What is wrong with you people?

Congratulations on owning the libs. Was it worth it?

Right, I’ve got something to say. It isn’t nice, and I’m not even sure it’s fair, but I’m watching the same news as you and I’m not in the mood to dance around anyone’s ego at this time.It seems to me that we are facing a moral test, and so far the failure rate is alarming.

Have you ever seen someone bomb a test so badly it’s almost heroic? I once knew a kid who got so high before his spoken French exam that he did the whole thing in English with a rrridiculous accent. A more extravagant flunk I have never seen-until today. Today’s test is a lot easier than high school French.

There’s just one question:

You wake up one morning to find a nakedly authoritarian regime running the world’s most powerful country on earth. Culture is becoming violent and vengeful. Crackdowns on immigrants, women and sexual minorities have already begun. You’ve always thought of yourself as a decent, tolerant sort. Do you:

1. Give up. Keep your head down, self-censor and obey in advance.

2. Refuse to normalize this shit. Summon the courage to stick to your principles.

3. Look on the bright side - at least you got to own the libs!

I feel like this one ought to be easy. So I’m genuinely shocked to see so many of self-appointed guardians of the enlightenment flame, however cautiously…. celebrating? Since November, when it became clear that Cheeto Mussolini was coming back for seconds, my feeds have been flooded with recent ex-liberals rehashing the same takes they’ve stammered for years - over and over, as if they’re desperate to believe that they made the right call here, that they’re still in the world where the most significant threat to civil society is cancel culture. As if it still made any sense to roleplay a public sphere where the greatest danger to democracy is woke kids being dicks on the internet.

What’s more, it turns out that woke kids with their pronouns and their protests are apparently to blame for provoking this hard-right takeover in the first place. That seems very convenient for the hard right and their apologists, in the same way that when a woman wearing a short skirt is held responsible for provoking sexual violence, it tends to work out well well for rapists. Look what we made them do.

Yascha Mounk was among the many gloaters apparently excited to see Team Social Justice take damage that is “to a significant degree self-inflicted.

‘A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world…has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms.”

This is an accurate pen portrait of the American hard right. But Mounk is not describing the hard right. He is describing everyone to the left of himself, with the special venom that most reactionary or ‘gray’ liberals still reserve for whatever it is that the young and zealous are doing today that makes them feel stupid, uncool or, worse, guilty. I say ‘most’ because there are significant exceptions. Scott Alexander, in his excellent endorsement of Kamala Harris, tried to persuade his many readers that while, even for him, the 2024 election sometimes felt like a personal psychodrama between himself and the straw social justice warrior in his head:

“Our first priority is to punish the bright-line violation, lest civilization collapse…I would feel like a total hypocrite with no ground to stand on if I claimed to be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.”

A chilling number of influential thinkers - many of them to the left of Alexander - who have yet to demonstrate a shred of the same foresight and integrity.

Part of the problem is that the language of the new right feels uncomfortably familiar. That’s no coincidence - that substantial chunks of the Trumpist and European neo-nationalist propaganda catalogue are straight-up plagiarised from the axioms of angry ex-liberals. The obsession with keeping trans people out of women’s sports, the panic about policing school bathrooms, and the outrage at the mere existence of non-binary people - it’s all hijacked from the so-called ‘Gender Critical’ movement that has been one of Britain’s biggest recent cultural exports since, well, Harry Potter. The fixation on ‘cancel culture’, the recasting of social justice activists as the ‘intolerant left’ who are determined to destroy free speech , the demonisation of ‘woke ideology’ - all of this was road-tested by mainstream reactionaries before the far right decided to ride it to victory.

Obviously, it’s got to be uncomfortable watching the far right make enormous gains using the same arguments you’ve been making for years. I can only imagine how mortifying it must be to hear the words you’ve spoken twisted by demagogues to make a grave for democracy. It would be crass to point out that some of us really have been sounding the alarm about this for a long time, so I’m not going to - firstly because we don’t have time, and secondly because, as mentioned, a fascist takeover is not the time to act like a smug, gloating prat.