#and also we are also gay middle aged men who hooked up on a fishing trip and we are going to make out at our not actually gay sons’ funeral | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

soulvomit · 5 years

Text

This is what *i* refer to when I talk about Boomer culture. It's the one thing that *is* unique to the culture of Boomers and isn't just mislabeling Greatest/Silent attitudes as Boomer.

In response to a few of the @'s and critiques:

basically the whole point of my half baked analysis about "lifestyle liberalism" isn't to accuse actual praxis based liberal politics of any special level of selfishness that conservative politics doesn't have. I can still find lots of arguments that liberalism is on the whole more beneficial to a larger number of people. The problem is when people who deep down are basically conservative, like limited applications of liberalism - especially ones involving no actual structural/institutional change - because they're in a unique position to benefit, then this gets passed on as what liberalism is about: a depoliticized set of weaponized social memes that result in reduction of service coupled with rise in self-centered laissez faire culture, which is presented as broadly liberating to everyone because it offers more personal freedoms with actually *less* accountability than 1950s white culture did. Fuck, at some point I'm feeling that I'm going to argue that the 70s liberalized popular/ consumer culture evolved from the 50s consumer boom more than it wants to admit.

Also, relatively few of us here, and probably no one who follows me, *are* ever going to be 100% lifestyle liberals. It is a really, really privileged cultural space - it's where you are still told to pick yourself up by your bootstraps but also told "your negativity is bringing people down, man."

Also, I'm not talking about the *specific policies* of California NIMBY liberalism - I'm talking about the *culture* of it, because I'm eventually going to go on to discuss New Age culture, the culture space of "wellness," the culture space of codependency and 80s pop feminism (which *both* radfems and intersectional feminists push back on), and also dating and the weird sex politics of the 80s and 90s, and how all of this is informed by the "Cult of the Self." And the weird social status and class warfare in geek culture. The thing is, I kept feeling like these were all basically part of the same broader culture space.

The whole point is to acknowledge a certain set of behaviors and ideas *as a broad culture space and worldview* (whose members claim all kinds of political ideologies). Lifestyle liberalism isn't any individual fish in the tank, or any particular school of fish in it, it's the water itself. I am analyzing it as a cultural, social, and psychological space more than as a political praxis.

My broader environment (raised in Los Angeles around status seeking middle class yuppie "fake rich" spaces and around New Age culture in the 70s/80s, to progressive parents; moved to Bay Area in mid 90s, worked in tech for a while) was heavily influenced by this set of cultural memes.

It's not *bad* that many people have more choice of how they live their lives, or more to choose from at the marketplace, and I'm certainly not in favor of authoritarian culture. Again, lifestyle liberalism is an individualist space but individualism itself isn't lifestyle liberal, and lots of really important things are fundamentally based on individual adult people - not their families, communities, churches, etc - having say at all with regard to their lives. Abortion and gay marriage (and freedom not to marry at all) are some of the the biggies we think about, and there are other fundamental individual rights that we didn't always have. Your family doesn't get to pick your spouse anymore, you don't need your husband to open a bank account for you, you are not accountable for your dead parents' personal debts, your family can not have you committed if you are a grown ass adult anywhere near as easily as they could in the 1950s. In many social spaces it's no longer acceptable to tell someone what gender they identify as or what religion to be. So it's absolutely necessary to distinguish the solipsism of lifestyle liberalism from actual praxis that concerns individual people.

For what it's worth, too, I feel like everyone with any actual political commitment at this point, on *either* side, hates lifestyle liberalism. The real lifestyle liberals at this point are probably just Objectivists. The problem is that lifestyle liberalism dug its hooks *deep* into the white liberal culture space where I'm from.

It's possible to grow up with damage from being raised in these middle class liberal spaces *and nobody talks about it.* Lifestyle liberalism took the credit for lots of real gains that were often lost because lifestyle liberalism did nothing to protect them (and sometimes blamed us for their loss), when in fact lifestyle liberalism had nothing to do with these gains at all. Lifestyle liberalism equates individual feelings and beliefs with praxis, so you have a culture space where lots of people don't think they're racist (to name just one example) because they don't ~FEEL~ racist. The thinking of many of these people is that they are a consumer in desegregated spaces, how could they be racist? Because after all, no class analysis exists ever, what you do with the freedoms you have is up to you, right?

