Best of 2024: The Woke and the Trad

If you think this is gonna win the culture war—brother, I have news for you.

This week, I’m posting some highlights from The Tracinski Letter—some of my favorite articles that I wrote in the last year.

Below is an article from July 30 about the two-front culture war we’re engaged in, with “woke” conformists on one side and traditionalist conformists on the other.

See also my examination of the rotating anti-free-speech attitudes of left and right in “Censorship: Local, Express, and Round Trip.” Also see my wry observations, in two parts, on the “late stages” of various ideologies on the left and the right.

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Settling Upstream

A little while ago, I came across a news story that seems to sum up where we are right now.

The story is about Poland’s selection for the Venice Biennale, which is, as the name implies, a biennial art festival in Venice that is supposed to represent the very height of the elite “artworld.” It’s organized a bit like Eurovision (which represents low-brow pop culture, yet somehow produces equally awful results) in that every country gets to select its own contributors.

Under the control of a right-wing authoritarian administration, the Polish government did what the nationalist conservatives in the US would like to do. They used their control of the state to support politically connected right-wing “traditionalist” artists. Here’s the result.

Six months ago, Ignacy Czwartos won the opportunity of a lifetime.

A politically conservative painter whose work contains religious, historical, and military images, Czwartos was an outsider in the contemporary art scene in Poland. But that didn’t stop the government there, at the time led by the populist Law and Justice Party, from choosing him to represent the country at the Venice Biennale.

OK, so what is his art like?

Visitors paid attention to one painting in particular. “Nord Stream 2” depicts Angela Merkel, Germany’s former chancellor, alongside President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. They are separated by a metal pipe that evokes the gas pipeline linking their two countries, and appears to form the shape of a swastika. Czwartos said that the painting was “a warning” about those countries’ close ties.

You can see an image of this piece in the article and at the top of this newsletter. It is illustrative but not particularly inspiring. The art is realist, but not skillful or well-painted, and it is entirely in a symbolic and propagandistic style. It’s not even good propaganda. Czwartos is a Polish Jon McNaughton, only much worse. You can see more of his art here. It is the work of a thoroughgoing mediocrity.

Czwartos was selected in a politically rigged process.

That year [2015], the Law and Justice Party came to power and began a yearslong effort to shift the country’s culture to the right, including by ousting liberal directors from major art museums and replacing them with conservatives who would promote traditional values.

Among the museums affected was the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, in Warsaw, which convened the jury that chose Czwartos to represent Poland at Venice.

One juror, the curator Joanna Warsza, said that the selection process was “a setup” designed to choose a “far-right” artist, and that Czwartos was the only option available.

A few weeks after Czwartos was selected, however, a new government formed a ruling coalition after an election that defeated Poland’s authoritarian right. So “the new culture minister announced that he would send Open Group, a Ukrainian collective, to the Biennale instead.” (Czwartos responded by holding his own separate exhibit, which is what the article is mostly about.)

What is Open Group’s art like?

Titled “Repeat After Me II,” the show consists of two large videos featuring Ukrainians who fled after Russia’s full-scale invasion, reproducing the sounds they remember from the war. They imitate the sounds of bombs exploding, automatic gunfire, and helicopters whirring overhead, then give an instruction to viewers: “Repeat after me.” Microphones stand on both sides of the pavilion, and visitors are also encouraged to imitate the noises.

Aside from the fact that this whole thing is ridiculous, juvenile, and meaningless—and involves no artistic skill whatsoever—notice what both exhibits have in common. Both are oriented entirely toward a political message, and the most crudely obvious and simple messages at that.

Political messages and overtones in art are hardly new, and a fan of Ayn Rand’s novels can’t exactly complain about political themes in art. But at its best, a political message is incorporated into something that has a deeper and more personal meaning. We can enjoy the operas of Giuseppe Verdi without having to know anything about the Risorgimento, and there are plenty of fans of The Fountainhead who don’t subscribe to Ayn Rand’s laissez-faire economics. Why? Because the theme of the novel, as she stated it, was “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul.” It is the soul that was her concern, and the politics was secondary.

Yet in the works described in this article about the Vienna Biennale, the political themes are very much on the surface, with nothing underneath. This art begins and ends with its political message, and the only question is whether it’s a right-wing message or a left-wing message.

Years ago, the late political commenter Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream of culture.” That’s true, as far as it goes, but I am afraid the conclusion the right has drawn—following the lead of the left, as usual—is that if they want to win political battles, their activists need to move upstream, kick the artists out of their encampment, and set up there to produce political propaganda in place of art.

It's a culture war in which culture is losing—or rather, one in which culture has to fight a two-front war against those who would collapse everything into crude political messaging for their side.

Below are a few more scenes from this two-front war.

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The Woke and the Trad

In addition to being exclusively about a rather shallow politics, the other problem with our current culture war is that it is conceived as a war fought about culture, when it is actually a war fought with culture—that is, a war fought by producing your own art and ideas, not just by criticizing someone else’s. (See, for example, conservatives freaking out about the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, in part because they got their art history references wrong and confused a banquet of the Olympian gods with the Last Supper.)

In short, you can’t cancel your way into a cultural golden age.

To get an idea of this problem, I recently came across a piece I had missed a few years ago. It is confession by a young woman who, as a teenager, helped set off the trend of online hysterias over supposedly “problematic” actors, authors, or films. It turns out, in retrospect, that she was just projecting out onto the world the inner turmoil of her own psychological problems after the tragic death of her older sister.

I tried going back to school after a few weeks, but I found myself picking frequent arguments with classmates and teachers. The school made an arrangement with my parents: I would be placed on “medical leave” for the remainder of the semester. I would graduate on time, but I wouldn’t return to campus.

