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"Kill All Normies", Angela Nagle posted:"What we now call the alt-right is really this collection of lots of separate tendencies that grew semi-independently but which were joined under the banner of a bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics through the culture wars of recent years. The irreverent trolling style associated with 4chan grew in popularity in response to the expanding identity politics of more feminine spaces like Tumblr. This, itself, spilled over eventually into ‘real life’ in the ramping up of campus politics around safe spaces and trigger warnings, ‘gamergate’ and many other battles."  Angela Nagle, a left-wing cultural critic and journalist for the Baffler, has written the first widely read treatise on the 'alt-right'. At about 200 pages "Kill All Normies" is a quick read that offers a brief history and wide survey of prominent alt-right figures, some of the major events that gave birth to the movement, and some of the cultural and political antecedents to the alt-right movement, and even a limited taxonomy of its major factions. The initial reaction to Nagle's work has been mostly positive, with laudatory reviews rolling in from across the political spectrum. It's not every day that a book on contemporary politics manages to get glowing reviews from Jacobin, the National Review and the New Republic, and that alone makes this a book worth reading: Jacobin posted:Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Donald Trump sheds a crucial beam of light on our present moment. It accomplishes this because its author did the dirty work: Nagle read, aggregated, and interpreted the actual mass of 4chan, Tumblr, and Twitter messages that have accumulated online over the last half-decade. (“Thank god,” writes Amber A’lee Frost, “because I’m sure as hell not doing it.”) National Review posted:An entertaining new book explores the roots and rise of the Internet’s most infamous subculture. After the culture wars of Western politics went online and were appropriated by Millennials, something strange happened. You could see it when Jeopardy! champion and Twitter personality Arthur Chu surveyed the phenomenon of young men pushing against the influence of feminist criticism on their entertainment and declared, “As a dude who cares about feminism sometimes I want to join all men arm-in-arm & then run off a cliff and drag the whole gender into the sea.” Those on the left side of these wars claimed to be victims as individuals even though, as a collective, they were capable of bullying people out of their jobs and harassing them to to the point of suicide. Taught by self-esteem con artists and children’s media that everyone is special in their own way, this generation in turn taught itself that everyone is oppressed in their own way. The New Republic posted:In Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, published by Zero Books, Angela Nagle plumbs the depths of the noxious digital morass that fed off Trump’s rise. Where some have seen unfathomable chaos, Nagle—an academic and journalist who’s covered digital subcultures extensively—aims to faithfully document the online culture wars that “may otherwise be forgotten.” By presenting one of the few holistic and sensible taxonomies of the alt-right, Kill All Normies offers a bulwark against desultory assessments of the movement that blur the myriad of ideological differences that make the movement’s origins and goals feel impenetrable. It is also a wake-up call to those on the left-liberal spectrum that it is high time they got their act together. It's worth asking how somebody in 2017 managed to write a book that is earning praise from the brocialist left, the lieberal centre and the cuckservative right. And the answer is simple enough. This book tells them what they want to hear. Nagle wrote her PhD on online misogyny and her work for the Baffler gives her an ideal perch from which to write this book and I was greatly excited to actually read it. My initial impression was highly positive but on reflection this book needs some work. There are no citations, no interviews, very little concrete data and a great deal of impressionistic analysis. Nagle demonstrates her scholarly erudition with references to Nietzsche and de Sade as well as to certain noteworthy events in the history of the 'culture wars' such as William F. Buckley's debates with Gore Vidal up to the infamous Gamergate controversy but at other times she seems to uncritically accept the alt-rights presentation of itself. Why, then, has this book proven so appealing across the political spectrum? Probably because one of its core messages is that the contemporary alt-right emerges, to a large degree, from the excessive conditions created by parts of the liberal left, especially as it manifested online in the early 2010s. For Nagle, this 'tumblr-liberalism' has much to answer for: it has spurred a right-wing backlash, continues to drive young people away from left-wing causes, acts as a mask for neoliberals who oppose any kind of economic populism, and cultivates styles of argument and habits of mind that leave the left incapable of meeting and defeating alt-right arguments on their own merits. How you feel about that argument will play a big role in how you feel about the book. But rather than me writing a tiresome essay on the book lets just start talking about it! In this thread I will periodically post excerpts and summaries of the book, chapter by chapter, in the hopes of keeping the discussion moving. However, I encourage people to talk about any part of this subject that interests you. For those who haven't read the book you should be able to follow easily enough just reading the excerpts. Much of Nagle's work is also directly anticipated by three essays she wrote for the Baffler, all of which are available here. An article she wrote for Jacobin, also discussing the alt-right, is available here. A google books preview of Kill All Normies can be found here. And for the reading challenged, here's an interview with Nagle on El Chapo Traphouse IMPORTANT NOTE This is a discussion Thread for talking about Nagle's book and any related topics. That includes some contentious topics like gamergate. Talking about gamergate is fine but any rants are going to end up with people getting probated Helsing has issued a correction as of 16:24 on Jul 17, 2017 |
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Jul 17, 2017 15:58
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Introduction: From Hope to Harambe Chapter One: The leaderless digital counter-revolution Chapter Two: The online politics of transgression Chapter Three: Gramscians of the alt-light Chapter Four: Conservative culture wars from Buchannan to Yiannopoulos Helsing has issued a correction as of 15:09 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 17, 2017 16:00
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Whatever you can say about Nagle's book she isn't exactly offering up Horse Shoe theory, but I think part of the books widespread appeal is that a casual reader could easily interpret her book in that way. R. Guyovich posted:i'd rather not give angela "nazis are the left's fault" nagle money but will be interested to look at the excerpts posted here Her target isn't the "left" per se, it's post modernism of the Judith Butler variety as it has filtered down into internet discourse and been manifested on sites like UpWorthy or everyday feminism. One of her principle criticisms of the "Tumblr-liberal" blogosphere in the early 2010s is that she thinks these sites were intentionally used to undercut calls for greater economic equality. That blog Dreylad linked to earlier actually summarizes her position as "an old leftist’s idea of what a young leftist should be—a sworn enemy of identity politics, a dedicated partisan of class struggle. " Dreylad posted:
I imagine that Nagle was under a lot of pressure to get her book to the presses quickly. The alt-right is a hot commodity right now so I'm sure her publisher wanted something to be released as soon as possible to capitalize on the buzz. Also, as others have pointed out, this topic evolves so quickly that it doesn't lend itself to studied reflection - at least half the groups and personalities she discusses will be forgotten in five years. I do think her book would benefit from at least one chapter that actually moves beyond taxonimizing the alt-right and discussing the substance of some of its claims. I think the first moment that I really started to question the books narrative was after she uncritically accepted the MRA derived idea of the modern dating and hookup scene as a "steep sexual hierarchy" in which growing numbers of men are forced into celibacy. But we'll get to that later. Overall I think this is a book worth reading or at least discussing. Even if its flawed it's the first actual attempt by the left to make any sense of what the alt-right.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:46
