Liberals are deathly afraid of living in a liberal consensus. This much we know.
To many people, Obama's second term looked like a liberal end of history. The United States elected a black president. Twice. Given expected demographic shifts, another four years may mean that the tea partying coded-language GOP may not win the presidency ever again. The Daily Show generation was now calling the shots. Healthcare was top of mind at the time, and the Democrats had a decent enough plan that was expected to bear fruit. The Democrats could easily overcome the party of Palin and finally move on all kinds of other important social issues. Climate change!
The only problem was that liberals clearly did not have a lot of consensus around "culture war" issues. Some things like marijuana and same-sex marriage created divisions in regards to strategy and priority, of course, but these divisions could be weathered with patience. Other issues have proven to be far more difficult. Which fractures are older and have created more vulnerabilities is up for debate, but Islam is a topic that maintained controversy as long as any other. Forget about a clear consensus about the causes of and appropriate response to 9/11, liberals did not even have a consensus of opinion about Salman Rushdie. This difference of opinion was vividly displayed every time a character like Christopher Hitchens opened their mouths - the gap widened into a vast canyon after Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo.
The controversy about religion around the liberal dining room table did not stop liberals from diving head first into the shallow end of a lot of politics surrounding deep social problems. Marginal groups that largely thought of themselves as comfortable liberal internet connected hiveminds soon found themselves divided by newfound "progress" on issues. Elevatorgate. Shirtstorm. Mattressgirl. Rolling Stone's UVA story. The Gamergate drama. "Women in tech". Non-binary pronouns. Cancel Colbert. Every few weeks, there reliably was a "lived experience" to discuss that opened questions that had narrative-shattering implications for the vast liberal friendship. What if your sex positivity was just creepy? What if your "satirical" race joke was just lazy? What is a university's role in policing behavior - what is a university's role anyway? Are people in our "free" society actually making informed choices for themselves or being groomed to accept unhealthy and unhappy adult lives?
The best way to get a political effort off the ground is to have a really "good" bogeyman. In the "social justice" world, a stereotype was created that outlined the perfect enemy.
The enemy is Chad.
Chad is a young college educated white male that has a decent job. Chad believes fervently that his school and career choices were based on his personal preferences and his educators/employers ability to objectively measure his merit as a person, as a student, as an employee. Chad's relationships with women have almost uniformly been based on "the chase" - Chad's mates have clearly desired to be pursued, indicators demonstrating otherwise are first diagnosed as sheepish playfulness that is part of normal heterosexual romance.
Chad feels no unique connection to history, or understanding of how colonialism, slavery and systemic injustices based on various biases in the past and present may have benefited him directly or indirectly. Chad feels that people like Chad are not the beneficiaries of social and government interventions but are instead the government's benevolent benefactors. Chads built society, after all.
Chad hails from a stable two parent household that likely bankrolled his education (including his internships) and this same family may prove to be an invaluable financial backstop in the future. Chad does not think of his family as an unearned inheritance - Chad believes it is the dividend of his parent's hard work and moral fortitude. Chad cannot find fault in his lineage - at least no faults that would find place him in a position that would ask him to claim financial or political responsibility.
Chad does not believe that his existence is "problematic" - instead what is "problematic" is all social, moral, cultural trends that aren't openly seeking to emulate his success. Why wouldn't everyone want to be Chad? Chad knows that being Chad is great.
In social justice terms, Chad's masculinity is said to be "toxic", his whiteness "fragile" - in sum, Chad's identity is based on ignorance and consumption. Chad isn't one to be argued with in a "civil" manner - Chad is to be lectured until his power can be seized completely.
Does Chad exist? This will prove to not matter. What matters is the idea of Chad was enough to create the social justice warrior.
A lot of academic discourse had already talked about "The Chad" derisively. As long as there has been something that would qualify as "the west" there has been someone writing about how it's all a bunch of nonsense created to prop up the identity of Chad.
