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By David Futrelle
Alt-Right Nazis love calling conservative pundit David French a “cuck.” In part, that’s because alt-rightists love calling everyone they hate a cuck, and French — a never-Trumper who’s openly criticized the alt-right — is the sort of “cuckservative” that alt-rightists especially love to hate.
But a large part of the reason they so relish attaching this particular epithet to French– which they’ve been doing for years now — is that he and his wife have an adopted daughter from Ethiopia, making his family an multiracial one. In alt-right eyes, this makes French a “race cuck.”
James Poulos — executive editor of The American Mind, a publication of the right-wing Claremont Institute — evidently also likes to call David French a “cuck.” But apparently he felt that the case for French’s alleged cuckoldry lacked a certain intellectual rigor. And so he recently devoted 1600 words in The American Mind to a rambling, quasi-Nietzschean essay on French’s supposed “cuckery” and, more broadly, on the alleged changes in society that allegedly make this insult so allegedly resonant. The “geneology of cuckery,” he calls it.
The essay is, to put it plainly, a huge mess; Poulos buries whatever points he’s trying to make beneath a virtual avalanche of vague buzzwords. I’ve read the piece through three times now and only barely understand what he’s trying, and mostly failing, to say. Here’s a rather typical passage:
But the charge of cuckery, leveled against Christians like French, has to do with the perceived untenableness today of staking out a middle position between the Benedict Option of evacuating from fronts collapsing in the culture war and the yet-to-be-named option of reasserting powerful constitutional authority for localities to resist and reject colonization by the revolutionary vanguard of institutionalized wokeness.
That’s all one sentence, by the way. The whole piece is like this. Here’s Poulos trying to argue that there are deep cultural changes underlying the sudden popularity of the “cuck” insult:
The Nordlingerians do not grasp that the rise of the cuck charge is the product of changes in our social and psychological environment that supervene upon, and are independent of, ideological phenomena.
In case you’re wondering what, specifically, these “changes in our social and psychological environment” are, he mentions two: ubiquitous porn and, er, invisible robots.
This alien invasion of invisible robots our technologists have touched off makes us feel as if our own creation has betrayed us, because the order of machine memory obsolesces the whole social structure of imagineering that first twinkled into being during the Enlightenment and really took off with the advent of electricity.
I think he’s still mad because Google once apparently tagged an anti-multicultural polemic from The American Thinker as racist.
Speaking of racism: Poulos manages to avoid mentioning the outright racism behind most alt-right attacks on French, and he himself says nothing about French’s adopted daughter. But racist worries about supposed “white genocide” seem to underlie many of the arguments that Poulos shows sympathy for in his piece.
The metaphor of cuckoldry is selected to the exclusion of all others because nothing else quite as effectively sharpens the charge that your obsession with the details of honor and principle has in fact become fatally abstract: you are being kicked out of your own house by a rival power actively working to take away everything that is yours, your children included. You are becoming the end of your line, forever, in every respect. Yet you won’t even evacuate from your breached defenses before it’s too late. Only the heights of spiritual snobbery can explain such a choice.
So, don’t adopt children of another race, I guess? If that is indeed the implicit message (or one of the implicit messages) of this passage, it means that Poulos has managed to stretch out the “race cuck” epithet from two to 1600 words.
This whole weird episode suggests to me that the walls between those like Poulos who warn against the alleged dangers of “multiculutralism” and those who shout about “white genocide” are indeed thin — and porous.
H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s @ClenchedFisk, whose tweet on the subject led me to this essay.
This is a minor detail and there’s a lot wrong here, but WTF is a “Nordlingerian”?
Also, where are all the invisible robots? That sounds cool.
Sentences like that remind me I’m behind on my sociolinguistics readings. But at least those ones make sense.
Granted, “revolutionary vanguard of institutionalized wokeness” sounds kinda badass.
I suspect “Nordlingerian” originates from the same place “untenableness” and “imagineering” do. And it’s not the English language.
