On today’s installment of Walt Right Perspectives I have a thoroughly bodacious discussion with
—a Gen X husband and father of Scotch-Irish and German extraction who writes primarily about modern youth culture and masculinity.Our primary subject is J’s recent piece Springfield WASPs vs Quahog Ellis Islanders, which he wrote to expand on a reply he’d made to some of my Notes observations:
We also delve into the emotional architecture of WASP vs. Ellis Islander power, the dissolution of our twentieth century monoculture into subcultures and microcultures, as well as changes in masculinity through Gen X → Millennials → Zoomers.
There’s enough material here for probably three dissertations, so give it a listen.
Topics include:
Gen X was the last cohort to experience a robust monoculture with legible ideals, norms, and status hierarchies, whereas Millennials predominantly experienced subcultures and with Zoomers it’s fragmented even further into microcultures
The Simpsons as a dying gasp of the American Monoculture
Early Bart Simpson as a short-lived Gen X masculine role model—what traits made him so appealing to boys in the early 90s?
What causes the Gen X apathy performance, particularly in men?
Mass divorce as a source of Gen X trauma
How many toddlers were getting molestered at daycare in the 70s?
Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver as representative of early Gen X / Jones Gen women
Did coming up in the 80s make
Republican-coded?The legacy of Ronald Reagan
Walt explains the Hajnal Line and standard temperamental differences between WASPy cishajnal whites and woggier transhajnal whites
The Right is Ellis Islander coded these days while the Left is almost hyper-WASP
The linear narrative structure of Simpson episodes maps with WASP moralism
Early-mid Simpsons as indulgent of Boomer nostalgia
More episodic nature of late Simpsons and Family Guy as compared to early Simpsons tracks with the increasingly episodic nature of American life
The gradual soyification of the Simpsons as tracking more generally with the show’s narrative centering of Bart → Homer → Lisa
Since the 2010s there’s been no space on the Left for male dissatisfaction
The exhausted stoic ennui of wounded Xennial masculinity
Xennials were at once the last generation who needed interpersonal competence in the monoculture and the first to live under the hypermodern panopticon
Millennials have Nerd Alphas / Nerd Stacies but Xers and Zoomers don’t
How their relatively scarce numbers make Gen X an Uncle Scar generation
The Revenge of the Nerds mentality of the early 2010s
How lifelong / familial class elasticity has informed J’s worldview
Spongebob as a symbol of toothless flattened Millennial masculinity
How cynicism is experienced differently in Gen X versus Gen Z
How Scotch-Irish differ temperamentally from mainline WASPs
The four WASP strands of Albion’s Seed, as well as how during the 20th century the Quaker Pluralist faction were mostly subsumed into Ellis Islanders
Richard Nixon as a Quaker Pluralist masculine ideal
Kennedy as John Mulaney-coded and the success of Irish politicians in America
Millennial men generally preferred Family Guy to Simpsons thanks to our pillarized and less moralistic / overtly subcultural posture towards muh values
The performative colorblindness and pro-Blackness of Simpsons versus the thoroughgoing racial awareness of Family Guy
Seth MacFarlane is so talented at making of Jews and gets away with it because his mockery has the flavor intra-Ellis Islander fraternal banter
An American Tail as an Ellis Islander unity film—Irish/Jews/Italians all have verses in No Cats in America where they compete in performative suffering
WASP flattening via moral universalism / methodological individualism
Seth MacFarlane as an ideal of libtard coastal masculinity
How different ethnicities lie—Irish tall tale vs. Jew legalism vs. WASP discretion
Why WASPs have less appreciation for tricker-coded asymmetric life strategies
How the Family Guy cutaway gag evokes Ellis Islander “event stories”
Family Guy’s use of Shaggy Dog Stories is cathartic for a Millennial cohort raised on unrealistic narratives about the world being mostly fair and legible
How WASP values are adaptive and prosocial even if rooted in falsehood
The maladaptive indolent broodiness of the Celtic temperament
Only WASPs and other cishajnals see institutionalism as virtuous ipso facto
WASP colorblindness / moral universalism is ackshully more racist and cements their power by making deviation from their values automatically low status—see my article The Aryan Question for a primer on how this works
As gay as WASPs are we wouldn’t want anyone else in charge (especially the Irish)
Walt explains the temperamental difference between Irish and Jewish women
How black women be in relationships
You can’t ever act gay around black chicks but they mind less when you chase
How the Irish are sort of Blackpeepo Lite
Blackness as a white vehicle for sublimating aggressive or boyish masculinity
How character development in the Freudian trio of characters Seth MacFarlane voices tracks with Seth’s own aging and increasing success
Stewie’s less WASP than an Irish Mischling kid theatrically LARPing as one only to be treated like a baby by the dismissive WASP femininity it wants to crush
How the Simpsons’ Jewish writers portrayed Jews as rabbis → clowns
Jewish media dominance isn’t automatically good for the Jews because ultimately they can never stop pandering to WASPs
Is Frank Grimes Jew-coded?
As Simpsons became more soy Family Guy progressively elevated Peter over Lois
Lois is less idealized maternal femininity now than a vehicle to clown on womyn
Seth MacFarlane made musical theater / old movies less gay-coded
Why the Irish are so good at boasting their way into the country club
Brian Griffin shows how male Irish are rakes by way of self-deluded romanticism
“Shut up Meg” as contempt for normalcy-enjoying non-sexualized femininity
WASP tendency to mistake Ellis Islander “bits” for lack of authenticity
The vacuousness of “just see me as a person” in Millennial / Gen X feminism
Quagmire is less rapey now whereas Peter / Chris / Brian are a lot more so
The throughline from Herbert jokes → Peter dumping his CP laptop
Men have no way to ackshully protect women once chicks have rights
Sexed epistemic / narrative / phenomenological gaps tend to confer womenfolk lots of social and professional advantages in late modernity
Men became less competitive as they lost pivotal coordination mechanisms
How a hyperconnected world universalizes status hierarchies and flattens us
Why Zoomettes have checked out fathers and neurotic sisterizing mothers
Adolescent female masochism makes bad boy enjoying inevitable but the incentive structure should at least make bad boys genuinely cool
How western culture sacralizes female desire
Is civilization just inherently thermostatic and entropic?
The AI bubble and frantic over-adoption of new technologies
Check out J’s article It Sucks but Sexism is a Good Filter Against Lame Games
