R.B. Ginsberg and the Sexual Revolution’s Monster

We’ve known for a while now that immigration and the sexual revolution stand at the forefront of contemporary leftist priorities. Taken at their most charitable word, they think America is such a great country that everyone should be allowed to come here, and they believe that sex is the highest of all goods and should not be restricted by any social preconceptions. In practice, no matter how genuine in their beliefs anyone might accuse them of being, these translate into “your country shouldn’t belong to you,” and “any attempt to safeguard properly ordered sexual morality must be condemned.”

If the last twelve hours has been any indication, one of these things is far more important to the neoliberal order than the other.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg

With Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s timely passing (may we hope she rests in peace), the meltdown has been impossible to avoid—and admittedly, it hasn’t been altogether unpleasant to experience. Ginsberg’s tireless defense of abortion is well known; her staunch adherence to her liberal values, but particularly with regards to child murder, turned her into something of an icon. At the time, they were desperate for a cult of personality; Obama was leaving office, Hillary was unpalatable no matter how they tried to pitch her as someone hip and cool, and Trump’s amusing persona was starting to gain popularity.

Ginsberg’s appeal comes across as something of a mystery at face value. She was old, physically decrepit, and had about as much stage presence as an electric eel. Fanatics of her cult point to the image that the media cultivated for her: a stalwart, unapologetic defender of civil liberties, and a strong intelligent woman, despite her size and physical frailty. In reality, she was certainly intelligent and, at least by all appearances, unapologetic about her views. As for the rest, it’s hard to say; reality is always more convoluted than the propaganda, especially in days like these when the propaganda is so shoddy.

What we do know about Ginsberg is her complete and utter adherence to the abortion defense. This one thing, probably more than anything else, is what propped up the RBG cult; women liked her because she was their girl who was in the right place to safeguard the most vile sacrament of the neoliberal order. I use the term ‘women’ here loosely, of course, as the cult was certainly populated with more than its fair share of feminized men and confused transsexuals.

The more photogenic of these women were certainly the younger ones, but it’s unlikely that that Ginsberg’s cult was predominately comprised of Millennials or Zoomers. Boomers and early-Xers constituted most of her cult, because they actually remember Roe v Wade, even if they don’t remember much about life before it. They grew up already presuming contraception was a human right, having no meaningful memory of Griswold or the social engineering that led up to and proceeded after it, much less the debut of the pill. Those generations fell in love right in the throes of the sexual revolution, at the time when the word itself lost coherency in the orgy of flower power, terrible music, Dionysian mania, and drug-induced insanity that characterized the end of the sixties.

Moreover, Ginsberg provided a vehicle for the empowerment fantasies that characterized that generation of women’s obsession with power, independence, sexual freedom, and revolution. She had done it all; she’d been married, and she’d had a successful career. She’d won the respect of presidents, sat on the left side of the most powerful governing body of the United States, and had the comfortable position of almost never being directly pressured on her decisions publicly. In a certain sense, it’s not hard to see why she’d be a role model for aging boomer women who have struggled these last four decades to make sense of a life that has resulted mostly in disappointment, hardship, or hollowness.

She acted as a living idol for this cult that manifested around 2016. They knew she didn’t have much time left, but they needed someone alive, in power, and at least seemingly bipartisan enough to rally behind in order to keep up their liberal pretenses. Ginsberg was the sexual revolution’s vanguard distilled into a single character, even though, again, by outward appearances, she hardly seemed to actually live that life. Her position and defense of abortion was good enough.

The Elephant in the Room

Switch gears for a second.

Since 2015, right wing consciousness has been growing in the US with enough intensity to warrant lock-outs, shutdowns, smear campaigns, and slanderous libel across both social and mainstream media. Trump rode a populist, America First wave throughout the Republican primaries and straight through the 2016 election, and while matters of immigration sat front and center of his platform (though not his administration), it’s fair to consider his campaign as “typically Republican, but a bit more conservative than normal.”

Even if matters of ‘social conservatism’ weren’t exactly in common conversation, the overall consciousness of the right had started to entertain the problems of libido dominandi with more seriousness than at any other time in the last twenty years. Sexual morality, abortion, and if you were in the right internet circles, traditionalist sexual morality were at least spoken of in meme terms, though the degree to which any of it was believed (sans abortion) in a post-feminist world and post-MRA internet is hard to gauge.

“Demographics are destiny,” we heard repeated over and over, appropriately, and truthfully. Immigration was supposed to be the shibboleth against which friend and foe could be measured. That means that if there was anything that would trip up the neoliberal order, it would be reversing the trends in demographic replacement that began with the Hart-Celler act of 1965. Trump didn’t do this, although the media’s fear mongering did help contribute to a mild slump in immigration. That said, the extent to which Democrats rallied behind pro-immigration causes, and the degree to which NGOs were found meddling in international arrangements to spark migrations to our southern border, were not insignificant. But the people with press passes weren’t quite openly advocating for civil insurrection because Trump was talking about building a big, beautiful wall.

