I used to joke that there were two kinds of people in the world: people who loved high school and people who didn’t. This admitted over-simplification captured something important to me, though: I felt that there was something determinative about experiencing misery while young, and that it was a kind of experience so formative that it would be genuinely difficult, if not nearly impossible, for someone who had not shared this experience to understand what it was about.
Nowadays, I find myself telling people that if you haven’t directly experienced “cancellation” (which we might broadly define as being openly targeted within any number of social or professional milieux for the purposes of harming your livelihood, reputation, or both), you will probably find it difficult to understand just how changed the world feels to people who have experienced this phenomenon.
Who’s a bigot?
The word “bigot” comes from French, and originally meant a sanctimonious person, a religious hypocrite. One (contested) theory holds that the word came from the Germanic oath “bi God;” the French thus derided the Normans who used it as those “by Gods”, those hypocrites. The obvious irony here — at least in the case of my own experiences with cancellation — is that bigot is the progressive left’s anathema of choice when it comes to smearing liberals who aren’t on board with the latest progressions in dogma. If you don’t agree that trans women are women, or that all white people are complicit in white supremacy, or that all cops are bastards, well, you are on the wrong side of history — just like the Republicans, the “religious right”, and the white nationalists.
In this fashion, a minority faction on the left has refashioned the classical liberal pride in “live and let live” tolerance as apostasy. One might even say that it is the very pride most liberals take in tolerating dissent that has made the woke takeover of media, medicine, law, corporations and the White House so easy: it actually only takes one or two well-placed, motivated individuals — whether at the ACLU or the American Academy of Pediatrics — to reset policy to please the activists. I personally used to have great faith in what I presumed was a core reasonableness of my fellow travelers on the left side of the political spectrum; thus it was incredibly destabilizing to learn that I was just as smearable as a “bigot” as any self-professed conservative.
Abigail Shrier feels that times are so bad that encouraging equal-but-opposite activism from the Republican side, such as the kind that Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis in engaged in, might be the best remaining option. But even in a state like Florida, the GOP doesn’t have the reach it would require to solve via state compulsion issues that have permeated into every aspect of corporate-consumer culture. Less and less remarked on is the fact that the recent legislation didn’t actually revoke Disney’s special tax status — it only set a date by which it would do so, leaving plenty of time to renegotiate once DeSantis has cashed in the political chits with his base.
In a very real sense, both parties are engaged more in repeating the pieties of their extreme wings — for what true conservative would let the state decide what type of show you could take your kid to see? — than they are interested in, or capable of, building successful, long-lasting, pragmatic governing coalitions.
Both sides now
In their current capture by extremists, I suggest that the two major political parties are essentially more the same than they are different. Neither one is capable of speaking for a supermajority of the country’s citizens, and yet both of them are obsessed with the right to rule from a minority position.
For the Right, the main vector of preserving minority rule involves promoting myths of illegitimate and/or rigged elections when they lose (and possibly, as of 2024, simply overturning any election that doesn’t go their way), leveraging the small-state power advantage in the Senate, gerrymandering, preoccupation with voter “fraud”, and packing the judiciary. It took a while, but they got their Supreme Court.
For the left, the main vector of preserving minority rule involves institutional capture (pretty easy going, considering the pre-existing liberal bent of the Cathedral), cancellation of anyone against the woke project, gerrymandering, preoccupation with voter access, and subsidizing/encouraging young people to spread its gospel through employment in the public sector. This is the reason why @libsoftiktok has it easy: the school teachers the account often highlights feel entirely confident not just in their cultural dominance, but also in their ability to influence others.
So why are both parties stuck on the edges, leaving the so-called “exhausted majority” essentially politically homeless? I have come to feel that it is due to an essential nihilism — a rejection of the goals, risks and compromises fundamental to human community and human happiness — common to both these would-be ruling minorities; a nihilism hat most Americans simply reject. This nihilism disguises itself well, as both extremes scream ever louder about injustice and freedom, liberty and rights. But what speaks even louder is the apathy of the American electorate when faced between essentially two forms of the same poison. I explore each briefly below.
Queer at any cost
Anyone who criticizes the medicalization of a growing cohort of teenage girls who suddenly say they aren’t really girls is quickly accused of “transphobia,” and removed from the good graces of the progressive left. What clearly looks, walks and quacks like a social craze spreading among young women, Joe Biden thinks is just like being gay; this is how the White House can issue a directive that equates trying to reconcile a young person to her natal sex as equivalent to attempting to counsel someone out of homosexuality.
