The Longhouse Will Not Tolerate the Cruelty of Laughter and Pleasure

I woke up this morning, feeling for some reason like I’d lost an hour of sleep somewhere, realizing I hadn’t finished the thought about all those dank memes. The news “analysis” of the JD Vance jokes is spreading fast, and it mostly sticks to the same theme:

1. The right is joking about JD Vance;

2. Why do they suddenly hate him?

Notice all of the unstated premises that underlie this discussion: Humor is hate. Jokes are an expression of contempt and loathing. Laughter is disgust. Imagine what kind of sick miserable Nazi goes around enjoying his day and being amused. First they laugh, then they invade Poland.

I was forced back to the discussion last month from the tech journalist Kara Swisher about Elon Musk. Swisher had discovered, from inside sources, that Musk makes jokes and laughs a lot. She ran with that devastating information, digging into Musk’s broken personality to figure out why he was such a degraded figure. He laughs? Why? What’s wrong with him? “But it’s — a 53 year-old man does not do this. I guess it’s part of video game culture or something, but I find it unusual for someone of his age to be such a juvenile.” Actual screenshot of that miserable discussion:

Sample of the responses, which mirror my “have you ever met any humans?” response from yesterday:

Anyway, rest assured that Kara Swisher doesn’t laugh. She’s above it.

The great political division that is in particular opening between young men and young women….

What an interesting way to illustrate this graph

….seems to me to not really be a political gap at its core, but rather a cultural schism that’s expressing itself in the form of voting and public “politics.” Cluster B tendencies, disconnected personalities, SSRI uptake, status anxiety: our gendered and class-structured “politics,” a set of status performances pretending to be a debate.

Lomez — or, sorry, LoM3Z, a name that Kara Swisher needs to investigate immediately:

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct….

The implications of the Longhouse reach yet further across the social landscape. The Longhouse distrusts overt ambition. It censures the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion. Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome. Even constructive expressions of these instincts are deemed toxic, patriarchal, or even racist. When Marc Andreessen declares that it is time to build, he must understand that the recognition of merit and the willingness to assume risk that such building depends on cannot be achieved under Longhouse rule.

And this is why, as much as I appreciate the political correction of DOGE and the top-down Trump intervention, I appreciate the rise of dank JD Vance memes a lot more. The cultural problem needs a cultural solution, a bottom-up rejection of grimly humorless Cluster B status performance. The culture needs to be ripped open again. Men in their 50s making terrible jokes with their engineers, and then laughing at their own jokes: I’m sorry, Kara, but this is what saves us.

We need jokes. Dumb ones. Urgently.