Someone from Nördlingen, a small town in Bavaria? Or maybe a disciple of Hermann von Nördlinger, a 19th-century botanist and entomologist? Or maybe a disciple of Jay Nordlinger, a conservative commentator who left the Republican party in 2016? That’s all I could find.
I like how revealing the very first quote here is:
“But the charge of cuckery, leveled against Christians like French, has to do with the perceived untenableness today of staking out a middle position between the Benedict Option of evacuating from fronts collapsing in the culture war and the yet-to-be-named option of reasserting powerful constitutional authority for localities to resist and reject colonization by the revolutionary vanguard of institutionalized wokeness.”
First of all, it reveals that the editing process somehow doesn’t object to needlessly complex sentences containing phrases like “perceived untenableness”. A relative minor note, but a big one.
Secondly, it suggests a hierarchy among conservative Christians. Specifically, it suggests that there are “cuck” and “non-cuck” versions of Christianity. Which is nonsense in light of the gospels, but whatever.
Third, if the “Benedict Option” refers to Benedict Arnold, then Poulos does not know anything about Benedict Arnold. He talks about the “Benedict Option” as a form of retreat from the culture wars, implying a form of cowardice. But Benedict Arnold was in fact a (somewhat reckless) war hero until he switched sides. And by most accounts he did not switch sides due to cowardice, but because he was passed over for promotion, and therefore felt that there was more money and glory to be found in fighting for the British than for the patriot movement that he saw as ungrateful and corrupt.
Fourth, the opposite of the “Benedict Option” is a “yet-to-be-named option” involving local communities resisting outside forces via the constitution. Since the phrase “Benedict Option” seems to be a weird made-up derogatory name, I’m not sure why the other option is unnamed. Maybe because Poulos is trying to insinuate that relying on constitutional separation of powers and constitutional rights are new and unfounded principles, rather than part of the philosophical core of the US constitution.
Fifth, I guess that “wokeness” is somehow both revolutionary and colonialist? Maybe there’s a way to reconcile the picture of “revolution from within” with “colonization from without”, but probably not a good idea to transition within a single sentence.
Sixth, the entire idea of taking “cuckery” as anything other than a shallow insult is just nonsense, and it would be the most uphill of uphill battles to suggest anything else. What is any of this anyway?
I suspect he’s talking about electronic appliances and things like Siri and Alexa.
@ jsrtheta: Imagineering is an accepted English word, a portmanteau of “imagine” and “engineering” created by Disney to describe their animatronics at Disneyland. (they may also have coined “animatronics”)
And by “electronic appliances” I meant smart appliances, like fridges connected to the internet and home security that monitors everything.
This sounds like somebody got his talking points from you tube. This guy was using an abundance of big words. I’m reminded of an old saying; stupid people will find other stupid people to be stupid with.
@Mabret
That’s probably it. I searched it and all I got was National Review op-eds. I hate that publication, seeing as it somehow manages to find the worst takes on everything (but especially on LGBTQIPA+ issues).
He really couldn’t come up with a better word than “untenableness”?
The original article, however odious, does explain what the supposedly-bad Nordlinger opinion is:
“[T]here’s nothing fancy or philosophical here: It’s just that David won’t bow to Trump and Trumpism, and that is what cannot be borne and must be punished.”
From this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/jaynordlinger/status/1172210940978372608?s=20
Basically, I think that the “Nordlingerian” view, in this article, refers to the view that Trumpism is more-or-less a personality cult, while French is more principled. Not that that really clarifies for me why Poulos disagrees. He basically says that the “cuck charge” is not about ideology, but about other social and psychological factors, which is more-or-less what Nordlinger said. So… he doesn’t really argue against Nordlinger? But he thinks he’s disagreeing because he completely misunderstands what Nordlinger is saying. Very silly.
The “Benedict Option” isn’t a reference to Benedict Arnold, but to conservative asshat Rod Dreher’s 2017 book “The Benedict Option.” Essentially, whiny entitled conservatives are going to take their precious little balls and GO HOME because liberals are big ol’ meanies.
