Republicans in the Senate are not even pretending to give a shit about the sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh. They do not care about women. They care about nothing but the acquisition of power.
I once saw a comment whose source is now lost to me that said something along the lines of, “For someone that wants to be a judge, Brett Kavanaugh seems to resent going through a fair, systemic evidence-gathering process.”
Republicans are mad because this situation is delaying their mad rush to get him on the bench before midterms. But they had no problem holding Scalia’s seat open for over a year.
Yesterday, a white woman — a woman with a PhD, a “credible” and “deferential” and “calm” and “articulate” woman testified about the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of a monster named Brett Kavanaugh — and Kavanaugh will still be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
To the 53% of white women who voted for Donald Trump because they thought his administration would protect them:
You were wrong.
You will always be objects to be used and abused by the good old boys’ club.
“I’m a straight white men, life is so hard for me!
I can still rape women and become the president, but I may now have to actually lie to the press about it! Back in the good old days women weren’t even able to speak about it, that’s how it should be!”
From“Why Do I Suck?” on Astral Codex Ten (for which I was way too late to the party to put something like this in the comments section):
My experience was basically that the commanding heights of society had suddenly gone insane and were saying crazy stuff, and literally nobody was pushing back against this.
I can relate to this strongly from the early-to-mid-2010’s; I wouldn’t call it the “commanding heights of society” exactly, because I was still pretty aware that SJ (although I didn’t know that term for it at the time) was a minority ideology, but it really did seem that nearly all the respectable people around me (my social and work lives at the time revolved around the university where I was getting my graduate degree) were going pretty far off the deep end and constantly posting really aggressive stuff of a certain ideological bent on social media, and that suddenly the most popular form of online article was in this vein. (The type of article posted was generally much more raw and less scholarly in style than social activism writing has gotten in recent years, an observation that I remember Scott touching on and explaining in his long post outlining the evolution of culture wars in the 2010’s, but I digress.)
(Another digression: at the time and for some years, this ideology almost completely overlapped with a sort of pop feminism, to the point that many people around the SSC community in the mid 2010’s were treating “SJ” and “feminism” as almost interchangeable, which seems quite surreal to look back on now.)
And what I remember striking me the most was that (almost repeating Scott’s quote above) almost nobody seemed to be pushing back against this – just a couple of guys on Facebook who came across as edgelord / devil’s advocate dicks and a couple of guys in my graduate program who I knew for sure were dicks. Opposition was a little incoherent and direct-reactionary; it didn’t feel fully congealed in any way. I felt like my issues with whatever newly blossoming ideology this was must be coming from a deep character flaw somewhere in me and as though I should keep trying to work on myself before feeling free to voice it.
Every once in a blue moon I ran into a sophisticated-sounding writer who discussed these things with some refreshing amount of nuance – interestingly, I remember one of these being Richard Carrier in a post about Michael Shermer’s rape allegations (whatever came of that situation anyway? he seems not to have been cancelled at all!) – but Scott Alexander was the very first person I came across who seemed not only to oppose the bad parts of SJ rhetoric but to somehow get it right (mostly) when he targeted/rebutted it. This was far from the only reason I began to read him and to fall in with the online rationalist(-adjacent) crowd, but it was still pretty huge at the time.
So back when it seemed like everyone was an SJW (which apparently was earlier for me than for anyone else!!) my natural inclination was to push back.
It was earlier for me than for most other people as well. I actually mark the proper start of this stage of culture wars (as visible to me) as around 2011 circa Elevatorgate, even though there was stuff brewing for a few years previously that had started to bother me.
It honestly feels quite strange whenever I hear commentators of various stripes among today’s general (nowadays very vigorous) backlash (e.g. John McWhorter, Jonathan Haidt, etc.) speak of this as having started in the mid-to-late 2010’s, or not picking up full steam until 2020, when in my world it had become full-blown a good few years earlier. I guess this has to do with me being relatively young and rather immersed in American academia and Facebook during the early 2010’s. The funny thing is that I was never “very online” by a long shot, not really online at all, especially compared to Scott Alexander at the time.
(Let me register a little disappointment with Scott that in the above quote as well as below he has resorted to calling people SJW’s, as that’s basically come across as a throwaway insult for a good few years now and I distinctly remember a few years ago that he said he avoided using it on the basis of it being a slur.)
