the way he described communists as spooky spectres. Surprisingly, the rightwing journal was unperturbed by this pointless gesture & noted that the new sentence he created lacked any o’ the philosophical aspects o’ Marx’s that rightwingers don’t like & e’en acknowledged Marx’s literary skills. This is apparently a goof on the rightwingers’ part: clearly philosophical meaning is less important than how you phrase things, in the empty void that is these “liberal”’s philosophies.

The MAGA right has strange and sinister qualities which look nothing like the traditional, religious wing of conservatism familiar from the era of William F. Buckley, or the anti-government, libertarian conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Its anarchic rejection of truth, its Nietzschean embrace of power as self-justifying, its unashamed anti-liberalism, and its glee in transgressing boundaries and giving offense are something new on the right: an embrace of postmodernism, which until recently was the exclusive property of the illiberal left.

Those who know e’en the basics o’ American history — unlike Rauch here, who is yet another cringe Canadian who is way too interested in the politics o’ a foreign country he clearly knows nothing ’bout — would recognize this as pure childish romanticism. Yes, Ronald Reagan, known as “Teflon Ron” for all the corrupt things his administration did & yet somehow managed to slag off controversy just like is spiritual successor, Donald Trump, including illegally going round a congressional ban gainst military involvement in favor o’ murderous dictators in Nicaragua — who were directly encouraged to commit war crimes by the CIA thru their lovely manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare — by bribing that liberal paradise known as Iran while knowing that those same contras were selling crack in the US & ignoring it @ the same time as “libertarian” Reagan hypocritically unleashed his “War on Drugs” which aimed specifically @ that same crack. & the idea that Barry Goldwater was anything but a kook is just ridiculous: this is the same “libertarian” who infamously talked ’bout nuking any country he didn’t like as casually as Trump talks ’bout invading Canada.

A generation ago, normies in the academy and other elite cultural institutions failed to see the postmodern left for what it was. And so they were run over.

Yes, Hoach was the 1st person to e’ery complain ’bout the vile postmodern left in academia, guys. & the “normies” — yes, Hoach is so pathetic that he unironically self-indentifies as a normie — are losing power not ’cause they sucked ass @ running the US in the last few decades, ¡but ’cause they got tricked by those dastardly lefties! ’Course, ’cause he’s not a disgusting Marxist ( & ’cause he’s an out-o’-touch rich person who knows nothing ’bout the material conditions o’ the vast majority o’ the US, or e’en probably his own country ) he pays no attention to the material conditions like rising economic instability that might be leading to this political instability: clearly it’s just people brainwashed by postmodernism & if ’nough “liberals” like Hoach write substacks then this brain virus will fade & the average worker will go back to happily working increasing hours for stagnant wages & rising costs.

In his 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism, Stephen R.C. Hicks posits three categories of thought about how the world has historically been ordered: premodern, modern, and postmodern. Where premodernism emphasizes faith, hierarchy, and duty to God, modernism emphasizes reason, individualism, and autonomy; postmodernism, in turn, sees reason as a sham, authority as a mask for power, and groups as prior to individuals.

You know the linked book is impressive when it’s given ’way for free as a PDF — almost as if this Stephen R.C. Hicks, a self-described “entrepreneur” ( which is a euphemism for “grifter” ) who hates socialism ’cause it attacks his own class, couldn’t get anyone to buy his book. Sounds like a bad “entrepreneur” to me. Or it could be that ’pon scanning thru this book I can see that it’s the sloppiest attempt @ philosophical critique, basically lumping together e’erything he doesn’t like into “postmodernism” without any sources just like “woke rightist” Jordan Petersen. But these guys insist very hard that they believe in rationalism & truth, so they must not be just as dishonest & incompetent as the “woke right” or “woke left” they hate so much. As a demonstration o’ how illiterate this book is, Hicks compares known totalitarian-loving Foucault, whose main focus was criticizing power, & his dastardly criticism o’ prison ( no discussion on the hilarious hypocrisy o’ “free” liberal societies imprisoning people for several years for daring to disobey government-invented property laws or partaking in non-government-sanctioned drugs ) with Andrea Dworkin, who ne’er called herself a philosopher @ all, much less a postmodernist, but was essentially the 1970s equivalent o’ the “dirtbag left”: an edgelord who spewed vile on men & the things they liked to deliberately trigger them.