The new and novel piece of the puzzle is Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, LiveJournal and other social media apps. Never before could a lonely mentally unstable person with political opinions project themselves as the modern world's greatest philosopher of human rights and fairness. Social justice warriors aren't simply "progressives" or "academics" in the typical sense, they are often completely detached from what many people would regard as normal human interaction within daylight in the physical world. Social justice warriors are oddly enough typically operating as "lone wolves" - there is rarely any evidence that suggests a basis for wide political effort other than tweets going "viral" and swaying a larger discourse largely by mistake. All snarky misrepresentations or misunderstandings contained in shared short showerthoughts are not to be thought of as embarrassing quips to put one's career at risk - the career itself relies on the response garnered by a half-formed sentence that suggests something very provocative. The goal is to 'speak truth to power' in simple terms, the more one-dimensional a perspective had, the more it gathered the edge it needed to spread quickly.
After the social justice warrior had gained enough mindshare on social media, many new forms of concerned liberal were born. One form was concerned about what social justice warriors would do if given a modicum of power. Another was worried about what it meant for negative electoral impact for liberal candidates.
A third form of concerned liberal focused on the conservative reaction that could be expected from the visibility of completely asinine social justice warrior advocacy. Measuring the impact of social justice warriors and calculating what the response should be from reasonable 'centrists' became just what the doctor ordered. Political analysis remained on how to conquer the virality of social justice warrior content, which exacerbated the problem.
The ascendance of the Trump campaign created a slogan for this flavor of liberal concern - "This is how you get Trump".
The problem with the social justice bogeyman is that the narrative of who Chad is and what Chad is capable of is almost precisely what white nationalists already believe. Against the backdrop of a social justice retelling of history, white nationalists respond with a "Yeah, and so what?". Atrocities of any size can be explained away as long as the eventual result of a modern world run by the United States can be conceived as better than the imagined alternative. Those that are unapologetically Chad cannot find a white male in history that is incapable of being rehabilitated - any tarnish on an image can at least be buffed by some well crafted whataboutery. Who should concern themselves with what Christopher Columbus or Robert E Lee did or did not do when other people of different identities in that time made similar choices? Is Muhammad any better? If white men are so bad, why does your team like Bill Clinton so much?
Along with an alignment in a reading of history, social justice warriors and white nationalists also agree that Chad is American. Whiteness is American. Masculinity is American. Nearly everything in history and world politics that is at all relevant is immediately concerned with America. America First.
If there is any doubt to how similar white nationalists and social justice warriors are, consider how ready they both are to dismiss inconveniences like the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is not regarded as a white male project. To many social justice warriors, the USSR is a complicated and misunderstood response to global capitalism, an imperialist power that cannot be judged without first understanding American provocations. To white nationalist, the USSR is either a Jewish plot or another failure of Slavic atheism. (Who exactly is white changes to suit an argument within both groups, of course. Asking an individual to categorize Netanyahu and Assad on a whiteness scale may be a revealing exercise.)
Religion is also disregarded by both parties. Social justice warriors see masculinity as a white colonialist product, created for white men and by white men. White nationalists are more than happy to claim this narrative as their own, believing themselves to be the inventors of apple pie and the nuclear family. To the extent scripture exists, it is either weaponized (social justice) or correctly interpreted (Chad) by the white male. Within this context there is no room to blame Abrahamic religions for their contribution to perverse conceptions of gender roles - it is the cunning white man that created a divisive binary in his favor.
Understanding this means Trump is no longer a mystery. Trump is a nepotistic ignoramus, a blowhard, a liar, an atheist and a coward - but it all does not matter as he has fully embraced the Chad role. Truth does not matter, morality does not matter, religion does not matter, civility does not matter, what matters is how much Trump can prove himself to be a cold and calculating Chad for the sake of all of America's Chads.
Trump can wallow all day in edgy memes, go against all political norms, and suffer no consequences. Everything he lacks, he makes up in denial. The Chads of America have convinced themselves, with the help of liberal hand-wringing, that accepting civility and a balance of power is to ultimately lose an epic culture war to a group of social justice warriors that use every opportunity to remind everyone how much white men have ruined everything. Given this binary choice, everything is said to be justified.
