(Link/Archive)
Jerusalem Demsas of the wonderful new liberal outlet The Argument has a recent article called No Kings wasn’t cringe. The article is a response to claims that, though the No Kings protestors are protesting for an important cause, they are doing it in a cringe way. Some of the protestors held up signs with boomerific manglings of memes. Others would dance to music (which is of course very cringe).
Demsas rightly argues that concerns about the protests’ alleged cringiness are ill-conceived. We are witnessing a terrifying authoritarian expansion of federal power in America. We are witnessing a president who has slashed foreign aid and brought about staggeringly large numbers of excess deaths. A president who attempted a coup, who is snatching people off the streets, who has denaturalized over a million legal immigrants. On a national scale, the country is sleepwalking through an authoritarian takeover by one of the most amoral, corrupt, and contemptible figures in recent public life.
Now, maybe saying that is a bit cringe. Perhaps I have exposed myself as cringe, and thus given you license to never take me seriously again. After all, being cringe is our culture’s cardinal sin. Our culture no longer takes vice particularly seriously—cringe is the antichrist in the public consciousness, the one thing, above all else, that you do not want to be. It is bad to be evil. It is worse to be cringe.
But I think it is cringe to care about being cringe. If your assessment of a national protest movement is affected by a four-second emotional reaction—wholly due to the overenthusiasm of the protestors—something has gone badly wrong. If you go through life classifying causes as either “cringe” or “based,” and then undyingly support the based ones and oppose the cringe ones, you have stopped being a serious person.
How do you avoid being cringe? Well, as we all know, if you care too much about something, that is cringe. If you are driven to tears when you learn about slavery, then that is very cringe. To avoid being cringe, you should demonstrate, at every juncture, how little you care about things. You have to maintain, at all moments, an affectation of complete, nihilistic unconcern with all the world’s problems. If you ever get emotional about terrible things happening, that is cringe—it is anathema. The based thing to do is, of course, to make an edgy joke about it, so no one could be mistaken for thinking that you have strong ethical compunctions about any issue.
One of the cancers metastasizing in our culture is the constant desire, on all sides, not to be cringe. While cringiness and goodness are not complete opposites, they certainly are located far from each other on the spectrum of ideas. Cringiness tends to come from overenthusiasm, from taking things too seriously, from caring too much. But if our chief concern, at every moment, is to make sure we do not care too much, that we are not taking ethical concerns too seriously, then we have allowed ourselves to abandon morality. We have given ourselves an excuse to ignore the call of conscience in our head, because listening to it might be cringe.
This cancer afflicts both sides. To be a leftist these days, you cannot be like Chomsky—who once wept about the bombs dropping on Laos that blew children limb from limb. You have to be ironic, with your singular emotion being detached semi-ironic amusement at how stupid your enemies are. You have to be like The Serfs or Chapo Trap House. You cannot care about anything. You must be a sullen husk devoid of emotions or moral compunction like a notary apathetically recording the other side’s malfeasance.
On the right, you can no longer talk about higher values like liberty and the constitution. These are not discussed much more among young rightists. The right wing has subordinated their ideals to politics. Right-wing political success has become their idol. Ronald Reagan would be quite out of place in the modern Republican party. Even the religious right has managed to become edgy and nihilistic—basedness has become their god, and to the extent that they mention religion, it is because there’s something based about quoting unsettling verses from the Bible or early Church fathers.
So is the No Kings protest cringe? I have bad news if you are asking this question: even thinking about it as a serious question means that your evaluation of ideas is out of whack. Dare I say: caring about that question is itself cringe—colossally so?
There are some causes that matter, that are worth making sacrifices for. One of those sacrifices, unfortunately, is being a bit cringe. If a cause matters, if it really is important, then you should sincerely and strongly advocate for it. Wandering through life like a dejected ghost, unwilling to latch on to any idea for fear that its advocates might care too much, is sad and pitiful. It is, in fact, cringe. What could possibly be more cringe than allowing the instinctive and unreflective reactions of morally indifferent internet nihilists to dictate what you think about some issue?
If you were at the No Kings protests you probably wouldn’t feel they were cringe. Demsas nicely describes some of the people she met at the protest:
If you actually met these people, you would probably not find them cringe. You would find them purposeful and sincere. The reaction of cringe comes not primarily from those who actually viewed the protests but instead from out of context clips circulating on the internet after the protest. If you have allowed your brain to get hijacked by a three-second emotional reaction you have towards randomly circulating internet clips, then that’s embarrassing. As Andy Masley said “It’s embarrassing to let people negatively polarize you. You’re an adult. Stop it. Negative polarization means your brain got hacked by individual annoying strangers. That’s ridiculous.”
