On "Lifestyle" and Lindy West

Or how I learned to stop worrying and denounce the dissident right

It’s no secret that many people on the political right feel like they have fallen into a rut during the early Spring of 2026.

Across the last several years, most ordinary forms of political discourse have collapsed. Progressivism died, conservatism died, and it was impossible not to notice and write all about it. At the time, I thought I might write a third piece in the series about how the “Dissident Right” died, but it seems that pretty much everyone beat me to the punch by repeatedly denouncing the label, and I have never liked hopping on bandwagons.

Of course, the “Dissident Right” as a concept is inherently vague. The title has been implicitly associated with my work since I started using the moniker to distinguish my perspective from that of the Richard-Spencer-types, circa 2016. Much later in 2024, I even wrote defenses of the label when “Dissident Right” became everyone’s favorite whipping boy. The moniker is stupid if one thinks about it as a symbol for an actual political movement, yet force of habit always brings me to its defense whenever people start “denouncing the Dissident Right”.

At the heart of things, if the “Dissident Right” represented anything, it represented two things: first, a set of criticisms about the failures of enlightenment ideas that remain impossible to ignore in late-modernity; second, a new and more realistic approach to politics that sought to cut through bullshit and develop a functional understanding of power.

As such, while the “Dissident Right” was a broad and entirely negative set of ideas, its core claims were undefeated, and its critics were almost always forced to direct their objections towards quibbles about exceptions, hypothetically ideal alternatives, and confusions over language.

So why, then, did the “Dissident Right” die in 2025?

The “Dissident Right” might die, but this title never will

Ultimately, what killed the “Dissident Right” was less an ideological challenge than that eternal human question: “what comes next?”. As it had existed in the previous decade, the online right excelled at describing the boundaries of power and the ways it might hypothetically be overcome. But when even a few of those boundaries began to fall, the challenge of actually getting things done proved insurmountable for a space entirely defined by negative ideas.

In 2021, when it seemed that everything was lost, criticism was at a premium. However, in 2024, after the liberation of Xitter and the defeat of the Biden/Harris ticket, action was the order of the day. Everyone’s favorite slogan of 2025 was “you can just do things,” but, short of taking over the government entirely, it turned out that many people didn’t actually know what they wanted to do.

To be fair, in 2026, the right’s options are still limited. Organizations like the EXIT group and the OGC are taking action, but the returns remain limited, and progress is slow. No one on the right wing wields real political power the way progressive factions do, and the possibility of another cultural explosion or political sea-change, as seen in 2016, remains doubtful. Short of a discourse with the left that never happens, what remains is only endless internal critique or the rather pointless anticipation of a coup or a vague “circulation of elites”.

Still, the challenge ahead of us is to take effective action. Certainly, right-wingers understand the realities of power and the comforting myths of the 20th century, but this knowledge is worthless if it’s not put into action. One has to start somewhere; there needs to be effective steps that build towards achievable goals, and achievable goals are hard to come by in 2026.

For instance, say what you will about the modern left, but progressives do not have problems finding things to do. Lefties have a mechanism for putting their beliefs into practice. They engage in activism and incorporate its form into all aspects of their daily lives. Of course, lefties' understanding of political “cause and effect” is entirely backward. They never grasp why their activities work to advance their ends, beyond appeals to the magical “will of the people”. Nevertheless, progressive communities build a sense of meaning around action that gives them coordination, belief, and ultimately, a means of organizing for power.

In other words, the left has praxis, and the right does not. And the process of developing a praxis starts with the concept of “lifestyle”.

Quite frankly, I hate the word “lifestyle”. It’s modern. It’s dirty. It feels like it comes from a 1999 gay-rights slogan or a 2003 Apple advertisement. Still, I don’t know any better word for what I am talking about. Lifestyle is the set of ordinary actions people engage in to demonstrate their values. It is the community, the habits, and the patterns of life that give one’s existence quality and show others who one really is. It’s impossible to live a good life without this quality, and it’s impossible to practice effective politics either.

Many in elitist school of thought are fond of saying that “Lifestyle isn’t politics”. Still, I wonder if this platitude is as absolutely true as presented. Effective action is a game of coordination and belief. Community and coordination can only be developed through real-world experiences, and belief has to be lived to be real.