Now that the Chad Trump is center stage, the current political game is stuck on repeat. Trump says something. It's interpreted by his fans in the most fawning way. The social justice warriors react. And then the Trumpkin react to the reaction. The Chads and the liberals are often concerned with what qualifies as 'racist' and when it becomes appropriate to drop the R-word in polite conversation, all the while creating enough irony poisoning to layer even the most innocent of phrases and gestures with enough drama as to make it impossible for a reasonable 9-to-5 working witness to determine what is meaningless trolling and what may be committed bigots winking at each other in coded messages in the daylight.
Several years into this game, the concerned liberal is more often playing the role of useful idiot. Not bothering to engage with mindful content and real political issues, the concerned liberal is stuck dissecting the culture war as a false dichotomy. Everything the social justice warriors do is interpreted as "more Trump" or "less Trump". It is taken for granted that the social justice warriors created Trump himself.
And the social justice warriors did create Trump. The social justice warriors drew the prophet of white males, in the most cartoonish way possible.
The true tragedy is that many white males have decided to make the cartoon real, or prove that the cartoon was always a true portrait of White America. Much like a lampoon of Islam can be a critique that proves its own point by the curated backlash, the social justice conception of the white male has given white males the world over an opportunity to not care about their image and embrace the caricature. Meanwhile liberal minded people sit back and critique the repeated provocations, as many chose to dissect the works of cartoonists murdered by jihadis.
The social justice warriors drew a cartoon. The cartoon was elected. One may choose to critique the choices made in the outline. But the prediction was clearly correct. Social justice warriors held up a funhouse mirror to white liberals and white conservatives. Some denied that it was accurate. Some claimed that it used to be accurate. Some claimed it to be an accurate depiction of the other team. And some saw themselves as what they are or saw what they aspired to become.
The choice remaining is to outgrow the social justice warrior. Unfortunately the kids aren't quite alright.
To many people, Obama's second term looked like a liberal end of history. The United States elected a black president. Twice. Given expected demographic shifts, another four years may mean that the tea partying coded-language GOP may not win the presidency ever again. The Daily Show generation was now calling the shots. Healthcare was top of mind at the time, and the Democrats had a decent enough plan that was expected to bear fruit. The Democrats could easily overcome the party of Palin and finally move on all kinds of other important social issues. Climate change!
The only problem was that liberals clearly did not have a lot of consensus around "culture war" issues. Some things like marijuana and same-sex marriage created divisions in regards to strategy and priority, of course, but these divisions could be weathered with patience. Other issues have proven to be far more difficult. Which fractures are older and have created more vulnerabilities is up for debate, but Islam is a topic that maintained controversy as long as any other. Forget about a clear consensus about the causes of and appropriate response to 9/11, liberals did not even have a consensus of opinion about Salman Rushdie. This difference of opinion was vividly displayed every time a character like Christopher Hitchens opened their mouths - the gap widened into a vast canyon after Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo.
The controversy about religion around the liberal dining room table did not stop liberals from diving head first into the shallow end of a lot of politics surrounding deep social problems. Marginal groups that largely thought of themselves as comfortable liberal internet connected hiveminds soon found themselves divided by newfound "progress" on issues. Elevatorgate. Shirtstorm. Mattressgirl. Rolling Stone's UVA story. The Gamergate drama. "Women in tech". Non-binary pronouns. Cancel Colbert. Every few weeks, there reliably was a "lived experience" to discuss that opened questions that had narrative-shattering implications for the vast liberal friendship. What if your sex positivity was just creepy? What if your "satirical" race joke was just lazy? What is a university's role in policing behavior - what is a university's role anyway? Are people in our "free" society actually making informed choices for themselves or being groomed to accept unhealthy and unhappy adult lives?
The construction of the privileged white male
The best way to get a political effort off the ground is to have a really "good" bogeyman. In the "social justice" world, a stereotype was created that outlined the perfect enemy.
The enemy is Chad.
