Milo Yiannopoulos Is a Godsend to Progressives—and He Knows It
Conservatives, you’ve been had.
And the chief architect of your now very public embarrassment has cashed in on your collective gullibility with a level of fame and remuneration previously unthinkable for a rather transparent internet troll.
Ask yourself: if authentic conservative values are really resurgent, why don’t we have a President Ted Cruz? Or a President Mike Pence? Or a Congress dead-set on enacting a conventionally conservative agenda, rather than one mired in the slapdash grab-bag of reactionary policies now being pushed by the essentially non-ideological president Milo Yiannopoulos deeded you?
Donald Trump has shaken American culture to its core, to be sure, but the nature of his political influence is still very much up in the air. Yes, his Cabinet picks—which neither Milo Yiannopoulos nor anyone else could have predicted, as they look nothing like the #DraintheSwamp contingent we might have expected from candidate Trump’s rhetoric—will go some way toward enacting a menu of conservative policy prescriptions. But at what cost? A four-year administration that effectively challenges “PC culture” but policy-wise is quickly and effortlessly erased by (say) an eight-year Elizabeth Warren administration? That’s not going to be the Christmas present the political right thought it was unwrapping in 2016. Sure, you’ll get what you wished for—less so-called “political correctness”—but because the diminishing of that element of left-wing political practice only strengthens progressivism, from a policy standpoint you’ll have only a giant lump of coal to satisfy you in perpetuity.
And that’s exactly how Milo planned it.
At base, conservatives, Yiannopoulos isn’t here for you and your values. He’s after money, celebrity, and the ability to instantaneously irk all the people who annoy him. He’s 3-for-3 on that score, while you’ve got a president who’s already gone back on every single promise he made to you on the campaign trail. Milo may call him “Daddy,” but the fringe Right won’t be calling him (as they do on Reddit) “God Emperor” much longer.
So enjoy the honeymoon while it lasts.
Build a wall? Well, maybe a fence, and we’ll have to pay for it. Deport all illegal aliens? Well, maybe just the convicted criminals the Obama administration was already deporting. End Obamacare? Well, maybe we’ll keep a good part of it, and if we vote to repeal it we’ll gin up a sunset provision that’ll keep it going into the 2020s. Prosecute Hillary? Not so much. #DraintheSwamp? Whatever the opposite of that is. Impose tariffs on foreign goods that raise the price of domestic goods sky-high and cause millions of working folks to lose their jobs? You betcha! Oppose TPP and NAFTA? Well, word is, that’s gone—conservative radio hosts are already discussing Trump’s forthcoming “pivot” back to free trade. Restoring honor and dignity to the White House? Okay, just kidding—obviously that wasn’t on your mind when you voted for Cheeto Jesus, given his lawsuits, sexual assault allegations, eighth-grade vocabulary, and penchant for saying whatever poop pops to mind.
But none of these policy reversals speak to what’s at the core of Milo Yiannopoulos’ betrayal of you.
No—the real betrayal lies in Yiannopoulos providing your cultural and political enemies with a blow-by-blow guide for how to defeat you. Prior to Yiannopoulos, no one was underscoring for progressives just how much our techniques of argumentation and sloppy rhetorical framings (e.g., sentences uttered by otherwise serious thinkers that begin with the words “White people...”) have been costing us at the ballot box and in policy debates. Now we know. And we know from every single interview Milo’s given and every single essay he’s written, all of which are basically on the same topic: how progressives can get their act together and start winning in the context of an American polity that, per all available polling, agrees with us, not conservatives, on almost every issue of the day.
So here’s the good news for you, conservatives, and it’s the only good news I have for you for either the medium- and long-term: progressives aren’t yet listening to Milo.
Instead, they’re boycotting his forthcoming book, and also the publisher of that book—which ill-conceived strategy has the dual effect of both making the book more popular and pushing even further into the future that moment at which we progressives realize that, sometimes, our biggest enemy is our best friend. And make no mistake, Milo’s our very best friend: he’s told us in almost saccharine levels of detail exactly what gets conservatives’ goats, and what appeals to you, and what strengthens you (and weakens us) in public discourse, and even what your collective Kryptonite is. Our path to victory in the medium- and long-term is so simple now that the only silver lining for you is that, as we progressives have so often done, we’re now blowing it daily in service of a reflexive emotionality that wins no policy battles but only makes us more bitter, despairing, and psychically wounded with each passing day.