Post-COVID, I notice people are now feeling a distinct sense of absence. There is no ambient community, and nothing feels meaningful or strong. Nothing we regularly engage with, from our online entertainment products to our corporate jobs to the petty political disagreements that we write about online, connects to anything larger.

What is the solution?

Certainly, it starts with some kind of rediscovery of spirituality. But such spirit will only become meaningful to the extent that it’s formed into a pattern and a habit of living life. It sounds trivial to describe such patterns under the label of “lifestyle”; nevertheless, in 2026, I think that “lifestyle” is where we need to begin.

On Lifestyle and Lindy West

For whatever reason, writing about lifestyle in 2026, I can’t help but think back two decades to the mid-2000s. Oddly enough, the decade didn’t feel particularly happening at the time. It was almost a hollow era of sorts. Nevertheless, whether in music, film, or digital entertainment, the 2000s marked a turning point, and few things represented that turning point in my mind more than The Seattle Stranger.

Really, it’s hard to explain exactly what The Stranger meant to people like me, living in Seattle after college, in a time before social media devoured the world. Circa 2006, print magazines were still a thing; in fact, they were the front lines of what was happening. Even back then we had the internet and early forms of social media. But these types of communication were still marginal and something of a novelty, existing in a world apart. On the other hand, when it came to real life and the events that characterized the urban scene, print was still king, and in this ecosystem, The Stranger was both an entry point to the world of youth culture and a bridge between the grounded modes of the city and the irreverent culture one could find on online. At the time, The Stranger’s humor was on point, its articles seemed relevant to my life, and its columnists’ writing seemed closer to how my friends and I actually talked amongst ourselves.

The Stranger in its natural environment

Back then, the incredible power of The Stranger was how the publication could “meme” things into existence, even before the word “meme” became common parlance. The right article in The Stranger could decide the new progressive political fascination, or make a niche art project a trend, or even rewrite history and convince everyone that the greatest album of the 1990s was Neutral Milk Hotel’s Airplane Over the Sea. Every time I’d see a new issue, I’d pick it up and read through it, absorbing its sardonic tone and detached sincerity, reviewing the fascinations of the day in its pages, from print to hypertext.

Certainly, a large component of The Stranger’s appeal in the mid-2000s came down to its writing staff, notably developed by the magazine's then editor-in-chief, Dan Savage, who also wrote the paper’s most popular, internationally famous sex advice column, Savage Love.

Dan Savage is a man whom I have written about (entirely too much) as a pivotal figure in the generational transformation of the Millennials. No doubt, Savage will be remembered for doing more than any one man to transform heterosexual relationship norms from “traditional” monogamy-centered ethics, to looser consent-only standards that centered pleasure and remained open to things like polyamory. Before Tinder and OnlyFans, Savage laid the groundwork for 21st-century dating culture, only to disappear from the public square during the decade of its final realization.

Though for all his notoriety as a pioneer of 21st-century relationship etiquette, Savage’s role as an editor of The Stranger might be underappreciated. During his tenure, Savage elevated the publication from a local oddity to a hub for a new generation of writers that would define progressive thought in the coming years. Throughout the 2000s, a reader might notice a gradual shift away from the magazine’s original ironic Gen-X tone towards a more confrontational, blog-style perspective with unapologetic progressive politics and a preference for on-the-nose ideological messaging. This was a subtle transition at first, but eventually the change became impossible to ignore with the ascendancy of one Millennial writer, Lindy West.

Lindy West and Dan Savage,

West arrived at The Stranger in 2009, just after Savage's departure as editor-in-chief, marking a generational passing of the torch. Initially, Lindy seemed to be very much in keeping with The Stranger’s tone from the previous decade. She was perpetually ironic, universally skeptical, and held a kind of nonchalant attitude toward new experiences, but never blind to problems in need of a good-old-fashioned mocking.