Chad is a young college educated white male that has a decent job. Chad believes fervently that his school and career choices were based on his personal preferences and his educators/employers ability to objectively measure his merit as a person, as a student, as an employee. Chad's relationships with women have almost uniformly been based on "the chase" - Chad's mates have clearly desired to be pursued, indicators demonstrating otherwise are first diagnosed as sheepish playfulness that is part of normal heterosexual romance.
Chad feels no unique connection to history, or understanding of how colonialism, slavery and systemic injustices based on various biases in the past and present may have benefited him directly or indirectly. Chad feels that people like Chad are not the beneficiaries of social and government interventions but are instead the government's benevolent benefactors. Chads built society, after all.
Chad hails from a stable two parent household that likely bankrolled his education (including his internships) and this same family may prove to be an invaluable financial backstop in the future. Chad does not think of his family as an unearned inheritance - Chad believes it is the dividend of his parent's hard work and moral fortitude. Chad cannot find fault in his lineage - at least no faults that would find place him in a position that would ask him to claim financial or political responsibility.
Chad does not believe that his existence is "problematic" - instead what is "problematic" is all social, moral, cultural trends that aren't openly seeking to emulate his success. Why wouldn't everyone want to be Chad? Chad knows that being Chad is great.
In social justice terms, Chad's masculinity is said to be "toxic", his whiteness "fragile" - in sum, Chad's identity is based on ignorance and consumption. Chad isn't one to be argued with in a "civil" manner - Chad is to be lectured until his power can be seized completely.
Does Chad exist? This will prove to not matter. What matters is the idea of Chad was enough to create the social justice warrior.
The Genesis of the social justice warrior
A lot of academic discourse had already talked about "The Chad" derisively. As long as there has been something that would qualify as "the west" there has been someone writing about how it's all a bunch of nonsense created to prop up the identity of Chad.
The new and novel piece of the puzzle is Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, LiveJournal and other social media apps. Never before could a lonely mentally unstable person with political opinions project themselves as the modern world's greatest philosopher of human rights and fairness. Social justice warriors aren't simply "progressives" or "academics" in the typical sense, they are often completely detached from what many people would regard as normal human interaction within daylight in the physical world. Social justice warriors are oddly enough typically operating as "lone wolves" - there is rarely any evidence that suggests a basis for wide political effort other than tweets going "viral" and swaying a larger discourse largely by mistake. All snarky misrepresentations or misunderstandings contained in shared short showerthoughts are not to be thought of as embarrassing quips to put one's career at risk - the career itself relies on the response garnered by a half-formed sentence that suggests something very provocative. The goal is to 'speak truth to power' in simple terms, the more one-dimensional a perspective had, the more it gathered the edge it needed to spread quickly.
The memos from concerned liberals
After the social justice warrior had gained enough mindshare on social media, many new forms of concerned liberal were born. One form was concerned about what social justice warriors would do if given a modicum of power. Another was worried about what it meant for negative electoral impact for liberal candidates.
A third form of concerned liberal focused on the conservative reaction that could be expected from the visibility of completely asinine social justice warrior advocacy. Measuring the impact of social justice warriors and calculating what the response should be from reasonable 'centrists' became just what the doctor ordered. Political analysis remained on how to conquer the virality of social justice warrior content, which exacerbated the problem.
The ascendance of the Trump campaign created a slogan for this flavor of liberal concern - "This is how you get Trump".
Enter the unapologetically Chad
The problem with the social justice bogeyman is that the narrative of who Chad is and what Chad is capable of is almost precisely what white nationalists already believe. Against the backdrop of a social justice retelling of history, white nationalists respond with a "Yeah, and so what?". Atrocities of any size can be explained away as long as the eventual result of a modern world run by the United States can be conceived as better than the imagined alternative. Those that are unapologetically Chad cannot find a white male in history that is incapable of being rehabilitated - any tarnish on an image can at least be buffed by some well crafted whataboutery. Who should concern themselves with what Christopher Columbus or Robert E Lee did or did not do when other people of different identities in that time made similar choices? Is Muhammad any better? If white men are so bad, why does your team like Bill Clinton so much?
