Iconoclasms Take On The Kriss Diagram Of The Neo-Right, Adjusted to 40 Years Ago
how it would have looked in 1984
My historical recasting of a Kriss diagram, recalibrated to 40 years ago, below. Yes, turning back the Zeitgeist Machine to 1984. A bit of sorting skill is required in order to match my text comments with the graphed presentation. (Part of the Intelligence Test of this post, which is to be scored by the taker, over time.)
Use the comparison to note that History shifts over time to a greater or lesser extent, faster or slower; and in other respects conditions remain the same. As will be seen, diagrams like the one above are painfully insufficient at providing categorical insight in historical terms. But they have their uses, as a preliminary structural template. As a categorical taxonomy to argue with. At least it’s that. It’s a pity that such diagrams are the only content that some writers are capable of providing to their readers.
The Kriss Diagram
Upper Left quadrant
UL: In 1984, a Latin American category, not a US American category. Guerrillas de Christo de Rey; some Latin American paramilitary leaders. Active, in 1984; raging Cold War in Western hemisphere. Militarist, aristocracy as proven by militancy. Much less overtly active today, but you never know.
UR: Reagan Youth default setting. Huge, in 1984. Probably still the most powerful contingent of ideologically Right-leaning Americans, 40 years on. The mainstream of politically right-leaning youth, c.1984. Short-term quarterly profit oriented vanguard, in both investment and politics. Loves the Easy Answers and just-so stories, particularly when the moral of the homily happens to work out to their benefit. Easily duped by numbers- which, being strictly denotative, provide the illusion of final summary authority. And also, in the case of Money, a running total providing the most important indicator of ones personal Evolutionary Fitness. Right-Wing Meritocracy (as opposed to the Democrat kind, which is Bad and Wrong.) Which accounts for both fixations with both ledger numbers and IQ tests as Objective Numbers indicative of Ideal qualities more Real than the messiness of humanly experienced firsthand reality, especially when the metrics happen to flatter their personal egos. A values question.
LL: the c.1984 analogy is Anti-Drugs (and Gangs!) Moralists. Punitively so, and in terms of officially ordained criminalization and discrimination, a level unmatched by any antigay or antifeminist campaign ever. Also unmatched by any racial discrimination measure since the Civil Rights Era. The War on Drugs Criminalizes all Violators, Officially—although some subgroups are obviously penalized more than others, all are penalized to some extent. C.1984, antidrug campaign leaders treat (illegalized) Drugs as a culture-alien invasion promulgated by the 1960s Hippie Conspiracy, and are confident of final victory over the Drug Culture now that Reagan Conservatism has turned the tide…
c.2024, Social Conservatives have had to re-trench, to different arenas. They’ve spent waay too much energy on the broad-front full frontal charge against Drugs thing, waay too counterproductively, in terms of the rest of the agenda. And now, c.2024, they’re sticking it to the Man, too. Fighting the Power of the Woke Agenda. Just not the same as the good old days when Newt Gingrich, William Bennett, Strom Thurmond, and Orrin Hatch joined with Dianne Feinstein and Joe Biden to Stop Drugs, somehow. (Hmm. It took 50 years for Joe Biden to catch up with Jimmy Carter on marijuana policy.)
LR: Cyber-libertarian pioneers. Libertarian Party voters, or apolitical- and an utterly different age group, cultural experience, and ideology from Curtis Yarvin. But- same Social Status Class! Middle class or upper class parentage, good schooling, individually rewarded for showing extra talent at a skill set, upwardly mobile, some even preternaturally rich. Following the bliss of their individual hero’s journey, into a horizonless Future. Utopian transcendentalists, overwhelmingly humanist idealists. Cyber-romantics, prior to the Great Disillusionment. Unseasoned, and therefore vulnerable to that 180 degree flip toward emphasizing the right-wing value of maintaining a society of hierarchical control.
Upper Right quadrant
UL: A blank space, an empty quarter. No political analogy. In 1984, almost no Americans had even heard of the Yoruba and the Igbo, especially on the political right. A few Right-leaning social researchers and economists might have, but if they did, few people were reading their books. Or books of any kind, c.1984. Many people still don’t read books. And online makes it easier to collect name-checks, references, post commentary and reviews. But even at that, I bet that few c.2024 American right-wingers even know that “Yoruba” and “Igbo” are Nigerian tribal distinctions. Hence, this “wonky detail” subquadrant is very sparsely populated. As yet, c.2024.
