It's hard for me to tell how much of the firestorm of SJWs vs alt-Right is actually a real, large scale thing and how much of it is just thrown up to me in the kinds of places I visit online (y'know, video games, media analysis, etc) which seems like it really attracts people who have very specific, if not well-reasoned, ideas about what social justice is and how it should be pursued.
I still don't fully buy it's a real zeitgeist defining conflict. People draw direct lines between the alt-right and Trump but I think the alt-right is basically just a fraction of the support Trump has if for no other reason than the majority of Trump's voters will not have heard of the alt-right, won't really use the internet much and are voting for him for good old-fashioned republican reasons. Same with the recent surge of the right in Europe (which is now faltering already).
So to me it's an expression of the typical left-right conflict which has invented a new, limited vocabulary to express itself in the absence of critical thought and experience. Everybody who uses these terms in abundance seems to feel like they are at the core of the political battlefield, but I think it's actually just a subsection of a subsection - the basis of the conflict is the same, but it's a caricatured and shallow version of it, and one largely devoid of the economics which actually cause it to arise in the first place. It is entirely about identity, and this is a common problem, although one usually taken advantage of by the right to distract an exploited population from its exploitation and gain votes by scapegoating immigrants, the poor themselves, etc, as the reasons for a society's problems.
Whenever I have talked to anybody openly about their use of the term SJW, or tried to get them to soften on it a bit, I've been successful and they start trying to explain themselves earnestly, and trying to mitigate the legitimate criticisms that have been thrown their way (not by me, but they assume simply because I'm questioning them I am condemning them). It generally hasn't really held up, because the vocabulary might be quite vivid, but it is as vivid as it is because there really isn't any deep thought behind it. It's like some kind of rhetorical flash grenade. They start out trying, then kind of get bored because y'know, discussion and self-reflection isn't the point. The point is gratification and feeling part of a group.
It probably mobilises people to vote in certain ways, but again, I haven't seen anything that makes me think 'wow we're doomed to far right governments if we don't deal with these 'sjw' insults'. It seems kind of immature all around, which makes sense since it is a vocabulary invented by the young. Not that only young people use it any more, but people of all ages have access to it now, perhaps through things like video game forums/reddits, and immaturity doesn't have an age limit. So it started with the young, but now it's more of a subculture.
I'm also not super worried about it because there will always be this far-right element in society, and they just keep losing ground in the west. Yeah there are road bumps but I'll start worry when I see civil liberties actually starting to be rolled back, rather than extended, even if the extension is frustratingly slow because of these far-right elements. I also think that attacking the far-right, racist or anti-progressive elements head on is just playing whack-a-mole and won't actually solve anything. It's all structural and to do with economics, and most people don't actually care so they don't want to talk about that stuff.
Anyone think I'm not taking it seriously enough?