Such a detached Gen-X attitude seems totally antithetical to what eventually made West (in)famous in her own time. Yet it was readily observable in the author’s early work at The Stranger, most notably Lindy’s mega-viral takedown of the pseudo feminist movie Sex in the City 2, where West cruelly mocked the film’s vapid vagina-centric girl power message with language that she would have almost certainly considered “misogynistic” had she heard it a few years later. Indeed, at the time, reading her work in The Stranger, West seemed just like the other “cool” girls that I considered friends IRL. Perhaps these women had some strident views on politics and often complained a bit too loudly, but they were fun people, down with the times, and possessed a certain brutal honesty that allowed them to call a spade a spade.

Yet times change, and as the “Great Awokening” of 2012 redefined what it meant to be a Millennial woman, Lindy West was at the forefront of this transformation. Gone were the days of detached irony and sardonic humor that tarred all sides broadly; in was the progressive stack, identity politics, intersectional language, and a new set of bizarre, intransigent political opinions that we would dub “woke” several years later.

Maybe in 2026, the travails of the “woke 2010s” have already been explored thoroughly. But a less-discussed component of this period was just how much the political tone shift was accompanied by an increasingly de-territorializing perspective that could be observed within the pages of publications like The Stranger, as the focus slowly shifted from happenings in the city of Seattle to the various dramas of the online world. Suddenly, ultra-orthodox feminist talking points, only visible in some niche social media spaces like Tumblr, became the talk of the town. Fringe academic subjects like “patriarchy” or “fat-phobia” now became part of the ordinary urban discourse, brought into the real world from their home online by Lindy West and her peers.

But perhaps I overstate the case. A few viral articles notwithstanding, probably no one outside of Seattle knew who Lindy West was until she changed publications, moving from The Stranger to the online rag Jezebel sometime in 2012, and subsequently becoming something of a household name among the older Millennial set.

For those unfamiliar, it’s easy enough to list a brief resume of West's work during the Jezebel period, as she became a spokesperson for new intersectional feminist perspectives in the mainstream. Herself quite a heavy-set woman, Lindy West pioneered the burgeoning “fat-acceptance movement”, lobbying the media and entertainment industries to endorse the idea that people could be “healthy at any size”. As it turned out, so many of the negative qualities seen as undesirable in women were actually a brave stand against the patriarchy. According to Lindy, being morbidly obese was good thing, actually, and so was being a confrontational, shrill scold.

SHRILL

Moreover, as the internet began to roll into its “Gamergate” era, West became an iconic firebrand decrying the harm caused by anti-feminist internet trolls, even going as far as to track down her hecklers IRL and scold them publicly for their online transgressions, a stunt that would have read as self-parody had it occurred a decade earlier or a decade later. Then, perhaps most famously, was Lindy West’s radically unapologetic defense of “reproductive rights”, which she pioneered with #ShoutYourAbortion, a publicity campaign so radical it mirrored a 4chan parody under which women who had terminated their unborn children (West among them) loudly celebrated their decisions under the pretense that they were destigmatizing the exercise of their “basic human rights”.

Ultimately, what made Lindy West so notable (in the eyes of both her supporters and detractors) was that she was one of the first in our generation to really “become the meme,” so to speak. Though few people talked about it back then, pretty much all Millennials in the 2010s were living double lives; a compliant, ordinary pattern of real-life existence, operating in parallel with an outspoken, ideological, and unconstrained life in the digital space. Of course, in the 2000s, everyone dismissed the online world as trivial. But as time crept forward, the internet became ever more central to the zeitgeist, gradually consuming the world, and after 2008, every young person began to notice that opportunity only really existed on the inter-webs. It was only in the digital space that we could define ourselves, live in the unconstrained way we were always taught was our highest calling, and pursue the various chaotic threads of truth and goodness that the rest of the old (Boomer) world rejected.

Thus, at least by 2010, everyone could see the writing on the wall: meat-space was the past and the digital wonderland was the future. The identities we had cultivated online were truer, freer, and would, at some future point, necessarily become the personalities we expressed in our day-to-day lives. The only question that remained was when the time would be right to discard the charade of normalcy and just run with the online egregores we had committed ourselves to, and people like Lindy West were all too willing to be the first to take the plunge.

Lindy West in the 2010s wasn’t just an internet feminist; she was THE internet feminist archetype, with all excesses accentuated and the qualities people once criticized as defects recast as virtues. Naturally, everyone was aware of unapologetic progressive ideologues from our many conversations online. But to see the type now appear in real life as a real person, was novel, horrifying to some, but also liberating to others.

