The Postmodern Right

Many on the right have stopped caring about arguments, preferring a weird form of performance art

1 The postmodern right

Ben Shapiro’s slogan is “facts don’t care about your feelings.” And while I find it irritating when he repeats his catchphrase, before engaging in philosophically confused, baseless speculation, I at least agree with the sentiment. Political debates should be based on facts, not whiny theatrics.

For this reason, I find it rather alarming that evidence-free whinging has become the primary argumentative style of the modern right.

During the recent fights over PEPFAR cuts, for instance, those on the right would rarely make arguments. Their opposition to PEPFAR mostly involved whining about claims that we should care about poor children dependent on U.S. aid and calling such claims emotional blackmail. That and simply reiterating that they don’t care about poor foreign children dying, without providing any reason why anyone else should share their psychopathic indifference, or replies to arguments for cosmopolitanism. The sheer stupidity surpassed even the wildest fantasies of the woke left.

The right has, as Hanania notes, an oppositional culture. They don’t have an ideology as much as mere hatred of the left. When presented with arguments for left-wing positions, rather than fight them on the merits, they devolve to an almost postmodern refusal to accept facts or make their decisions based on what is right. They have an instinctive desire to punch back, even if they lack substantive criticisms.

Few had genuine, specific objections to foreign aid. Instead, they didn’t like that the left was telling them off. As a result, they developed utterly braindead procedural objections to any argument for foreign aid—accusing such arguments of being moral blackmail, unfair guilting, or in some other way fallacious.

Take, for example, one of the least pleasant humans on the planet—a fellow called Captive Dreamer. Go to his Twitter, and you’ll find Tweets like the following:

I know its a trite observation but it really is incredible how insane the left goes when you say that you're going to deport illegal alien drug dealers. It's like they go all in on defending the absolute worst people in the world

(This guy is followed by Vance, btw).

Notably, this is not an argument. It’s just a dunk. The reason that the left is concerned about Trump’s immigration policy is that he’s chucking people in ICE detention facilities for ordinary speech and sending people to brutal El Salvadoran jails without due process. Captive Dreamer’s comment doesn’t advance serious discussion one jot—it’s just an effort in complaining, in lashing out at the left without having anything substantive to contribute. It’s the right-wing equivalent of Walz calling the Trump administration weird. But such comments are ubiquitous.

When Trump cut PEPFAR, Captive Dreamer Tweeted:

Again, nothing contributed, just a dunk. No arguments, just dunking. In fact, if you scroll through this guy’s Tweets, you’ll find something remarkable. While he Tweets constantly—dozens of times per hour, almost nonstop, with the obsessive furor of a man wholly without a life—and often takes shots at the Democrats, he never makes arguments for anything. His sole function, which he spends almost the entire day performing, is to fill the public square with stupidity, invective, and pointless rhetorical aggression. This man couldn’t argue his way out of a paper bag, and those who follow him don’t seem concerned with the fact that all he does, all day, every day, is signal his vice.

Now, Captive Dreamer is a particularly extreme case. His degree of immorality and stupidity is rather astonishing—the sort of thing worthy of study by future historians. But the basic pattern of arguing is far more common.

There seem to be various interesting peculiarities of the right-wing psyche. For instance, there’s a widespread, pathological, and nearly homicidal hatred of HR ladies. This reached a bizarre fever pitch when a few Australian women at a skincare company made a video of them dancing and introducing themselves, which caused millions of people to declare that these women were the cause of everything wrong with America. One person even ludicrously declared that these ladies dancing was worse than tariffs!

Much of the right has stopped caring about arguing as the primary method of persuasion. All they do these days is emote—expressing their bizarrely angry emotional reactions to things, all while wrapped in a strange veneer of rhetoric and aggression. Persuasion is gone, dunking is all that remains.

2 A case study in postmodern right arguing

Later edit: Sai has informed me she is not right wing, but is largely a political. However, the argument patterns, and many of the views are still the same, and she hangs out with many members of the new right who are prone not to make arguments.

I recently got into an argument with a deeply unpleasant person called Sai. It began when I made a very funny joke, that everyone laughed at, and said “sir, this joke is funny probably at a level that no one has ever seen, please we need more jokes.” I bravely declared:

I just hate the bad so much. It sucks. I much prefer the good.

Sai, compadre of odious individuals like Walt Bismarck, replied:

Quite a claim! The usual utilitarian claims allegedly just involve asserting obvious truths? So I asked: which effective altruist claims simply involve asserting banal platitudes? Sai replied “all of them.”

Now, this is obviously a ridiculous claim. Many claims made by effective altruists are not at all intuitively obvious, and certainly are not trivial platitudes. It’s hard to declare something a triviality if almost no one accepts it. I thus replied:

This is when Sai went full postmodern right. Immediately I was hit with an incredible wall of theatrics and complaining, but nothing approaching a substantive reply. In response to an obvious counterexample to his claim, she vomited out a great degree of rhetoric about party tricks, picking a card, people like me calling Sai evil, but nothing approaching a reply.

