David Brooks has now declared his Proud Boy membership, because Western Civilization needs someone to comment on its discontents.
Irony was supposed to have died on 9/11, but with David Brooks’s admission of “feeling like a loser” while smoking weed, the myth of Western Civilization ignores a shibboleth made banal by WWII and now rendered impotent by reactionaries.
Today’s reactionaries need some academic cache and why not go to the “classics”. Hipster conservatism has now found its Trumpian home, or at least a place to find a common wardrobe now merged with the goals of the “Alt-Right”. Brooks Bros, yo.
The invention of a “culture war” has often been waged by those most ignorant of Western Civilization. Brooks is no different with rationalizations common to Beltway pundits, although his pride probably is less identified with blue truck nutz, and he probably doesn’t venerate housewifery.
The next Brooksian project will be to revitalize the interest in drinking medicinal alcohol.
On Friday Brooks published a column titled “The Crisis of Western Civilization,” in which he traces the current “crisis” back a few decades to when people, “especially in the universities, lost faith in the Western civilization narrative” and began to believe (and learn) that “Western civilization is a history of oppression.”
Explains those PBS News Hour appearances because who doesn’t like Glee’s show-tunes….
Also if you are a “Proud Boy” you are not allowed to masturbate more than once a month unless it is within a yard of a woman. (Given, this seems an unlikely scenario for such men.) Also you have to wear Fred Perry shirts — a fashion generally favored by skinheads. No word though on whether or not they also go around lecturing people on how the original skins were not actually racist but rather a working class reaction to the mods, something, something two-tone ska. I feel like they probably do not. I figure they probably just latched on to the Fred Perry shirts because Republicans have never been particularly good at coming up with their own shit.
David Brooks just needs that Proud Boy ink and Conor Lynch gives a good analysis of irony being on life-support.
The great irony of Brooks’ piece, of course, is that the “illiberal authoritarians,” whom the author denounces as enemies of Western civilization — that is far-right populists like Trump and French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen — are also the ones who purport to be its true defenders.
Indeed, the entire “alt-right” is a reactionary movement established on the idea that Western culture is being attacked by both internal and external enemies (and for white supremacists like Richard Spencer, Western culture and whiteness are more or less synonymous).
At last week’s demonstrations in Berkeley, California, where alt-right extremists and “antifa” protesters came to blows, Shane Bauer of Mother Jones reported one alt-right protester wore an American flag over his face and claimed to have come there to “defend Western civilization,” while a group of self-proclaimed “Western chauvinists” were led by Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of Vice magazine. Although Brooks would no doubt reject any comparison to these unseemly characters, he seems to share their contempt for rowdy college students who haven’t read Allan Bloom — namely, “fragile thugs” and “Social Justice Warriors.”
It is an anti-Semitic (and anti-intellectual) conspiracy theory which posits that 20th-century intellectuals from the Frankfurt School — who all happened to be German Jews and Holocaust survivors — founded what is called “cultural Marxism” to overturn traditional values by promoting things like homosexuality and political correctness, with the ultimate aim of undermining Western civilization (Not coincidentally, the Nazis had an almost identical conspiracy theory in the 1930s known as “cultural Bolshevism”).
The popular YouTube vlogger and editor of Infowars.com, Paul Joseph Watson, recently promoted this unhinged conspiracy theory in a video screed railing against American popular culture:
From the 20th century onwards, postmodernists, moral relativists, critical theory-espousing cultural Marxist nihilists began to seize control of society. Postmodernism seeks to erase the distinction between high culture and popular culture. They want to turn everything on its head.
The goal, continued Watson, is to “completely undermine the foundation of Western civilization and leave us open to subversion and capitulation.”
In his video, Watson goes on to identify reality TV and the narcissistic personalities who infest the genre as a product of “cultural Marxism” — which is more than a little ironic, considering his favorite politician is a narcissistic reality-TV star. (Perhaps Watson and his narcissistic colleague Alex Jones should investigate whether President Trump is part of the cultural Marxist conspiracy).
While Watson blames the emergence of reality TV on cultural-Marxist bogeymen, critical theorists do not stoop to anti-intellectual or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and would point out to Watson that reality TV is a profitable business venture that helps keep millions of Americans distracted from the fact that their incomes have stagnated over the past 20 or 30 years while CEOs’ paychecks have skyrocketed...
At the end of the day, the collapse of Western civilization — and perhaps all of civilization — is less likely to be a consequence of cultural factors than economic and ecological ones. Indeed, just a few days before the Brooks column was published, the BBC posted a noteworthy article titled “How Western civilization could collapse.” According to the computer models of system scientist Safa Motesharrei, the leading factors will likely be “ecological strain and economic stratification.”
This sounds more like Karl Marx than Oswald Spengler, and it indicates that it will be people like Donald Trump — rather than Syrian refugees or irritating Social Justice Warriors on Tumblr — who will bring about the end of Western civilization.
It also demonstrates how badly we need more thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer today, and fewer YouTube conspiracy theorists and clueless Beltway columnists.
www.salon.com/…
Helpfully, in November 2001, linguist Geoffery Nunberg undertook his own investigation into the phrase's origins in the Los Angeles Times, providing a nice timeline:
"The Age of Irony died yesterday," wrote Andrew Coyne in Canada's National Post on Sept. 12, a report confirmed a few days later by no less an authority than Vanity Fair editor and Spy co-founder Graydon Carter: "There's going to be a seismic change. I think it's the end of the age of irony." Roger Rosenblatt came to the same conclusion in a Time essay that decried the intellectuals and "pop-culture makers" whose detachment and unseriousness now seems a dangerously empty pose: "The ironists, seeing through everything, made it difficult for anyone to see anything."
www.theatlantic.com/...