Far beyond the victories for gays and lesbians, the “Lfabet” movement (LGBTQI+ etc.) has been co-opted by the far left for its own purposes. Under the mantra of protecting “minorities”, it uses accusations of bigotry as the carte blanche to settle any conflict of rights — women’s single-sex spaces, parental rights, the protection of vulnerable minors — in its own favor. The main thing wrong with society, this movement contends, is the oppressive majority standing in the way of its most “marginalized” citizens living their truth. Masterfully, a minority so totally in control of the party in power has managed to simultaneously insure its symbol’s ubiquity while decrying its continued victimization. This is how you have cities covered in the updated — politicized — chevroned Pride flag and activists decrying the “hypocrisy” of Glenn Youngkin’s (the Republican governor of purple Virginia) Pride month events. Under the new rules of what Carol Horton has named “post-liberal progressivism,” a religious Republican who is comfortable with legalized gay marriage is still the enemy.
The reason for the preservation of the animus has to do with the fact that the law — which is forced to negotiate conflicts of rights, and indeed is only invoked when such conflicts have risen to the attention of the state — is no longer the focus of the woke. It is not good enough to have legal rights: instead, hearts and minds must be changed such that each vulnerable person’s “identity” can be affirmed. This is where we get trends like the elimination of standardized tests that show disparate racial outcomes, or the disingenuous “healthy at any size” campaign, or references to “birthing people” in a pre-labor class attended and taught by women. The goal is purportedly compassion, but it is not a request — it is a demand. If “gay rights” was a political struggle to remove legal differences between hetero- and homosexuals in law, the Lfabet movement is a far broader quest to enforce right-think both within the left and beyond.
Gender ideology seems to reflect this odd mix of militancy mixed with the old lefty compassion. On a Callin with Wesley Yang, Leor Sapir notes that there are actually two opposed meanings of the term “transgender”.
[O]ne meaning is moving between categories of gender that are thought to be essential, even fixed, innate, some even argue biologically rooted in the brain, and most importantly, good — that it’s good for somebody to discover their authentic female self.1
This is the side of the house that gives us Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair and the cri de coeur that trans women are women: because gender is a feeling, and women are a gender, not a sex.
But then there’s another understanding of “trans” and “gender” where gender is a system of social oppression. This understanding comes from radical feminism, queer theory, and so “trans” means moving beyond a system of oppression, so to be transgender means to not be identifiable according to any gender categories.
This other side is where we get straight people with funny hair calling themselves “queer”, as well as the “non-binary” trend, where people feel the need to label some aspect of themselves as belonging to a part of the population that is somehow against the systems that oppressively define and limit human identity. It is an internalized persona of political resistance and of radical acceptance (for its similars, anyway) in the face of a world set on forcing it to conform.
Sapir notes that how this distinction gets lost:
Now of course in our easy-going, Joe-Bidenesque, mainstream discourse, all these things are just lumped together because it’s all kind of of progressive and compassionate and who cares.
But Sapir cares, because these overwhelmingly positive associations with both authenticity and acceptance are exactly what make it impossible for the left to come to terms with teenagers saying they will kill themselves unless they get hormones and surgeries.
If you look at the rationales given by policy makers, by teachers on the ground, by social workers, the rationales are therapeutic. They’re by in large, “these kids are suffering, if we just tell them that they are who they say they are, they’re not going to suffer as much; we want to try to boost their self-esteem in what ever way we can; we don’t want to them to kill themselves because they’re threatening to do that and everyone’s telling us that if you don’t affirm them, they’re going to commit suicide.” It’s really therapeutic — and all of the kind of ideological, philosophical arguments about what really is the nature of human sex differences, all of those are retroactively imposed in a way that makes it more or less coherent.
But Sapir’s point is precisely that the term “gender ideology” cannot give us this coherence:
If we want to understand why teenage girls are identifying as boys and seeking mastectomies, it would help us to recognize first and foremost that they are anxious to not become two-dimensional female stereotypes, and that they seek refuge in the most grotesque stereotypes of maleness. So how we understand gender, whether it’s a system of oppression or as categories that are innate and socially valuable and authentic really matters to solving these problems.
In short, the Lfabet people simply cannot identify any overarching reason, be it cultural or personal, for these young women to maintain their bodily health and reproductive function. They only see personal choice in the face of systems of oppression, and the resulting suffering. And so to this suffering they respond with “an excess of compassion, an excess of empathy… empathy unmoored from any rational assessment of the evidence,” as Sapir puts it, referencing the paucity of the data that shows the benefits of “gender affirming medicine”.
