Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Insufferable Pretense of the Performative Moderate
There is a certain sort of person one encounters online—a sort of person I once was but now utterly cannot abide—who, if removed as a class from the internet, would make it a substantially more tolerable place. Sanctimonious, supercilious, haughty, and absolutely prone to the same ignorance, dishonesty, and outright paranoia of which they accuse others, they are the Performative Moderate. “I believe what I believe because I am not only smarter than you, but also a better person. I’ve posted six Vox articles and a Max Boot column to explain why.” You know the type.
They are the Never Trumpists who stand upon their soapbox to wag their fingers at their “fellow” conservatives whenever the New York Times posts their latest “Why the GOP is worse than the Third Reich” article or column, which occurs on schedule every quarter-hour. They are the sullen members of your conservative church with liberal arts degrees who write post after post in condescending tones about how Critical Race Theory isn’t Marxism but post-structuralism you ignorant and witless little rubes, and then sigh dramatically and roll their eyes when you point out CRT proponents also tend to be hardcore Marxists who openly advocate for the abolition of capitalism.
They are the white women whose only apparent hobby is to sit around waiting for any and all Twitter reports, no matter how implausible or unsubstantiated, of violence against a black man, to flood your feed with digital self-flagellation and extremely misleading if not outright wrong memes about crime statistics. They are the “well, actually” types who go on and on about the stupidity of QAnon and then whisper conspiratorially about how you mustn’t trust a vaccine from the Trump administration or how Trump will seize power from Biden in a military coup.
(The irony is always lost on Performative Moderates because they cannot comprehend irony unless it is shouted at them by a late-night comedy host.)
They are never liberals, mind you. At least, they say they are not. The Performative Moderate claims to be conservative (or sometimes “traditionalist”), but somehow their feed is indistinguishable from that of a Slate television critic’s. They claim they are only following the facts and the science, though neither ever hold up to scrutiny. They speak primly and in patronizing tones (learned from Obama, one supposes) about how the only possible reasons for disagreement with their positions are stupidity or immorality. Ruffling their feathers is easy; the other day I innocuously posted on Facebook that liberals are no more immune to fallacious reasoning than conservatives (as both are human), and the Performative Moderates began crawling out of the woodpile to stomp and snort and whine about the wild unfairness of such a claim.
I was once a Performative Moderate. I’ve never felt quite at home in either party, and I arrogantly assumed it was thus my duty to serve as some sort of prophet and deliver condemnation to Democrat and Republican alike. To my eternal shame, I too have unironically shared a Max Boot column. However, as I gathered among other Performative Moderates, I began to understand just how vacuous, disingenuous, and pointless we all were being. In fact, this has made me truly appreciate the oddballs, wackos, and lunatics among my circles, for they at least are substantially more interesting—and, in the real world of flesh and blood, tend to be more generous, kindly, and less self-absorbed.
Published in Politics
Oh, David French.
LOL yes.
Et AL
I also never felt at home in either party as both are filled with corrupt politicians. A curse upon all the corrupted. Lately, the GOP is looking better as the DNC is looking worse.
They also think we can win the culture wars by doing…nothing.
I must confess, I too have once uttered the phrase “socially liberal, economically conservative”.
I’m now in a ’12 Step Program’ after they started forcing bakers to make them cakes. They want us in re-education camps (the tolerant ones).
I was trying to decide whether I fit better in the oddball, wacko, or lunatic groups and really couldn’t decide.
I then thought about asking my fellow members for a vote on which I fit better into. But that’s crazy – I’ve seen what they do with a little power. I mean, Princess Bride? Come on!
Then I realized it isn’t like a party registration – I really CAN be a member of all 3.
Congratulations on your enlightenment. Welcome to the lunatics; we are lots more fun!
Well they do pontificate. Too often in fact.
Eric Hoffer said something that seems to apply to those losers. He said that success doesn’t really settle anything. In a sense, success today only sets one up for failure tomorrow. So if one succeeds he has to be ready to repeat the success, to prove that he is still as good as he once was. But if one has a good excuse for failing, he’s set for life.
“the”
The one about how he’s no longer a Republican? The one he’s written 1,467 times?
The great economist and columnist Thomas Sowell once gave a speech to incoming Republican members of the US House of Representatives in 1993, as they strategized about how to deal with the new Clinton administration. It was a great speech in which Sowell encouraged Republicans to fight against the enlargement of government.
The money line in the speech was:
Sort of a twist on Goldwater’s favorite Aristotle line about “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Speaking of Mr. French, this was amusing:
https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2020/11/16/oh-hell-yeah-protein-wisdom-owns-david-french-for-dissing-manly-man-trump-in-badas-thread-about-what-the-president-actually-got-done/
Electro, it’s hard to believe you were once a “Performative Moderate”. Many of us were Never Trump till just before the 2016 election when reality hit us over the head like a 2 x 4, but never Performative Moderate. I for one was concerned Trump wasn’t conservative enough and had done some shady things, but he has been exemplary in office in the face of an treacherous onslaught of lies and criminal conspiracies.
