The short answer? Hell no.
After the last presidential election, some music commentators believed they had discovered the possibility of a silver lining: “Punk will be better under Trump.”
We figured that would be the most inane subculture-concerned assertion this decade—at least among those takes that gained a modicum of currency. Nope. Something else had surfaced a little earlier, but seemed destined to shrivel of its own inanity. That didn’t happen. “Conservatism is the new punk” emerged, gained a bit of traction in select right-wing quarters, and now floats like a U-boat moored in a fetid bay of discourse as we approach the next election.
Now, knowing how much those in these aforementioned quarters value the “vigorous exchange of ideas,” or whatever it is they call misgendering trans people and mocking school-shooting survivors, I won’t simply counter this absurd claim by telling these ahistorical nerds to go fuck a jackboot. I will instead try to counter their attempts to appropriate God’s greatest one-chord wonder, punk, with the intellectual dark web’s own cuddly toy—logic.
First, a concession. Punk, as both fashion and music, has always had a huge reactionary strain. As was pointed out by right-winger Kurt Schlichter in his 2014 column, “Conservatism Is the New Punk Rock” (which, by the way, predated English vlogger Paul Joseph Watson’s now-infamous use of the phrase), the Ramones—arguably the first punk band, if you, incorrectly, ignore Peru’s Los Saicos—had a right-leaning member. Johnny Ramone was a Reagan-loving Republican.
And while much of early punk’s use of fascistic imagery was driven largely by a petulant need to shock, there was barely any time between punk’s popular inception and the rising of entirely fash movements like Rock Against Communism. If anything, punk arguably would have happily remained a debauched art-school exercise in pissing off the libs if the right’s rise within it hadn’t forced a response. After all, hating the hippies back then was de rigueur.
Conservatives could use punk’s failure to always live up to its self-mythology if they weren’t more invested in rhetorical points than the music. Though I suppose the admission, “Actually, I don’t just listen to the first Skrewdriver” would be saying the quiet part loud.
Of course, men like Paul Joseph Watson are more interested in the cultural cachet of being truth-bomb-dropping Henry Rollinses of the right than in engaging with punk as art. Like Gavin McInnes, Dave Rubin, and all the others who have staked their intellectual reputations on pure reactionarism, Watson is interested in the idea of “PUNK RAWK”—an almost baby boomer-ish fairy tale of absolute freedom combined with a baby’s inclination to paint the walls with its own shit. Punk reduced to the Sex Pistols and GG Allin thrusting out their middle fingers like beads thrown at Mardi Gras. Watson latches onto John Lydon—onetime Johnny Rotten of the Pistols—big-upping Brexit as though the Clash hadn’t already presciently addressed this with “He who fucks nuns will later join the church.”
The Paul Watsons of the infosphere so badly want the rickety equation “conservatism = the new punk rock” to
be dictum that they’re, by necessity, happy to wipe away any rational history of the genre—good and bad.
The fact that punk has always been an amorphous mess of ideas, with ideological and anti-ideological strains shooting off willy-nilly across any and all spectrums, is not a useful concept if your entire argument is predicated upon taking away something you suppose the opposition values. This isn’t a coherent position—it’s just hoping to hurt the feelings of some random girl with a bunch of piercings.
Watson and his ilk’s central thesis is that “The Left” (and, within that vague designation, socialism, PC culture, the mainstream media, etc.) is the monolith culture, so anything that offends this oppressive mass is, by some mathematical property I’m not familiar with, punk.
The obvious retort to this is that cops aren’t on the left, and the police are not punk. And, brother, Watson and his ilk sure as shit love cops. The alt-right is joined in this affection by the mainstream media and the vast majority of Democrats in national office. I won’t use this limited space to debate the merits of the prison industrial complex and a fully militarized police force, but I think we can/should all agree that, with the exception of Joe from The Queers—and while conceding that some leftist punks sure seem to have the souls of cops—there’s nothing punk about loving actual, uniformed, backed-by-state-and-truncheon cops. At the risk of complicating the argument with unasked-for nuance, even any skinhead worth his boots and braces hates cops. (Please note the 1982 British punk song “A.C.A.B.” by notorious PC police, The 4-Skins.)
