I’m not entirely sure what possessed me to engage with a bunch of disposed reactionary young men on Twitter this weekend but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I took some pleasure in it. Cognitive dissonance and copium can feel like an amusing game if you don’t think too hard about the pain behind it. And I saw a lot of pain in the responses to me.
My husband asked me if we should increase security at the homestead. I told him I wasn’t sure if these boys were up to more than larping but in truth I’m not sure if teasing groypers and trolls is dangerous or not. The real danger is civilizational. We’ve got angry, disaffected, and emotionally violent men with nowhere to go and nothing constructive to do. Our politics reflects it but only barely.
What happens when the reactionaries go beyond Roe v Wade and clip the wings of democracy? Will the 19th amendment be up for discussion? You’d be surprised at what the discourse is considering at the moment. For all the whining about cancel culture, we’ve never had so much open consideration of rolling back modern liberalism.
I guess I’m glad that we are having conversations about the success of our current political and civilizational social contracts and whether or not some of our choices were failures. But if any of these boys thinks I’m giving up even an iota of the freedom to be responsible for my own life, well, they have got a surprise coming in.