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So, for those who are interested in a real overview of the book I'm going to try and walk through it chapter by chapter, starting with her introduction. Introduction: From Hope to Harambe Nagle's book opens with a discussion of the contrasts between the celebratory atmosphere surrounding Obama's first candidacy in 2008 - with people "ecstatic to be part of what felt like a positive mass-cultural moment" - and the wide-spread mockery of Hilary's appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show eight years later. Clinton "became a source of comedy and ridicule among large online audiences from right across the political spectrum". Nagle writes: quote:"How did we get from those earnest hopeful days broadcast across the media mainstream to where we are now? This book covers this period from the perspective of Internet-culture and subcultures, tracing the online culture wars that have raged on below the line and below the radar of mainstream media throughout the period over feminism, sexuality, gender identity, racism, free speech and political correctness. This was unlike the culture wars of the 60s or 90s, in which a typically older age cohort of moral and cultural conservatives fought against a tide of cultural secularization and liberalism among the young. This online backlash was able to mobilize a strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls whose dark humor and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz. What seemed to hold them together in their obscurity was a love of mocking the earnestness and moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity running right through from establishment liberal politics to the more militant enforcers of new sensitivities from the wackiest corners of Tumblr to campus politics. Nagle writes that the Obama period saw "the death of what remained of a mass culture sensibility, in which there was still a mainstream media arena and a mainstream sense of culture and the public." Trump's victory was also a victory against the mainstream media, which is widely held in contempt across the political spectrum. This is reflected by the chaotic nature of modern social media: Nagle compares the iconic blue-and-red pencil portrait of Obama - an official symbol commissioned by the campaign and then spread in a top down fashion to social media devotees - with the anarchic and uncoordinated nature of r/TheDonald or Bernie's Dank Meme Stash on facebook. "The year 2016 may be remembered as the year the media mainstream's hold over formal politics died", writes Nagle. She then catalogs several examples of how viral content spread online and the cycles of activist enthusiasm and deep cynicism that was provoked. Nagle uses the Kony2012 campaign and the emergence of the Harambe memes to demonstrate the chaotic and often contradictory pathway that memes take, as well as to illustrate how a kind of knowing cynicism became the default poise of the internet: "By 2016, after countless repeats of the Kony 2012 cycle form virtue to disgrace, a spirit of deep nihilistic cynicism and reactive irony bubbled up to the surface of mainstream Internet-culture and an absurd in-jokey forum humor became dominant." For Nagle, this is crucial to understanding the emergence of the alt-right: quote:"It was amid this ironical in-jokey maze of meaning that the online culture wars played out, that Trump got elected and that what we now call the alt-right came to prominence. Every bizarre event, new identity and strange subcultural behavior that baffles general audiences when they eventually make the mainstream media, from otherkin to far right Pepe memes, can be understood as a response to a response to a response, each one responding angrily to the existence of the other. Trumpian meme-makers ramped up their taboo-breaking anti-PC style in response to genderbending Tumblr users, who themselves then became more sensitive, more convinced of the racism, misogyny and hetero-normative oppression of the world outside of their online subcultures. At the same time, the 'deplorables', from the Trumpian trolls to the alt-right, view the Hilary loyalists - the entrenched identity politics of Tumblr and the intersectional anti-free speech campus left - as evidence of their - equally bleak view of a rapidly declining Western civilization, as both sides have become increasingly unmoored to any cultural mainstream, which scarcely resembles either bleak vision. So this is how Nagle frames her book. One good point she makes which hasn't been addressed yet is the huge transition the internet made from a fundamentally anonymous place to the modern "panoptic" world of social media in which your entire history and identity become both commoditized and subject to intense scrutiny.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:53
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Chapter One: The leaderless digital counter-revolution Nagle’s opening chapter focuses on how the early, utopian (and either implicitly or explicitly progressive) dreams of the early 2010s have been upended by the emergence of the alt-right. I think this is one of the principle criticisms she deploys against left-wing theorizing on the significance of the internet – that it lazily takes for granted that new technology was, according to one account she quotes from, “breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency”. quote:It is worth thinking back now to the early 2010s, when cyberutopianism had its biggest resurgence since the 90s, before the dot-com bubble burst. This time it emerged in response to a series of political events around the world from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement to new politicized hacker movements. Anonymous, Wikileaks and public-square mass protests in Spain and across the Middle East were getting huge coverage in the news, causing a flurry of opinion and analysis pieces about their profound significance. All of these events were being attributed to the rise of social media and characterized as a new leaderless form of digital revolution. The hyperbole and hubris of the moment should have been enough to make anyone skeptical, but most on the left were swept up in the excitement as images of vast crowds in public squares appeared on social media and the in the mainstream media. This is a consistent them in Nagle’s account of the alt-right: how the left fundamentally misunderstands the significance of social developments over the last several decades. She’s not assigning blame for actually causing the emergence of the alt-right but she does think the left lazily assumed that the internet and its related social media technologies were inherently biased in a progressive direction. In later chapters she expands on this critique and argues that after World War II the left adopted a new ethos which celebrated the artistic and political value of transgression for its own sake. Nagle will repeatedly point to this strong cultural bias in favour of transgression as one of the reasons that some left-wing cultural commentators could mistake the anarchic and pornographic chan culture of the early 2010s for some kind of progressive incubator. quote:But this fervor died down in just a few short years. The Egyptian revolution led to something worse – the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamists ran riot in the streets and stories of rapes in the very public square that had shortly before held so much hope came to light. Soon the military dictatorship swept back into power. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators remained literally aimless and were eventually forced out of public property by police, camp by camp. By the end of 2013, a public-square style movement took place in Ukraine, which started with many of the same scenes of romanticized people-power in the public square. However this time the leaderless network narrative, which was already starting to look a little less convincing, was left aside because the protests quickly erupted into fascist mob rule. I think that this is a more substantive critique from Nagle than the idea that “tumblr-liberalism” directly caused the alt-right to emerge. Instead she blames left-leaning cultural commentators for rushing to embrace the zeitgeist of the early 2010s without recognizing that the political incoherence of these movements made them ideal for co-optation by the right. quote:After the election of Trump, everyone wanted to know about a new online right-wing movement whose memetic aesthetics seemed to have infiltrated sites from the popular The Donald subreddit to mainstream Internet-culture. In the leader-up to the election, the most famous common imagery was of Pepe the Frog. The name given by the press to this mix of rightist online phenomena including everything form Mil to 4chan to neo-Nzi sites was the ‘alt-right’. In its strictest definition though, as an army of Internet pedants quickly pointed out, the alt-right term was used in its own online cirlces to include only a new wave of overtly white segregationist and white nationalist movements and subcultures, typified by spokespeople like Richard Spencer, who has called for a US white ethno-state and a pan-naitonal white Empire modeled on some approximation of the Roman Empire. The movement’s media also includes Scottish video blogger Millenial Woes, Red Ice, sites like Radix and the long-form and book publishers Counter Currents. At this point Nagle does a survey of various stars within the alt-right firmament: Kevin B MacDonal of the Occidental Observer, Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, as well as an overview of some persistent obsessions these figures have such as “IQ, European demographic and civilizational decline, cultural decadence, cultural Marxism, anti-egalitarianism and Islamification”. Most of all, however, the focus of the alt-right is on “creating an alternative to the right-wing conservative establishment, who they dismiss as ‘cuckservatives’ for their soft Christian passivity and for metaphorically cuckholding their womenfolk/nation/race to the non-white foreign invader.” quote:But of course what we call the alt-right today could never have had any connection to the mainstream and to a new generation of young people if it only came in the form of lengthy treatises on obscure blogs. It was the image- and humor-based culture of the irreverent meme factory of 4chan and later 8chan that gave the alt-right its youthful energy, with its transgression and hacker tactics. The Guy Fawkes mask used in the protests in 2011 was a reference to Anonymous, which took its name, leaderless anticelebrity ethic and networked style from the chaotic anonymous style of 4chan. V for Vendetta, which the Guy Fawkes mask is taken from, and the ‘dark age of comic books’ influenced the aesthetic sensibilities of this broad online culture. At this point Nagle name checks Chris Poole (moot) briefly (for the first and last time) references “Something Awful” as influencing the style of 4chan. She doesn’t really offer details but if you ever wanted to see the words “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse” in print then this book is probably your only chance. She describes how the early culture of 4chan evolved and took influence from iconic films like Fight Club and The Matrix and how “the culture of the site was not only deeply and shockingly misogynist, but also self-deprecating in its own self-mockery of nerdish ‘beta’ male identity’”. She describes examples of doxing and harassment emerging from 4chan and targeting female reporters and game makers, explains the origins of Pepe the Frog and the term ‘kek’ and a bunch of other stuff that will be old news to anyone reading this thread. quote:One of the things that linked the often nihilistic and ironic chan culture to a wider culture of the alt-right orbit was their opposition to political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, etc., and its encroachment into their freewheeling world of anonymity and tech. After offering some further summarizing of various alt-right figures and their particular fixations (Gavin McInnes, Mike Cernovich, Milo, MGTOW, etc.) Nagle concludes: quote:What we now call the alt-right is really this collection of lots of separate tendencies that grew semi-independently but which were joined under the banner of a bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics through the culture wars of recent years. The irreverent trolling style associated with 4chan grew in popularity in response to the expanding identity politics of more feminine spaces like Tumblr. This, itself, spilled over eventually into ‘real life’ in the ramping up of campus politics around safe spaces and trigger warnings, ‘gamergate’ and many other battles. I would point out here that her argument seems to be, in part, that Tumblr encouraged the growth of chan culture’s trolling because it was such a target rich area. Much in the same way that early Something Awful was probably aided by the existence of all kinds of mock worthy late 1990s / early 2000s webpages (let’s not forget the term ‘goon’ comes from the aggrieved complaints of some forgotten website owner who ended up as the target of one of LowTax’s Awful Links of the Day). It’s not just that 4chan was a backlash aginst tumblr: tumblr also presented an ideal target for any would be troll. Nagle then discusses gamergate (“One can feel the life draining out of the body at the thought of retelling or rereading the story of the gamergate controversy”) and the obsession with comparatively mild feminist critics of video gaming like Anita Sarkessian, etc. the rise of doxing, etc. She builds to this conclusion, in which she grants GamerGate special significance: quote:
At this point she circles back to her early target: all those cyber utopians who thought the internet was going to be a benign, leaderless and utopian space. She references Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zone, John Perry Barlow’s famous declaration of independence for cyberspace, and then writes that “this leaderless anonymous online culture ended up becoming characterized by a particularly dark preoccupation with thwarted or failed white Western masculinity”. She goes on to give several examples of 4channers committing actual crimes, such as murder, online and then posting about it for approval, or the link between 4chan users and certain mass shootings and violent attacks on BLM before concluding that “the anti-PC taboo-breaking culture of 4chan is not just ‘for the lulz’”. She concludes that: quote:"Just a few years ago the left-cyberutopians claimed that ‘the disgust had become a network’ and that establishment old media could no longer control politics, that the new public sphere was going to be based on leaderless user-generated social media. This network has indeed arrived, but it has helped to take the right, not the left, to power. Those on the left who fetishized the spontaneous leaderless Internet-centric network, declaring all other forms of doing politics old hat, failed to realize that the leaderless form actually told us little about the philosophical, moral or conceptual content of the movements involved. Into the vacuum of ‘leaderlessness’ almost anything could appear. No matter how networked, ‘transgressive’, social media savvy or non-hierarchical a movement may be, it is the content of its ideas that matter just as much as at any point in history, as Evgeny Morozov cautioned at the time. The online environment has undoubtedly allowed fringe ideas and movements to grow rapidly in influence and while these were left leaning it was tempting for politically sympathetic commentators to see it as a shiny new seductive shortcut to transcending our ‘end of history’. What we’ve since witnessed instead is that this leaderless formation can express just about any ideology even, strange as it may seem, that of the far right." I think that last passage should help clarify who Nagle's target here is. While he has harsh words for the substanceless IdPol of "tumblr-liberalism" she's even more disdainful of the cyberutopians who yearned for a technological shortcut that circumvented all the messy hard work involved in traditional political organizing. You almost could have titled this book "What's the Matter with 4chan?", it takes a now familiar leftist critique of contemporary liberalism, one that Thomas Frank (who, it should be noted, is the principal founder of the Baffler) seems to update with a new book every few years. The target here is how mainstream liberals will embrace seemingly any gimmick or fad that suggests they can win their future political struggles either painlessly, or at least without relying on anything as antiquated and distasteful as traditional social democratic organizing.