E’en mo’ laughably uneducated is this histography that conflates 18th-century enlightenment with 20th-century modernism, the latter o’ which was mainly an art movement, not really a philosophical movement — & the political groups mainly interested in modernism were, ironically, socialists & fascists, not ol’-school liberals who probably still preferred realism. These idiots are so uneducated on their own s’posed ideology that they don’t realize that the enlightenment e’en in its own time wasn’t modern, but was a callback to a time e’en before medieval times: the Roman Empire. ¿Why do they think US government architecture loves Romanesque pillars ( but from people so uneducated ’bout the Roman Empire that they didn’t realize Roman pillars were not white but painted bright colors which had simply faded out by then — so just as much a childish romanticism as these idiots’ romanticism o’ a past American liberalism without all those inconvenient historical truths like slavery & indigenous genocide & the fact that they thought cutting someone to make them bleed out to balance their imaginary “humors” was a good medical procedure )? The claim that postmodernism views “groups as prior to individuals” is absurd, not only due to the hypocrisy o’ how this article is full o’ talking only ’bout vague strawman groups, not real individuals, but also ’cause it seems to, again like Jordan Petersen, conflate Marxism & postmodernism, e’en tho postmodernism was most oft criticized by Marxists as a sign o’ how “decadent” the “western bourgeoisie” had become due to its focus on individual subjective experience clashing with Marxism’s focus on materialist objectivity ( ’cause — ¡surprise! — Marxism, which originated in the 19th century, was inspired by 18th-century liberal rationalism thru Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Feuerbach, Proudhon, & Charles Darwin, not postmodernism that would not come for another 100 years ).

It’s also ironic how these 2 criticize postmodernism & Marxism for criticism liberalism for the identities & intentions behind it, not its ideas by themselves, when that is exactly what they’re doing here: they don’t ask whether or not postmodernism is right or wrong ’bout the nature o’ truth, but simply portray it as having s’posedly sinister motives ’hind it. This is particularly goofy when you consider that the postmodernist/Marxist conspiracies make mo’ sense: there is a’least a logic to the idea that powerful classes would push ideologies that keep them in power; ¿why would the rich white people that make up the majority o’ postmodernists & Marxists in academia push ideologies that go against rich white people?

A good way to think about these categories is suggested by Richard Tafel, a pastor and social entrepreneur who uses them to train organizations in what he calls “cultural translation”—helping people communicate and relate better across cultural and political divides. Each of the three worldviews, he argues, is based on a distinctive epistemology; that is, on its own conception of truth.

Crazy how this “rational atheist liberal” is relying on religious authorities & “entrepreneurs” — pastors o’ the market, essentially — instead o’ actual scientists. I guess it’s ’cause academia has been taken o’er by the woke & only random rich people writing pop psychology can be trusted as the harbingers o’ rationalism now. I love when self-described moderates & centrists talk ’bout “relating better across cultural and political divides” while slagging off anyone who steers too far from their comfortable philosophical centers with sloppy strawman attacks, including attacking the idea that anything other than what rich white men say is science. ¿Is not that vile woke “moral relativism” trying to communicate across cultural divides?

Those principles, in and of themselves, do not have a particular political valence. They do not seem to advance any agenda at all. “At its core, postmodernism rejected what it calls metanarratives—broad, cohesive explanations of the world and society,” wrote Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their 2020 history of the movement, Cynical Theories. “It rejected Christianity and Marxism. It also rejected science, reason, and the pillars of post-Enlightenment western democracy.” Indeed, “postmodernism raised such radical doubts about the structure of thought and society that it is ultimately a form of cynicism.”

