To those who got cold feet
Wanting change without shakeup is the game of madmen (and women)
Recently, an article in the NYT appeared which, predictably, sought to smear the dissident Right. It would all be a normal day if it weren’t for the person who was quoted at length as a now disillusioned former “insider” of the movement - Alex Kaschuta.
I first found Kaschuta because my friend
was featured on her show a few years back, I saw that she was providing a space in which people with unique viewpoints about the world (many coming from segments of the emergent new Right, which has been continuously growing over the past 15 years) could speak freely and were taken seriously. It was, of course, a great relief to see that novel or historically-grounded ideas from our side were getting the recognition they deserve. The concerns which under-girded all such discussion, implicitly or explicitly, were twofold: “why is everything so broken and terrible now” & “how do we move past it”. It is this exact purpose that Kaschuta, alongside others before and after her, have apparently forgotten.It’s necessary to take a brief detour from the subject at hand here, so we can better understand what is occurring. What is now termed “Dissident Right” was not always called that and it was, in fact, much less cohesive in the past than it is even now.
In the span of time between the converging of various spheres of niche internet subjects (whether those were “Manosphere” matters, anti-feminism, early 2010s “New Right” ideological spheres, or Gamergate) and the overt politicization of everything - brought on by the Left, often to their own detriment - a new generation of mostly young people - generally Millennials and Zoomers - eventually came to a set of ideas which became characterized, in broad terms, as “Dissident Right”. That morphing process saw many people, for one reason or another, crash out of the movement, over the years, usually supporting some earlier-stage and, frankly, more naive, servile, or self-serving, variant of the ideas which evolved into this new movement. The hack-”historian” Kraut was an early case, being unable to understand how utterly irrelevant his 20th century social liberalism is to the present day. Another famous example is “Elite Human Capital” guy, Richard Hanania, as well as pol-sci boomer James Lindsey, with his “woke right” nonsense, all of whom have followers with similar, irrational, political hangups. What they all suffer from is an inability to accept harsh realities, especially ones necessary to bring about actual change in the world, because of prior ideological commitments. In Alex’s case, this also seems true, but maybe not due to ideology.
As detailed in the NYT article itself and by the author in her attempt to explain herself here on this very site, the burdens of motherhood, combined with her actually listening to incel memes on the internet and the dire economic situation we’ve all found ourselves in during these past few years, contributed to a breakdown which, in her words, made her wish for the old managers of the establishment, rather than the populist upstarts of “the right”, like Donald Trump and the politicians he has inspired around the world.
I won’t comment too much on how she based her model of motherhood on sundress girls in wheat fields, because, from a certain angle, it is sad that she had her hopes dashed, on a different note though, it should have been obvious to all that memes are not a basis for living one’s life, no matter how wholesome a few of them are.
Lest I am accused of creating strawmen, let us continue this article by arguing with proper quotes from her defense:
“I know a lot of people in my audience will say: It’s still better than the alternative. He, at least, cares about what I care about. Without theorizing about Trump’s personal values, which are controversial in their own right, I can still understand that view. You trust the plan, or at least that whatever the plan will turn out to be, it will be more aligned with your values and interests than whatever the left had in store. I used to agree, but watching the reality of what is happening politically at the end of the funnel of right-wing memes, both in the US and Romania, has been very sobering.
I don’t think the meme machine is capable of governing, and it seems like it is actively antithetical to competence. The destruction of flawed but functional institutions, trillions of wealth for your own constituents, and the affordance of immense executive powers to people who have proven to be disconnected from reality in proportion to how loyal they are to Trump and the right-wing memeplex are serious. Not to mention the more salient point for those who believe in a more right-wing future and finding actual solutions to the grievances on this side: the fracturing of a formerly relatively cohesive coalition against the excesses of the left and the discrediting of the right wing more generally.”
