I think you're taking the ghetto culture comparison too literally. He's not saying they're stylistically similar, rather that they are both oppositional, and there are clear oppositional strains on the Right. For many of us (myself included) this is a feature and not a bug. It's verboten to say you believe in the Great Replacement theory - "it's not happening, and even if it was it's a good thing" - but to espouse it, as we do, is important to us despite that, if not because of that. That is, we are consciously taking a countercultural stance when we make these demographic arguments. It doesn't mean we do so to a hip-hop soundtrack.
Accordingly, I have much more sympathy with Hanaina's argument than you do, but I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. If we're united in the belief that a lot of what the dominant culture peddles is actively harmful, then why _wouldn't_ one be confrontational towards it? You agree with this in your article, so I think your objection is just to the comparison, which isn't the germane part of the argument.
I do agree with you completely, though, that Hanaina gives the Left far too much credit. It's true that in terms of educational attainment and income they're higher-status than the Right, but it's completely untrue that this makes them more discerning and less likely to believe in falsehoods. I raised the example in his comments section of Russiagate, and concluded that it's not that the Left is full of beautiful minds who are so much less susceptible to nonsense than the Right, but rather that their scams (like Russiagate) are bigger and actually work. It's a difference of degree. Dinesh D'Souza just makes stupid arguments and claims that appeal to stupid people. The national security state makes stupid arguments and claims, but we spend billions of dollars and years of effort chasing a Putin-shaped ghost around the room - and we make it high-status, to boot. (Remember Muller-mania? He was the toast of DC! AWFLs and soylibs were crowding in Asheville bars to watch his magic!)
Finally: to an extent, I think the respectability-Breitbart pipeline is somewhat real. I think some suburban college-ites really do think the Right is redolent of grease and televangelism, and the boomer conservative aesthetic really is something they want to stay away from. I'm not sure how to resolve this either, because the supposedly respectable Right (e.g. National Review) is so craven and pathetic that I'd take Breitbart over it 100 times out of 100; and the nice right (e.g. Claremont) is impotent and read by about four people (one of whom is me.)
The main point of the article is not to point out how conservatism is a valid counter culture. it's that it's filled with low status rubes who disgust high status chads. It's a different meaning from what we positively view as an oppositional culture
You are correct that Hanaina's view of what's "respectable" in the US is laughably outdated, but I still think you're getting hung up on the ghetto comparison. He's not saying "Stop the Steal is ghetto." He's saying "Stop The Steal is to mainstream thought as ghetto culture is to what I think of as mainstream American culture." If we allow, again, that he's outdated, and off by 40 years in his comparison, I think he's undeniably correct.
Like you, I don't think this is because liberals are that much more discerning. It's well-known that education causes its own biases and that smart people can reason themselves into believing all sorts of rubbish, especially since they're that much better at justifying their visceral reactions in intellectual, post-hoc terms.
But it is absolutely and clearly correct that Stop The Steal smacks of stupidity and desperation, despite actually having more factual basis to it than Russiagate. (It's still massively insufficient factual basis, to be clear.) That _is_ a problem with the Right that _does_ derive from status; the Right won't even demand, as does the Left, that its scams and falsehoods be halfway decent, that they be used for an end beyond simple grifting. The Left's scams and falsehoods involved the security state and Silicon Valley and changed the course of our history. The Right's scams involve pillows and gold coins. In other words: we're looting Foot Locker while they're on Wall Street.
And to repeat myself slightly, I think this huckster aesthetic actually does move the needle. I don't personally care about being a deplorable. A lot of people do. You frequently decry - correctly, in my view - the idealized view of rural, true-blue American culture that people on the Right hold as a fetish, and point out that for all too many people, the culture is Dollar General, Oxycontin, and the exact same music and video as city-dwellers have, only on slower WiFi. Surely you can see how bound up in this is the Right's overall aesthetic, the Right's overall vibe of "the main culture, only slower and not as good?"
