There has been a spate of profiles about the “new right” lately and I’m coming to the view that the media is mostly cooperating with these freaks by writing this sort of shit about them. (See Ron Howard/JD Vance.) This is different from the question of whether exposure is warranted; that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the way the media creates these fetishizing profiles—nicely written, sure, sometimes—that skirt around the real point: these people are repulsive, they are fascists.
You might consider this after the horrific mass shooting in Buffalo, which was part of the same comprehensive movement of which the “new right” seeks to be the intellectual vanguard. Glenn Greenwald’s pathetic contortions aesthetically lead the way in the attempt to distance the broader right from a mass murderer who believes everything they do—(and I ask genuinely, re: Glenn: Is it reflexive? Is this motherfucker paid to defend Tucker Carlson; what kind of groveling piece of shit would do it for free?)—but it’s pretty clear to anyone who bothers to look what’s happening. These people are not “novelties” or really interesting in any way; they are not worth considering as anything except what they are: fascists, freaks, who—particularly in the case of many in the new right crowd—are mostly too cowardly to admit what they actually want.
With the news that Roe v. Wade will likely be overturned, there is plenty of blame to go around. Obama, RBG, George Bush—above all our pathetic, collective cultural inability to meaningfully stand up for the right to abortion, a pretty apt metaphor for liberal culture as a whole. One target of blame in some corners of the internet was Elizabeth Bruenig, columnist for the Atlantic (formerly NYTimes and WaPo).
Bruenig occupies the uncommon space of token “leftist” at a mainstream outlet—with a significant caveat. She openly identifies as a pro-life Christian, and this has made her the target of both suspicion and hostility by those who see her as unreliable.
Personally, I have been hesitant to participate in the Bruenig bashing—for one thing, because I think it’s often misogynistic. But I found her Atlantic piece post-leak disturbing.
It was a sort of vague lament for… the state of children? I’m not sure. There was a weird #savethechildren thing going on, but functionally it managed to say—“woe woe, what a sad society we live in”—without, in the rather prominent platform she has, taking a position on anything serious. Bruenig fetishizes the “Nordic model”—which is OK in a vacuum, I guess—but it’s time to get over it. It’s time because 1) that shit is not happening in the United States and 2) it’s built on the backs of the non-white world anyway. How anybody can gauge even relatively good European social democracy as morally enlightened and be highly educated suggests at best naivete, at worst an embrace of white supremacism.
I really don’t know Bruenieg’s views; she may just be unable to deal with abortion as it conflicts with core beliefs. But then, let’s treat those beliefs seriously, and not as a curiosity.
At this point, we might also ask: does her opinion matter? The “left” is more a concept than anything; the American left has no mass organizational power, though I would emphasize there are of course many “left” organizations and groups doing powerful work on a smaller scale.
But assuming the term “leftist” has some value, is Bruenig’s view appropriate, and can she be considered “part” of the left? And to that I’d say—in the light of the events of the last few weeks—unequivocally, no. To the extent the term has any meaning in 2022 America, it means you must meet certain thresholds, one of which is being unequivocally pro-choice in resisting a coordinated and vicious onslaught on women by the right. No couching it in bullshit “woe is us” arguments in the Atlantic. You’re either aggressively pro-choice, or you accept the other view.
Whether Bruenig is a “liability” to the left—whether a liability can exist in the absence of any power—is debatable. But if her “socialistic” views can only be expressed in the context of being anti-choice, she’s hardly an asset.
Substack regularly sends out little promotional emails—most of which I ignore—but one recently caught my eye. It was a brief interview with Glenn Loury about how he had effectively monetized his substack.
I have no particular beef with Loury, who strikes me as one of the more banal anti-woke guys. This substack email was a little absurd, though, because—CLEARLY—a major ingredient to securing attention or success on this platform is leaning into the anti-woke thing. I find this pseudo-intellectual shtick ridiculous—and also economically bizarre, mostly because all of these people (Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Jesse Singal) pretty much say the same thing. Glenn Loury does too, if (in appearance) maybe slightly more reasonably. Shocking how many people will pay for this! Seems like an overinflated market. Maybe it’s not a huge number in the scheme of things. But I digress.
I have no real problem with substack’s platform; I think it works pretty well as a blogging site. I find the aesthetic a little less inspiring than I did before it became so popular and filled with money-making reactionaries and VC dollars but… so it goes. Maybe it will be worth switching to Ghost or something but hardly seems necessary for the shit I write here.
Still, substack occupies a funny place in this interminable conversation because while anybody can put anything here—“free speech,” right?—most of the offerings of note lean right, and again, all say variations of the exact same thing. The fact that people want to hear it—and will pay to hear it—says less about a given individual (Glenn Loury, whoever)’s success in monetizing their “ideas” and more about the grotesque feedback economy of the internet, and probably even more about the pseudo-intellectual pretensions of the kind of people who in 2022 pay for an Andrew Sullivan subscription. Fucking imagine that. Paying to read that shit.
So what to say about Loury? I don’t know. I can’t take it seriously. Loury’s arguments, like most of these people’s, seem to be regurgitated 90s culture war shit. You can agree that “corporate wokeness” is shallow while also understanding that lending defensible cover to the real fascists out there is disgusting—which is exactly what these defenders of classical liberalism, or whatever they want to call themselves, are doing. So either these people have no spines, or they’re idiots. Not sure it matters which.
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