Whereas the old Christian conservatism was about defending an old order, the new social conservatism is about overthrowing a new one. The transformation of the right is a direct response to a shift on the left. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the G.O.P. was the party of the traditional moral order, many individualists, rebels and eccentrics found themselves aligned with progressives. Today the reverse is true. The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention. Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right.
According to Pogue, the [reactionary chic] movement “has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right-ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic.” This might be an overstatement, but it’s pretty clear that there’s cultural energy in the opposition to the progressive norms and taboos that are derisively called “wokeness.”
The BuzzFeed News writer Joseph Bernstein captured this energy in a March article about an anti-woke New York film festival funded by Thiel and headed by a Black queer provocateur named Trevor Bazile. “Call it, if you must, a vibe shift: a new generation of internet-native tastemakers — like many of the people crowded into Bazile’s party — who find the moralistic gatekeeping of millennials all a bit passé,” wrote Bernstein.
Michelle Goldberg, "The Awful Advent of Reactionary Chic"
There's tremendous energy in any group that sees itself as unfairly marginalized, and there's also a lot of energy in transgressing the pieties of the establishment. Isn't that what's driving what Goldberg calls 'reactionary chic' in her column yesterday? She gives an example of what is being reacted against:
In novels set in progressive social worlds, internet leftism tends to be treated with disdain — not a tyranny, but an annoyance. In Torrey Peters’s “Detransition, Baby,” a young trans woman reacts with priggish outrage to a dark joke shared between the book’s heroine, Reese, and her friend, both older trans women. “Reese recognizes her as one of those Twitter girls eager to offer theory-laden takes on gender,” writes Peters. “The girl has listened in on the joke and shakes her head — insensitive! — staring at them over her black-framed glasses with watery, wounded eyes.”
For those who get most of their politics online, this can be what the left looks like — a humorless person shaking her head at others’ insensitivity. As a result, an alliance with the country’s most repressive forces can appear, to some, as liberating.
I remember thinking decades ago that what made gay culture interesting and energetic was its transgressiveness, it's being anti-establishment, it's being a place for those who couldn't stand the sanctimonies of the straight, conventional world to gather in a joyful communities of liberation and mutual support apart from all of that was too buttoned down, prim and proper. There was something my gay friends in New York and Seattle had that straight people did not, which was a vital sense of community that gave them a sense cohesiveness and energy and purpose. They had an elan, a verve, a joie de vivre, a disinhibited, creative craziness that most straight people I knew lacked, and I saw it as as being directly associated with their being counter-cultural, their being against and so liberated from establishment pieties.
And I wondered back then if the assimilation of gay culture into the mainstream would take the joy out of it, make it as boring as the culture it saw itself then in opposition to. It would appear so, at least insofar as the partisans of gay assimilation into the establishment have now become santimonious scolds. They've become the new establishment with a new set pieties. They've become the new gatekeeper regime of the boring and ordinary. It's annoying because all moralistic priggery is annoying, but as such it was inevitable that it would spawn a new counter-cultural reaction.
So it's ironic that the sexual identity politics of the 80s has spawned a new transgressive community on the Right that now occupies the space they once did. These days if you want to belong to a community that provides cohesiveness, energy, and purpose born of transgressiveness, you have few other choices than on the radically chic Right.