The nihilism of the Woke Right

My Brews & Choos buddy highlighted this thought-provoking essay Jonathan Rauch posted yesterday in Persuasion; the whole thing is worth a read:

Sheer aggressiveness is perhaps the postmodern left’s and right’s most salient feature. Because they are revolutionary movements, they recognize few legitimate boundaries and observe few behavioral constraints; because they are anarchic, they have no grand plan or object beyond achieving dominance. Their signature style of no-holds-barred aggression was observed on the left more than 20 years ago by Hicks, in Explaining Postmodernism: “Postmodernists,” he wrote in 2004, “are the most likely to be hostile to dissent and debate, the most likely to engage in ad hominem argument and name-calling, the most likely to enact ‘politically correct’ authoritarian measures, and the most likely to use anger and rage as argumentative tactics.” Delete “politically correct” and you have a pitch-perfect description of the postmodern right.

The modernist right draws on a tradition dating to the Magna Carta, and the traditionalist right on a tradition dating to Plato. Like them or not, they have been around a long time and will be around a lot longer. By contrast, because right-wing postmodernism is cynical and anti-rational, attempts to theorize it will fail, just as attempts to theorize left-wing postmodernism have failed. The postmodern mindset is inherently parasitic and opportunistic, good at shocking its opponents and manipulating language but not good at building and governing. The very features which give postmodernism its supernova energy when it bursts upon the scene—its ability to be all things to all people and to bulldoze but not build—require it to win victories quickly, before it falls apart. Today, the postmodern left clings to sinecures in humanities departments but is a spent force intellectually, its methods exposed as a tired bag of tricks. The postmodern right’s performative outrages are likewise quickly becoming formulaic and self-parodic.

In one future, the postmodern right overreaches, splinters its coalition, is exposed as a fraud, and suffers political defeats in 2026 and (more importantly) 2028. That provides time for opposing forces to slow it, expose it, and defeat it. In another future, the postmodern right wins those elections and uses the period to 2032, and possibly beyond, to consolidate its power, corrupt or demolish institutions that stand in its way, and use coercion to neutralize political opposition.

For liberal and traditionalist opponents of the right-postmodern onslaught, the imperative now is to do what liberals and moderates failed to do when the postmodern left rushed academia: recognize the radicalism, nihilism, and revolutionary ruthlessness of the postmodern phenomenon; organize aggressively to stall and then defeat it; and tirelessly expose it as self-serving, parasitic, and hollow. In other words, as postmodernists love to say—unmask it.

Nihilists always lose; our job is to keep them from destroying us as well.