Cuckservative

"Cuckservative" is a neologistic epithet.^[1] It is a portmanteau of the word "cuckold" and the political designation "conservative", and has become an increasingly popular pejorative label used within the conservative movement, and among white nationalists in the United States.^[2][3]

The word "cuckservative" reached the cusp of mainstream political conversation where it soon gained media attention just a few weeks before the start of the first Republican primary debate for the 2016 United States Presidential election,^[4] around mid-July 2015,^[5]

The term originated on websites such as 4chan (specifically the /pol/ imageboard), the far-right message board My Posting Career, the white nationalist site The Right Stuff, and other sites in the alt-right movement.^[2][6][7]

Definition

Those in the self-described conservative media targeted by the "cuckservative" slur along with various moderate and left leaning news sites decried the term as an anti-Christian,^[5] racist slur^[8][9] and a rallying cry for white nationalists and neoreactionaries.^[10]

One definition of "cuckservative" defines it as a conservative who sells out,^[11] having bought into all of the key premises of the left,^[8] and is enthralled with liberal values.^[4] According to Richard B. Spencer, the president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, the term is a shorthand used to express "certain kind of contempt for mainstream conservatives".^[12] The phrase is similar to "Republican In Name Only" (RINO).^[13] Social conservatives who use the term condemn what they see as Republicans running on socially conservative values to appeal to their base during an election cycle, only to use vote trading to compromise on those values while in office.^[12] The term "cuckold" has a long history as an insult implying that a specific man is weak and emasculated, and may even feel pleasure at his own humiliation because of sexual masochism. The term "cuckservative" similarly implies that certain male Republicans are humiliated through their actions while feeling thrilled and excited from their own degradation because of the abandonment of their own moral standards.^[14][2]

Some American political writers have suggested that the term is racially charged by being seemingly derived from a genre of interracial pornography in which a white married woman spurns her white husband for sex with a black man.^{[15][14][16][17]} This concept is itself rooted in ideas of interracial sex being taboo and the stereotype of black men being more sexually active than white men, and in this context the fact that African Americans are particularly prone to support the Democratic party.

Far right anti-immigrant groups have used the term to condemn white politicians who they say unknowingly promote "the interests of Jews and non-whites".^[18] They attack a cuckservative as "an extreme universalist [who] seems often to suffer from ethnomasochism & pathological altruism. In short, a cuckservative is a white (non-Jewish) conservative who isn't racially aware."^[19] The Anti-Defamation League says that the term is used by white nationalists as a synonym of the pre-existing phrase "race traitors".^[18]

A conservative news site in Spain translated "cuckservative" to "cornuservador", stating that: "Republicans are nothing but the 'controlled opposition' completely in the hands of the political left, whose only aspiration is for those rare occasions when those hands pat them on the head, and the media rewards them with the coveted adjective 'moderate': these are the cornuservadores."^[20]

Use

Jeet Heer of The New Republic wrote that the word is a "fine example of how the sound of a word can reinforce its meaning: abrasive on the ears, cuckservative appropriately enough has an ugly origin and meaning".^[14] The word was most popularly adopted in mid-2015 after some alt-right web users were disapproving of the attempts by John McCain, Jeb Bush, and other Republicans to establish more politically liberal positions, dubbing those who did "cuckservatives". Over a matter of weeks, the term then proceeded to attain usage additionally on social media and the wider internet.^[14]

Writing for Hot Air, Taylor Millard criticized the word and its history of usage of by white nationalists within the conservative movement. He called it short-sighted, giving his opinion that Rand Paul's popularity at leading majority-black universities could make African Americans more conservative in the future.^[11] Matt Lewis, in The Daily Beast, gave his opinion that the word could become as popular with Republicans as "RINO" (Republican In Name Only), even if they were oblivious to its often racial connotations.^[10] Erick Erickson, of right-wing website RedState.com, called the word an insult to Christian Republicans by white supremacists.^[10] Milo Yiannopoulos of right-wing site Breitbart News said the term was not purely racist, and that the term "cuck" had long been used on 4chan to attack any individual considered cowardly or lacking in principles.^[21] Writing in The Washington Post, David Weigel described the term as arising from disaffected elements of the right wing.^[1]

Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason argues that the Democratic party uses constant appeal of identity politics to various minority groups, and that the Republican party is at a crossroads in whether to accept a form of white identity politics.^[22]

See also

• Betrayal
• Bootleggers and Baptists
• Quisling
• Un-American
• Uncle Tom – an epithet targeting black people deemed to be subservient to whites and their interests

References