The Cringe Ritual

Mixed Signals

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The Cringe Ritual

I’ve long bristled at Richard Hanania’s barbs about the right being stupid, not because they’re wrong, but because the right isn’t actually dumber than its lefty equivalents. It’s just dumb in different ways.

I’ll even concede, right up front, that on paper liberals are in fact smarter. It’s why they dominate academia and most fields that require advanced credentials. But if anything, that only makes them more susceptible to destructive ideas in clever packaging, the classic trap of the smart but unwise.

Hanania’s Based Ritual essay was an instant classic for a reason: queasily recognizable to those of us on the right and clarifying to many on the left (“Why do they keep capitalizing Noticing?”). But I always felt it was missing the other half; the thing that provoked the Based Ritual in the first place. Why did these escalating vice signals become the right’s primary form of bonding?

There are plenty of answers to that, but since I’m trying to keep this short and punchy, I’ll focus on one: the progressive performance that preceded and provoked it, the mirror-image ceremony I’m calling The Cringe Ritual (I like rhetorical symmetry).

Like obscenity, cringe is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. And the Cringe Ritual is all about pretending not to see it (or genuinely not seeing it, for the truly indoctrinated) when it sends the right tribal signals.

It’s saying “Drumpf” and “Elmo” and “Muskie McSpaceMan.” It’s calling everything fascism (except, apparently, actual Nazi tattoos if you’re running as a Dem in Maine). It’s treating those lines as the height of wit and sophistication.

It’s tuning in to Colbert or Kimmel for your nightly serving of reheated jokes and thunderous clapter that’s been microwaved since 2015. You can even get the spicy version from South Park if you prefer your “Trump is literally Hitler-slash-Satan-slash-Satan’s boyfriend who also has a small penis” jokes with a side of profanity.

It’s insisting that the plotless movie with the diverse cast was in fact deeply profound and entertaining, and that you shouldn’t pay any attention to the audience-versus-critic score, because those people are all rubes.

If you go back a little further, earlier versions of the ritual included such gems as “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot,” Shrub, the entire Jon Stewart era of The Daily Show (ironically, back when Colbert was actually funny), wishing The West Wing was real life, and treating Michael Moore films as brilliant documentaries.

The point isn’t that this was all cringe (it was). The point is that going along with it was the price of admission to polite society inside the liberal bubble, which even back in the 2000s included virtually all professional workplaces, any social event not held at a dive bar, and basically anywhere not explicitly conservative. It was suffocating. Even before Trump, the witch-hunting instinct was just below the surface in liberal groups. So you laughed at the nicknames, nodded along that the boring movie was actually brilliant, and politely pretended that current Colbert was still funny, because even a slight deviation could draw suspicion that you were one of those people.

Say what you will about the Based Ritual, at least it is occasionally funny and takes a bit of courage to initiate, especially in its early form, when it still functioned as a recognition signal rather than a contest to see who could be the most offensive. This is the part Hanania glossed over, although he surely knows it. The Based Ritual did not start as a crude test of who could break the biggest taboo, but as a covert handshake among people who wanted to talk freely while living behind enemy lines.

You do not just start blurting out slurs or dropping crime stats into random conversations. If someone seems stifled by local social mores, the kind of person who laughs a little too hard at a joke that is barely allowed, you probe with something that sits right on the edge of offensive but is still deniable. A word that has only recently become problematic. Then you wait for the response.

The progressive will flinch.
The normie will look relieved, happy to meet someone who will not report them for forgetting which words are on the naughty list this week.
And the fellow based traveler will grin and escalate, eager to play along.

Progressives never needed a secret handshake. Their signal was open conformity, performed loudly and with enthusiasm. In their circles, it wasn’t enough to agree; you had to show that you agreed, and you had to do it with the proper emotion. Anyone who failed to perform with enough vigor or feeling was quietly marked as suspect.

Remember, these aren’t stupid people. By every measurable metric, they’re the smart ones. But their version of intelligence became deference, outsourcing their thought to institutions that they were not allowed to question. That deference became its own form of status, a way to prove you belonged among the enlightened.

They laughed at the jokes not because the jokes were funny but because laughter was required. They praised the nicknames not because they were clever but because the group said they were clever. The good, smart people watched the same shows, read the same articles, and liked the same movies for the same approved reasons.

In a word, cringe.

Ideally, it would be great if nobody had to choose between pretending to like mediocre entertainment properties that flatter their beliefs and pretending to hold problematic views just to reject those mediocrities. Unfortunately that is not the world we currently inhabit, and that doesn’t look to be changing any time soon.

As for me, I’m happy being semi based, no rituals required.