And to West’s credit, at least in the early years, the decision to “become the meme” took some measure of dedication, and even bravery, as the mores of internet culture were still being established and the power of Boomer-normalcy remained strong.

Could one really make it a point of pride not just to be unapologetically obese but to make fatness their brand? Could disgusting bodily functions and general unlikability really be front-lined as part of one’s public persona? Could being insufferable really be part of a woman’s proud image of herself, even going as far as to title her memoir “Shrill”?

These weren’t trivial questions at the time.

Though it might surprise those who never lived in urban areas before 2011, overbearing politics-obsessed feminists never were socially well received, even at parties replete with progressives. Abortion, though accepted as a “fundamental” right, was still regarded through the lens of “safe, legal, and rare”, and, even when necessary, carried a melancholic weight that one could feel in the lyrics of a song like Ben Folds’ “Brick.” Moreover, despite the ubiquitous criticisms of “Western Beauty Standards,” no one in 2000s-era Seattle thought “fat” was a good look, even in the highly alternative venues that The Stranger wrote about.

But the 2010s marked a new era. The tropes that had been constrained by the limits of normal social interaction were now liberated by an online substrate where subcultural forces could move faster than the speed of human judgment. A new kind of irreverence was now available that previous generations of libertines could only dream of. Now, one could simply ignore ordinary social attitudes and appear in public with one's opinion preapproved by millions of internet fans, commanding a higher status through online clout than the real-life normies could ever imagine gaining through ordinary social interaction.

Perhaps such a dynamic was ultimately deleterious to society’s cohesion, but it worked, allowing a new class of alternative influencers to come to the fore and a new set of political ideologies to become mainstream. As it turned out, the internet age allowed many highly abstract ideas to shed their messy contradictions and advance faster than their competitors. The phenomena made political radicalism both impossibly pure and infinitely accessible, and that combination sold like crack to a generation of alienated, autistic online adolescents. Now, the sexually frustrated teenage girl dreaming of being a big city writer could look past conventionally attractive, well-adjusted role models and instead base her dreams on people who thought and wrote just like she did, while looking objectively less attractive than her peers.

The star of Lindy West was born.

Lindy might be unhinged, but you have to admire the confidence

Nevertheless, in spite of everything, I am forced to admit that the unhinged radical feminism of Lindy West prefigured a similar radicalism that took place on the right wing, half a decade after her rise through the ranks of Jezebel.

The right’s ideological shift during the 2010s (which I might dub “the Dissident Right revolution” to antagonize people) began with a cultural backlash against progressive tropes in video games, but soon began to redefine all elements of counter-progressive politics. Certainly, to someone like myself who participated in this transformation, the changes seemed necessary and long overdue, marking an essential departure from well-to-do Buckley-ite conservatism and stale libertarian platitudes towards a more realistic understanding of politics.

Nevertheless, the changes on the right during the 2010s could not have been accomplished without the cultural disconnection created by social media, ironically, the same disconnection that created the “woke” revolution that many right-wingers were reacting against. So, even as I might consider the ideas of figures like Lindy West to be otherwise socially destructive, I must acknowledge that the same technology that let her be a proud, rude, fat abortion-celebrating feminist in 2013 was the same technology that allowed me to write about Julius Evola and Thomas Carlyle in 2019.

This technological shift might have been destructive. It might have been necessary. But the shift’s energy was undeniably temporary, a fleeting historical moment that unspooled almost as quickly as it had ramped up. Indeed, the unapologetic internet personality had a natural burnout point that was destined to be reached once social media stopped growing. There was a wall blocking the continued expansion of Millennial internet hype-culture, and sometime in the 2020s, post-COVID, we all hit it.

That’s not to say that I renounce any of the ideas that I discovered during this period. The revelations of that time were true, and the mainstream lies we exposed were pernicious. Nevertheless, I understand that much of the energy latent in the years between 2014 and 2022 was particular to a unique historical context. There is a limitation to what online discourse can accomplish, and smashing the false idols of the 20th century did not, in and of itself, provide people with the spiritual sustenance they require. In my experience, radical ideas either make peace with a radical honesty about human limitation or descend into narcissistic COPE and become little more than a LARP for the people who espouse them.