But back to the good news—for us—which that Milo’s given us a detailed account of how to defeat regressive political ideologies, while leaving conservatives with nothing but facile epithets like “cuck” and “snowflake.” (How a bit of humor that was already dated when Don Knotts used it on Three’s Company in the 1980s has made a return appearance as a serious, “manly” political comeback, I have no idea. As for “cuckservative,” for your own sake, “alt-writers,” please get a creative writer or a marketing person on-board—as that’s as clumsy a moniker as American politics has seen in some years. C’mon—I know you alt-cucks can do better.)
Anyway, here’s what Milo has taught us progressives, if only we choose to listen:
(1) Stop debating politics on social media—it’s not the right venue for it, you don’t convince anyone, and you only make yourself falsely feel like the whole world is against you. There are no more boors in America now than there were before the internet—they just have, with the internet, a megaphone to go with their technology-enabled anonymity. So instead of framing them as the omnipotent bogeyman of your social media feed, hit the streets. Be an activist. Get stuff done in real time and put your transient (self-oriented) outrage aside in doing so. Why? Because outrage doesn’t win policy battles. Money, boots on the street, phone calls, meetings with those in power, well-funded lobbying, taking over state and local governments, online and real-time organizing, voting—these things win battles. As well as full-blown policy wars. Always have, always will. Bernie said so, and he was right. This isn’t his first rodeo, after all.
(2) Stop making fun of or trying to culturally legislate the views and emotions of those who disagree with you. It doesn’t work. Repeat: It. Doesn’t. Work. It doesn’t change anyone’s mind. It only hardens others to you and your views. It creates resentments that have nothing to do with policy and everything to do with how we treat strangers. If someone you know IRL disagrees with you online, chat about it in person next time you see them, and do so with the same care you’d want someone who disagreed with you to exhibit. If a stranger disagrees with something you online, say, “I hear what you’re saying, and I respect your right to an opinion. We don’t agree, but that’s okay.” Then move on—permanently—from that conversation. Say these words even when it doesn’t feel emotionally okay to be disagreed with, and even when the views expressed offend you (assuming they’re not actually bigoted views; for that situation, see #5, below). The reality? Routinized emotional hurt is real—very real—but it’s also a condition of daily living for nearly everyone, whatever their background. Far fewer people than we think lead emotional lives that are safe. Focus your attention on winning votes and policy battles and you’ll find that the daily emotional harm of not being agreed with or even violently disagreed with is mitigated by controlling the reins of U.S. government and seeing the people you admire setting a domestic and international policy for America and the world that matches your values.
If none of this convinces you, perhaps because you want your emotional truth daily validated by your social media practices, here’s another tack: ask yourself whether arguing with strangers on the internet makes you happy. Are you happy? When you’re boiling mad online, are you happy? Really ask yourself this question. Ask it daily. I do. And I say this as someone who argued online—daily—for years, and was driven to absolute misery because of it.
(3) Stop treating idiosyncratic subjective opinions as inherently nationally newsworthy. In the same way we progressives don’t share the views of the 0.1% of climate scientists who call global warming a hoax, if a few students at Oberlin College decide that poorly made sushi is a cultural violence we should let them fight that battle without us helping such “news” knock (say) climate change off the front page of national newspapers and the internet.
Most people in America, and this includes the overwhelming majority of progressive Asian-Americans, do not consider bad sushi to be among the top fifty most important public policy challenges facing America and the world, or even a particularly good metaphor for systemic racism—so let’s not pretend otherwise. When bad sushi is in the news, something else that impacts far more people far more directly and gravely is not. Start seeing stories about transient hurt feelings as pushing out of the news much bigger stories about people in the U.S. and around the world being killed, maimed, chased from their homes, economically devastated, choked or drowned to death due to avoidable environmental disasters, and aggrieved in other systemic ways that our own actions here at home could (in the short-, medium-, and long-term) do something to address.