The Lfabet movement is unwilling — or perhaps unable — to see the misery of these adolescents as a function of anything other than a political culture that does not adequately “live and let live.” It sees no conflict — because it sees no difference — between these two “cover girls”:
The triumph of the therapeutic
Sapir’s use of the term “therapeutic” is interesting, for this same term has been used to describe the profound shift in Western Culture over the last several hundred years: a shift away from faith and toward what Philip Rieff called the therapeutic, by which he meant a culture focused on the needs and wants of each individual “self”. This is not a new critique, either — in a few years, Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud will mark its 50th anniversary.
In his 2020 book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, Carl Trueman discusses Rieff’s ideas in his attempt to provide a more proper historical context to the social changes they might be tempted to see as recent and rapid. These means, for example, thinking of the sexual revolution not in terms of changes since the 1960s, but since the 1760s:
Many Christians were amazed at how swiftly society moved from a position where in the early 2000s a majority of people were broadly opposed to gay marriage to one where, by 2020, transgenderism is well on its way to becoming more or less normalized. The mistake such Christians made was failing to realize that broader, underlying social and cultural conditions made both gay marriage and then transgender ideology first plausible and then normative and that these conditions have been developing over hundreds of years. They are therefore by now very deep seated and themselves an intuitive part of life. Acceptance of gay marriage and transgenderism are simply the latest outworking, the most recent symptoms, of deep and long-established cultural pathologies.
I can already hear the cries of “bigot” in response to the term “cultural pathologies.” And yet it seems clear to me that this Christian critique can see and name the origins of the unease felt by confused young women who are fleeing femininity like a house on fire. The no-longer-liberal left’s notion of radical acceptance, of blind affirmation of any psychological whim, is just more oxygen on the flames. If we are, as Trueman says, “all expressive individuals now,” then we can hardly expect the culture that brought us the revolution of the self to save us from its own cul-de-sac.
From a Rieffian perspective, what this present age represents is an anti-culture: a repudiation of the various regulations and regulative practices that characterized Western society until recently, particularly, though not exclusively, in the realm of sexual ethics. Behind this repudiation lies a deeper rejection: that of any and every sacred order on which they might be grounded, whether it be that provided by a formal religion such as Christianity, or a commitment to some broader philosophical metaphysics, such as that found in Emmanuel Kant.
Which brings us to the blind spot of the faction controlling the political right: it seems to believe that merely changing the laws of the land — by force if necessary — would be sufficient to reverse the changes it wants to see as political, rather than as a result of profound cultural shifts that Trueman traces all the way back to Rousseau and the Romantics. This is how we have a Republican party convinced that overturning Roe v. Wade, or encouraging the presence of arms in day-to-day life between the citizenry, will somehow improve the lives of Americans. Meanwhile, we have the history and data to show the contrary: women controlling their fertility, including post-conception, has always been a part of American history, whether the law wants to acknowledge it or not; the presence of guns marks America as an outlier, and as long as we have this many guns, we will continue to see higher numbers of gun-related suicides and homicides.
And the saddest part of all is this: the vast majority of Americans do not subscribe to the nihilist extremes of either party. Most Americans believe abortion should be legal and accessible, albeit with certain restrictions. Instead, it has been politicized and therefore — even when it was still legally protected nationwide — difficult to access. Most Americans believe that the level of gun violence in this country is unacceptable, and that the majority has a right to pass laws to reduce the carnage. Instead, it has been politicized, and the most conservative ideologue on the Supreme Court writes an opinion that will ensure the carnage continues.
And finally, the vast majority of Americans believe that it is insane to sterilize and mutilate children who are — understandably, given the messages they are now getting — confused about the relationship between their bodies and their sense of self. Instead, the very fact of puberty has been politicized, and the mainstream press ignores the reports from the young adults themselves who have been disappointed and destroyed by this misguided medical adventure. Meanwhile, the institutions captured by this Lfabet ideology, be they schools, media companies, or marketing and payment platforms, are relentlessly continuing to ostracize and deplatform their detractors.
As long as both parties remain beholden to their nihilist extremes, no political solution will be forthcoming. The Democrats and Republicans seem similarly content to ignore the vast middle and instead to impose ideological mandates through any means they are able to control, be it the Supreme Court or Etsy, state legislatures or Twitter.
Against such extremes, how can a happy majority find a way back to sanity?
Callin produces transcripts, although I’ve made adjustments for clarity. The quotes are taken from a section starting at around 1:37:25.