The lack of acknowledgement that difference or inequality even exists, coupled with equating the middle class to the rich, meant that lots of institutions and culture spaces and industries even *lost* any kind of parity they had, because lifestyle liberalism largely constructed as the individual self-betterment rights of people who had never actually lost their privilege or left privileged spaces to begin with.

Like, I remember talking about sexism in tech in the 90s (which at the time wasn't as dominant a thing as it became later). But it was always dismissed by both men and women in the industry and was barely even talked about in hushed whispers. We just didn't have the words. 90s tech culture had a number of women senior programmers and women managers, and it wasn't even heavily bro yet. It wasn't until the dominant work culture shifted to "brogrammer" (itself a product of lifestyle liberalism, I'll argue) that anyone even admitted that any structural inequality was there and even then it was a struggle to acknowledge that company culture is a structural problem at all.

Part of it was that sexism had rebranded by the 90s; it wasn't grandpa's male chauvinism, it was a new post-Sexual Revolution, post-"Women's Lib" world of limitless options and any restriction on any privileged person's behavior - *especially* when it was selfish or oppressive - was represented as oppression of that person. Any complaint on the part of the person being punched down on, was framed as them not being liberated enough. All the world's problems were solved, right?

This is part of the cultural gaslighting I feel like a lot of Gen X came up with, but in many cases got perpetuated anyway (because lots of people who think lifestyle liberalism is politics and not culture, think they're pushing back, when really they're just rebranding).

It's hard to exit a space that everyone thinks gives you the most options unless you're actually forcibly ejected from that space. (Like the downwardly mobile children of yuppie Boomer parents. The ones who made good just kept the system going.)

Whereas people *do* talk about exiting authoritarian spaces. Also, people often need somewhere to exit authoritarian space *to.* and what's often presented is either another equally authoritarian space... or lifestyle liberal space.

The problem is, you can't really exit *to* lifestyle liberal space because it is inherently privileged, often results in loss of status and social capital to those who leave (because status signaling and social capital are - in my opinion - a really big part of lifestyle liberalism), and the pull to authoritarian space was often the validation of experience of lifestyle liberal/me-generation gaslighting. Sometimes the gaslighting of authoritarian space seems like a relief in comparison because the rules are explicit, whereas lifestyle liberal culture is a huge space of unwritten rules and expectations.

Lifestyle liberalism tends to not be either culturally sustainable or personally sustainable - the massive pushback it's getting now, when we couldn't even question that these systems existed in the 90s, is evidence of that.

Also, it requires a huge base of aspirationally wealthy and wealthy people in order to even function as a dominant culture meme, because of the degree to which it was about leveraging economic privilege. (Economics play a huge role. Lifestyle liberalism in practice turns into class warfare.) So the erosion of the middle class probably has a role to play. Because I feel like what I've seen in recent years are lots of people cut out of the lifestyle liberal social space because the middle class is losing so much adjacency to the rich, and even the illusion of adjacency. But now we have a culture space with 30+ years of entrenched mores, institutions, and viewpoints to deal with.

I feel Leftism is pushing back - in fact it's the whole cultural appropriation discussion that made me want to identify this culture space, because a lot of the appropriative practices critiqued were in liberal social space, not traditionalist or conservative social space.

And I feel like non-traditionalist conservatism became friendlier to lifestyle liberalism over time.

I was raised in this culture space, and it's fucked up, and I banged my head against the wall trying to succeed in it, then blamed myself and my own mental wiring for issues that turned out to be wholly structural and cultural. I tried to get therapy but found that therapists *generally* were in this same culture space as well and many seemed to mainly be about bringing people back to lifestyle liberalism.

I'm a downwardly mobile Gen Xr who is the kid of upwardly mobile parents, and I had to identify this set of cultural memes in order to recognize that I was being gaslit by them.

It's possible that a lot of the culture of lifestyle liberalism was a consequence of a strong economy to begin with and a consequence of disliking authoritarian culture but staying within one's privilege bubble.