UR: Alienated youth, crafting their mythos out of speculative sci-fi novels and action blockbusters like Mad Max and Rambo, with their depiction of desert landscapes, rubble-strewn battlefields, wide-scale devastation and destruction, lawlessness, and continual physical struggle. Youthful questioners of Left shibboleths. Veterans of combat deployments. Veterans of non-combat deployments. Readers of Soldier Of Fortune magazine, and occasional purchasers of the advertised products. The recruiting pool for the LR contingent in this quadrant. The Dreamers. Speaking of which- you know what book has just blown me away? American Cipher. About that guy that went AWOL and ended up in the hands of the Taliban. There’s a lot more to that story then most people realize. More evidence for the view that the best nonfiction is as riveting as a novel. Reality-based stories, educational in ways that myths and legends of fiction can’t match. Trust me: no novelist could make up the story of Bo Bergdahl. I want in expecting something simpler, like the story of John Walker Lindh. Bergdahl’s story more closely resembles the saga of Louis Zamperini, as told in the book Unbroken .
LL: Down-low racists (mostly confirmed, sometimes rabidly so.) The faction represented by the publishing industry dedicated to the niche genre of white ethno-nationalist (including extreme anti-Jewish) literature from previous decades- very little of which ever went out of print, although the works weren’t nearly as available in the pre-Internet era. Although if “unconfirmed racists” with biases drawn from poorly examined asumptions are included, this category is more like a Venn diagram. Not one confined to the ideological Right, either.
LR: Alienated Individualists, questing romantically for a Transcendent Myth to believe in. Right-wing Tolkienites and Evola acolytes (mostly confined to Italy, c.1984.) Alienated sci-fi novelists, and story tellers and illustrators of sci-fi magazines, who lean heavily on Nietschean-informed mythic dreamscapes. The handful of readers aware of the fundamentally right-wing character found in the ‘source material’ of some c.1984 “New Age” teachings. OTO, Niezscheans, Crowleyites. Many European neopagan revivalists. The proto-Dark Wave of the Right, c.1984. The World Anti-Communist League, that global ecumenical alliance of European neopagans and right-wing Christian militarists allied as paramilitaries, mercenaries, and covert operative assets all over Latin America during the Cold War.
Lower Left quadrant
UL: N/A c.1984, the closest analogy would be talk show advice on Christian radio broadcasts, PTL TV, CBN TV. A lot of which is actually pretty good, sound, helpful, prosocial family counseling advice. Better than what magazines like Cosmo were dishing out in that era. I heard some the other day, it still sounds like good advice. Something about radio is more honest and compelling in some ways than any other media. I think it’s the invisibility factor. The same topic focus online, 2024: typically consumer-y.
UR: The analogy is only a very rough one, but- 1984 was the first year of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. His strongest suit—the part of his spiel most resistant to refutation—was inveighing against the fatuity of the Liberal Democratic PMC, who were unintentionally providing so much of the grist for his material in the 1980s. (As of 20204, the Democrats are still doing it.) Limbaugh mixed in a lot of plain-folks stylistic touches and incoherent fake populism. But he was never, ever a Marxist. Limbaugh’s version c.1984 is that more Jobs would be created, and Working Men would all be well-paid by their Job Creators, if only all of the job-killing environmental regulation disappeared. The Right Wing Poster Child Working Man is an Oil Rig roustabout making $28/hr (and seasonal unemployment benefits)- with the unstated subtext that if the Democrats weren’t such Green Totalitarians, those jobs would be there by the millions!
(China is not even on the screen in 1984- except as a gleam in the eye of a handful of businesspeople reading the trade magazines and the papers. The shift of the first US manufacturing businesses to the PRC is several years off. The first legal Chinese imports consisted of a very modest selection— the first “made in People’s Republic of China” consumer product I ever saw on American shelves is a wicker laundry basket, which I bought at Pier One. Hey, President Ronald Reagan himself was applauding the opening of US trade with the Communist Chinese- who was I to argue? I had no clue that Disney would be making a deal to relocate its entire toy production to the PRC within 8 years. In 1992, Ross Perot spoke of a “giant sucking sound” of US jobs to Mexico, from NAFTA. In the wider context of offshoring and outsourcing, he didn’t say the half of it.
c.2024, the dupes of Magic Wand Populism are the second-largest Right constituency in the US. The largest constituency? Americans utterly alienated from the Democratic Party. Occasionally in connection with Manichean conspiratorial batshit paranoia, but more often for reasons that are not easy to gainsay.
LL: Jerry Springer. And c.1984, there were probably some TV shows that were even worse. Shock jocks. The National Enquirer. The National Enquirer is the progenitor of Clickbait. Gossip has never not been huge. Inquiring minds want to Know. It’s the same scunge, the buttons are no different, it’s never changed. I keep waiting for it to be over, for people to burn through it and be done with it. For it to be over, and really over, the first rays of a new mass shift in the social consensus. I’m not holding my breath. The Right constituency in this quadrant is large—don’t flatter yourselves, Rightists—but also the group least likely to vote, for better or worse.