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Jul 18, 2017 14:49
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papa_november posted:Found this bit from one of our old LF exiles to be pretty informative. This review identifies some of the same issues that I had with the book. Nagle's methodology needs work and some of her observations are overly impressionistic and seem overly credulous to the alt-rights presentation of itself and her attempt at differentiating between the alt-right and the alt-light feels under theorized and possibly superfluous. The book would have benefited from a more rigorous methodological approach. On the other hand this 'review' isn't even attempting to be fair to Nagle and the author makes some weird over reaches to try and justify his rather sweeping dismissal. I think this part of the review is pretty telling, with the author essentially accusing Nagle of arguing in bad faith: quote:Special vitriol is expressed in the chapter “From Tumblr to the campus wars: creating scarcity in an online economy of virtue”, where most of the thesis is actually set forth. Tellingly, it’s by far the weakest part of the book on an argumentative level. It opens with a collection of anecdotes about people on Tumblr being earnestly silly about how many genders they have or how they deal with anxiety, depression or any of their other real or imagined disabilities. Each one is postscripted with a wry variation on “aren’t these people silly”. (There are indeed some very silly people on the internet, and it is diverting to laugh at them. Here, in a supposedly scholarly work with a purpose, it is a mere waste of ink.) Having thoroughly demonstrated her novel premise that Tumblr has silly people posting on it, she proceeds to explain how some of the same people started aggressively posting at other people on Twitter, and then aggressively saying things to them on college campuses. The targets of this aggression, mainly professors and administrators and leading lights of left-leaning sensibilities became “baffled, cowed or apologetic” when confronted.* But those who had learned their game on 4chan — shockingly — did not feel compelled to moderate their responses, instead coming out “all guns blazing”. Thus, did the Tumblr left give birth to a phenomenon which already existed. (Nagle is doing things with causality here which would impress Einstein.) Of course, there is enough weaselry in the text that its author can retreat to a more defensible position; that performatively hypersensitive social-justice-warriors who problematize everything under the sun are easy to mock, and the act of mocking them simply shaped and influenced the emerging alt-right’s aesthetics and ideology. I suppose a trite statement is an improvement over a false one, but not by much. It again fails to answer the question of where they came from or what to do about them; the genie was evidently out of the bottle already and you cannot put it back by purging trigger warnings from the campus or “check your privilege” from your mentions. So he fully recognizes there's a much more reasonable interpretation of Nagle's thesis but insists that he knows what her real argument is and premises his entire essay on the notion that she's directly blaming tumblr for the alt-right. Then he argues that if we accept Nagle's thesis (which I don't think her accurately portrays or even attempts to portray) that we're on a rapid and slippery slope to liberals abandoning any critic of racism or sexism, which is bizarre given that Nagle spends a lot of time in this book documenting and condemning examples of misogyny. Then there's this passage: quote:It’s not just factually inaccurate, or just ahistorical, or symptomatic of a facile and misleading conception of online discourse as both a phenomenon sui generis and the major underlying force driving social movements and change; it revolves around a deep and seductive misconception that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of Discourse. I think Nagle's book really needed at least one chapter addressing material conditions in the 2010s and that her failure to include such a chapter left her vulnerable to exactly this critique. However, that's a weakness of Nagle's rhetorical craftsmanship, I don't think its a fair presentation of what she actually believes. "Kill All Normies" does make reference to material conditions (sometimes inaccurately, unfortunately). The book would have benefitted from a stronger materialist underpinning but the idea that it treats internet discourse as sui generis isn't accurate. Finally, given that this review tosses around the charge of being "ahistorical" I found the following passages to be really weird: quote:I challenge anybody to tell me the functional difference between sighing over the decline of the traditional family and saying “make me a fukn s@ndwich bitch lol”. The only transformation is on a superficial aesthetic level. quote:[Editor note: the italicized sentence is a quote from Nagle's book]“Despite calling himself a conservative he, Trump, rightist 4chan and the alt-right all represent a pretty dramatic departure from the kind of churchgoing, upstanding, button-down, family-values conservatism that we usually associate with the term in Anglo-American public and political life”. It’s only a “dramatic” departure if you are more concerned with the fuzzy mental associations each approach evokes, rather than true, material effects on human lives; these do not change at all. Surely this is nonsensical. If taken at face value then it is an argument that racism and patriarchy are timeless. There's a huge difference between the culture wars of the 1960s and the culture wars of today, even if in both cases a one side is defending a fundamentally racist and sexist system of beliefs and practices. I mean, no wonder the author dismisses Kill All Normies, he is arguing its not even worth bothering to document the ways in which racism changes over time. Personally I think Nagle's argument that a generation of young men online were radicalized by their experiences online and that this has produced a new form of right wing activism that merges the sensibilities of paleoconservatives with the shock aesthetics of the counter culture is a lot deeper than this guy acknowledges.
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Jul 19, 2017 16:51
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Scent of Worf posted:lol if you think i am trying to defend worthless liberals who pushed idpol garbage as a sort of game for years and completely drowned out discussion about leftist economic causes. Presumably there is some population of people who aren't automatic converts to leftism but who could be brought into the fold. This notion that potential allies or converts experience "false consciousness" which pulls them to the right is centuries old. I also think the idea seems less ridiculous when you imagine it taking place over years and happening organically through thousands of micro-interactions rather than being caused by a single dramatic moment. It's not hard to imagine how over the course of, say, a high school and university career, somebody's ideology might be nudged in one direction or the other based on the interactions they have with their peers and the messages they pick up in the media they consume.
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Jul 19, 2017 17:12
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:I read the book last night (it's surprisingly short and took me only a couple hours) and the discussion itt is highlighting the big failure of the book imo: failure to lay out a clear argument in favor of anything. This mirrors my own feelings about the book. I think some of the accusations getting leveled against it are unfair and really come off as people who are actively searching for a reason to dismiss the entire book without really engaging with it first. That having been said this is a very flawed book that feels way too much like a 200 page Baffler article (and I say that as someone who likes reading the Baffler). For instance, I think it's ridiculous to say that Nagle treats the alt-right as "sui generis" internet phenomenon, but I also understand why an uncharitable reader could reach that conclusion because Nagle's overly rushed treatment of the subject doesn't give her enough time to lay out an actual theory.