It’s an all too rarely stated fact: everyone in America, and that includes people we armchair-psychoanalyze (knowing nothing of their lives) as “having it easy,” in fact have a lot on their plate emotionally and otherwise. if you‘ve ever been an activist—and been successful at it—you’ll know that you get only ever the smallest sliver of anyone else’s plate, and only for a very short time. Be very careful what you put on that plate. Make sure it’s not bad sushi at a well-to-do liberal arts college, but instead (say) the fact that all of humanity may go extinct within the next few generations.
(4) Toughen up. I want to be real clear on this: micro-aggressions, as I know from hard experience, hurt; being triggered because of past traumas, as I know from hard experience, hurts; being aggressively and boorishly disagreed with online or off—as, believe me, I know from over a decade of very hard experience—hurts. And sometimes it really hurts. And that hurt is so real and so evident that, in fact, its realness and genuine effect on our daily living isn’t even what our ideological adversaries are questioning. Rather, they’re questioning what place that hurt has in public discourse or public policy. And whether or not we agree with the place our ideological opponents think it should have in American civics—that would be none—we can at least agree with them on practical grounds. That is, we can observe that the pain (say) I felt when I was being called a “kike” repeatedly and threatened with death for writing against Donald Trump in 2016 in no way moved the ball on any issue I care about. Nor would detailing that hurt in an article make it more likely that, say, Merrick Garland would get confirmed to the Supreme Court, as should have happened, instead of us progressives letting the GOP steal a SCOTUS seat, which is what did happen. (And “steal” it the GOP did—an unprecedented theft that was, in spirit if not legally, an act of treason.)
The other thing we can observe, and it’s not a fun thing to say but it’s empirical fact, is that those of us on the left who are regularly triggered and cannot readily handle acidic or even deeply prejudiced responses to our words make for absolutely terrible off-line activists.
The best activists have iron emotional constitutions, not because that’s an inherently better or worse thing to have in general terms (though it sure does make life easier) but because it definitely is better for in-the-trenches policy fights. So no one is telling you not to be hurt, or not to be angry about being hurt; no one is telling you not to privately talk to others you trust and care for, and who care for you, about your anger and hurt; no one is saying that that anger and hurt isn’t 100% valid, as definitionally no one can argue that another’s subjective experience of the world is somehow illusory; no one (except for real jerks) is even trying to get to the question of what you “should” feel in response to certain stimuli, as that’s always going to be a function of one’s idiosyncratic background, experience, temperament, and context.
But what is in question is whether the public expression of such hurt on social media is productive for progressive causes, and whether attempting to soft-legislate away certain sorts of harms through collective action is a better or worse use of progressives’ limited resources than, say, fighting global warming or redlining or gerrymandering or racist voter suppression statutes. Also at issue is whether arguing over anything but the big policy debates now confronting the nation is good for the creation of alliances with people who may not agree with you on everything. Why? Because no two people agree on everything, and when the issues that perpetually threaten to divide us are particularly sensitive ones, that’s even more so. And yet—we need coalitions to win policy debates. So coalitions will always be hard to create and maintain, and on some level they should be.
With that in mind, the argument that progressives’ focus shouldn’t be on soft-legislating away micro-aggressions (i.e., trying to erase them via aggressive forms of collective cultural resistance such as blacklisting, ostracizing, and name-calling) is that (a) this doesn’t ever work in the medium- or long-term, (b) there are other, more effective ways to deal with individuals who enact these harms against us—for instance, through private one-on-one conversations that don’t command a discussion-altering public audience—and these methods are better than trying to insist that large groups of strangers who either don’t understand our life experience or feel they owe us nothing shape their actions en masse to suit our sensibilities, and (c) public efforts to address such harms in one or two fell swoops not only take energy away from other battles but also implicitly ill-prepare us for the much more naked aggressions that larger real-time policy battles will necessarily invoke.