This is hilarious in how much it contradicts the general narrative o’ this article: remember, postmodernism is s’posedly ’hind neofascism, which, ’course, rejects “broad, cohesive explanations of the world and society” & rejects Christianity. It’s almost as if the only commonality is daring to critique in any way possible western democracy, as it does any other society. Crazy that people would be cynical ’bout an ideology that praised liberty while having some o’ the most infamous examples o’ slavery & colonialism — almost as if liberal democracy came from hypocritical slavemasters & white supremacists who put their own material interests o’er their claimed ideals. ¡Damn those cynical woke postmodernists for acknowledging historical reality & not inventing an alternate reality where liberal democracy didn’t do all those bad things!

Radical skepticism is like the acid that eats through every container. And sure enough, postmodernism’s skepticism undermined itself. How could it be for anything if all truth claims, including its own, are masks for power?

Well, if you’re not an idiot who relies on traditional authorities to bequeath unto you “truth”, the answer is that you can accept that you may ne’er know the ultimate truth, but can still try to get as close to truth as possible thru, you know, the scientific method. ¿Do these idiots not know that skepticism is ’hind not just woke postmodernism, but also rationalism — that the scientific method involves questioning & testing hypotheses as much as possible to really know they’re true, & that testing for biases is a part o’ that? It sounds like this postmodern skepticism is a threat to rationalism only if one relies on one’s own ability to scrutinize evidence & not, as I said, traditional authorities who are just as biased as you & me. It’s almost as if just like how this “liberalism” o’ theirs is a ( very weak ) mask for their conservativism, their “rationalism” is just a mask for the traditions that they hold with no evidence whatsoe’er — almost as if their definition o’ “science” is, “all my centrist homies call this science, so it must be science”.

Identity and oppression now took center stage. Society is best understood not as an association of autonomous individuals but as a congeries of groups contending for dominance and organized into hierarchies.

The stupidity is amazing. ¿When has history e’er been ’bout “autonomous individuals” magically free from any social influence & not “groups contending for dominance & organized into hierarchies”? ¿What was the Roman Empire but a group contending for dominance & organized into a hierarchy with a monarch @ the top? ¿Were all the histories o’ the Roman Empire woke? ¿If I acknowledge that the US is a group o’ people with a shared culture is that woke? ¿Should I pretend that there are no countries or social classes & that we’re all just Robinson Crusoes in our own virtual world, unaffected by anyone else? ¿Are you woke for not talking ’bout autonomous individuals thruout this whole article but woke leftists & rightists contending for dominance & organized into hierarchies?

Because some groups dominate and oppress others, not all standpoints are suspect; marginalized groups’ vision is less distorted by the dominant narrative.

“Woke” people don’t e’en think that: ¿have they ne’er heard feminists talk ’bout women being manipulated into being misogynist themselves by the dominant ideology? No citations for any o’ these accusations, by the way: apparently “rationalist liberalism” is just making shit up ’bout people, just like MAGA. ¿Are the postmodernists eating the dogs & cats, too?

Identity thus confers expertise and oppression confers authority.

I will grant them, that this line comes close to a genuine flaw in leftist philosophy, but which these writers are, unfortunately, too incompetent & myopic to see. Leftists, who in contrast to the “cynicism” claim oft fall into karmic romanticism ( think Marx’s promise that the lowerclass would inevitably o’erthrow the upperclass ), oft conflate their sympathy for the downtrodden — their “goodness”, in a moral sense — with competence — their “goodness”, in a skill sense — when the tragic reality is that yet another aspect o’ privilege is better education: it is, in fact, this knowledge discrepancy that can help powerful classes keep control o’ lower classes. This doesn’t contradict the fact that upperclasses could lie to serve their own interests, howe’er: being smarter or mo’ rational does not make one mo’ moral or honest.

Now equipped with a worldview which justified their own claims of epistemic privilege, second-wave activists welded onto the original postmodernist engine an assortment of progressive ideologies, including post-colonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and intersectionality.