Then came Gorsuch’s nomination, and there was a mild freak out. Then came Kavanaugh’s nomination, and the masks started to come off. This is still fresh enough in our minds, I hope, that it doesn’t warrant a refresher here: the important part is that the sexual revolution’s prize, the Roe decision, was so hastily guarded that even the suggestion of attacking it provoked a clown show of a hearing put on by bad actors and dishonest journalists.

Last year, I wrote about the sexual revolution and its three offenses. The first was the fight to divorce sex from its intrinsic ends, which began with contraception and won its victory with Roe v Wade. The second was the fight to normalize homosexuality; its victory was secured with the Obergefell ruling. In between these two offensives was a long push to legitimize sodomy through the use of pornography; this began with the release of Deep Throat and continued all the way up until the internet made distribution of pornography easier than paying your electric bill. Without it, there would not have been the other offensives. The third offensive, transgenderism, began sometime in the early 00s, before the second had even completed; the recent Bostock decision seems to be the victory lap heralding its legitimacy against all sense of reason and lived reality. And we can thank Gorsuch for it. Now, if the efforts to push drag kids, the Cuties controversy, and talk of “child sexuality” are any indicators, the revolutionaries’ decision to use child molesters as the front men of their fourth offensive seems clear. The revolution never sleeps!

The key takeaway from this is that despite the enormous unpopularity of abortion, Republican lawmakers almost never pushed back with enough force or coordination to mount a legitimate counter-offensive. It was only around the time of Kavanaugh’s nomination that states began edging toward serious abortion bans. Despite the enormous unpopularity of same-sex marriage, no effort has been made to try reversing the legislative effects of the Obergefell decision. And despite the enormous unpopularity of transgender “rights”, whatever that even means, we can expect the same trend to be made manifest.

And ordinary laypeople on the ground have a good idea as to why, too. Charitably, the lawmakers are cowed by a mobster class of journalists who threaten to go after their funding and families if they don’t comply with their demands. Less charitably, the lawmakers themselves, despite being Republicans, don’t actually care about matters of sexual morality and have given up arguing for causes that reflect good values. These are the types who are worse than RINOs, because the apathy of RINOs for American goals is usually palpable.

It is not attacking immigration that makes the liberal recoil in horror, that makes him strike back in derangement and panic, that wounds him. Attacking immigration tells the liberal that you’re an enemy, a bigot, a racist, some barely-mentionable clod that deserves ridicule and scorn: a Trump supporter. Attacking the sexual revolution, license, free love, and abortion—these earn you things greater than the liberal’s contempt, they earn you his panic. The mere possibility of banning pornography, returning it to the status it held in the 1950s or before, earns you accusations of being puritanical, involuntarily celibate, harboring closeted sexual neuroses—all attacks rooted, of course, in some Freudian sexual obsession, because that’s the only way the neoliberal order is understandable.

What the sexual revolution did was create a rival metaphysic around which to order reality. At the heart of that metaphysic is the presupposition that everyone, without exception, is some kind of pervert. It’s Freudian, of course, except on steroids. The moment you refuse to engage with this, you look like some kind of alien. Those tuned into neoliberalism have given themselves over to passions of the flesh, and they refuse to believe that it’s possible not to live that way. Politics turn into a means of taking the collective shame of sexual license and trying to spread it around under the guise of terms like “tolerance”, “equality”, and “love”. It’s the same sort of behavior you used to see in old cults.

Conclusion

Those familiar with the Roe decision know that reversing it grants states autonomous authority to decide whether or not the practice is legal within their borders. It stands to reason that certain states, like California, New York, and probably even Maryland, would spring to keep it legal, given that they harbor the cities and living areas of the most liberal people in the country. States like Georgia, Florida, and Utah would probably outlaw the practice entirely, or at least come as close as possible. Many others would follow suit.

But defending Roe isn’t quite about defending the federal fiat. If it was about the issues, then of course it wouldn’t be the end of the world for a mother, so possessed of the demonic urge, to hop on a plane, or a bus, or a train, and cart herself to the nearest murder state to have the wretched surgery performed, and liberals know this. It’s about poking a hole in the liberal narrative. Sexual liberation is not a good in and of itself, and to some degree, many of them sort of have this impression even if they can’t articulate it. Taking one of the cornerstones of the revolution and reversing it is tantamount to recognizing that a catastrophic blunder had been made. If it happens, it’ll be written about and propagandized as “America takes a step backwards in reproductive freedom,” tying into the progressive narrative. But interiorly, the doubt that this whole enterprise is working will get a little harder to ignore.

There is no denying that the shibboleth is the sexual revolution. The right cannot afford to sleep on this or distract from it. Demography is destiny, yes. Immigration is important, yes. The ethnic composition of a country, particularly that of America, is something delicate that must be attended to. But this conversation, or fight, if it comes to that, can’t be undertaken at the expense of attacking sexual liberation. It’s too late for that; the birds are coming home to roost.

In the face of widespread demographic collapse, of the desolation of women’s dignity at the hands of sex-positive feminism, the rise of Only Fans, the abolition of male responsibility, the weakening of the family’s legal apparatus, and the porn epidemic, there should be no question as to where the attention should be. Making efforts to curb immigration is great. It’s not going to matter when there’s no one left worth marrying—or worse, when there’s no one left capable of having kids.