Ultimately, the problem with defining one’s existence by clout in an infinitely fast, taboo-breaking online environment is that human beings cannot live as such. As powerful as an unapologetic ideology seems in a digital space, it must necessarily be wielded by humans with finite, limited existences. Because, beyond the political and religious commitments that might divide us, we all comprise the same mortal organic matter. We are flesh and bone, experiencing brief lives and searching for a sense of meaning that, tragically enough, cannot be simulated. Life’s truth and the consequences of our ideas eventually catch up with us, and we don’t always like their implications.

…. but maybe no that confident

For Lindy West, the arc of life’s consequences began to unfold with her pursuit of love, which she eventually found in her marriage to Ahamefule Oluo midway through the decade. Even in 2015, when I heard about the coupling (via The Stranger, no less), something about the news felt strange. Instead of finding a cowed male progressive as most other feminists had, the ever-outspoken, ever-irreverent Lindy West had chosen to wed an otherwise competent and self-assured Nigerian-American musician. More strangely yet, when I heard the couple in interviews, it was clear that her soon-to-be husband, Oluo, paid very little deference to his wife’s feminist pieties. Now, strangely enough, Lindy West, the woman who disowned family members for the slightest deviations from the progressive orthodoxy, was meekly demurring to a man who made it clear that he really didn’t give a f*ck what middle-class urban feminists thought.

Naturally, this was not too surprising for me, even in 2015, being well past understanding the Red Pill and other ugly truths about human nature. There was a sense of irony that West had been won over by an African chauvinist who was nothing like the men who supported her politics or read her columns. Race aside, the development wasn’t revolutionary; it was as traditional as it got, a veritable rehash of The Taming of the Shrew for the 21st century. Lindy West, no doubt, had bought more than she bargained for, and maybe she would learn something, that is, if she hadn’t gotten in too far over her head.

Fast forward 10 years, and it turns out that my suspicions had merely scratched the surface as Lindy West returned from her long hiatus to once again define online discourse with a new book, a New York Times profile, and countless blog posts which focused on her new identification as sexually “polyamorous”.

However, West’s identification with “polyamory” wasn’t the real story as it soon became apparent that this newfangled identity was a cover for Lindy’s own marital difficulties that began with her husband’s insistence on pursuing extramarital affairs and then finally bringing another partner into the house as an implicit second wife. West’s new rejection of monogamy was less a triumphant act of liberation than a way to emotionally cope with her spouse’s continuing infidelity.

Although the sympathetic mainstream media went to great lengths to present this development as a feminist victory against patriarchal norms, the ideological subterfuge could not hold. Moreover, even beyond the torrid articles presented as West’s celebrity confession, her story seemed to get worse the more one read between the lines.

Far from just psychologically coping with a regrettable situation, Lindy’s resignation to being in a polyamorous relationship was a mark of total surrender to her husband’s selfish appetites. Oluo’s ongoing affairs had obviously been committed despite the continuing disapproval of Lindy, and the new co-partner in the marriage had been made public under the implicit threat that West’s failure to accept the arrangement would result in the end of her marriage. Moreover, based on how the “throuple” behaved publicly, it was obvious this new woman was indeed Oluo’s primary affection, rendering Lindy little more than a second wife in her own marriage, a status clearly visible in the body language of the family’s recent photos.

The happy throuple

At once it seemed that the impossible had happened. The iconoclastic Lindy West, who had built her brand around unapologetically combating the patriarchy of the old Christian world, was now submitting to a humiliating public lifestyle that not one of her traditional Christian ancestors would have ever accepted.

As the articles about Lindy West made the rounds in early spring of 2026, one could feel the liberal egregores reeling from the psychic damage the news had inflicted. And through the many, many reactions being written online, the same set of questions seemed to be on the lips of almost every well-to-do liberal white woman.

How could this happen?

How could Lindy West, the icon of norm-shattering rude girl politics, submit to such a humiliating end?

How did the arch opponent of patriarchy find herself as just another sister-wife to a patriarch?

Why couldn’t the woman who had shouted her way through an abortion, not now shout her way out of an abusive marriage that the likes of Mary Whitehouse and Phyllis Schlafly would have left in a second?