& now we’re just throwing out “woke” buzzwords that don’t tie in with the 1st part whatsoe’er & have nothing to do with postmodernism. Liberals have no problem with these things, so, again, Rauch outs himself as right-wing, if not outright far-right. Fuck gay people for thinking they deserve to be present in sociology in any way, I guess. I would love to know his preference o’er critical race theory when it comes to race: critical race theory is probably the least anti-western, anti-white o’ theories ’bout the unquestionable fact that European powers enslaved & dehumanized black people on the basis o’ their appearance, arguing that it came from self-interested moral justifications from white people, rather than any inherent evil or irrationality o’ white people. Presumably, Rauch would rather we lie & pretend slavery ne’er happened: that we engage in historical revisionism so we can lie & pretend liberal democracy was all sunshine & rainbows. Sounds a lot like what the so-called woke right is doing. ¿Who is like the neofascists again?

This compound of radical relativism and left-wing ideology, Pluckrose and Lindsay argue, then hardened into its final form, a third wave which asserts, in practice, the absolute truth of postmodern principles and themes. The third wave thus came to embrace exactly the sort of dogmatism and authoritarianism which the first wave of postmodernists had set out to challenge and overthrow. The end result was a bit like a battle rig in a Mad Max movie: a bolted-together, incoherent, yet potently weaponized contraption which eventually became known as Woke.

@ this point I literally can’t understand what makes the “woke right” different from these “liberals”: the unironic use o’ the word “woke”, capitalized, as if ’twas an evil virus; the cringe comparison to a sci-fi movie; the histrionics o’ comparing a bunch o’ dorks in academia being @ worst narrowminded to Stalinism. I’m assuming that this is all just trauma-dumping on Rauch’s part: he said something stupid & some dastardly wokester had the audacity to dunk on his dumb ass & ’cause Rauch is too much o’ an idiotic bitch to argue back, he just hid ’way to his substack to call them names & make shit up ’bout them ’hind their back where he can’t be challenged.

Its incoherence, however, proved to be its secret weapon. Because it was unmoored from any commitment to objectivity or consistency, Woke could work both sides of every street. It was simultaneously egalitarian and authoritarian, skeptical and dogmatic, transgressive and intolerant, cynical and sanctimonious, revolutionary and bureaucratic. Whatever you wanted, it offered.

This is the only accurate thing Rauch e’er says in this article, with the only caveat being that these are attributes applied to a vague, imaginary group by fascists, not self-applied. Yes, paranoid fascists like Rauch do indeed accuse their enemies o’ inconsistent flaws, with no evidence o’ any happening, so they can maximize the power o’ their 2 Minutes Hate program gainst the enemy Emmanuel Goldsteins: the “woke” are both moral relativists who dare to question traditional narratives & also dogmatic in that they only believe in their beliefs & think other beliefs are stupid, just like e’ery other ideology in the universe. “Liberals” like Rauch certainly aren’t dogmatic in their raging hate boner gainst socialism, no… They’re transgressive & intolerant: they transgress traditional sexual norms, like accepting LGBTQ+, but are intolerant o’ pedophilia, just like how the founding fathers transgressed monarchy but were intolerant o’ homosexuality. Clearly if you are tolerant o’ things tradition doesn’t tolerate, you must tolerate e’erything else, too. They’re cynical ’bout the present & sanctimonious ’bout the future… that’s not e’en an inconsistency, dipshit. They’re revolutionary & bureaucratic, unlike the US, which has a bureaucracy & was founded on revolution: again, you can’t revolt gainst an existing government & form a different government, as that’s hypocritical based on my artificially simplistic criteria. Anyone who supports an Iranian revolution that doesn’t lead to pure anarchism is a hypocrite & we should be against them — ¡good point!

Even better, its radical skepticism, rejection of norms, and revolutionary energy made it seemingly impervious to rational arguments and moral objections: a “perfect rhetorical fortress,” as Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott call it in their 2023 book The Cancelling of the American Mind.

Yes, when I hear someone use stale memes like “cancel culture”, I totally take them serious as scholarly experts, not ol’ fogies butthurt ’cause nobody wants to read their shit ’cause it sucks. Yes, clearly it’s that “radical skepticism” that makes them impervious to your “rational arguments”, not the fact that you’re all shit debaters.