(5) Don’t ever engage racism- or misogyny-spewing posters online or off, because they’re either bigots or trolls. If they’re bigots, you can’t reach them—you can only militate for our society to advance so rapidly in terms of its core principles that their regressive ideologies will be left in the dirt. If they’re trolls, any engagement with them is a classic “don’t wrestle with the pig” scenario: both of you get dirty and, as they say, the pig likes it.
(6) Celebrate the Bill of Rights—loudly and often. Why? Because it deserves it. And I say this as someone who’s a progressive and who worked as a public defender for many years. All which leads me to conclude that there isn’t a more progressive document in our culture than our Bill of Rights. Have you read the 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th amendments? Have you thought about how amazing the 1st amendment is? Sure, the 2nd amendment doesn’t actually say or hold what conservatives say it does, but if we progressives get control of SCOTUS back we can start chipping away at our ideological opponents’ deliberate misreading of American history to suit their own personal ends. Hunting with a gun will always be legal in America, and it should be, but as for the rest—well, it’s negotiable, especially since Colonial “militias” no longer exist and the rest of our European allies now recognize that gun-show sales loopholes, concealed-carry laws, and universal semi-automatic weapon ownership only endanger civilians and (most notably) children.
But here’s the point: the Constitution is ours. With a few very notable exceptions in the body proper, it is fundamentally a radical and progressive document that for most of progressivism’s august history we deeply adored and spoke loudly about adoring. I don’t know of what political stripe non-civil-liberatrians are, but they’re not Democrats or progressives—and we should stop coddling them or treating them as ideological kin. We should be the biggest Constitutionalists around, which isn’t difficult given that 90% of those on the political right who speak with nauseating self-righteousness and at nauseating length about the value of the Constitution both haven’t read it and oppose categorically so many people who (like, say, public defenders or legal-positivist judges) take an oath to uphold it and fight for its core principles daily. Conservatives love the Constitution the way companies that sell bleach love blood stains; it wouldn’t take much for us to out-shout our ideological adversaries in support of a Bill of Rights with only one patently poorly written clause in it.
The upshot of all this: soon enough, conservatives will realize that Milo’s “culture war” isn’t theirs.
All Yiannopoulos wants is for progressives to stop being insufferable in public debates, and perhaps (at the outside) for them to be a bit more consistent in applying their values. (Milo and his ilk are very big on having progressives decry how women are treated in certain Muslim countries. That’s not a hard bar to clear, because women are treated terribly, in certain respects, in some Muslim-majority countries. There, I said it. As progressive Bill Maher, and many other progressives, have said repeatedly. And yes, the poor treatment of women in some Muslim-majority nations is deeply upsetting to me and other progressives. But we can confidently say so without slipping into American exceptionalism. I don’t think instances of genital mutilation or public stoning or the prohibition of women drivers somehow becomes odious just because America. Likewise, Milo’s obsession with feminism is merely a trap, and he knows it: whenever we’re having a conversation about the conversation over gender equity, rather than directly discussing the healthcare and employment and other policies that profoundly impact women’s lives, Milo is winning. When we discuss policy rather than—in a very removed, postmodern way—how we discuss policy, we win every time. Milo knows this, and says as much in interviews.)
So when Trump takes his Oath of Office and reveals himself to be the typical fat-cat corporatist and irredeemable liar he’s always been, and when Congress begins kow-towing to him the same way North Korean military officials do their Dear Leader, and when the President-elect begins kow-towing to a post-Communist dictator in Russia, and when internet culture gets coarser and coarser and social boundary-erasing trolls multiply online at a rate social conservatives can’t possibly match, it’ll be seen that Milo, while a hero for alt-Right trolls—and a hero to progressives who detest his words but love his transparency about how to beat him and those he encourages—is nothing more than a traitor to the bulk of the political right.
All of this is already clear to mainstream Republicans, but soon enough (as, again, Milo himself has presaged and discussed at some length) the same will be true for the racist factions within the alt-Right. And then Milo, a glorified blogger, can go back to wherever he was before he became a troll, which apparently was a niche media outlet with, in the view of many, a dodgy reputation.
(Attention, trolls: I do know what dramatic irony is.)
So: celebrate Milo’s book deal, conservatives. Soon enough, we progressives will too. And for a lot longer than you will.