Were Hipsters BASED?

The millennial subculture is prompting a lot of nostalgia from unlikely places

Nostalgia makes everything wonderful in hindsight, especially on the internet. Hipsters, the once-maligned millennial subculture, are currently the subject of wistful remembrance by denizens of the Online Right. When hipsters were a thing, people hated them. They saw the indie aficionados as smug, weirdly-dressed dorks who thought they were better than everyone else because of the music they listened to. By the late 2010s, no one identified themselves as hipsters anymore. It was a fashion left behind in the Obama era.

So why do a lot of right-wingers miss them? A lot of these guys were hipsters back in their youth and they fondly look back on the good old days. But there are deeper reasons given for this besides nostalgia. As X user Indian Bronson argues: “Hipsters were the last gasp of a White American Identity which rejected ‘pop’ culture.” He and others highlight what they see as the conservative, implicitly white aspects of hipsterdom, including songs extolling rural life and home. This is why the culture had to go: it was too damn white. The age of woke demanded people eschew indie rock in favor of rap. The jangly guitars and white voices were replaced by urban beats and lyrics Caucasians couldn’t repeat.

These right-wingers lament hipsterdom’s disappearance as it was replaced by something worse and more anti-white. Maybe that makes the hipsters good, but not everything better than woke and Kendrick Lamar is great. It’s a low bar to exceed.

To answer whether hipsters are worth missing, one first must understand them and their times. Hipsters were primarily known as avid listeners of indie rock who dressed and lived in a quirky manner. They avoided the preppy style in favor of anachronistic fashions, such as suspenders and stylized mustaches. They favored vinyl over CDs and MP3s. They were proponents of organic food and doing things locally. They loved irony and niche. They wouldn’t be caught dead watching popular TV shows or laughing at Will Ferrell comedies. They stuck to arthouse fare and left that slop for the masses.

Some of this might sound like the current Dissident Right, especially the health fixation and sympathy for localism. But the two split on politics and style. Hipsters rejected traditional masculinity and other norms the Dissident Right upholds. While not explicitly leftist, hipsterdom was left-coded. These were the people who, in a rare moment bereft of irony, seriously thought Barack Obama would deliver hope and change. These were the 44th president’s young white voters.

Their leftism was more the product of the era they lived in than a well-thought-out worldview. Hipsters turned to the Left due to what they rejected. Hipsters' anti-pop culture stance was a reaction against suburban malaise and the George W. Bush administration. Hipsters defined themselves against the country club, the 9-5 job, and the middle class from which they hailed. (Hipsters, despite aping archaic blue collar styles, were definitely not working class.) They associated conservatism with everything they hated, from Dick Cheney to the NFL. This made them leftists by default. To be a leftist was to reject pop culture and, in some ways, America itself. It was common in these circles to lambast this country as the land of the fat and stupid and to mock the patriotism the Bush admin exploited for the Iraq War effort. America only became worthwhile again when it elected Obama.

Hipsters were uniformly white. Very few non-whites got into this stuff. Blacks especially found the music and culture unbearably Caucasian. This was not a point of pride for hipsters. Like most liberals, they were embarrassed by their whiteness. Many hipsters gentrifying cities found themselves neighbors with blacks. The white newcomers saw the locals as allies against their suburban hometown. But this didn’t create real solidarity outside of voting for the same candidates. Hipsters, at least the wise ones, would still shuffle to the other side of the street when black youths approached. The anti-racism was reserved solely for their own circles. Hipsters would try to compensate for their overbearing whiteness by championing black music. Pitchfork, THE publication for hipsters, praised rap almost as much as they did indie rock, even in the 2000s. But the kind of black music hipsters gravitated to the most was the stuff blacks no longer listened to, like jazz and funk.