There comes the party trick I suppose.

Hmm can we skip the part where I pick a card and you tell me I am evil because I question the utility of sending a bunch of malaria nets across the world? Or would that not make the trick work anymore?

How about we split the difference? I’ll admit I am “evil” and you can admit you love banal platitudes.

You can read the rest of the exchange. Once again, there was a good deal more flailing around and theatrics, but an odd refusal to address any real points. For instance, Sai later said:

I didn’t say malaria nets are not effective. I said that I would question the utility in sending as many of them as possible across the world, to a place, people and ecology that you do not understand or give two shits about beyond scoring social points with people just as banal as you.

Now, obviously if malaria nets are bad, then the claim that they’re good would not be a platitude. Platitudes are trivial, not false, so this falsifies her original claim in a totally straightforward way. But this sequence of sentences is a useful case study in how the postmodern right argues. Or, more precisely, how they don’t.

Is there a point here? There’s the obligatory nod to left-wing virtue signaling and the accusation that people like me are banal. Neither of these, of course, tell us anything about the efficacy of malaria nets. There’s the assertion that EAs don’t understand the places they give malaria nets to, which is obviously irrelevant—if you give to a charity that’s demonstrably effective, as shown by high-quality randomized control trials, it doesn’t matter much if you personally understand the location. But there’s no substance, just aggression, just dunking.

Suppose someone proposes raising the minimum wage—perhaps after citing studies finding that it reduces poverty. The typical postmodern right reply would be along the following lines:

Left-wing virtue signalers, who understand nothing about economics, just love to signal how compassionate they are by expressing their desire for a higher minimum wage. This HR lady squawking, “just raise muh minimum wage” is just the typical instance of low-IQ compassion porn about how they love the poor and you hate them. Don’t fall for it.

Now you’ll notice, the above is a dunk. Comments like this are routinely paraded as devastating takedowns and liked to the heavens on social media. But they don’t involve making arguments. They just involve pointless, demeaning, sneering outrage. They are to political debates what “you always do this” is to family disputes.

3 Members of the postmodern right?

Who are the members of the postmodern right? Certainly Sai and his friend Walt, who traffic in rhetoric rather than arguments. So are many of those most vocally critical of foreign aid. Few who were critical of foreign aid bothered to make arguments—they preferred to squawk and emote. Gobry, Captive Dreamer, Aimee Terese—these people never attempt to argue for what they believe, they just blow smoke.

But it’s not just Twitter anons who do this. Watch how Vance or Hegseth answer questions. They sometimes make substantive points, but they can’t finish a sentence without a substance-free dunk on the left. Vance, for instance, recently declared:

It’s bizarre to see all the limousine socialists screech desperately for dependence on Chinese supply chains and inflated equities.

This is obviously not a serious argument. Accusing people of screeching (desperately, no less!) does nothing to discredit their positions. Whether some of Trump’s critics are in limousines—which most are, of course, not—tells us nothing about whether their criticisms of tariffs are correct.

Later Vance declared “we don’t ask the far left’s permission before we deport illegal immigrants.” This was effective rhetorically, and was blasted across much of right-wing Twitter as a devastating own. But it’s deeply unserious. To carry out deportations one does, in fact, have to refrain from violating judicial proceedings.

The reason that this was seen as such a good dunk is that the very online right harbors seething hatred for the left. They get very annoyed when they imagine schoolmarmish left-wingers telling them off for doing immoral things. So Vance’s fan fiction about ignoring those schoolmarmish left-wingers is appealing.

In woke spaces, there are certain irritating conversational norms that must be adhered to. For instance, declaring something toxic or problematic is seen as sure proof that it’s in error—merely saying “yikes” about a position and noting that it sounds conservative is enough to make it poisonous. But on the postmodern right, exactly the inverse is true. Merely conjuring up hypothetical images of HR ladies telling you off for holding a position is seen as sure proof that it’s correct. Appeals based on evidence and moral decency are almost entirely ignored.

All that’s left over after this hollowing out of rationality is a remaining veneer of aggression. They must be constantly lashing out, attacking phantoms, tilting at windmills. God forbid they ever endorse a position that sounds mildly left-wing. They have, in a profound sense, abandoned their humanity. They have chosen to entirely ignore the callings of their higher faculties—which can ascertain right, wrong, and reason—preferring to become a braindead, animalistic, seething ball of resentment. Figures like Captive Dreamer and Aimee Terese are among the most wretched specimens of humanity imaginable. They have become like Pavlov’s dogs, snarling and biting in response to some stimulus; a bell in the case of Pavlov’s dogs, anything sounding remotely left-wing in the case of these people. They are the most unpleasant of brutes, particularly noxious and tragic because they have corrupted and perverted all that is good and beautiful about the human species.