Ace took him to pieces, too. (Warning: some bad words.)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/391323.php
David Frum was as mad as a wet hen back in 2009, when he came to the realization nobody in the GOP was listening to his brilliant post-2008 strategy to deal with Obama, by having the Republican Party move left and simply mimic the Democrats’ plans, only at a slower pace. The fact that voters on the right preferred the Tea Party option over his led to a series of punditantrums and attempts to create virtue-signaling alternatives like the “No Labels Party” using Michael Bloomberg’s money.
That’s pretty much what I’m expecting for 2021 from Frum and lots of the others, when they realize that Trump’s not going away and the bulk of the Republican base isn’t going to pull away from his policies, even if some of them might prefer someone else at the top of the ticket in 2024 (in fact, outside of the angry caps-lock woke progressives, I expect the performative moderates to be among the most irate people in ’21 if Trump’s still on the political stage, and will be among the loudest voices demanding that the Biden Justice Department make Trump go away if he won’t stop stealing what they think should be their post-Trump spotlight).
I knew one who was so against the concept of calling for America First, he decided to call himself a “Country First Republican”.
We never could get him to answer “which country?”
Ah, Max Boot. A curious sort of conservative: For our military he advocates Peace Through Superior Firepower, while for the Republican Party he recommends Peace Through Superior Capitulation.
And apparently lots more sane.😎😎😎
David Frum and I exchanged emails for a while when he briefly had a blog. He told me that he was angry at National Review because he had not been offered a free trip on the 2008 cruise. I think a lot of his nonsense is derived from that snit.
One detects quite a sense of entitlement from these insufferable
punditsbloggers. I have a feeling that the animating factor for most of them is status and jealousy.Frum’s mad rush to claim credit for Bush 43’s “Axis of Evil” line showed someone with both considerable ego and desire for self-promotion as the real brains of the outfit (i.e. — try to imagine Peter Robinson running around while Reagan was still in office, telling the world the Berlin Wall speech would have been nothing without his deftness with a phrase). His snit at not being recognized as the intellectual leader of the Frumpublican Party in the wake of Obama’s election was pretty much a preview of how the angriest of the #NeverTrump folks would react to the bulk of the GOP base siding with Trump over them, and where their anger has in turn caused many of them to repudiate their supposed core conservative beliefs because they can’t be on the same side of an issue as Trump.
It’s hard to see how any of that group believes they can reclaim intellectual leadership of the conservative movement, when their devotion to it is so weak they run away from their principles the first time things don’t go their way in the nominating process.
Great, I had just gotten over the fact that I wasn’t either. Man, I guess it’s back to therapy.
This is the best way to know these people. When you’ve experienced the exact same – or similar thinking. People who grow up conservative… great, but you’ll never really understand.
Great post!
And his nastiness to people like Jerry Pournelle is derived from knowing that he is their intellectual inferior? Could be, but it seems likely that, in the end, the problem is that he’s just an unprincipled creature who is willing to say anything to get what he wants–because anybody who gets in his way is not really a human being deserving of respect but merely an obstacle to be destroyed.
Perhaps one of the biggest unforeseen consequences of the lockdowns and unemployment etc, is the large numbers of people who suddenly have a lot more free time to be stupid.
Interesting post. There is something about the “Performative Moderate” criticism. I think there are some Arc Digital contributors who fall into that crowd sometimes. I’d actually be okay if they felt the need to perform and just keep it at that. However, they more often than not want to turn into boundary police and believe they know the limits to appropriate conversation.
It’s such a weird phenomenon. Because they actually do probably hold some moderate views they can sometimes play both sides and get retweets from both sides. But they tend towards acting like they are in some position to be the ones who can make certain thoughts are tweets verboten and that rubs me the wrong way.
What about Jen Rubin? She makes ex conservatives like Frum look reasonable & sane. She has gone full Stalinist. She & Boot must have been in the same cell at the re-education camp.
Not unforeseen by everyone: Anyone familiar with the permanent underclass in the UK (see Theodore Dalrymple) or in America would be entirely unsurprised. Remember when socialists and other reformers confidently told us that industrialization would mean that nobody would have to work more than a few hours a day? And that everybody would spend their leisure time in Healthy Sports and Intellectually Uplifting studies?
There’s nothing moderate about Jen Rubin.
As mentioned before, when she and Mickey Kaus had a podcast together here, with Rubin supposedly representing the right side, and Kaus representing the left side, Kaus always came off as the conservative one.