Objecting to Woke’s hypocrisy, inconsistency, and empirical shoddiness got you mocked, disqualified, and personally attacked.

¡That’s freedom o’ speech, bitch! Go cry ’bout it some mo’. The audacity o’ this cowardly ho to whine ’bout personal attacks, when this article is full o’ nothing but that. Also, audacious to talk ’bout “empirical shoddiness”, when this article has barely any sources, & what sources do exist are just entire books that are pop nonfiction books by random “entrepreneurs”, nothing actually academic. If this bitch turned this article in as a paper to any college I’ve seen, he’d get an F, & then blame it on the woke & not the fact that he’s a lazy, illiterate hack.

So where does the right come in?

“O, yeah, I was s’posed to be criticizing the right, who I am totally against, which is why most o’ this article is blaming the left, who are really to blame for e’erything”.

Rauch goes on to argue the right’s lack o’ interest in postmodernism in the 70s to 90s — when the left was s’posedly all ’bout that postmodernism — due to their political successes, especially after the collapse o’ communism, but that they s’posedly developed interest after the disasters o’ the Bush administration leading to widespread disillusionment with conservative politics. So far this is Rauch @ his most coherent & accurate, but their are still obvious inaccuracies.

1, there is still no evidence that the right has any interest in postmodernism; & in fact, whene’er I see the right talk ’bout it, like Jordan Peterson, it’s negative & associating it with the left & Marxism. This is because Rauch’s definition for postmodernism is still idiotic & wrong: it’s the qualitative aspects that he applies to it, not the actual definitive qualities. It makes ’bout as much sense as him calling the Mongolian Empire “Marxist” because he thinks Marxist governments are authoritarian & violent & the Mongolian Empire was authoritarian & violent. Being incoherent & disingenuous long predate postmodernism: the right acted the exact same way under early-20th-century fascism, which is actually the influence, & which was also notoriously incoherent & disingenuous. ¿Has he heard some o’ the “theories” that Hitler spouted ’bout race? Ironically, by making this nonsensical & slanderous conflation o’ postmodernists with neofascists, he is engaging in the same incoherent & disingenuous slop propaganda the neofascists do & he accuses postmodernists o’ doing ( having, ’course, ne’er actually read any postmodernist theory ).

2, he doesn’t explain why conservativism was starting to succeed in the 70s & 80s to being with. The reason is ’cause acknowledging the cause would hurt liberalism: it’s ’cause liberalism had failed in the 70s: the US & UK had started to experience low growth & high inflation, which was blamed on the Keynesian policies o’ the time, which led to the idea that they don’t work, either, from the leftist point o’ view, ’cause not e’en a welfare state could prevent capitalism from its contradictions leading to crisis, or, from the conservative point o’ view, ’cause government intervention in the market is bad. Since the Cold War led the left to be politically subdued & the split ’tween the left & liberals caused by this further weakened liberals, this left conservatives the succeed.

Actually, I’m remembering he did before, ’twas just a very stupid explanation: the dastardly postmodernists tricked people into supporting them instead o’ liberals, & liberals were all weak li’l beans who couldn’t defend themselves. This is stupid & wrong & my explanation makes mo’ sense & is generally accepted by people who don’t have an insane ax to grind like Rauch.

What that might be was foreshadowed in Stephen Hicks’s 2004 book on postmodernism, well before the right’s postmodern turn. Discussing the postmodern frame of mind, he observed that, along with its relativistic and egalitarian themes, “we hear … deep chords of cynicism.” He continued:

Principles of civility and procedural justice simply serve as masks for hypocrisy and oppression born of asymmetrical power relations, masks that must be ripped off by crude verbal and physical weapons: ad hominem argument, in-your-face shock tactics, and equally cynical power plays. Disagreements are met—not with argument, the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation that reason can prevail—but with assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force. … Having rejected reason, we will not expect ourselves or others to behave reasonably.