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Jul 19, 2017 17:16
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My write-up for this chapter is shorter because Nagle delves into several asides on cultural history and analysis that I'm only going to summarize briefly. You can get a full sense of her arguments and the genealogy she traces by reading this chapter but I'm going to mostly focus on what I see as her core arguments. Chapter Two: The online politics of transgression In chapter one Nagle discussed how the history and development of online communities like 4chan first seemed to fulfill and then eventually disappointed various prophets of the digital utopia. She suggests that this credulous form of cyber utopianism caused many on the left to assume that the internet and the leaderless, horizontal and “networked” society that it was giving birth to would be fundamentally progressive in nature. In chapter two Nagle expands her criticism, arguing in effect that the left failed to anticipate the reactionary potential implicit within communities like 4chan because of a widely shared cultural bias which uncritically celebrates transgression for its own sake. As we shall see, in Nagle’s estimation the avant-garde’s cultivated contempt for the tastes of the masses, and the tendency for many figures on the cultural left since the 1960s to celebrate any rupture with the status quo, overlooks the fundamental political neutrality of transgression itself. In fact, Nagle argues, transgression against the status quo has often been paired with reactionary or misogynistic sentiments. Nagle writes: quote:Transgression has been embraced as a virtue within Western social liberalism ever since the 60s, typically applied today as it is in bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. So elevated has the virtue of transgression become in the criticism of art, argued Kieran Cashell, that contemporary art critics have been faced with a challenge: ‘either support transgression unconditionally or condemn the tendency and risk obsolescence amid suspicions of critical conservatism’ as the great art critic Robert Hughes often was. But, Cashell wrote, on the value placed upon transgression in contemporary art: ‘In the pursuit of the irrational, art has become negative, nasty and nihilistic.’ Literary critic Anthony Julius has also noted the resulting ‘unreflective contemporary endorsement of the transgressive’. Nagle points to Milo Yianapolis and his claim that “conservatism is the ‘new punk’ because it’s ‘transgressive, subversive, fun.’ quote:"The ease with which this broader alt-right and alt-light milieu can use transgressive styles today shows how superficial and historically accidental it was that it ended up being in any way associated with the socialist left." Nagle then points to the history of using the swastika symbol, including by members of the counter culture, to signal transgression against postwar society. She also references an interview with professional troll weev, aka Aurenheimer, who has a swastika tattoo on his chest. Nagle quote’s weev’s transgendered companion and fellow troll, Jaime Cochrane, who says trolling is ‘satirical performance art’ and ‘aggressive rhetoric’ deriving from a tradition that includes Socrates, Jesus and Loki. Nagle quotes the interview at length, in it the interview relays how “Auernheimer likens himself to Shakespeare’s Puck. Cochrane aspires to Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman. They talk of culture jamming, the art of disrupting the status quo to make people think. They talk of Abbie Hoffman.” Nagle continues at some length, linking the “cult of the moral transgressor as a heroic individual” with Romanticism and then charting its development through various literary and media incarnations, its celebration of madness as non-conformity, etc. This is then linked back to various pranks performed by 4chan, typically at the expense of the relatives of dead people or the victims of various tragedies. Perhaps the following highlighted passage also gives a clearer sense of the relationship she sees between the alt-right and tumblr: quote:Another conceptualization of transgression that applies to this culture has been the idea of the carnivalesque. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White considered the carnivalesque to be a form of radical transgression against hierarchy and hegemony: ‘The grotesque tends to operate as a critique of a dominant ideology which has already set the terms designating what is high and what is low.’ This is very much how 4chan has long self-described and how it was described by its early ‘progressive’ boosters, except that the dominant ideology in the time of 4chan has been cultural liberalism, and the ‘low’ therefore meant un-PC poor taste, rudeness, shock, offense and trolling. The carnivalesque was also theorized by Bakhtin, whose ideologically flexible and ambivalent definition sounds like much like some of the self-descriptions of trolls on what trolling is doing: Nagles writes that despite a few exceptions it has been Rightwing commentators who have been the primary critics of transgression, while the left has tended to celebrate transgression and to view it as politically useful. quote:During the recent online culture wars, and their spillover into campus and protest politics, feminists have tried to embrace transgression with the Slut Walk movement and sex-positive pro-trans, pro-sex worker and pro-kink culture that was central to Tumblr. However, like the right, it has run up against a deep philosophical problem about the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression as a style, which can characterize misogyny just as easily as it can sexual liberation. As Lasch understood, for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one." I would point out here that this is a direct refutation of that review posted up thread which was suggesting that the clear implication of Nagle’s book was that the left should abandon critiques of sexism. The argument is actually something close to the opposite: for Nagle there is a fundamental incoherence in simultaneously arguing for equality on moral grounds while also elevating the transgression into a heroic stance, because transgression is fundamentally anti-moral whereas equality is fundamentally being argued for on moralistic grounds. Thus the left’s aesthetic preferences clash with its moral instincts, creating a cultural confusion which the alt-right was able to exploit during a time when discourse on the internet was hegemonically liberal. Nagle concludes: quote:That the transgressive values of de Sade could be taken up by a culture of misogyny and characterized an online anti-feminist movement that rejected traditional church-going conservatism should also not be a surprise. The Blakean motto adopted by the Surrealists, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’, dominance as sexual ‘sovereignty’ and the freeing of the id from the constraints of the conscience have all descended from this transgressive tradition. Just as Nietzsche appealed to the Nazis as a way to formulate a right-wing anti-moralism, it is precisely the transgressive sensibility that is used to excuse and rationalize the utter dehumanization of women and ethnic minorities in the alt-right online sphere now. The culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII. The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right.
