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--- politics:philosophy:shadowpolitics [2025/03/21 20:14] – ["Woke" vs "Antiwoke"] Owen Mellema
+++ politics:philosophy:shadowpolitics [2025/03/30 16:18] (current) – [“Antiwoke”, Transgenderism, and Pedophilia] Owen Mellema
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 We can now also understand why political groups suffer when everyone agrees with them. They suffer from their members having an excess of Sameness. The political group will therefore lose it's relevancy and it's group feeling, and members will go to other political groups to get their group feeling fix.
-===== "Woke" vs "Antiwoke" =====
+===== "Wokeness" and the Rise of Fascism =====
 Like many of my thoughts, the concept of shadow politics came to me as I was trying to understand modern US politics. In particular, I was trying to understand how fascism, which I consider to be one of the worst possible political ideologies, had managed to gain a foothold among the population. More broadly, I was interested in how a liberal society had produced so many people that were opposed to liberalism.
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 Society still keeps ticking along, even when at war with itself. When an individual is faced with two contradictory facts that it believes to be true, it will attempt to create a reasonable synthesis. The same thing happened with reactions to the “woke left”. For instance, liberals would hear chants like “Abolish the Police”, and attempt to explain that they didn’t //really// want to abolish the police, they just wanted reform”. That would be a reasonable synthesis if that was really what they wanted — however, the left quickly would say “No, we really mean we want to abolish the police”
-The problem with placating the woke left is that the very act of placating them opposed their true intent. The group didn’t want effective change, it wanted relevance.
+The problem with placating the woke left is that the very act of placating them opposed their true intent. The group didn’t want effective change, it wanted relevance. In pursuit of relevance, the group engaged in a number of unsavory activities, from rioting to vandalism. We saw the rise of “cancel culture” where they would try to prevent speakers from speaking, often with physical altercations. We also saw the rise of cancel culture being used against average people expressing their opinion online.
-In pursuit of relevance, the group engaged in a number of unsavory activities, from rioting to vandalism. We saw the rise of “cancel culture” where they would try to prevent speakers from speaking, often with physical altercations. We also saw the rise of cancel culture being used against average people expressing their opinion online.
 Their rhetoric was also designed to provoke. One thing that gets mentioned again and again by neo-fascists is the words of a Canadian professor who made the statement “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide”. Now, this was just one guy, but it still caused quite a stir. Many white nationalists are of the opinion that white genocide will occur if they don’t take power, as a result of this and similar rhetoric.
-The stage is now set for the birth of neo-fascism. Fascists (and I mean literal, Hitler-loving, Jew-hating fascists) have always existed in the United States. From time to time they would have their gay little marches and go back to whatever else it was they do in their spare time. Things changed, however, in 2015, ahead of the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton made a statement stating that the “alt-right” was supporting Trump. At that point, very few people really knew what the alt-right was. In response, Richard Spencer, a fascist, declared that he was the head of the alt-right. In my opinion, this was the beginning of the Trump-era fascist movement.
+The best description that I have heard of wokeness is that it is “illiberal progressivism”. To many people, myself included, the “progressivism” part didn’t bother them. What bothered them was the illiberalism.
+The stage is now set for the birth of neo-fascism. Nazis (and I mean literal, Hitler-loving, Jew-hating fascists) have always existed in the United States. From time to time they would have their gay little marches and go back to whatever else it was they do in their spare time. Things changed, however, in 2015, ahead of the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton made a statement stating that the “alt-right” was supporting Trump. At that point, very few people really knew what the alt-right was. In response, Richard Spencer, a nazi, declared that he was the head of the alt-right. In my opinion, this was the beginning of the Trump-era nazi movement.
+Many people take it for granted that nazism, a failed 19th century political movement, will naturally arise again. However, if we top to examine this more closely, we will see the strangeness of it. The time in which Nazism formed has long-since passed away, social conditions have changed enormously. Fascism is not like Communism, it's founding text does not make general claims about the human condition, but rather specific claims about the state of Germany. Furthermore, the basic ideas of nazism were based upon an appreciation for the German race. For a non-german person, living in a different country, in a different era and set of social conditions, to be a Nazi would simply be an absurd act of cosplay. It would be like me, an American living in 2025, being a Jacobite.
+For this reason, in the past, I have made the somewhat controversial claim that Nazism is not a real political movement. I made this claim because I didn't believe that they were motivated by a desire to institute a specific set of policies. I believed that even if they did gain power, and sent all the Jews to camps (or whatever else they claim to want), they still wouldn't be happy. I have since realized that this is true of many more political groups, and that politics *itself* is a shadow of the true shape of the group.