But it seems like I must still be near the top of the barberpole - because while everyone else is freaking out about wokeness, I’m starting to feel like all my friends are anti-woke. Who’s woke anymore? Are there really still woke people? Other than all corporations, every government agency, and all media properties, I mean. Those don’t count. Any real people? I guess I know one or two SJWs. But I also know one or two Catholics. Doesn’t mean they’re not the intellectual equivalent of out-of-place artifacts.
Um yes, there are “woke people” all around me in my life (I’m still in academia), but now it’s spilled out into a much wider portion of the general populace, including most of the people I consider nicer, more “respectable” company, and more compatible with me in terms of getting along and becoming close. This general ideology (while having evolved a lot and while the more widespread variants have been watered down somewhat) has become far more prevalent among actual people, not less! I can’t tell how tongue-in-cheek Scott is trying to be here. He has to realize that there are fewer “woke people” around him because he insulated himself from them and found a very ideologically unorthodox social bubble (which he was both able and naturally inclined to do as an internet-famous opponent of that ideology!). Elsewhere, including in many if not most particularly intellectual spheres, it is still a fairly dominant ideology even though there’s now very significant visible pushback.
I remember things as starting in 2007 on feminist blogs. As you say, “feminist” and “sj” diverged subsequently, as race issues crowded out gender ones, but I associate the beginning partly with the Clinton v. Obama primary, and the people who were insane in a proto-SJ way were feminists in the Clinton camp.
There was definitely a proto-SJ-ism that I was aware of in the second half of the 00’s decade. Your reblog made me ask myself about my recollections of the Clinton vs. Obama primary contest in 2007-2008, during which I was in college. The strange thing is that I remember very little of it playing out amongst my friends and wasn’t “sufficiently online” (e.g. wasn’t on Reddit, and my only window into cultural conflict besides my news sources was Facebook). I have no memory whatsoever of any discussions or debates about it in my social life, either in meatspace or online and suspect that we were all pro-Obama for the primary contest (I was and voted for him). This is in stark contrast to 8 years later when Clinton and Sanders supporters among my peer group spent a year duking it out on Facebook by each accusing those on the other side of covert racism/sexism (a trend I’m pretty sure I complained about here at the time and which I think undermined the Clinton campaign in the general election). Now I do remember perceiving an air of “What, you have a problem with a woman president?” vs. “What, you have a problem with a black president?” about the left-of-center national discourse but not anywhere near the level of toxicity in it that I saw in 2015-2016.
I do remember @invertedporcupine describing some stuff from the Clinton campaign in 2007-2008 that I probably wasn’t aware of and which drove him away from mainstream feminism but am having trouble drawing any specifics.
Great post (as always), and thanks for sharing this! Definitely gives me a lot to think about…I had always felt that 2015 was the start of the online social justice discourse, but clearly it was earlier. If nothing else, maybe 2015 was roughly when the focus started to shift from feminism to race.
Thanks for the compliment! I think we all were in different places during different parts of last decade (the internet is a very big place, and by that decade almost every evolution in the cultural discourse happened through the internet) and so have different recollections. I’m torn on whether I would call 2015 the turning point where SJ shifted away from feminism. On the one hand, I do consider the peak of SJ-ish online feminism to have occurred around 2014 and that a certain intense variety of it (that I can’t quite put a finger on how to describe) was waning around 2015.
On the other hand, I don’t remember race stepping up to a place of particular prominence at that time, and SJ feminism was still quite a major force for a while longer – the Me Too hashtag wouldn’t emerge for a while yet, not to mention certain current events like the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh. (And it could be argued that the zenith of SJ feminism was with the Me Too movement of 2017-2018 rather than in 2014; I might be biased in that I was far more personally bothered by the whole anti- Nice Guy thing that peaked around 2014 than I ever was by the Me Too movement, which I always broadly supported.) I feel kind of like the feminism component of SJ only really diminished when the Me Too movement lost momentum maybe in late 2018 or early 2019 and then race only gradually began to drift towards front and center, only fully taking its place as the face of SJ in early summer 2020.
But again, we’re all in slightly different places and so won’t have quite the same accounts or perceptions of how all this evolved.
Gosh, if Brett Kavanaugh and the rest of Republicans are worried that a man was arrested near his house with a gun, perhaps they should pass some sort of bill, I dunno, banning such weapons in general or in public. A bill to control guns so that he and others won’t feel endangered.
You know, the way every child, churchgoer, supermarket shopper, Black American, and average citizen feels right now.
Until then, he has my deepest thoughts and prayers
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