The contradiction could not easily be reconciled.

Some people are now calling West’s breakdown the “Death of Millennial Feminism”, but I don’t think any of us are getting off that easy. The ideology mainstreamed in the 2010s will not be so simply defeated, and moral contradictions have never weighed heavily on progressive political ideas. Moreover, even if Lindy’s implosion did cause some Millennial women to reconsider their life’s direction, the damage of modern feminism has already been accomplished, and our social order can’t walk away from its inherent flaws any more easily than a man can dig himself out of a hole.

Of course, in Lindy West’s case, the obvious next step is for the author to find her proverbial balls and end her marriage with Oluo, a decision that will no doubt be accompanied by many celebratory articles in The New York Times and The Seattle Stranger as it will relieve her liberal fanbase of an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance. Naturally, once the marriage is terminated, mainstream progressives will frame West’s crisis as a problem with men, the author’s only defect being her unwillingness to DTMFA fast enough.

However, divorced or polyamorous, shrill or submissive, the mainstream will never understand the real tragedy lying at the heart of Lindy West’s midlife crisis, a spiritual sickness native to all of us in the Millennial generation, reaching a crescendo as we leave behind the promises of youth.

As it turns out, branding and hyper-idealism can only take you so far, and ideology can never be completely separated from lifestyle, as trite as that sounds. We all wanted to present ourselves as brave, uncompromising revolutionaries lurking behind keyboards and screens. However, despite the profiles we might create, we all eventually had to build lives we could actually live in, and those lives spoke more truth than the stories we told about ourselves on dying social media platforms.

For a time, internet culture demanded that we “become the meme,” and many of us obliged, seeking greater meaning through radical ideologies. But people cannot live like embodied memes, and eventually, whether we follow West’s intersectional progressivism or my own dreaded “Dissident Right”, we all have to escape the online trap and find life as it is.

Disconnection and the Diner-goths

Perhaps Lindy West is a strange example to use when examining the defects of modern culture, much less the defects of the modern political right. The ridiculousness of the woman’s ideas, combined with her personal hubris, fully explains the failure of her life, without appealing to a broader point about post-Millennial social attitudes. Since most never followed West’s extreme ideological path, her crisis approaching middle age feels distant. Nevertheless, beyond West's poor life decisions lies a much more relatable story about the disconnection between aspirational meme identities and our organic existences.

As might be apparent to anyone observing her writing over the long term, Lindy West was, in fact, a rather weak-willed woman who possessed a deep need for interpersonal connection. She desired approval and love, so when traditional modes failed to provide these things, she adopted an alternative lifestyle and became a living contradiction. Ultimately, the persona that shaped her image in her online career was entirely out of sync with what she manifestly wanted in life, and thus her tragedy became inevitable.

And it is on this point of memetic disconnection that West’s meltdown reflects on the rest of us trying to live in the real world of 2026.

Today, everything feels oddly mismatched. Nothing is in the right place. All forms of art and entertainment appear to be declining simultaneously. There is a dearth of good film and a drought of new music. The social organizations and high art that characterized life in the early 20th century have long since departed, while the subcultures of the late-20th century that publications like The Stranger once highlighted have been devoured by international, homogenized mass entertainment and endless algorithmic drains on our attention spans. People call this development “stuck culture,” but really, it is a crisis of authentic lifestyle. The products people consume and the identities they follow are detached from the patterns of their actual lives, so naturally, everything feels fake.

An instructive new example of this disconnection can be seen this month with the publication of Robert Mariani’s piece in The New Atlantis on the “Diner-goth” subculture that has emerged across America in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Diner-goth cometh

As described, “Diner-goth” might be thought of as a subculture in a world where all other subcultures have perished. Centered on Discord communities, anime, and consumer identities tied to alternative entertainment products that reached mass audiences through decades-old brick-and-mortar establishments like Hot Topic, the Diner-goth bases her life on digital tropes, alienation from “Boomer” promises, and adherence to a low-investment internet monoculture that transcends national boundaries. Dispossessed and post-blue-collar, the “Diner-goths" remain the last children of a proletarianized middle America, scrapping for meaning in the ashes of a hollowed-out world of low trust and zero cultural cohesion.