There never were any walls, they’ve always been the same people, they just used to keep the white genocide on the qt.
@Naglfar
Mechanization of manufacturing generally, I think.
@Hippodameia
The Benedict of the title is Benedict of Nursia, who founded the largely cloistered Benedictine order. Thus, the Benedict Option is to form little cult compounds where you can raise your children shielded from the evils of the world and then… I’m not sure, try to be like the Amish or something?
@Hippodameia: Thanks! That makes a lot more sense now. If I understand correctly, that means that Poulos is dismissing this option not because it is traitorous, but because he sees Dreher’s book as advocating a kind of Christian isolationism/quietism? I feel like I was more plugged into this stuff in the past (especially way back when I was a Baptist), but in any case I guess that 2017 is much too recent for me to get the reference.
Shorter Poulos:
The Benedict Option sounds like a hipster breakfast entree.
To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel cuckolded without your permission.”
Sean said: “but because he sees Dreher’s book as advocating a kind of Christian isolationism/quietism?”
Queue Rod rushing into complain that he’s being misinterpreted; that just because he wrote a book advocating that conservative Christians should withdraw into their own communities he didn’t mean conservative Christian should withdraw into their own communities, and you’re getting it all wrong. Only by buying his book can you understand the fact that he can say two opposing things at once- sort of like Jordan Peterson.
I learned something from this thread!
I’d never heard “on the qt” before. Brit for “on the down-low” I guess? Not that I know why that term means what it means.
Anyway, I stopped caring about conservative thinkers quite a while ago. It’s long been quite obvious that all that was left was an attempt to justify racism by sounding learned (with side gigs in misogyny and class warfare).
When I was much younger they had one good idea: that sometimes it’s better to set a goal and create a market than to regulate specifically how to deal with a social ill. It’s straight out of Wealth of Nations, so not exactly a *new* idea, but still it works well sometimes (particularly when it’s about making companies solve problems, like reducing sulfur in power plants).
Then in the 1990s they decided to ditch any pretense that social ills even *should* be solved.
@ numerobis
Brit here. I’ve always taken ‘on the qt’ as another way of saying ‘on the quiet,’ so it probably is a cultural equivalent for ‘on the down – low.’
When it comes to right – of – centre ideas, they’ve favoured the supposedly heady brew of racism, xenophobia greed, spite and callousness in one form or another since, well, forever.
I’m fairly sure that a large percentage of the dudes who use ‘cuck’ as an insult don’t actually know what it is derived from and what it means.
I’ve seen quite a few of them calling cis women ‘cuck’, and that’s not really how it works.
On the other hand, US sex education is apparently so bad, that there are multiple women out there asking ‘My SO cheated on me. How do I know that the baby I’m pregnant with is mine, and not the other woman’s?’
@Hippodameia
I haven’t read his book: is this similar to “going Galt” from the Ayn Rand libertarian revenge fantasies? Do you know why he called it that, as opposed to the Dreher Option or something? Like what meaning does it have?
Whew! Copyediting this author’s writing would be a lot like shoveling shit. Contemplate this: the people who work at this think tank get paid to write this kind of stuff.
@Knitting Cat Lady
There is a female equivalent term, cuckquean, though I’ve never heard conservatives use that term, so they probably don’t know it.
Like that thing from the first misogynatomy thread? I know sex ed in America is bad, but this is a new one that women think they can be pregnant with children from other women. The failed US sex ed system probably is to blame for much of the misogynatomy on that thread.
I’m late, but I’m not going to let more sensible comments stop me.
@Naglfar:
I think they’re an ethnic group in Skyrim.
But what if they’re invisible sex robots? That would be much less cool, I think. It’s important to see who or what is cucking you.
It never stops being strange, watching what passes for the conservative intelligentsia attempt to put an intellectual gloss on the stupid end of hate. You can polish that turd to a dull shine, Claremont Institute, but it’ll still be a turd.
Hmm, those kind of sentences always make me think of Le Pipotron (there is probably equivalent in other languages somewhere), except they use one with their alt-right thematics implemented in it.