And I'm not saying it is a bad thing on its own - it's that it's not praxis at all, but for 30+ years, was mistaken for it. Lots of people called themselves liberal who were only describing their personal lifestyle beliefs and choices and a set of consumer patterns. Lifestyle liberalism is to liberalism what mall goth is to goth.

It's that it leads to really selfish, narrow, and callous culture memes when left to its own devices and that it's a whole social system, not merely a praxis. It gets weaponized against vulnerable people in insidious and devastating ways, and then those people get blamed for their own bad experiences. Sometimes the lip service ends up being a way to wash your hands of the problems of other people. Sometimes lifestyle liberalism even ends up enhancing the social problems that praxis liberalism tries to oppose.

There are lots of problems we haven't been able to wrap our minds around, because of not being able to fit certain behaviors into either a conservative or leftist or even liberal framework. For example: protesting a war then demonizing the dominantly marginalized people drafted into it, seems inconsistent, right? No, it's totally consistent within the framework of lifestyle liberalism. It's punching down, it's actually class warfare with a smily face and a flower, as opposed to just plain old class warfare.

And my mom, who grew up poor in Venice and experienced its gentrification in the 60s, has talked lots about this - you couldn't even acknowledge that "baby killer" praxis was punching down, or that gentrification was happening. But to many of the poor people, and or POC, and or actually marginalized countercultural outsiders living in Venice, "the Man" had finally won, but he had come wearing long hair and a beard instead of a flat-top.

But within the cultural framework of lifestyle liberalism, it starts to make sense. So do a lot of things which seem ethically or politically inconsistent on the surface.

I feel like a lot of the more committed lifestyle liberals i knew, became libertarian or even conservative and stopped really giving a lot of lip service to leftist ideas.

Some even went traditionalist - because part of the dynamic of the 80s was that lots of these people had married and had children, and only had traditionalist cultural frameworks to function within once they were no longer swinging singles. The thing is, so much of lifestyle liberalism was not scalable to the family unless you had a lot of money. You had to actually be rich enough to afford the Montessori education and the macrobiotic afterschool snacks and to live in communities of "Positive People" that of course were in higher cost areas. (I've struggled with what so many New Agers mean when they say they want to live around "conscious" people. What they mean generally is that they want to live in rich liberal spaces instead of rich conservative ones.)

Lifestyle liberalism heavily favored the priorities of a large population of young childless, affluent singles. I feel like this is where you get the Silent Generation observation of "Boomer liberals who turn conservative after age 30," because in many cases it *was* about optimizing the freedoms and advantages of a semi-affluent youth culture.

For the most part though I feel like lifestyle liberalism isn't an individual take or set of takes or an individual praxis so much as a broader set of cultural memes. And, btw... it's really, really capitalist and consumerist! It basically treats people as independent consumers and groups of people as marketplaces.

The things that made me think of this and feel like I needed to analyze it:

1. Lifestyle liberalism is a really, really dominant theme in the world I was brought up in, and there is a lot of personal damage I had to overcome because of being in these environments. It infected every single part of every space I lived in, but was presented as the only option besides traditionalism.

2. I had these viewpoints for a long time, and continued to internalize them well into my 30s. I struggled in spaces that pushed back for a long time, because lifestyle liberalism isn't just a political or social viewpoint, it's a whole way many people in my age group are socialized to exist.

3. I struggled with why, after I became unhealthy and broke, many family and my old friends treated me differently and it wasn't about being actually rejected. It's more that they existed in spaces I could no longer move in, continued to say that i was welcome there, but did nothing to actually make it easier for me to be there, all the while maintaining the plausible deniability and moral certainty that they were inclusive of me.

4. I had to *unlearn* a lot of lifestyle liberal viewpoints to survive outside of that space, in spaces where survival was based upon pooling of effort and trying to problem solve interpersonal relationships, rather than being able to just opt out of any situation I was slightly uncomfortable in.

5. This space wasn't actually giving or helpful - it was basically a bunch of solipsists in the same room together - and when I actually started to have any requirements for real emotional or social support, these spaces left me to twist in the wind. "You're like, really bringing me down, man."

#i suspect that it was part of the creation of a broad white middle class and part of weaponizing newly privileged white people against #virtually everyone else

4 notes · View notes