+But why, specifically, Nazis? Why is the opposition to "wokeness" -- illiberal progressivism -- illiberal conservatism (aka, fascism) instead of liberal progressivism? There are two answers. Consider firstly that fascism has been used as a left-wing bogeyman for many years. This is a reflection of the founding myth of communism -- that Communists and Fascists are inherently at war with one another, like two sides of a divine dual, ever since the USSR beat back the Nazis in WWII. (This is a nice story for Communists, if you forget the fact that Hitler and Stalin were allies during the first half of WWII, working together to conquer Poland.) To Leftists, many things are a form of fascism, including capitalism, police, the military, and even the very institution of government itself, depending on who you ask.
+In pursuit of proving that their enemies are fascists, leftists continually did violence to the term. Fascism is a word that already is not well-defined, again considering that is based on a failed 19th century government. The best definition, it seems, is that "fascism is as fascism did". Yet fascists did a lot of things. Hitler was a proponent of road safety, is road safety a form of fascism? Hitler's brownshirts rioted and protested, is rioting a form of fascism?
+The problem was that, like many words, the word "fascist" went from being descriptive to being pejorative, and then, as leftists used the word more as a term for non-leftists, it went from being pejorative to again being descriptive -- this time meaning "a person opposed to leftism". The swastika lost it's meaning as a symbol of racial dominance, and gained a new meaning as a symbol of resistance against leftism.
+As I had previously stated, leftists purposefully gave non-leftists many reasons to be opposed to them. They deliberately fanned the flames of discourse to provoke an emotional response to their own group. Then, they labeled enemies of that group "fascists". The fact that an actual fascist movement emerged in the United States was made almost inevitable.
+An example of this phenomenon is the group known as "Antifa". The word "Antifa" is short for "anti-fascist". This group engaged in a variety of anarchic thuggery, vandalism, violence, and wanton destruction of property. The reaction from moderates, of course, who //don't// want to be victims of vandalism, etc, would be to disavow the group. Some in the group countered this by saying "If you are opposed to anti-fascists, doesn't that make you a fascist?" This is a logical fallacy, one can be opposed to both anti-fascists and fascists at the same time, because "Antifa" doesn't have a monopoly on opposition to fascism. Yet, it's clear that this rhetoric could cause people to reinterpret their stance not only on Antifa, but also on fascism. ("Perhaps fascism isn't so bad?")
+Indeed, the Left, faced with the specter of irrelevance, produced its own arch nemesis, in the form of fascism. This was a manifestation of its own shadow, the opposite of its ego, an encapsulation of everything that it believes to be evil. Both Leftist and Fascist now form a codependent relationship. After all, the rise of fascism has caused people to look to leftists more than any time in our nation’s history, and fascists rely on leftists to motivate their crusade against modernity.
+It is easy to see why fascism was the group’s shadow. The foundation of “wokeness” is postmodernism, and the foundation of postmodernism is the critique of power structures. Yet, paradoxically, in order to achieve its ideals, leftists would need to institute their own power structures, which would necessarily have all the flaws of the systems they were critiquing. Their greatest enemy was themselves, personified as fascism. This may have created a “death drive” — as I call it, the “suicidal urge” of the group.
+The second reason that fascism emerged was the same reason that the “Woke Left” itself emerged — people, especially young people, had an excess of Sameness. Many fascists, in fact, are former liberals and libertarians themselves, until they had a “moment of revelation”. Like with the “woke” crowd, they found that liberalism had lost its groupfeel, and turned to fascism in an attempt to regain it. To many fascists, the lack of groupfeel itself is a flaw in liberalism, whether they understand it or not. This is why many of their critiques of our modern society hinge primarily on aesthetic bases — “it’s bad because it fosters a passive ennui”.
+Fascism has been steadily growing amongst the youth ever since 2016, but around 2020 it seems to me that there was an inflection point. I attribute this to the end of Trump’s first presidency. The theory is that having Trump in office rendered extremist rhetoric pointless. After all, if your guy is in office, what, exactly, is the suggested improvement? You can’t get more Trump than Trump (even if many fascists had an outright disdain for Trump, following his support of Israel). 2020 was also an insane year, probably one of the most insane years that I can remember, with COVID, the George Floyd protests, and January 6th (2021, but who’s counting).