Though unspoken in Mariani’s article, a significant part of Diner-goth’s novelty lies in its being one of the first widely documented cultural trends that is decidedly post-Millennial. For all its nostalgic trapping, the phenomenon is fresh-faced and young, ready to accuse “Uncs” like me of “just not getting it”. And certainly, when reading the piece, I could hear the out-of-touch millennial objections mounting in the back of my mind:

How are anime and edgy adult cartoons somehow new now?

Weren’t people shopping at “Hot Topic” and wearing cat ears when I was in junior high?

After all, Discord memes and Chan culture were a mainstream thing 13 years ago!

But without being too presumptuous, it seems quite obvious why these objections fail.

Sure, we Millennials had goth types, anime, and chan culture. But we experienced these phenomena when they were ascendant, on the way up the social totem pole. By contrast, diner-goth Zoomers find these cultural fragments in the aftermath of total massification and civilizational decline. The Millennials experienced these products as an enticing online frontier, whereas the diner-goth Zoomers now survive inside their remnant as vagabonds in a digital ghetto.

Like impoverished Africans wearing donated sports jerseys from the past decade, the Zoomers are wearing the affectations of a previous era and forced to forge an alternative sense of purpose in the shadow of a mainstream that has forgotten how to produce meaning. The markers of the Diner-goth persona don’t represent optimism for the future; they are just the products that everyone was left with in lieu of a functioning social order.

Uncool Millennial “Unc” that I am, I can’t help but feel sympathy for the Diner-goths of the Zoomer era, since I experience a similar kind of alienation from the other side of the generational divide.

Certainly, I am lucky enough to have been on the right side of the cultural war (with shouting children rather than shouted abortions), but I am perhaps still luckier to be on the right side of the generational shift in wealth, following one of the last lifelines to a (relatively) middle-class existence like the last chopper out of Vietnam.

Still, even within such serendipity, there is no way to return to the America of my childhood. The safe, shady neighborhoods that made up the backbone of my early life experiences are now geriatric. The social structure that shaped the pattern of middle-class family life has been entirely deconstructed, and mainstream culture, as it exists, is not set up for educated adults like myself; what remains is only low-effort, massified entertainment and nostalgia baiting.

Oddly enough, I have found myself in a state of alienation similar to that of many other people trying to understand youth, or even early middle age, in the 21st century. Like the diner-goths, or even Lindy West, I cannot be the person in my daily life that I know I ought to be. Just like the shrill feminist strong-armed into submission by her fear of loneliness or the young Zoomer trying to blow meaning back into the embers of counterculture, I search for the patterns of existence that should characterize the good life, but the circumstances we all live under seem to prohibit any realistic solution.

There is an essential dimension of culture that modern people often overlook. Culture isn’t about the consumption of media or any other text; it’s a process of self-authorship people undertake through experiences in real life. Everyone within a living cultural moment is in the process of recreating themselves in relation to others and to the spirit of the time. Culture isn’t about seeing certain things, or even doing certain things; it’s about becoming the kind of person who does certain things. Perhaps that sounds trivial, even a bit narcissistic, but really, that’s the thing people are after when they participate in cultural spaces. They don’t want to experience beauty or reproduce beauty. They want to become worthy of beauty.

This is also why there can never really be an authentic cultural moment online. As transformative as the ideas we encounter in the digital world might be, there is never enough friction to make them meaningful. No one is ever forced to confront the brave and quarrelsome spirits residing within their fellow man, nor face their own inner demons. Every interaction can be curated and crafted to optimize the presentation of oneself to the world until one ends up, much like Lindy West, in a life that they can neither recognize nor explain.

Across the divide of generations and politics, I sense a latent hunger for a post-postmodern life that hasn’t quite come into focus yet. There needs to be a way to live the principles we profess and to discover what they mean in our lives. Even if we are overworked, isolated, and weighed down by responsibilities, both familial and professional, we need a way to participate collectively in the activities we find most uplifting. And, as daunting as our modern wasteland might be, such opportunities could still be found, or recreated.

Not that there won’t be challenges. Engaging with people in the real world is necessarily slow and painful, and it involves crossing the lines we erected around internet identities we developed for ourselves, running up against others who see things radically differently. The way we experienced the culture war of the 2010s might have to change.

