Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
PaulHoule · 2022-09-26 · Original thread
... right wing criticism of postmodernism has gotten popular since the 1980s when the right discovered Antonio Gramsci.

It's never been coherent because postmodernism is basically a characteristic of the culture and not an intellectual movement. (Although various intellectual movements claim the term) In short, modernist ideologies, particularly Marxism, became untenable post-1970 or so. The right wing has been a beneficiary because now it's hard to convince people that you can get ahead rationally planning anything and you might as well just be Lassez-Faire. This is just one of the of the cautionary tales

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre

but you can see it in two great anti-architecture books that advocate for (alternatively) traditional downtowns and strip-mall construction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas

Robert Jay Lifton described two examples of postmodern personality types in this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmen...

one of those was environmental activists, the other was fundamentalist Christians, which represent a particularly stark example of turning their back on rationality. Fundamentalists believe they've got the right to pick some book and decide it is absolutely true; their original sin is that they stole a book from Jewish people and added a few mor chapters. Nothing stops Muslims or Mormons from adding more books, or for anyone who wants to drop out of rational discourse with other people from inserting any axioms or postulates they want into their own closed system.

It's true that the "woke" are just as interested in creating their own reality like Shirley McClaine as the postmodern right (witness the poor man's dialecticalism of How to be an anti-racist) but postmodernism is the ocean we swim in woke or not. It's depressing because when I asked a philosopher what comes after postmodernism the answer was "post-humanism".

PaulHoule · 2018-03-30 · Original thread
I read that article too and when I read it I thought "this is the first time I've seen somebody write this"

My basis for that judgement came from reading a lot about Bannon and my own experiences w/ the "alt-right" and "alt-left". (ex. a "gamergate person" is to me a person who will never let you have the last word in an argument, no matter what they believe about boys and their toys; sometimes they get arrested because they just can't stop arguing with a cop)

I grew in Manchester, NH which was home to the Manchester Union Leader which was a leading conservative publication in the 1980s. I regularly saw editorials by conservatives who were interested in emulating the strategies of the communist theorist Antonio Gramsci.

You should see the Robert Jay Lifton book:

https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmen...

that both left-wing and right-wing activists have that "postmodern personality disorder" that Chris Lasch warned you about.

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