To Know a Society, Map its Extremities
When we talk about a culture, we often talk about its center, its meaty mass. The majority rules. A society’s heart is to be found in whatever the bulk of people clustered in the middle think, feel, and do.
I object. The extremes matter. That crazy person who reads the news, gets upset, and commits an act of rebellion against the status quo gets a vote, too. In fact, they get the biggest vote of all. What the deranged feel permitted to envision is as much a read on who we are as what all us sensible centrists allow ourselves.
In this regard, what is equally as telling as outbursts of antisocial behavior are the missing acts of subversion. What our lunatics don’t get upset about is as important as what they do, because see — the lunatics aren’t all one and the same. They can sit at opposite poles, and when the poles reverse or vanish, you’d be wise to pay attention to which way the wind is blowing.
What interests me is that a certain type of extremism has vanished altogether, near as I can tell: animal and environmental extremists.
Do a Google News search for “animal welfare extremists.” You won’t get many results. The first result talks about 100 of so-called extremists gathering at a conference.
Yawn.
If extremists are as extremists do, then extremists in our age are apparently as worrisome as insurance agents.
What ever happened to the Earth Liberation Front? Where is the Monkey Wrench Gang? When was the last time the Animal Liberation Front burned down a monkey-breeding laboratory? It’s been a minute. How about those Occupy Wall Street folks? Does anyone remember the WTO riots?
That sort of extremism seems to have disappeared. The discomfiture around commerce seems to have vanished and with it any resistance to the primacy of capital. There is no left anymore, near as I can tell. The environmentalists are all meekly making sustainable goods on Etsy. That’s as rowdy as things get. Yes, the Black Bloc is still occasionally shattering some storefront windows. Antifa is not much of a thing — a convenient strawman for the right, but not a movement as such. Michael Reinoehl provided them their lone moment of galvanization, and that was quickly snuffed out, not to be repeated.
Now look at what extremism does occur. You can name half a dozen extremist nationalist movements without even trying that hard. Proud Boys. Three Percenters. Oath Keepers. Patriot Prayer. MAGA. National Policy Institute. Atomwaffen Division.
And unlike the leftists, rightist lunatics do engage in outbursts of antisocial behavior pretty regularly. Kyle Rittenhouse is on trial as I type, and while he may wriggle off the legal hook, there isn’t much question that he was looking for a fight and felt totally within his rights to end it with deadly force. The trial of the three men who killed Ahmed Arbery is going on right now as well. January 6th is not a distant memory. White males still feel completely comfortable spouting antisocial nonsense about freedom amidst a continued pandemic, because even in a health crisis, the worst thing you can do is ask a white man to do anything to help out. His freedom comes first. A bald-faced liar can foam at the mouth and shout down any legitimate questions about whether or not he raped someone until he gets appointed to the highest court in all the land.
These sorts of things are just accepted now. Forget cancel culture. Forget the woke mob. Forget #metoo. None of these things has real power. Need proof? Just look at Roe v. Wade getting chipped away at bit by bit. Sure, ladies, you can take down a random guy who raped you (as long as he’s ugly and Jewish), but we still get to tell you that you’re not allowed to abort a fetus.
All the supposedly scary liberal thought police movements are just classic liberalism applied to skin tone and sex. The harder these movements push, the more they affirm the underlying original point: the individual is all that matters. And there is one individual who held all the cards before and still does today, and the harder you fight him with his own weapons, the more smug and powerful he becomes.
Deep down, we all know it. It’s why the resistance has broken. We’re all just passengers on this ethno-capitalist train barreling into environmental catastrophe, absorbing a certain amount of abuse from the sanctioned extremists, the ones our society winks and nods at.
While a Rittenhouse or a McMichael or a Fairlamb or a Chansley may get thrown in jail, that isn’t enough to tell the next one that what he’s thinking isn’t right. And that is why the next Roof or Earnest or Bowers or Fields (see how easy it is to find exemplars?) is just around the corner. The rest of us don’t believe strongly enough in something else. We’ve meekly accepted that there is no greater good than consumerism and individual freedom. There may be more of us, but deep down, we agree with them enough for them to come back again and again. They are the unruly foot soldiers of a school of thought that has the upper hand, in our minds as much as in our institutions.