But would not such ideological friction itself be an opportunity? After all, in the cold light of the real world, would such divisions necessarily remain intact?

Meltdown

Far from me to downplay the essential role of belief, much less the modern errors built into the substrate of our society. Nevertheless, part of me wonders just how much of our contemporary political conflict is essential religious division and how much is pride and petty resentment. So much is bound up in symbolism and the imagined (but often false) distinction between “friend” and “enemy” that those labels create.

For example, if I were to sit down with the “Diner-goths” or even Lindy West in a room without windows into the internet, I doubt the hostilities between us would persist for very long.

Certainly, we would be divided by religion and past life decisions, but we would share similar concerns for the future, and ultimately, that which is living always looks forward first. Real experiences and the hard friction of consequence have a natural tendency to break down artificial barriers, and it’s altogether likely that the conflicts we thought defined us in the social media age would seem less relevant than the solutions we might pursue together.

Such encounters might lead to a kind of synthesis born of broad alignment, or, alternatively, to a renewed conviction that our projects needed to be pursued separately. Nevertheless, such interactions would be the first step to move away from paralyzing ideological stagnation and towards an embodied life. We would be, in effect, relearning an essential human discipline, and, for humans, such a discipline can only be understood in physical space.

Once upon a time, several decades back, there were many such spaces that included people like myself, Lindy West, and a myriad of subcultures which we might analogize to today’s Diner-goths. Certainly, the situation we encountered years back wasn’t particularly enviable. The culture was already hollowing out, and no one was enjoying themselves at the time. Nevertheless, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, people feel the absence of these spaces distinctly, and there is a sense that, if people were to make an effort, the public lifestyle of earlier eras might be restored with many of its contradictions resolved.

Increasingly, I see more people thinking in this direction. It’s clear that social media is dying, and that people need to reconnect to the physical world. There are new projects afoot to bring people together. Some efforts are currently attempting to revive the old weekly periodical, others, like my own work with The Redwood Society, are trying to reimagine a fraternal model for community. Nevertheless, there is an understanding, especially within the right-wing, that there is a problem with public politics that can only be overcome with pre-political methods, starting with human connection.

For all the bad-faith criticism of the “Dissident Right”, its critics do have one point here. There is a destructive quality inherent in politics itself, especially right-wing politics. Insofar as right-wingers participate in the political discourse as defined in the 20th century, we do so as its villains. Naturally, we do everything in our power to break the frame, gather a vanguard, and establish different perspectives that challenge the mainstream assumptions about premodern ideas. Nevertheless, once the vibe shifts and the coalition loses focus, the gravitational pull of modernity drags us back into the mainstream's orbit, and we are stuck in the democratic trap, advocating unpopular ideas while bearing the devil's livery.

Many neo-reactionaries have pointed out this recurring problem over the years, and while I do think the “online right” has played a necessary role by speaking unpopular truths and reviving forgotten wisdom, there was a cost we had to pay as we fed the very chaos our culture now languishes in.

For instance, whether I like it or not, I have to admit that people like Lindy West are, in some sense, my people. I was born among such Blue-State liberals and spent almost my entire life living in progressive urban areas. Certainly, in the spirit of cultural localism, I should have some responsibility to help those poor souls lost in the sauce of 20th-century leftism and disconnected from greater spirituality.

Certainly, after 2012, very few of these progressives were listening to people like me. But then again, the aggressive memes developed by right-wingers to break through the mainstream’s taboos didn’t help the situation either. Now, nearly fifteen years later, I wonder if it isn’t time to recover a more diplomatic approach toward my leftist neighbors who are looking for a better future.

And look, if it helps anyone out there, I will hop on the bandwagon and join with every other post-progressive voice online to denounce the “Dissident Right.” Perhaps the time for this banner has finally passed along with the rest of the tropes from the social media era.

Nevertheless, while I have no plans to abandon my principles, I don’t think I will spend much time mourning this fervent age of internet social media. The time was stunning in its inception and dizzying in its culmination. But now that the period is drawing to a close, I feel a sense of sobriety and optimism returning, and I am excited once more to see what will happen next.