Here Kaschuta mentions “flawed but functional institutions”, I really wonder which ones these may be? the security departments that spy on their own citizens? the courts that annul or cast doubt on elections because the establishment doesn’t like the outcome of democratic vote (like in her homeland, Romania, or as it is happening now in Poland)? or the judges who mire administrations they don’t like in legal battles so that they can’t enact the agendas they were voted in to do? Which of these institutions are “competent” really? is the standard of competence their ability to oppress the political right? Because that’s certainly the only thing they seem capable of achieving properly. On every other metric, from crime by foreigners, to disorder in the cities, to economic downturn and the continuing exploitation of economies by foreign and domestic financiers to the detriment of the local average citizen there is nothing that those institutions have done or planned to do.
“The Liberation Day Tariffs are one of the first online-right meme policies. They are a perfect storm of congruence between the ascendant memes of “multipolarity,” “America First,” and “reviving manufacturing will bring back the 1950s social order,” and Trump’s hardened mind palace where he has been obsessed with both the trade deficit with China and the idea of tariffs as revenue since the 1980s.”
In order to tackle the economic part of this article, let us remember that Kaschuta wrote it back in the first few months of the return of Trump’s tariffs, when everyone was freaking out about their short-term and long-term economic impact. One could say that I am being harsh here, given my benefit of hindsight, by saying that this was always a ridiculous fear, but I remember explicitly outlining this position back then as well, so I think I am perfectly justified to point this out (not to mention that this article has been in the works since April anyway). The US economy is, for the most part, no worse than it was under Biden. Maybe it isn’t as good as Trump’s claims of triumphalism would have one believe, but that’s a completely different matter. To the question “did Trump ruin the US economy?”, the unequivocal answer of every honest person ought to be “he did not”, for that is the actual reality we live in.
“DOGE is also a meme policy. Despite there doubtlessly being ways to make the government more efficient, the guiding meme here is “the establishment is corrupt and wasteful.” For the true believer … it is natural to boast about a massive budget deficit reduction before assessing if the reality on the ground matches the priors set by the meme. The projected $2 trillion in cuts are now looking more like at best $100 billion, and both spending and the budget deficit are higher than under Biden at this point in the year. The details of the DOGE cuts are meme-powered in themselves, gutting USAID (clearly a longhouse-adjacent empathy racket) but also targeting the Department of Energy and programs like the LPO, which are critical to enabling the nuclear energy expansion promised as part of the administration's economic revival.
There is this interesting trend within the sphere of people who engage in these ideas (the sphere with which Kaschuta broke relations, through this article and her New York Times interview), where they will see a policy they’ve advocated for being implemented and go “sure, he did what I asked but he did it the wrong way! If he had done it in the obscure and arcane way I dreamed up in my head it would have certainly worked much better”. I have only one honest reply to this whenever it comes up: what are we? 5 years old?
A man has gotten elected through help from some within the sphere, at the very least, with all of us knowing full well that: 1) he is not perfectly aligned on all matters with us, 2) that democratic politics in states as large and complex as ours is a game of limitations and 3) that political capital is always restricted and should be wasted as little as possible. Under these rules, it is perfectly understandable why a budget deficit cut would turn out less than ideal and why it may require cuts in things we would all consider useful. I don’t like it either, but the solution to this is the same one I’ve been harping on for a while now, if you don’t like your policy-makers, you must find a way to become one in their place, otherwise we’ll just keep being sore losers complaining about everything till the end of time. You don’t have to believe in democratic politics and you shouldn’t play the game the way they want you to, but you have to show up, because no matter how you protest it, this farcical game will keep going on until someone definitively puts the breaks on it.
“The deportations, as performed by this administration—whatever you think of the merits of mass deporting illegal aliens—are another meme policy. Numbers for FY 2025 are running about 5,200 removals (approximately 4%) behind the pace set in FY 2024 under Biden.”
Again, we are dealing with an artifact of the time the article was originally written in, now we are seeing large-scale operations against illegal immigration in the US and we are still seeing complaints about it from the side that has been wanting this for years at this point.
“The meme-first approach to policy means you and your supporters have already assumed the meme is accurate. You skip the vitiated organs of the establishment (every mainstream opinion on the matter) because it’s time to implement. It’s only logical to make bold, manly promises because your view of the world is presumed correct, so taking strong steps to solve the meme problem quickly is the best course of action. But pretty much all meme policies deform on impact with the rocky soil of reality.”