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Jul 19, 2017 18:12
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Why does she say that "cultural liberalism" has been dominant, and not just "liberalism"? Seems like a deliberate attempt to ignore economics. This is jumping ahead but in later chapters she describes how cultural liberalism was weaponized during the Cold War (and also later used in the 2010s to attack leftist calls for material redistribution). From chapter 4: quote:"It is sometimes said that the right won the economic war and the left won the culture war. And as political theorist Walter Benn Michaels has argued, it is the recognition of identity that has triumphed over economic equality as the organizing principle of the Anglo-American liberal left and of mainstream discourse more broadly. quote:It is significant here too that, despite the constant accusations of ‘Cultural Marxism’ by the Trumpian online right, the countercultural aesthetics of anti-conformism in the US were later cultivated by the US government as part of a culture war against communism. Through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a covert cultural soft-power initiative, it was the Cold War anti-communist liberals who used non-conformism, self-expression and individualism to rival the collectivist, conformist, productivist and heavily restricted Soviet Union, which still revered the uniformed pre-60s anti-individualist forms of culture like army choirs, marching bands, orchestras and ballet. By the time Buchanan gave his speech in 1992, the Cold War was over and the economic program of the Western democratic left had suffered a catastrophic defeat during the Reagan and Thatcher years. However, the socially and morally permissive, transgressive, nonconformist cultural project within the US New Left had by then emerged triumphant and, as it turned out, coexisted quite comfortably with the scorched-earth free-market economics of the right –a fusion that reached its fullest expression in the Blair/ Clinton era, when a non-conformist cultural gesture could still cover a multitude of economic sins
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Jul 19, 2017 18:33
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The story so far In Chapter 1 Nagle wrote an overview of chan culture and it’s synergistic relationship to prominent left-leaning web outlets, most notably the more progressive parts of tumblr. She then discussed how the evolution of chan culture and the emergence of a new internet based right-wing movement (or more accurately, constellation of different groups) in some ways fulfilled and in other ways contradicted the dearly held beliefs of the digital utopians. In chapter 2 Nagle examined how the left’s sixty year love affair with artistic transgression (and the accompanying tendency to view acts of transgression as inherently politically progressive) created a dangerous blind-spot. Because the left’s fundamental appeal to equality is a moral one, the embrace of anti-moralistic transgression was inherently contradictory. These contradictions became more apparent as the left won the culture wars of the 60s and 90s. By the 2010s mainstream media – including some of the internet’s highest traffic websites – had become hegemonically liberal. This created an opening for a new kind of right-wing politics: in this environment attacking PC culture could be framed as transgressive, and therefore cool, perhaps even progressive. The left’s love affair with transgression came back to haunt it by empowering a transgressive right-wing movement. Indeed, the left found it suddenly lacked the rhetorical tools to meet this new challenge head on. Now, we pick up at the start of chapter 3, where Nagle is going to argue that rather than being a coincidence, these developments can be read (at least in part) as the conscious enactment of a Gramscian cultural warfare. In this chapter we get a look at what Nagle refers to as the “alt-light”. The distinction here is vague at best but the primary litmus test seems to be mainstream acceptability. The alt-right explicitly embraces racialist and gender based attacks on equality – they are open white supremacists and misogynists. The alt-light, on the other hand, are the best examples of Nagle’s thesis that right-wingers have learned to hijack the left’s love of transgression: it’s men like Milo Yianopolis who present themselves as political satirists and hide their beliefs within an evasive cloud of irony while still nevertheless moving alt-right concepts into the mainstream and recruiting new members into the alt-right. Chapter 3: Gramscians of the alt-light Nagle opens this chapter with another canned intellectual genealogy: quote:There were two major figures of the online culture wars Trumpian right who wrote glowingly about the hard core of the alt-right in a heavily quoted piece in Breitbart called ‘An Establishment Consearvative’s Guide To The Alt-Right’. These were Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari, who traced the intellectual roots of the amorphous alt-right ack, in quite a flattering portrayal of the movement, to a number of key intellectuals and schools of thoughts. They singled out Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher who wrote The Decline of the West in 1918, who influenced the whole discourse civilizational decline and advocated a nationalist non-Marxist socialism and authoritarianism, H. L. Mencken, the deeply elitist but undeniably brilliant anti-New Deal US satirist and cultural critic, who also made Nietzschean criticisms of religion and representative democracy, Julius Evola, the Italian philosopher loved by the Italian fascist movement, who advanced traditionalist and masculinist values and believed modern man lived in a Dark Age, Samuel Francis, the paleoconservative US columnist and critic of pro-capitalist neoconservatism and lastly, the French New Right, who importantly were sometimes called ‘Gramscians of the right’. (By the way, that paragraph should tell you a lot about the principle weakness of this book. It’s the opening paragraph to one of Nagle’s most important chapters. It contains 182 words spread across three sentences. 110 of those words are found in a single run on sentence that reads more like an intellectual shopping list than a coherent intellectual biography. A better editing process would have helped immensely here and probably would have made it more difficult for Nagle’s critics to misrepresent her work. There’s a lesson here on the importance of clarity and decent editing.) Nagle’s introduction is important because it sets up her principle (and not entirely convincing) argument for this chapter: that the right has adopted a Gramscian strategy, and that this strategy is starting to work. quote:The French New Right or Nouvelle Droite adapted the theories of Antonio Gramsci that political change follows cultural and social change. Andrew Breitbart’s phrase was that politics is always ‘downstream from culture’, and was often quoted by Milo. Belgian far-right anti-immigration party Vlaams Blok leader Filip Dewinter put it like this: ‘the ideological majority is more important than the parliamentary majority.’ I’ve quoted Nagle at length because there’s so much to digest here. First let’s acknowledge the obvious weakness of Nagle’s argument. She tells us that the French New Right “adapted the theories of Antonio Gramsci that political change follows cultural and social change” but she never gives any specific examples of this beyond saying that after 1968 they abandoned the belief that “defeat of radical elites or vanguards would enable the restoration of a popular traditional order”. We don’t really get a clear sense of who was in the French New Right, what distinguishes them form the Old French Right (other than their apparent recognition, post 68, that they were culturally marginal) or how (or if) they are connected with the alt-right. Nagle’s account here is vague: the French New Right “took stock of how profoundly the 60s had changed the general population and become hegemonic”. According to Nagle this is the same attitude adopted by the alt-right. However, she never really demonstrates whether this was a coincidence or a case of conscious adaptation, nor does she really provide enough detail about the French New Right for the casual reader to evaluate whether her description of their Gramscian turn is accurate. Indeed, given how they’re never mentioned again why bring up the French New Right at all? Perhaps because it creates the appearance of continuity – Nagle says the French New Right adopted Gramscian tactics, then she suggests the alt-right shared the concerns of the French New Right, and from this she perhaps expects that the reader will conclude that there’s a direct line of continuity. Needlessly to say I’m skeptical and wish she’d spent more time on developing this connection. Despite these flaws I think that Nagle’s argument here is extremely important to her book and therefore wroth paying attention to. Regardless of whether her analysis works as piece of scholarship, as a piece of left-wing strategizing it’s more compelling. After all Nagle is examining a movement that went from the margins to the mainstream in record time: it’s clear that she wants the left to study these lessons and adapt based on them. I suspect that the real reason she shoehorns her ‘the Right are the new Gramscians’ angle into this chapter is because it starkly illustrates her real argument: that the left was asleep at the switch. In essence she’s saying “if the right can accomplish this, why not the left?” quote:First, think for a moment about the amount of scholarly and polemical writing that has come from a broadly left perspective in recent generations, attempting to explain why it is that the project of the revolutionary socialist left continues to fail and remains unpopular. Entire schools of thought about the culture industry, media hegemony, discourse, narrative, normativity and power have this problem either overtly or implicitly at their core. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s ‘manufacturing consent’ thesis has remained quite dominant in left rhetoric ever since it was written. The Frankfurst School and the Situationists remain canonical in university theory courses. Of all the Marxian and Marxoid schools of thought, Gramsci’s is perhaps the most influential today, placing media and culture at the centre of political analysis and praxis in a mediated age after the decline of the old labour movement. Again, I find Nagle’s fast and loose analysis a bit frustrating. This is interesting stuff and for a leftist in 2017 surely this is a conversation worth having: what is actually possible in 2017, now that the old media gatekeepers seem weaker than ever? How does one go about bridging the demands of the far-left and the cultural concerns of the mainstream, what is the role of theory in contemporary political struggle? I just wish this chapter was better edited. Another frustration I have with this part of the book is that it leaves unasked one of the most basic questions of the last year. Did the alt-right contribute to Trump’s victory and, more broadly, what is the political significance of the alt-right? That’s hard to quantify but Nagle doesn’t even attempt to address this. So instead we get much weaker bits of analysis such as how Milo went from the fringe to the mainstream thanks to the election. Well, that may be true but so what? What we want to know is whether Milo is actually advancing a right-wing cause. If all that can be said of the alt-right is that it helped a few no-name hucksters take a shot at the big leagues then that’s far less concerning than if we think that the alt-right represents the germ of a neo-fascist political movement? The only concrete marker of influence that Nagle really offers are page views: later in this chapter we get a list of alt-light figures and outlets and the number of unique visitors their websites receive, we also learn of the hundreds of thousands of views garnered by Milo’s “Dangerous human being” tour videos. While this is better than nothing it’s clearly inadequate. This is where I agree mostly strongly with some of Nagle’s critics: we really need a chapter on the material conditions behind the alt-right. We don’t end up getting it here. We sort of get one in a later chapter, where Nagle implies (problematically, I must say) that sexual frustration is the driving material concern of the alt-right, or at least its rank and file membership. But the question of how to quantify the actual influence of the alt-right hangs over this entire book, and this chapter in particular. After setting up her argument that the alt-light is enacting (consciously or coincidentally? She doesn’t make it entirely clear which) a ‘Gramscian’ strategy Nagle then turns her attention to the liberal establishment. She can’t resist settling a few scores from the 2016 primary along the way: quote:Let’s also remember that during the Obama years millennial cultural liberals had their own new media platforms to fill the vacuum left by the decline in the centrality of mainstream newspapers and TV as the general arena for public discourse. In this brave new world of clicks and content, their alternative came in the form of the often-sentimental feel-good clickbait sites like Upworthy and listicle sites like Buzzfeed. Other liberal sites like Everyday Feminism, Jezebel and Salon delivered a strange mixture of ultra-sensitivity, sentimentality and what was once considered radical social constructionist identity politics. Nagle then runs through a checklist of left-wing media outlets, including the usual suspects like Jacobin, Novara Media, Chapo, the Young Turks, Owen Jones, Adolph Reed, Walter Benn Michaels, Amber A’Lee Frost, Connor Kilpatrick, Liza Feathersotne “and many others”. etc. In another hit on identity politics she notes the irony that Jacobin “was smeared for being the magazine of choice for Bros and ‘the white left’, despite its two key founders being the children of Jamaican and Trinidadian immigrants, and of having its logo based on the Black Jacobin”. Nagle’s real point here is that while different elements of the left-liberal internet were squabbling for turf the alt-light was constructing a political bridge between the mainstream and the alt-right: quote:But what few on the left were paying attention to in the years leading up to Trump’s election, and really throughout the entire Obama administration, was the alt-light building a multilayered alternative online media empire that would dwarf many of the above. This stretched form white nationalist bloggers in its sparsley populated corners to the charismatic YouTubers and Twitter celebrities in its more popular form. These included right-winger outsiders such as Steve Bannon who, through building a publication like Breitbart, became chief strategist to the US president. Here, Nagle points out that one of the most common tropes on these alt-light websites were ‘SJW cringe compilations’ or exposes on “the absurdities of the kind of Tumblr identity politics that had gone mainstream through listcle sites like Buzzfeed and anti-free speech safe space campus politics’”. So while Nagle’s argument here is that the alt-right grew in popularity by mocking tumblr (rather than her actually saying that tumblr “caused” the alt-right) she also seems to acknowledge that there was plenty on tumblr worth mocking (she also seems to imply that she thinks the alt-right had a point about free speech on university campuses, but she brushes over this point so quickly its hard to parse her real thoughts). You can see why this chapter got people’s hackles up: Nagle doesn’t display a gentle bedside manner when diagnosing how the Alt-Right exploited tumblr to gain prominence: instead she pretty much says that they found an easy target to mock and then used that mockery to grow their own numbers. It’s not assigning blame to confused kids on tumblr, but it’s also not an account that portrays those confused kids in a particularly sympathetic light. The rest of this chapter is an itinery of alt-right websites and personalities. A particular focus is placed on the Canadian based Rebel media and its top contributors. There are also some illustrative details on how effective these sites have been at fundraising and gaining page views. We also get a more indepth discussion of Milo, Richard Spencer and Alex Jones. She’s perhaps overly impressed with Spencer, who she views as the only alt-right figure “to rival the popularity and mainstream attention of the alt-light”. She writes: quote:Spencer believes the alt-right will continue to infiltrate mainstream US formal politics through culture, starting with a focus on deporting documented immigrants under Trump, later moving on to negative migration as a goal and eventually on to a white ethnostate. He once told Mother Jones: ‘Conservatism is going to be dead in my lifetime and the question is, who is going to define the right after that? I want to do that.’ Spencer started out as a scholar of Leo Strauss and his MA thesis was on Adorno and Wagner, but he later dropped out of his Duke University Ph.D. You can still detect in his writing and public speeches that he longs for a more intellectual European style of blood and soil nationalism and he said in an interview that he used to want to be an avant-garde theatre director. The chapter also notes some of the divisions and rivalries emerging on the alt-right / alt-light, and points out that “the divisions within the broader orbit of the alt-right started to appear almost instantly, with the success of Trump and their sudden mainstream exposure”. Nagle concludes the chapter: quote:One thing that can’t be denied is their remarkable success in spreading their ideas through their own alternative and almost exclusively online media content in the absence of traditional media, political establishment bodies or other institutional support. It appears as though in the online culture wars, those heeding the ideas of the left most closely, from Chomsky’s idea of manufacturing consent to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and counter-hegemony, and applying them most strategically, were the right.
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Jul 21, 2017 16:32
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the trump tutelage posted:Sorry, was responding to this specifically: Given that "cultural Marxism" is a term that can be traced directly back to the Nazis and their criticism of "degenerate" art I'm not sure why it's a leap to think people who take the idea seriously would start adopting other fascistic ideas or symbols.