So this is just the age-ol’ shallow “I just want people to be mo’ civil” take, held by rich people whose only missing privilege is an insecurity that makes them particularly vulnerable to verbal criticism, in contrast to the mo’ dire materialist needs o’ the lowerclasses. “¿Why feed the starving or stop massacring middle-easterners when people could not hurt my feelings instead?” is the rallying cry o’ these people, & it’s obvious why nobody outside their tiny minority takes them seriously. It is also, again, hypocritical: this article is full o’ ad-hominem attacks, judging political orientations based on the s’posed strategies implemented, — none given evidence, by the way — not their truthfulness. Despite Rauch’s claim to caring ’bout truthfulness, he ne’er bothers to test the truthfulness o’ anything he’s criticizing, criticizing them based purely on him not liking them for unexplained reasons. ¿“[I]n-your-face shock tactics? ¿You mean like sending a sentence from Marx rewritten to not have the parts for which Marx was actually controversial sent to conservatives for a cheap gotcha? Meanwhile, this whole article is full o’ assertions & animosity. ( My critique is, too: but I don’t pretend to be civil: fuck this dumbass ).

I shrugged off Gamergate as random online craziness. In reality, it debuted the Joker-like nihilism of the postmodern right.

It’s @ this point that I realize that Rauch’s entire understanding o’ politics — both past & present — is just in the form o’ memes. Neofascism is nothing mo’ than “Joker-like nihilism”, e’en tho there was nothing particularly rightwing ’bout the Joker. Arguably, some o’ his rebellious, anti-cop elements could be mistaken for leftwing if one based their understanding o’ leftism on shallow surface appearances rather than the actual underpinning. This is what annoys me the most: Rauch tries to pretend to be an ol’-fashioned intellectual like William F. Buckley ( the guy who infamously threatened to punch Gore Vidal in the face ’cause he called him a mean word, he was so civil & reasonable ), but clearly doesn’t read any books or have any education & engages in the same brain-rot TikTok politics o’ today — which, as I just showed, isn’t much worse than what passed for “intellectualism” back in the 60s.

He then goes on to s’posedly describe ( I haven’t read it, so he could be making e’erything up ) the esteemed sociological investigation, Kill All Normies, which, if his depiction is accurate, is e’en mo’ infuriatingly slanderous & stupid as Rauch’s article. She has the gall to compare neofascist “nihilists” to Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was imprisoned up to his death by literal fascists, you lying fuck face. There is no evidence whatsoe’er that Gramsci was nihilistic @ all, nor a postmodernist, I might add: he was a materialist, like all classical Marxists. These fat fucking losers who like to call themselves fighters for individualist freedom would ne’er have the balls to go to prison for the rest o’ their lives by insisting on standing by their principles e’en in the face o’ a regime as brutal as fascist Italy. You lying, lazy sacks o’ shit who would rather pontificate ’bout both-sidesism in the face o’ neofascism are the cynical nihilists.

When I asked James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Rick Sint (a gifted amateur intellectual historian of postmodernism)

Translation: a crank. ¿Why don’t you ask any actual academics, Rauch? ¿Is it ’cause they’ve all been hypnotized by the woke virus? ¿Or is it ’cause you’re too illiterate to understand them? Again, Rauch has no idea what liberalism is: liberals, for better or for worse, tend to side with academia as the form o’ scientific inquiry with the highest standards. Historically, fascists were the ones who invented conspiracies ’bout academia & intellectuals all being in line with the “Jewish bourgeoisie” — or in modern terminology, the (((woke))) — in favor o’ random idiots with forceful assertions with which they already agree ’cause fascists are just as cynical & dishonest as Rauch projects onto his ideology enemies.

In a recent video, Carl Benjamin, a right-wing British YouTuber and commentator who goes by the online pseudonym Sargon of Akkad, explicitly acknowledges the woke right’s debt to postmodernists. “The problem with the woke left wasn’t the woke part, it was the left part,” he said.