Most sincere displays of emotion are cringe. If a man’s statement to his wife about how much he loved her circulated on the internet, people would find them cringe. Every time some celebrity’s sexts and flirts become public, the entire internet remarks on how cringy they are. Flirting—cringe. Caring about your friends—cringe. Caring about anything—cringe. Love itself—cringe. The good, the true, and the beautiful—cringe.
The other thing to note about claims that the No Kings protests are cringe is that they’re obviously, in large part, a byproduct of the fact that every generation inevitably thinks all the ones before it are cringe. Everyone is in agreement that the stuff done by their parents’ generation is cringe. Older generations provide the younger generations with the gift of life. Younger generations repay that gift by declaring everything the older generations did cringe.
So it’s not surprising that a protest movement with lots of middle-aged people is widely regarded as cringe. ANY protest movement that’s mostly middle-aged people will seem cringe to younger generations. Plato proposed that there is some man up in the celestial realm, and all men get their manhood from resembling him. The older generations are the cringe analogue of that celestial man (that’s a fun sentence to write). They are the Platonic form of the cringe, which all other cringe draws its being by resembling.
In light of this, what should we do? Should we dismiss any movement with people above the age of 45 as automatically cringe, whatever it accomplishes? Should we allow Gen-alpha to run the protest movements, so as to avoid cringiness, where the protest signs would read “6 7 and Trump is like not cool or whatever?” No! That’s ridiculous. As Cartoons Hate Her says “Your Protest Needs Cringe Middle-Aged Women.”
Serious authoritarian encroachment has come to America. It is important that the public sends a visible signal that we do not approve of Trump’s policies on immigration, foreign aid, or trade. We must send a signal that this morally necrotic, demented liar is out of accordance with the principles of America. If you find yourself dismissing such a movement, not because you disagree with its aims, but because you find it cringe, then you have committed two cardinal sins. You have acted foolishly AND you have become cringe.
Jerusalem Demsas of the wonderful new liberal outlet The Argument has a recent article called No Kings wasn’t cringe. The article is a response to claims that, though the No Kings protestors are protesting for an important cause, they are doing it in a cringe way. Some of the protestors held up signs with boomerific manglings of memes. Others would dance to music (which is of course very cringe).
Demsas rightly argues that concerns about the protests’ alleged cringiness are ill-conceived. We are witnessing a terrifying authoritarian expansion of federal power in America. We are witnessing a president who has slashed foreign aid and brought about staggeringly large numbers of excess deaths. A president who attempted a coup, who is snatching people off the streets, who has denaturalized over a million legal immigrants. On a national scale, the country is sleepwalking through an authoritarian takeover by one of the most amoral, corrupt, and contemptible figures in recent public life.
Now, maybe saying that is a bit cringe. Perhaps I have exposed myself as cringe, and thus given you license to never take me seriously again. After all, being cringe is our culture’s cardinal sin. Our culture no longer takes vice particularly seriously—cringe is the antichrist in the public consciousness, the one thing, above all else, that you do not want to be. It is bad to be evil. It is worse to be cringe.
But I think it is cringe to care about being cringe. If your assessment of a national protest movement is affected by a four-second emotional reaction—wholly due to the overenthusiasm of the protestors—something has gone badly wrong. If you go through life classifying causes as either “cringe” or “based,” and then undyingly support the based ones and oppose the cringe ones, you have stopped being a serious person.
How do you avoid being cringe? Well, as we all know, if you care too much about something, that is cringe. If you are driven to tears when you learn about slavery, then that is very cringe. To avoid being cringe, you should demonstrate, at every juncture, how little you care about things. You have to maintain, at all moments, an affectation of complete, nihilistic unconcern with all the world’s problems. If you ever get emotional about terrible things happening, that is cringe—it is anathema. The based thing to do is, of course, to make an edgy joke about it, so no one could be mistaken for thinking that you have strong ethical compunctions about any issue.
One of the cancers metastasizing in our culture is the constant desire, on all sides, not to be cringe. While cringiness and goodness are not complete opposites, they certainly are located far from each other on the spectrum of ideas. Cringiness tends to come from overenthusiasm, from taking things too seriously, from caring too much. But if our chief concern, at every moment, is to make sure we do not care too much, that we are not taking ethical concerns too seriously, then we have allowed ourselves to abandon morality. We have given ourselves an excuse to ignore the call of conscience in our head, because listening to it might be cringe.