While hipsterdom was white, these people embraced leftist politics. Their politics weren’t reserved for the ballot box either. They would rigidly enforce left-wing standards within the scenes they influenced. One example is heavy metal. It is odd that hipsters came to control metal journalism. In the early aughts, hipsters were notoriously anti-metal. In Michael Azzerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, a profile of pioneering indie acts, metal is treated as the worst genre on planet Earth. The author treats metal listeners as troglodytes and he depicts his subjects going through metal phases as dark periods of their life. It came as a surprise when Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan, and similar publications began covering metal in the late 2000s. As an anti-hipster metalhead at the time, I knew this was bad news.

Sure enough, I was right. While this attention made many people take the maligned genre seriously, it also made it woker. Hipster journos relentlessly policed the heavy metal scene for any signs of racism, sexism, or other wrongthought. They cancelled bands for remarks made in old interviews, releasing records with the “wrong” label, or having members who played in politically incorrect bands. They’d even castigate death metal bands, a genre centered on violence and gore, for growling about women meeting grisly ends. Apparently, that’s misogyny. Hipsters were successful in their endeavor. The American metal scene is insufferably politically correct now. There’s no chance a band could get away with calling their fan club the “Slaytanic Wehrmacht” anymore. Everything has to be approved by hipster censors now.

Rather than being a culture free of woke, hipsters exhibited many proto-woke tendencies.

One difference between hipsterdom and woke is that the former was shaped by straight white men. The latter saw that class as the enemy, regardless of their politics. Pitchfork experienced this change when the white men were pushed out in favor of “women of color.” One could see hipsters as wokeness enforced by white dudes rather than by troons, women, and POC. It was better, but not ideal.

The other big difference between hipsterdom and woke is that the former wasn’t a political thing. It was a culture dedicated to music, movies, and fashion. Its adherents were overwhelmingly Obama voters, but their primary interest was in other matters. The woke activists in the 2010s made everything political. This drove some former hipsters to the Right.

There are clear commonalities between hipsters and the Online Right. Both reject pop culture, both indulge in “nerdy” interests, both value organic food, and both have a conflicted relationship with the suburbs from which they come from. The hipster expressed these feelings by being a modern dandy and voting Democrat. The Dissident Rightist turns to posting and sometimes LARPing as a modern-day barbarian. Two different responses, same underlying sentiments.

This shared disaffection may explain the hipster nostalgia. Hipsters stand as an unabashedly white, yet more cultured alternative to the suburban lifestyle. It’s something many right-wingers seek as well. Unlike hipsters, right-wingers claim to love Middle America and fight for its interests. But if you find yourself on RW Twitter, you’re most likely alienated from Middle America to some extent. Few posters do the standard things associated with the bourgeoisie, such as joining a fraternity and playing golf. Their spare time does not revolve around sports–many right-wingers in fact detest sports fandom. The standard suburban life is just as unappealing to Dissident Rightists as it was to hipsters. The right-wingers just haven’t formulated a concrete alternative to that lifestyle beyond posting on the internet.

Back in the Alt Right’s heyday, its leaders envisioned its target audience as hipsters fed up with leftism but who wanted nothing to do with the lame conservatism of the time. The Alt Right, in contrast to the Dissident Right, was more open about its alienation from Middle America. This made them more like hipsters. A number of hipsters were converted by the Alt Right and now shape online Right discourse. For all of the Alt Right’s many failures, the movement at least knew where to spread its message.

If hipsters were still around, we would hate them. Many of their traits laid the groundwork for the cringiness of the white liberals we despise. I personally hated them when I was a metalhead and when I was in a fraternity. I knew they were libtards and couldn’t stand their music taste. Now that hipsters are safely a thing of the past, we can soberly reflect on them.

They had noble motives and were interested in cool stuff. They were more open to different ideas and higher culture than the average normie. They sought a life with more meaning than the one offered by the suburbs. But this well-meaning pursuit led them to leftism, pretentiousness, and a rather effeminate style. Hipsters are best left to the Obama era. Zoomers have already made us suffer by resurrecting nu-metal; we don’t need them to revive “stomp clap hey.”