So our only example o’ a rightwinger who praises postmodernism ( as well as “wokeness”, which is e’en mo’ absurd ) is some dipshit YouTuber that nobody cares ’bout anymo’. ¿When is the last time anyone’s heard o’ Akkad? ¿During GamerGate? Nowhere does Rauch investigate if Akkad actually knows what postmodernism is or actually studied any postmodernist theorists, ’cause Rauch doesn’t care: his entire politics is aesthetics, not truth. He doesn’t know anything because he doesn’t read anything that isn’t pop yapping that already gels with his vibes, so vibes is all he knows. ¿Does he know or care whether or not these vibes are disingenuous? ¡’Course not! This is why he calls himself a rationalist liberal, but does not exhibit the traits they have: he has no idea what liberalism really is & just likes the vibes. He almost certainly hasn’t e’en read Madison or Burke.

OK, I’m skipping ahead ’cause this article is long & repetitive. The subchapter, “Outdoing the OG”, adds nothing new & reiterates the same sloppy analysis. But the stuff under “Weaker than it looks” stood out to me:

Today’s conservative coalition, however, seems less stable than the Reagan era’s. Woke, while scary to the public, was never as scary as the Soviets, who aimed 40,000 nuclear warheads at the United States and its allies. Moreover, Woke peaked in 2020. The political drubbings it has received since then—the collapse of the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements, the backlash against DEI and radical gender ideology, and Trump’s victory in 2024 and his subsequent governmental assault on every Woke bastion—have left the postmodern left damaged and reeling. As its salience wanes, its power to act as coalitional glue will weaken, too.

1. Rauch is apparently too ignorant to know that the right has mo’ dire conspiracies than just “the woke”, like the “white replacement theory” or Christian eschatology.
2. ¿When did Black Lives Matter collapse? I guess black lives don’t matter anymo’: ¡go ahead & keep killing innocent black civilians, cops! ¿Does Rauch think that caring ’bout black people being killed by cops is “woke” & not serious? ¿Does he not believe George Floyd or Trayvon Martin were killed? ¿Does he believe they deserved it? Like all pathetic cowards, Rauch doesn’t elaborate why he says this — tho he’ll reiterate endlessly in this long trudge o’ an article how irrational those evil postmodernists are, the real threats to livelihood — beyond pithy phrases ’cause doing so would reveal he’s fine with innocent civilians being killed by the law if they’re not rich white people like him. Real liberal o’ him to not oppose state assassination without trial. Liberals ne’er cared ’bout “innocent until proven guilty” or the like. Him handwaving civilian murders isn’t cynical or nihilistic @ all.

Meanwhile, the mutually repellant forces within the contemporary conservative coalition are stronger than they ever were in the Buckley-Reagan era. Christian nationalists, libertarians, and MAGA populists share no common view of the role of government or the common good. Traditionalist conservatives’ call for a Christianized, post-liberal order is thoroughly incompatible with modernist conservatives’ embrace of individualism, freedom, and dynamic entrepreneurship. And both sit crosswise with the postmodern right’s leering nihilism.

Ignoring this “I’m totally a liberal, guys” conservative romanticizing “modernist conservatives” ( “modernist” being from the 80s, which was 40 years ago ) whose idea o’ individualism was suppressing gay behavior & whose idea o’ freedom was supporting fascist dictatorships in Latin America, ¿where are the ( presumably right, since Rauch clearly has no idea what a libertarian socialist is ) libertarians? Libertarians have been irrelevant for o’er a decade @ this point: they are not in the contemporary rightwing coalition @ all. Also, a nitpick: Christian nationalists & MAGA populists are not conservatives; they’re fascists: not all rightwingers are conservatives. Neither o’ these people want to conserve society, but want to radically recreate a fantasy reactionary society, as fascists always do.

The modernist right draws on a tradition dating to the Magna Carta, and the traditionalist right on a tradition dating to Plato. Like them or not, they have been around a long time and will be around a lot longer.

