Date rap

Conservatism is about not taking no for an answer

One of the many things I’m ashamed of having done in my youth — albeit far down the list, and even further down than the things I’m ashamed of having done in my non-youth — was when my college roommate and I stole a manuscript by a film critic we didn’t like from the copy box at our college newspaper, replaced all the modifiers with “good,” “bad,” “well,” and “badly,” and put it back. They printed it like that, and never issued a correction, and to this day I entertain the suspicion that we weren’t the only ones who were doing things like that. Sometimes I see an article in a political journal that I suspect isn’t just a bad job on the author’s part but, like our altered manuscript, a hoax meant to embarrass them. Take this from Eric Kauffman at National Review:

Viewpoint neutrality should be legally mandated

The bizarre headline (and yes, I know that sometimes authors don’t write or approve their own headlines, though in the current journalistic environment a writer is unlikely to get even that level of editorial support) gives the impression that a few words were accidentally lopped off; surely Kauffman can’t mean that all viewpoints must be neutralized; am I not to be allowed a preference for coffee ice cream over chocolate, or the works of Carlton Mellick III over those of Chuck Tingle?

But then you read on:

When a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes (after excluding the small minority of the sample who support him). So finds a survey of 20,000 university students that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) conducted in 2020. While people are free to discriminate however they wish in dating, this attitude bleeds into problematic spheres such as hiring and social toleration.

[Rips up a guy’s janitor position application] “Sorry, I just can’t see myself fucking him.”

This reveals the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism…

I can’t break in for every nonsense phrase he uses but does “young elite American” mean college student? Because if so he should just say that. Now I’m really convinced Kauffman wrote the headline.

…a belief system that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment or free speech in the name of the emotional “safety” of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexuality groups.

So wokeness is keeping MAGA guys from getting their wick dipped? Is refusing to date a Jo Jorgensen supporter also woke/snowflake/slur-of-the-moment? (I bet Kauffman could cook up an algorithm whereby refusal to date Trumpkins is 100% authoritarian but your score goes down by increments if you’ll consider supporters of other terrible Presidential candidates.)

In this left-modernist worldview, conservatives’ resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism mark them as moral deviants.

What’s sexual progressivism? Cunnilingus? No wonder these people have trouble getting dates.

Then Kauffman yaps a while about how, in order to generally get social results they desire, conservatives have to use power and force rather than persuasion (“As J. D. Vance, Michael Lind, and Richard Hanania suggest, conservatives will have to overcome their squeamishness about government to have any chance of holding back the woke domination of American institutions”). And he keeps on going back to dating. Did you know that only 23% of “Ivy League men” will date Trump women? (Kauffman finds this “highly discriminatory.”) “Non-Trumpist Republicans” are prejudiced against Trump supporters too! Conversely, other poll results show “that Trump supporters are considerably more politically tolerant than Clinton voters when it comes to dating.” Maybe they heard Democrats were good in bed.

Kauffman eventually appears to feel a need to explain why the refusal to date Trump supporters is significant of anything besides the sad recognition that one’s fascism is unattractive:

The problem of “affective polarization” has been well documented, in which people react negatively to those of the opposing political tribe, and this animosity spills over from politics into everyday social relationships. But what if polarization has an asymmetric effect on power in society? What if the elite is becoming a politically endogamous tribe that dominates positions of power in society, reserving them for those with the correct political pedigree?

Prejudiced groups with power have more ability to shape the life chances of out-groups than do prejudiced groups without power. In a world where institutions are increasingly dominated by the cultural Left, progressive prejudices have a powerful effect on the fate of conservatives and other political minorities who fail to conform to ideological dictates.

In other words, Trump voters are not unfuckable because they’re rude, chest-beating bullies who smell; they’re rude, chest-beating bullies who smell because “affective polarization” made them unfuckable. Morlocks are made, not born! Consider the lifetime of lovelessness and loneliness to which you elites have condemned them! Can’t you at least offer them the dignity of a hand job?

This embarrassing display reminded me of the recent news story about how the Trumpkin cranks and nuts who are conducting the fake “audit” of Arizona 2020 votes have generated a rash of sexual harassment claims:

Several women who’ve participated in Arizona’s partisan election “audit” are alleging sexual harassment by male co-workers, and they say management initially ignored their complaints.

One of the alleged victims provided Phoenix’s CBS 5 with statements from seven witnesses and victims corroborating her description of what happened…

According to the alleged victims, the primary offender engaged in unwanted touching, demanded dates from women he thought were attractive, and made comments about their appearances, asking them things like, “You showing off your butt?”

When they rebuffed his advances, he would insult them. He also reportedly was prone to angry outbursts. “This issue seemed to stem from some type of anger over women having authority over him,” one witness said.

In its degenerate stage, conservatism is about demanding things to which one has no legitimate claim simply because one feels a right to have them. Conservatives insist the 2020 election was stolen, for example, because Trump sold them on a supremacist dream of invincibility — the same dream that has them convinced Trump has the body of an Adonis and the brains of an Einstein, despite all evidence to the contrary — so they continue to try and gin up evidence that keeps their fantasy alive, to which end some of them threaten and commit violence. It stands to reason that this refusal to take no for an answer would be seen in their relationships with people who do not reciprocate their other fantasies as well, and why conservative intellectuals, freed by Trumpism from the task of framing policies that might actually help the nation and its people, instead devote themselves to smart-sounding justifications for their readers’ wounded vanity and eternal grievance.