Stuck at home, I devoted myself to Tumblr. What was I trying to accomplish? Mostly, I was interested in knocking people off their pedestals. I also enjoyed being popular, controversial, discussed….

In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret—about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad. Who was I to lump together known misogynists with people who got tattoos in languages they didn’t speak? I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had.

There’s something almost quaint about it all now: teenage me, teaching myself about social justice on Tumblr while also posturing as an authority on that very subject, thinking I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude. 

So far as I can tell, however, this little bit of introspection is an isolated exception.

As for the right, if there is anything the new nationalist conservatives have managed to produce as their vision of the future, it is a collection of “trad”—i.e., traditionalist—lifestyle blogs and social media accounts. These do what most social media lifestyle accounts do and present a glamorized and highly inaccurate version of the subculture they are intended to celebrate. That is particularly so for a “trad” lifestyle that starts out as a cartoon caricature version of the past in the first place.

Among the most popular versions is the “tradwife,” which offers an idealized vision of a woman who submits herself to selfless service to her husband. You can see how this would be very popular with the kind of sadsack young man who tends to be attracted to the traditionalist right. But a few young women get sucked into it, too.

Here is the story of one of them, Lauren Southern, a woman who made a (small) name for herself a few years back as a young right-wing media firebrand. Then she disappeared into a “tradwife” marriage in which her husband turned out—surprise, surprise—to be an abusive creep before abandoning her and their child. Here is a profile on her story.

She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticized by progressives as “dangerous and stupid.” Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves—this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods….

She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss….

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”…

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support…. [According to Southern], “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

I have heavily excerpted this article because the author has an annoying compulsion to balance every criticism of the “trad” right with a criticism of the “woke” left. Yes, I know that I’m doing that here, for the most part—but this is in an article that is focused around the failure of the trad lifestyle, and it’s by an author and in a publication (Unherd) that made their names by criticizing the woke, so it has the air of a cringing apology for daring to depart from their side’s orthodoxy.

But the saddest part is this passage.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships.”

If only someone could have warned her that not everything you read on the internet is true.

I get the impression that Southern is trying to get her career as a commenter back together, but I’m old-fashioned enough to think that the people who comment for us on the big questions of life maybe ought to have some life experience, show some sensible judgment, and maybe have their own lives sorted out before they start making pronouncements for the rest of us.

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“Buckle Up, Tovarisch”

The male equivalent of Lauren Southern’s failed experiment with being a tradwife are the guys moving to Russia because “it feels like our positive vision of 1950s America.” In the end, I think they will find it bears more resemblance to 1950s Russia.

This story is in the British Daily Mail, and you have to know that paper to realize what they’re doing when they feature a picture of a goofy-looking divorced 62-year-old guy, with a caption about how he “hopes to start a family in his new home of Yalta with one of the ‘20%’ of Russian women who he says look like super models.” If you look at the photo, you realize this guy is delusional to think he’s going to end up with a supermodel—and the Daily Mail is quite deliberately making fun of him.

But far more dangerous, and less excusable, are the guys sitting back in the relative peace, security, and prosperity of America and comparing it unfavorably to various dictatorships. The latest example, which I mentioned recently, is historian Niall Ferguson straining himself to compare the US today to the Soviet Union in its late stages. The whole thing is ridiculous and seems to be a rationalization built around only one passage, in which he compares Donald Trump’s recent felony convictions—in a fair trial decided by a jury of his peers—to the martyrdom of a Soviet dissident.

The response I was looking for was from Cathy Young, who knows something about Russia in its late Soviet period because she grew up in it.

Her response at The Bulwark is, as usual, carefully balanced. She acknowledges the legitimacy of some of Ferguson’s complaints against the left, while correcting him on numerous factual errors that undermine his wildly hyperbolic claims. I would not have that degree of patience and forbearance. But she captures a couple of important evasions in Ferguson’s case, including the by-now notorious right-wing tendency to loudly complain about censorship in a widely read article in a popular magazine. As Cathy puts it, “America remains a pluralistic society; remarkably, Ferguson doesn’t say one word about the existence of alternative institutions, even as he is writing for one.”

But here’s the more important internally imposed blinder.

Ferguson’s purported critique of “Soviet America” is aimed more or less exclusively at blue America [i.e., the left and Democrats]…. 

[I]f you’re criticizing Soviet-flavored left-wing groupthink and intolerance but have nothing to say about aspects of right-wing Trumpian populism that mirror both the Soviet legacy and toxic trends in post-Soviet Russia—authoritarianism, the strongman cult, paranoid conspiracy theories, pervasive grievance over lost “greatness”—chances are you’re being a political hack.

Cathy is even sharper in responding to one of Ferguson’s defenders, the increasingly nationalist conservative writer Helen Andrews.

It is also worth noting that while Andrews latches on to Soviet analogies as a way to indict modern-day America, just last year she argued in Compact that nostalgia for actual Soviet and Soviet-bloc societies is on to something: Those societies had more “sense of purpose” and less “disorder and degeneracy,” consumer luxuries aren’t everything (who cares about bananas when the Soviet bloc offered an alternative to liberalism?), and the lack of freedom and human rights was “an annoyance at most for the average person.” Andrews’s overriding point, always, seems to be “liberalism bad.” Either it’s too Soviet, or it’s not Soviet enough.

Ouch.

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I omitted a final postscript from the original version of this article about yet another rigged election in Venezuela and a short-lived uprising against the regime. I omitted it because it turned out to be short-lived. But I do want to repeat my final observation, which is that we need a rebound against both the woke and the trad in favor of liberalism.

That’s something to work toward and look out for in the next year.