¿Evidence that being ol’ means it will last longer? That’s the opposite o’ how aging works. This is literally “appeal to tradition”, a logical fallacy. & Liberalism also draws from both; lots o’ things do. ¿Why would we need to keep e’ery single idea inspired by ol’ ideas? Again, this idiot is mixing up vague associations with the things themselves: just because the “modernist right” takes inspiration from a really ol’ thing doesn’t mean it’s really ol’ itself — ¡it has “modernist” right in the name, for fuck’s sake! By definition it can’t be ol’: ¡then it wouldn’t be modern! This fuck face is so illiterate. Marx took inspiration from Epicurus, ¡so clearly Marxism has been around since the time o’ Ancient Greece!

By contrast, because right-wing postmodernism is cynical and anti-rational, attempts to theorize it will fail, just as attempts to theorize left-wing postmodernism have failed.

By the way, ¿you know what’s much older than either the Magna Carta or Plato? Cynicism. ¿Why are we assume that it will go away, but not capitalist principles, which are much younger?

The very features which give postmodernism its supernova energy when it bursts upon the scene—its ability to be all things to all people and to bulldoze but not build—require it to win victories quickly, before it falls apart.

It’s funny, because postmodernism has been round for probably longer than Rauch has been alive, & the same could probably be said for predictions that it’s totally going to fall apart, guys; & I can bet that long after Rauch is dead there will still be an identical dipshit who claims that it’s going to collapse, guys, just you wait.

In “Journey to Babel,” an episode of the original Star Trek series, the Enterprise encounters an alien spacecraft whose unprecedented speed of attack the Enterprise cannot match. Eventually, Spock figures out that the enemy ship’s advantage is not technological but tactical: the aliens are on a suicide mission and therefore can use speeds that will destroy their ship. The postmodern right is a bit like that. It can win by doing what no one else in politics will do, but it must win quickly, before its momentum stalls, its coalition ruptures, and its failures become glaring.

Nothing says intelligent like getting your politics from a pop sci-fi where space explorers engage in badly-choreographed fights with alien monsters in cheap rubber suits.

For liberal and traditionalist opponents of the right-postmodern onslaught, the imperative now is to do what liberals and moderates failed to do when the postmodern left rushed academia: recognize the radicalism, nihilism, and revolutionary ruthlessness of the postmodern phenomenon; organize aggressively to stall and then defeat it; and tirelessly expose it as self-serving, parasitic, and hollow. In other words, as postmodernists love to say—unmask it.

This the kind o’ socially-incompetent understanding o’ politics & power only a complete shut-in like Rauch surely is could believe. Yes, the way to stop fascists who stomp on anyone they can is to… talk ’bout how bad they are a lot. ’Cause nobody realized Trump was bad & a liar till Rauch came onto the case.

Also, ¿what is the alternative to Trump? Right now progressives are pushing the Democratic Party further to the left. The biggest Democrats in the media right now are Mamdami & AOC, both o’ whom describe themselves as socialists. But again, Rauch’s idiotic narrative completely ignores materialist issues like stagnant wages & rising prices that caused people to become disillusioned with “modern conservatives” & liberals in the 1st place & bizarrely thinks that liberals lost because they just sat round while postmodernists took o’er academia ( ne’er mind that the public has also become disillusioned with academia in general due to its perceived elitism: MAGA is hardly in love with academia ). I want to reiterate: Rauch thinks liberals having obscure parts o’ academia sniped from them by postmodernists is mo’ important to the average American who ne’er so much as touches academia than economic issues, racial conflicts, immigration, foreign policy… ¿How out o’ touch can you be? So out o’ touch that you’re useless for giving any political answers that don’t sound like they came from an alien, that’s how. Have fun shaking your fists @ the cloud in your shroud o’ obscurity & irrelevance, ol’ conservative man pretending to be a liberal: the fascists & socialists — or “postmodern right” & “postmodern left”, as your alien kind call it — will be out here doing actual politics.

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& here’s the punchline: we learn that this group also includes Francis Fukuyama, the infamous liberal who proclaimed the late 90s as the “end of history” with liberal democratic capitalism’s victory, only to end up later admitting himself how laughable that was in the face o’ Brexit, Russian invasion o’ Ukraine, & a Trump presidency. But as Marx said ( quoting Hegel ): history repeats itself, 1st as tragedy, then as farce.