This cancer afflicts both sides. To be a leftist these days, you cannot be like Chomsky—who once wept about the bombs dropping on Laos that blew children limb from limb. You have to be ironic, with your singular emotion being detached semi-ironic amusement at how stupid your enemies are. You have to be like The Serfs or Chapo Trap House. You cannot care about anything. You must be a sullen husk devoid of emotions or moral compunction like a notary apathetically recording the other side’s malfeasance.
On the right, you can no longer talk about higher values like liberty and the constitution. These are not discussed much more among young rightists. The right wing has subordinated their ideals to politics. Right-wing political success has become their idol. Ronald Reagan would be quite out of place in the modern Republican party. Even the religious right has managed to become edgy and nihilistic—basedness has become their god, and to the extent that they mention religion, it is because there’s something based about quoting unsettling verses from the Bible or early Church fathers.
So is the No Kings protest cringe? I have bad news if you are asking this question: even thinking about it as a serious question means that your evaluation of ideas is out of whack. Dare I say: caring about that question is itself cringe—colossally so?
There are some causes that matter, that are worth making sacrifices for. One of those sacrifices, unfortunately, is being a bit cringe. If a cause matters, if it really is important, then you should sincerely and strongly advocate for it. Wandering through life like a dejected ghost, unwilling to latch on to any idea for fear that its advocates might care too much, is sad and pitiful. It is, in fact, cringe. What could possibly be more cringe than allowing the instinctive and unreflective reactions of morally indifferent internet nihilists to dictate what you think about some issue?
If you were at the No Kings protests you probably wouldn’t feel they were cringe. Demsas nicely describes some of the people she met at the protest:
Swift was attending the protest alone. When I asked him why he came out, he said “I’m old enough to remember the time when JFK was assassinated and RFK and Martin Luther King and that was an unsettled time, but it never [before] felt like things could collapse in a more permanent way.”
Is that cringe?
A middle-aged man named David Arndt came to the protest with his teenage daughter. He was dressed in a suit, tie, and hat. The front of his sign was a large image of Donald Trump with the word “corrupt” on it. On the back, almost like a note to self, was a small sheet of paper that simply read “I Love America.” He joked that he was wearing a suit so people would know he was a “respectable person” and not an “agitator, malcontent, [or] scruffy beatnik.”
Is that cringe?
If you actually met these people, you would probably not find them cringe. You would find them purposeful and sincere. The reaction of cringe comes not primarily from those who actually viewed the protests but instead from out of context clips circulating on the internet after the protest. If you have allowed your brain to get hijacked by a three-second emotional reaction you have towards randomly circulating internet clips, then that’s embarrassing. As Andy Masley said “It’s embarrassing to let people negatively polarize you. You’re an adult. Stop it. Negative polarization means your brain got hacked by individual annoying strangers. That’s ridiculous.”
Most sincere displays of emotion are cringe. If a man’s statement to his wife about how much he loved her circulated on the internet, people would find them cringe. Every time some celebrity’s sexts and flirts become public, the entire internet remarks on how cringy they are. Flirting—cringe. Caring about your friends—cringe. Caring about anything—cringe. Love itself—cringe. The good, the true, and the beautiful—cringe.
The other thing to note about claims that the No Kings protests are cringe is that they’re obviously, in large part, a byproduct of the fact that every generation inevitably thinks all the ones before it are cringe. Everyone is in agreement that the stuff done by their parents’ generation is cringe. Older generations provide the younger generations with the gift of life. Younger generations repay that gift by declaring everything the older generations did cringe.
So it’s not surprising that a protest movement with lots of middle-aged people is widely regarded as cringe. ANY protest movement that’s mostly middle-aged people will seem cringe to younger generations. Plato proposed that there is some man up in the celestial realm, and all men get their manhood from resembling him. The older generations are the cringe analogue of that celestial man (that’s a fun sentence to write). They are the Platonic form of the cringe, which all other cringe draws its being by resembling.
In light of this, what should we do? Should we dismiss any movement with people above the age of 45 as automatically cringe, whatever it accomplishes? Should we allow Gen-alpha to run the protest movements, so as to avoid cringiness, where the protest signs would read “6 7 and Trump is like not cool or whatever?” No! That’s ridiculous. As Cartoons Hate Her says “Your Protest Needs Cringe Middle-Aged Women.”
Serious authoritarian encroachment has come to America. It is important that the public sends a visible signal that we do not approve of Trump’s policies on immigration, foreign aid, or trade. We must send a signal that this morally necrotic, demented liar is out of accordance with the principles of America. If you find yourself dismissing such a movement, not because you disagree with its aims, but because you find it cringe, then you have committed two cardinal sins. You have acted foolishly AND you have become cringe.