This ties back to your citing Hanaina's description of resentment from this culture to the dominant culture. That's absolutely true and you've highlighted it yourself: every time there's a drag show for kids somewhere, there's a parade of men in your replies saying "Heh, I'd like to see them try that in Dry Lakebed, Oklahoma! We'd teach 'em a thing or two!" Then a week later there's a drag show for kids in Dry Lakebed, Oklahoma, and nothing happens except the reply guys seethe and pretend they're safe in West Dry Lakebed. The dead interior of this country has been completely colonized by the dominant culture, and those who resist it are absolutely low status and absolutely resentful of the fact. They're not even safe in their own towns, and they're mad about it, and nobody is listening.
If that is different from what we positively view as oppositional culture, that is of course unfortunate, but it's also true. We simply _are_ the poor relations to the dominant culture. Sometimes (e.g. in clarity over our demographic future, ability to discern basic reality in our cities) that puts us ahead of the curve, but in many other ways - such as the ones Hanaina describes, it places us at a huge disadvantage because we simply cannot demand better of our movement.
Though you seem to stress on Ghetto aspect of his article which is a terrible take, Mr. Hanania made some valid points in his article. As he pointed out, with conservatives being the oppositional culture, they take stand which are just oppositional and self-defeating. For example, instead of working towards reforming title IX, which Trump administration worked towards. Now, conservatives are the biggest champions of title IX, even though title IX is the reason we have a lot of DEI staff on college campuses.
Today Blacks enjoy high moral status in our society, conservatives as a oppositional culture make dumb arguments about how democrats are the true racists because they won in the south in 1950s. Or they elevate mediocre black senators like Tim Scott to show moral superiority ( democrats are the real racists trope). So, they cannot make any original arguments, instead their positions are always defined by showing democrats are bad. Instead of working towards undermining civil rights act which frankly is a source of all wokeness, supporters of DeSantis wrongly believe they can take over civil rights bureaucracy and fight the left, even though reducing federal bureaucracy is the only way to fight civil rights excesses.
“Black culture influences the norms and values of modern America much more than Hanania acknowledges. An oppositional culture today would be a rejection of black culture rather than analogous to it.”
Hanania recently claimed that Republicans are becoming the “low class” party. This seemed like an exaggerated claim considering that the Democrats are home to low class blacks, Hispanics, etc. And he wants the US to be flooded with millions more of these low class people. He seems schizophrenic on these issues.
I think you're taking the ghetto culture comparison too literally. He's not saying they're stylistically similar, rather that they are both oppositional, and there are clear oppositional strains on the Right. For many of us (myself included) this is a feature and not a bug. It's verboten to say you believe in the Great Replacement theory - "it's not happening, and even if it was it's a good thing" - but to espouse it, as we do, is important to us despite that, if not because of that. That is, we are consciously taking a countercultural stance when we make these demographic arguments. It doesn't mean we do so to a hip-hop soundtrack.
Accordingly, I have much more sympathy with Hanaina's argument than you do, but I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. If we're united in the belief that a lot of what the dominant culture peddles is actively harmful, then why _wouldn't_ one be confrontational towards it? You agree with this in your article, so I think your objection is just to the comparison, which isn't the germane part of the argument.
I do agree with you completely, though, that Hanaina gives the Left far too much credit. It's true that in terms of educational attainment and income they're higher-status than the Right, but it's completely untrue that this makes them more discerning and less likely to believe in falsehoods. I raised the example in his comments section of Russiagate, and concluded that it's not that the Left is full of beautiful minds who are so much less susceptible to nonsense than the Right, but rather that their scams (like Russiagate) are bigger and actually work. It's a difference of degree. Dinesh D'Souza just makes stupid arguments and claims that appeal to stupid people. The national security state makes stupid arguments and claims, but we spend billions of dollars and years of effort chasing a Putin-shaped ghost around the room - and we make it high-status, to boot. (Remember Muller-mania? He was the toast of DC! AWFLs and soylibs were crowding in Asheville bars to watch his magic!)
Finally: to an extent, I think the respectability-Breitbart pipeline is somewhat real. I think some suburban college-ites really do think the Right is redolent of grease and televangelism, and the boomer conservative aesthetic really is something they want to stay away from. I'm not sure how to resolve this either, because the supposedly respectable Right (e.g. National Review) is so craven and pathetic that I'd take Breitbart over it 100 times out of 100; and the nice right (e.g. Claremont) is impotent and read by about four people (one of whom is me.)