I completely agree, but I think this proves the opposite of what Kaschuta is trying to conclude from it. Meme policies may crash on impact against reality but that is the point. Only by actually moving from this spot we are stuck in, by actually doing things that would seem impossible or beyond the pale in yesteryear’s political scene will there ever be a way go beyond the zombified corpse of “capitalist liberal democracy” or whatever one wishes to call it, that we are stuck in right now. We are rotting away inside the corpse of a long dead system and the only way out will be its messy unravelling. That such an approach will involve some pain and hardship is certain, but that pain and hardship is *already* here! people in their 20s today, my generation, already cannot afford a house without becoming debt slaves for their entire lives, we can barely afford a new car if we save enough, we’ll get pensions in our 70s and the only solution to this, we are told, is to import infinity migrants to make our countries look like the horrific lands they arrived from. The situation is already tougher than any recent generation prior to the millennials was ever used to. Staying in the comfort of the devil you know out of fear of greater punishment, while he is already ramping up the bloodletting he inflicts on you, is more insane that trusting the whims of some eccentric orange millionaire on margins of high society.
“The online right signalling ratchet also selects for the most apocalyptic scenarios of the future lest the issues be resolved … Most people do not want to return to the social compact of subsistence agriculturalists. They’re nostalgic for the ‘90s. They want prosperity, safety, and meritocracy. They want to skip the DEI seminars and not get mugged on the street. Wokeness had already peaked around 2020, and its worldview has since been discredited in the eyes of a vast number of people, including a large proportion of the elite. It’s not dead yet, but a bumbling and cartoonishly evil right might be just the adrenaline shot it needs to reanimate.”
While I would agree with the assessment that most people truly are looking for a return of the 90s, it is exactly that notion from which they must be disabused. Ironically enough, it is often the Traditionalist side that is said to be inhabited by romantics longing for ages long past, yet here it is visible for all to see that the side with this problem is precisely the one of centrists, liberals, and average people today. There is no going back to the 90s, the prosperity that was then will never be replicated in the same way. What can be done, though, as I’ve pointed out previously, is movement toward a new type of prosperity, which will require, however, the defeat of all these 90s nostalgic sides and talking points in the public sphere, or, alternatively, their silencing. That is the only way we will ever move past the post-90s decline we are stuck with.
“… the online right is a machine for creating ever-escalating brainworms, personality cults, mental dissociation, haphazard and destructive policies, and in the end eating itself through purity spirals and the eternal struggle to prove you are the most based left standing at the top of the iron hierarchy of nature.”
In which way is this article not an authentic example of a purity spiral? Half the piece is about how Trump’s influences from the meme machine are less pure than they should be. The arguments here vacillate between critiquing the policy being mentioned in itself or simply its interpretation, with Kaschuta hiding behind whichever argument appears most convenient for the point she is trying to make.
“As for me, I didn’t change sides. I didn’t sell out. I didn’t take a deal. I looked at what was happening in front of me, in real time, and saw that it wasn’t leading to renewal. It was leading to rot. And if I can’t say that honestly, what the hell was I ever doing here in the first place?”
What of the rot we currently live under? is that not more important than the hypothetical rot we may get from the implementation of “crazy, right-wing, meme policies”? Governance in the Western world, as it stands, outright never works efficiently and is never done in the interests of its native people. That is the actual, observable, truth. Conjectures about Trump’s long-term impact are impossible to measure from here, outside of sensationalist doom-mongering, because it is a new situation that is in development as we speak.
It is often said in this sphere that “the only way out is through” but it seems that very few have managed to internalize this truth to any degree. Trump is not a savior, but he at least rolls the ball forward. The matter is not whether you trust Trump as a flawed man, but how much you actually want things to change. That is what separates cowards too comfortable in their present torture from people seeking a way out, even if it involves more torture in the meantime.
Finally, one has to ask, what is the difference between Kaschuta and co.’s argumentation and the old Churchill-ian “democracy is the worst system except for all the others” establishment apologetics? I’ll allow you all to ponder that with this audiovisual aid.