One thing the right does share with punk is a sense of being picked on. But, while punks felt harassed by forces ranging from the existential (religion, the past, Texas hicks in pickup trucks) to the political (first the Labour Party, then Thatcher; and in the U.S., Jerry Brown and Reagan both), the new right feels put upon by a loosely defined cultural “mob.”
But the “mob” is what it always was—a fickle, largely split-down-the-middle, politically unknowable, and unpredictable wave. Bari Weiss gets yelled at and Marc Lamont gets fired. The Covington Catholic case didn’t exactly cover anyone on the left with glory, but Gamergate and Comicsgate are ongoing shitshows with little underpinning beyond constantly shifting grievance. If the left are the new Puritans, so are the right, and so is the center, at least when it comes to things like, say, Israel. All puritans, no witches. Anyway, people always complain about the pitchfork-wielding mob, but fail to mention that in the original Mary Shelley novel, Frankenstein’s Monster did, after all, kill that kid….
Whether or not white cis men are a marginalized group is not something the left and the right will ever see eye to eye on, but it all goes back to if you want your entire existence to be defined by pure reaction. The punk rockers behind both “White Minority” (Black Flag) and “Guilty of Being White” (Minor Threat) were coming from the perspective of young white men who were occasionally hassled by (also young) minorities in the urban centers they shared. But these punks left that whining behind once they realized that they were essentially voicing the GOP national platform.
Look, mainstream culture is neither left nor right. It’s the same mix of nihilism, amoral statecraft masked by religiosity, and market-driven distraction that led our country to invade the Philippines, establish Hollywood as an exploitative world monopoly, delay our joining World War II, maintain Jim Crow (in various forms) to this day, support the 1953 Iran coup, invade Iraq, assassinate Patrice Lumumba, and occupy Afghanistan for almost two decades with minimal public attention.
Mainstream culture—beyond occasionally inconveniencing the career of some star for their use of the N-word or briefly delaying a preordained seat on the Supreme Court—gives not a damn about the left. And if it appears to hold the right in disdain, it’s only because people, for whatever reason, prefer their war propaganda with “Fortunate Son” playing over the credits.
Punk rock is, was, and always will be a profoundly dumb genre of music with a wildly rancid undercurrent. I hold no illusions about it. But it’s also the genre of music I most love, and the punk-rock “lifestyle”—partial leftist politics, drugs, cool boots, and all—is the one I am most comfortable existing on the periphery of. But, to quote England’s finest melodic hardcore band, Leatherface, I have my place in the scheme of things. And that place lies outside punk. Still, in my calcified and impotent bones, I need to defend it from this recent calumny.
It would be pretty neat to end this with a “When it all comes down to it, punk is really about…” moral. But the truth is that punk is not about anything. It was started by malcontents whose grievances spanned from the trivial to the profound. And those grievances were as disparate and slippery in 1977 as they are now. The new clarion callers of the white minority see themselves as victimized arbiters of some larger, unpopular “Truth.” That’s fine, but that’s hardly a novel self-perception.
L.A.’s Minutemen had a song called “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?” It asks “Should words serve the truth?…. I shout for history.” And it ends, “I am a cesspool for all the shit to run down in.”
The song doesn’t sound “punk” at all, but of course it is. It is lovely and vulgar and wildly strange. Music for the uncertain; music for those trying to get by but not just trying to get by. And certainly not at the cost of fucking over those around them. In the gutter but looking at the stars, and all that romantic pining for a greater purpose, while never denying the earthly shit of existence—that’s what this Minutemen song communicates to me.
I don’t think Paul Joseph Watson, or Kurt Schlichter, or even their intellectual dark web overlords, are worthy inheritors of such a legacy. Frankly, they’re just not complicated enough.
Art by Tara Jacoby