The main point of the article is not to point out how conservatism is a valid counter culture. it's that it's filled with low status rubes who disgust high status chads. It's a different meaning from what we positively view as an oppositional culture
You are correct that Hanaina's view of what's "respectable" in the US is laughably outdated, but I still think you're getting hung up on the ghetto comparison. He's not saying "Stop the Steal is ghetto." He's saying "Stop The Steal is to mainstream thought as ghetto culture is to what I think of as mainstream American culture." If we allow, again, that he's outdated, and off by 40 years in his comparison, I think he's undeniably correct.
Like you, I don't think this is because liberals are that much more discerning. It's well-known that education causes its own biases and that smart people can reason themselves into believing all sorts of rubbish, especially since they're that much better at justifying their visceral reactions in intellectual, post-hoc terms.
But it is absolutely and clearly correct that Stop The Steal smacks of stupidity and desperation, despite actually having more factual basis to it than Russiagate. (It's still massively insufficient factual basis, to be clear.) That _is_ a problem with the Right that _does_ derive from status; the Right won't even demand, as does the Left, that its scams and falsehoods be halfway decent, that they be used for an end beyond simple grifting. The Left's scams and falsehoods involved the security state and Silicon Valley and changed the course of our history. The Right's scams involve pillows and gold coins. In other words: we're looting Foot Locker while they're on Wall Street.
And to repeat myself slightly, I think this huckster aesthetic actually does move the needle. I don't personally care about being a deplorable. A lot of people do. You frequently decry - correctly, in my view - the idealized view of rural, true-blue American culture that people on the Right hold as a fetish, and point out that for all too many people, the culture is Dollar General, Oxycontin, and the exact same music and video as city-dwellers have, only on slower WiFi. Surely you can see how bound up in this is the Right's overall aesthetic, the Right's overall vibe of "the main culture, only slower and not as good?"
This ties back to your citing Hanaina's description of resentment from this culture to the dominant culture. That's absolutely true and you've highlighted it yourself: every time there's a drag show for kids somewhere, there's a parade of men in your replies saying "Heh, I'd like to see them try that in Dry Lakebed, Oklahoma! We'd teach 'em a thing or two!" Then a week later there's a drag show for kids in Dry Lakebed, Oklahoma, and nothing happens except the reply guys seethe and pretend they're safe in West Dry Lakebed. The dead interior of this country has been completely colonized by the dominant culture, and those who resist it are absolutely low status and absolutely resentful of the fact. They're not even safe in their own towns, and they're mad about it, and nobody is listening.
If that is different from what we positively view as oppositional culture, that is of course unfortunate, but it's also true. We simply _are_ the poor relations to the dominant culture. Sometimes (e.g. in clarity over our demographic future, ability to discern basic reality in our cities) that puts us ahead of the curve, but in many other ways - such as the ones Hanaina describes, it places us at a huge disadvantage because we simply cannot demand better of our movement.
Though you seem to stress on Ghetto aspect of his article which is a terrible take, Mr. Hanania made some valid points in his article. As he pointed out, with conservatives being the oppositional culture, they take stand which are just oppositional and self-defeating. For example, instead of working towards reforming title IX, which Trump administration worked towards. Now, conservatives are the biggest champions of title IX, even though title IX is the reason we have a lot of DEI staff on college campuses.
Today Blacks enjoy high moral status in our society, conservatives as a oppositional culture make dumb arguments about how democrats are the true racists because they won in the south in 1950s. Or they elevate mediocre black senators like Tim Scott to show moral superiority ( democrats are the real racists trope). So, they cannot make any original arguments, instead their positions are always defined by showing democrats are bad. Instead of working towards undermining civil rights act which frankly is a source of all wokeness, supporters of DeSantis wrongly believe they can take over civil rights bureaucracy and fight the left, even though reducing federal bureaucracy is the only way to fight civil rights excesses.
Richard Banania 🍌
“Black culture influences the norms and values of modern America much more than Hanania acknowledges. An oppositional culture today would be a rejection of black culture rather than analogous to it.”
Hanania recently claimed that Republicans are becoming the “low class” party. This seemed like an exaggerated claim considering that the Democrats are home to low class blacks, Hispanics, etc. And he wants the US to be flooded with millions more of these low class people. He seems schizophrenic on these issues.