Along with an alignment in a reading of history, social justice warriors and white nationalists also agree that Chad is American. Whiteness is American. Masculinity is American. Nearly everything in history and world politics that is at all relevant is immediately concerned with America. America First.
If there is any doubt to how similar white nationalists and social justice warriors are, consider how ready they both are to dismiss inconveniences like the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is not regarded as a white male project. To many social justice warriors, the USSR is a complicated and misunderstood response to global capitalism, an imperialist power that cannot be judged without first understanding American provocations. To white nationalist, the USSR is either a Jewish plot or another failure of Slavic atheism. (Who exactly is white changes to suit an argument within both groups, of course. Asking an individual to categorize Netanyahu and Assad on a whiteness scale may be a revealing exercise.)
Religion is also disregarded by both parties. Social justice warriors see masculinity as a white colonialist product, created for white men and by white men. White nationalists are more than happy to claim this narrative as their own, believing themselves to be the inventors of apple pie and the nuclear family. To the extent scripture exists, it is either weaponized (social justice) or correctly interpreted (Chad) by the white male. Within this context there is no room to blame Abrahamic religions for their contribution to perverse conceptions of gender roles - it is the cunning white man that created a divisive binary in his favor.
Understanding this means Trump is no longer a mystery. Trump is a nepotistic ignoramus, a blowhard, a liar, an atheist and a coward - but it all does not matter as he has fully embraced the Chad role. Truth does not matter, morality does not matter, religion does not matter, civility does not matter, what matters is how much Trump can prove himself to be a cold and calculating Chad for the sake of all of America's Chads.
Trump can wallow all day in edgy memes, go against all political norms, and suffer no consequences. Everything he lacks, he makes up in denial. The Chads of America have convinced themselves, with the help of liberal hand-wringing, that accepting civility and a balance of power is to ultimately lose an epic culture war to a group of social justice warriors that use every opportunity to remind everyone how much white men have ruined everything. Given this binary choice, everything is said to be justified.
The concerned liberal vs the engaged Chad.
Now that the Chad Trump is center stage, the current political game is stuck on repeat. Trump says something. It's interpreted by his fans in the most fawning way. The social justice warriors react. And then the Trumpkin react to the reaction. The Chads and the liberals are often concerned with what qualifies as 'racist' and when it becomes appropriate to drop the R-word in polite conversation, all the while creating enough irony poisoning to layer even the most innocent of phrases and gestures with enough drama as to make it impossible for a reasonable 9-to-5 working witness to determine what is meaningless trolling and what may be committed bigots winking at each other in coded messages in the daylight.
Several years into this game, the concerned liberal is more often playing the role of useful idiot. Not bothering to engage with mindful content and real political issues, the concerned liberal is stuck dissecting the culture war as a false dichotomy. Everything the social justice warriors do is interpreted as "more Trump" or "less Trump". It is taken for granted that the social justice warriors created Trump himself.
And the social justice warriors did create Trump. The social justice warriors drew the prophet of white males, in the most cartoonish way possible.
The true tragedy is that many white males have decided to make the cartoon real, or prove that the cartoon was always a true portrait of White America. Much like a lampoon of Islam can be a critique that proves its own point by the curated backlash, the social justice conception of the white male has given white males the world over an opportunity to not care about their image and embrace the caricature. Meanwhile liberal minded people sit back and critique the repeated provocations, as many chose to dissect the works of cartoonists murdered by jihadis.
The social justice warriors drew a cartoon. The cartoon was elected. One may choose to critique the choices made in the outline. But the prediction was clearly correct. Social justice warriors held up a funhouse mirror to white liberals and white conservatives. Some denied that it was accurate. Some claimed that it used to be accurate. Some claimed it to be an accurate depiction of the other team. And some saw themselves as what they are or saw what they aspired to become.
The choice remaining is to outgrow the social justice warrior. Unfortunately the kids aren't quite alright.