+In 2016, I predicted that a billionaire, influenced by right-wing propaganda, would take over a social media website and spread right-wing talking points extremely far and wide, kickstarting an explosion of right-leaning people, including fascists. This uncanny prophecy, which seemed unthinkable at the time, came to pass in 2022, when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, renaming it X. Now Elon, who, for lack of a better word, seems to be completely deranged, is running the show, and seems to be boosting his own tweets and the tweets of right-wingers, retweeting literal nazis. As I predicted, fascism entered the mainstream.
+===== “Antiwoke”, Transgenderism, and Pedophilia =====
+Now we must consider the other side of the political equation, that is, the Right. It seems to me that there are about six segments of the modern Right, give or take:
+ - Concerned conservatives, whose allegiance to the Trump regime is predicated on its support of certain issues, such as abortion or immigration
+ - The MAGA-Loyalist crowd, who hangs off of every word that Trump says
+ - Fascists, Racists, Authoritarian Aesthetes, Psuedomarxists, etc
+ - The “traditionalist” crowd
+ - The amoral crowd, who disdain all forms of morality as social control
+ - The Neo-Reactionaries, occultist intellectuals who encourage the birth of oligarchy.
+The last five groups mix and blend together, at times more distinct from one another, at other times indistinguishable. It’s a huge tangled mess of ideas, often contradictory, but all united in opposition to one thing: “wokeness”. This is what I call the “Antiwoke Right”.
+You’ll notice that whenever I use terms like “woke” and “antiwoke”, I put them in quotation marks. I do this because the word is really only pejorative, and no one opposed to “woke” can even attempt to give a coherent definition of it. At least with fascism people could point to an actual thing that existed at some point, whereas “woke” is nothing more than the vague notion of a thing. This vagueness is what allows for the “antiwoke right”  to stick together despite being composed of many contradictory notions. “Woke” can, and does, mean just about anything. It means masks, the belief the vaccines work, the idea that the earth is round, the notion that science is the best way to approximate truth, etc. It doesn’t help that many of them are anti-intellectual, meaning many don’t even consider a coherent worldview a worthwhile thing to have. (Furthermore, the plurality of types of rightists lends itself to an incredibly diverse array of notions — which effectively doesn’t matter, because they will ally with each other anyways)
+While the “Woke Left” mainly critiques power structures, then the “Antiwoke Right” mainly critiques so-called degeneracy. “Degeneracy”, like “woke”, is a word that has no meaning, thus, it really is only a gesture at a feeling of disgust, “wrongness”, decay or general non-conformity. You might notice a big problem with this — people have different opinions on what is disgusting, for instance. One must remember, however, that being a shadow of the Left means that it is the Left’s true enemy, meaning that it is opposed to humanism (the idea that humans themselves have value), and thus they are apathetic about fairness, equality, or human dignity. So, the real shape of the movement is opposition to things that //this group of people finds disgusting//, and that they must also take power, so that their standard of wrongness becomes the true standard of wrongness.
+Consider an ugly person. We can’t help finding the person ugly, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t extend the same cordiality to them as we do to our fellow man. We do this because we believe in the basic notion of universal human dignity, that everyone deserves to be treated equally, on the basis of their actions. It’s difficult to imagine a society in which it would be considered not just socially acceptable to be cruel to ugly people, but socially required, as a form of group participation. Yet, the “antiwoke right” is already engaging in this form of group cruelty. In the same way that we could say to be engaging in “performative virtue” in our treatment of ugly people, it may soon be that we will engage in “performative vice” in our treatment of them. I have called this “vice signaling”.
+In the same way that fascism is the left’s shadow because they are inescapably authoritarian, degeneracy is the right’s shadow because they, themselves, are inescapably degenerate. In the literal sense, this group of people want us to “degenerate” (ie, to regress) backwards, away from the shining beacon of “The West”. Consider, for instance, anti-intellectualism. Part of what made the west so powerful was our beliefs in certain ways of thinking, such as rationalism, and the triumph of reason over blind faith. And yet, the right is increasingly skeptical of the institution of science (critically, they are critical of it without offering a real substitute).
+Furthermore, the idea of degeneracy is, itself, degenerate. It is the base instinct of disgust taking precedence over our higher virtues. In this way we quite literally regress to the level of the uncivilized savage, who acts on emotion without thought. And, of course, it must be pointed out that within the “antiwoke right” there are contingents of people who lack any sort of moral conviction or fiber — in my above dissection of the right, I call this group of people the “amoral crowd”. Even outside of this group, many do not take pleasure in the higher art of the West but rather continue to consume facile forms of entertainment.
+I don’t (necessarily) say this to levy a criticism of the “antiwoke right”, but rather to explain its obsession with degeneracy, and why “the degenerate” is the shadow of the group.