LR: N/A Not on anyone’s screen as a political issue, in 1984. Transsexuality was most widely known as a fetish category of porn and prostitution. (And not very well-known, at that.) The “trans-” was still more widely connected as “transvestite”, and then commonly abbreviated to the now-vanished “TV.”
Single issue politicizing of trans issues doesn’t really belong as a political category. Procedures to assist in “gender transitioning” have never been legally restricted for adults. But the American Democratic Party propensity for mollifying Everybody has morphed into a rote orthodoxy, combined with the adoption of a spurious medical paradigm, and so it’s come to pass that transsexualism was upgraded by the Democrats to a social justice cause on the order of the Civil Rights Era. That’s what has led to the controversy, especially when elevated as a top priority in the agenda of a political party. (“Trans rights”are explicitly mentioned in the Democratic Party platform. Including elevating the prominence of the constituency, to judge by the flags flying over official US government buildings. Considering all of the issues that are left unmentioned while Trans is included, it’s obviously held to be inherently more important. So it’s a top priority, relatively speaking. No?)
If “reactionary feminism” is arising to protest the confusion of actual XX womanhood with a turf claim that defies ordinary good sense and elementary biology, the “reactionaries” have the weight of the argument with them.The real single issue there has to do with not having any nonsense. It’s like someone trying to convince me that I need to give up water in favor of drinking gasoline. In that regard, I don’t find it mysterious that c.2023, it’s a “single issue” that’s led a lot of people to oppose the Democrats. This quadrant is sufficiently numerous to have possibly tip the election(s), and it’s too late for the Democrats to do anything about it.
Lower Right quadrant
UL: The Pat Buchanan faction of the Reaganites. Right-wing “third parties” like the Constitution Party and the Taxpayer’s Party. American Independent Party. Nascent nativist populism, c.1984. Just waiting for enough hand-wavey neglect and temporizing to help the mindset become more attractive as a political option. Also c.1984, 60 years of Drug War and booming Drug Dealing Economy, the previous two years in a whole new phase of Intensity for both.
Many changes since then. 40 years later, it’s a whole new world.
UR: N/A 1984 is the Era of Phyllis Schafly and Nancy Reagan. Of course women vote! Margaret Thatcher! Also, c.1984, American men aren’t threatened by 64 years of female enfranchisement, either. Or at any rate, it was a marginal attitude.I do remember one of my Sacramento cab passengers from the 1990s going off on a rant about women getting the vote, after I told him that it was illegal for him to smoke his cigar in my cab. But that was it, one guy. And I suspect that c.2024, decrying the 19th Amendment is still cheap talk. Beer-crying. It’s just that the Internet grants self-pitying grumblers the power to enshrine their opinions for a wide general audience. Yes yes, “there ain’t nothing a Man can do for himself any more.” A complaint not entirely without validity, but there’s no sense in getting carried away.
I don’t know about today, c.2024; maybe there are some self-identified women of the Right who identify as chic or who are seen as a participant in the chic elite, and also argue for their own disenfranchisement, or anyway a blissful return to swoony oblivious apathy. But if I cared enough to find someone like that to read on the Internet, I’d be wary of being trolled. In any case, not a well-populated quadrant. At least in the US.
LL: c.1984, Miss Manners, Erma Bombeck, Heloise, various other female columnists. A role. But not an ideology. Writing on that perennial role, tradwifery, which arguably remains the most popular and powerful of all the subcultures. Even in the US. Plurality status, at minimum. If the US was “less feminist” in 1984, it’s because it was widely assumed that domestic household topics were the only thing Women could write about. Back before they proved beyond all doubt that they could be just as clueless as Alpha Males when writing on political topics.
LR: “Men who have utterly fried their brains on anime porn, but it’s womens fault” Ironic, indeed. All porn is Anime porn, in some sense. Porn has always been to some extent an Artifice, how could it be otherwise. As with all Media. Decontextualized, mnemonically biased, pre-edited, amenable to information stovepiping by self-selected individual demand. And as Normal Mailer once pointed out, “the ultimate direction of masturbation is always Insanity.”
My advice to Youth is—if abstinence proves impossible—moderation. Consider just doing it until you’re half-crazy. Put the brakes on at a safe distance before tipping over into politicized misogynist paranoia. The screen is not the arbiter of Reality. Porn is just more Media. (Speaking of which, it’s probably time to check yourself on your responses to all of the other Media that you review. Just on general principles.)
I’m sure that the LR/LR quadrant contingent was there in 1984. In the Before Time, it just wasn’t as numerous, because porn wasn’t available at saturation levels. At ones fingertips, so to speak. And turning toward misogyny didn’t have an overtly political aspect until the age of social media that began with Usenet. Where the attitude finally got an outlet.
That’s the Internet, for you.