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Jul 22, 2017 17:53
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the trump tutelage posted:It's too contrived. I don't agree that the link between Nazi symbolism and the belief in cultural Marxism is entirely ad hoc. While the adoption of Nazi symbolism may have been ironic or humourous at first I don't think anyone now denies that the alt-right is a fascistic organization. Once you adopt a fascist outlook something like the theory of cultural Marxism becomes necessary and if such a theory hadn't already existed then a similar one would have been invented, much in the way that I think a group of ironic Communist edgelords who started to take their ideas seriously would inevitably end up sincerely adopting or re-inventing the idea of social class and class struggle. These ideas are at the core of their respective movements and would emerge organically if they didn't already exist.
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Jul 24, 2017 15:18
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In Chapter 3 Nagle introduced one of her central theses: that the alt-right / alt-light are at the forefront of a new episode in the culture wars. However, unlike the culture wars of the 60s or the 90s, the culture wars of the 2010s have occurred in a context where the dominant ideology was perceived to be a kind of liberal egalitarianism. This allowed a generation of young online trolls to adopt the transgressive rhetoric and tactics pioneered by the left since the 1960s. It has also left many liberals and leftists poorly equipped to respond to this unexpected new challenge, in which conservative ideas are presented as edgy, subversive and anti-establishment. Nagle believes that this reflects a conscious strategy by the right to shift the battle of ideas onto a cultural terrain that would be most favourable to its agenda. Following the revelation that the left had won the first two rounds of the culture wars prompted some members of the right to re-evaluate their strategy. Nagle described this shift to a “meta-political” stance in the last chapter: quote:As Andrew Hartman outlined in his book on the 90s culture wars, The War for the Soul of America, the radical upheavals of Paris 1968 and the rise of the New Left was proof to the demoralized right that the whole culture would now have to be retaken before formal political change could come. This led to the pursuit of a ‘metapolitics’, and a rejection of the political party and traditional activism within a section of the right. Instead, they set about rethinking their philosophical foundations and creating new ways to counter the ‘68 ideology of Social Progress. Now, in Chapter 4, Nagle seeks to locate the newly emerged alt-light within the larger context of American conservative thought, primarily through a comparison of Milo Yiannopolous’ politics with those of Pat Buchanan, the famous paleoconservative. There is, however, a second key message in this chapter. In effect Nagle argues that the contemporary alt-right was poised to succeed because politics had been reduced on both the left and the right to competing forms of identity politics. I’ll warn you now this is a messy chapter. Why exactly these two topics are put together isn’t clear to me and better editing would probably have lead to this chapter being split. Also, Nagle can’t seem to decide how many Ns there are in “Buchannan” (hint: when you misspell somebodies name in your chapter heading you really need a better editor). The ideas here are interesting but under developed. To repeat something I said earlier, part of the advantage of this book is that it's flawed. It demonstrates some promising ideas but it also provides some cautionary examples of how even a smart author can get lost in the weeds at times. Anyway, without further delay… Chapter 4: Conservative culture wars from Buchannan to Yiannopoulos Nagle begins: quote:Where does the most mainstream wing of the alt-right – the alt-light – fit historically in terms of its political ideas and style? Throughout the US presidential race, Milo Yiannopoulos regularly reiterated that he loved ‘Daddy’ (Donald Trump), because he was ‘the first truly cultural candidate since Pat Buchannan’. He admitted in a Bloomberg profile that he doesn’t ‘care about politics’ and has reiterated this point explicitly on several occasions, but is instead interested in the cultural battles that are shaping it. Nagle writes that by invoking Buchanan and the cultural conflicts of the 1990s (Nagle, in particular, cites Buchannan’s famous 1992 Republican National Convention speech about the ‘war for the soul of America’ as exemplifying Buchannan’s cultural politics) Yiannopoulos “was drawing a parallel between his own anti-PC Trumpian culture wars online and that of the conservative culture war of the 90s”, effectively “weaving himself into a broader historic narrative” in which “he and the new online Trumpian trolling right are leading another great push, as important as the culture wars of the 60s and of the 90s, only this time with a bit of youth and Internet subcultural cool on their side.” Nagle then raises the question of just how much in common Buchannan’s traditionalist cultural conservatism has with Milo Yiannopolous’ intentionally transgressive political aesthetic. quote:Buchanan’s book Death of the West has been hugely influential on the paleoconservative ideas that have rivaled those of the pro-market modernizing neocons. He called neoconservatism ‘a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology.’ Through American Conservative, he and other like-minded anti-establishment conservatives opposed the Iraq War and took many other positions that distinguished them from the internationalist, free market, and pro-interventionist components of the right. Long before Trump’s election Buchanan was talking about the white working class as naturally conservative, opposed globalization and neoliberal trade deals, and pushed for a crack down on immigration. While the neocons had their origins in the materialism of the anti-Soviet left, Buchanan also stressed the non-material questions of patriotism, the nation, family, community and cultural inheritance. Nagle writes that Yiannopoulos’s style represents “a marriage of the ironic, irreverent, taboo-busting culture of 4chan with the politics of the right, although, as his hard alt-right detractors often liked to point out, once you remove the ‘trolling’ many of his views amount to little more than classical liberalism.” Indeed, according to Nagle, Milo, “Trump, rightist 4chan the alt-right all represent a pretty dramatic departure from the kind of churchgoing, upstanding, button-down, family-values conservatism that we usually associate with the term in Anglo-American public and political life.” Instead she views the alt-right as “a bursting forth of the id unrestrained by conventions of speech or PC culture” that owes more to Fight Club and de Sade than Edmund Burke. quote:It is sometimes said that the right won the economic war and the left won the culture war. And as political theorist Walter Benn Michaels has argued, it is the recognition of identity that has triumphed over economic equality as the organizing principle of the Anglo-American liberal left and of mainstream discourse more broadly. Nagle’s point here is hard to follow because she doesn’t offer a clear definition of what she means by “conservatism” but she seems to be broadly referring to the mixed defense of traditional culture and economic inequality that was associated with the Republican party for many decades. Nagle’s larger point seems to be that both the left and the right were radically transformed by the 60s. She is at particular pains to point out how the establishment went form abhorring the kind of transgressive anti-moralism represented by aspects of the counter culture and instead began to operationalize this transgression so it could be used to fight the Cold War more effectively: quote:It is significant here too that, despite the constant accusations of ‘Cultural Marxism’ by the Trumpian online right, the countercultural aesthetics of anti-conformism in the US were later cultivated by the US government as part of a culture war against communism. Through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a covert cultural soft-power initiative, it was the Cold War anti-communist liberals who used non-conformism, self-expression and individualism to rival the collectivist, conformist, productivist and heavily restricted Soviet Union, which still revered the uniformed pre-60s anti-individualist forms of culture like army choirs, marching bands, orchestras and ballet. By the time Buchanan gave his speech in 1992, the Cold War was over and the economic program of the Western democratic left had suffered a catastrophic defeat during the Reagan and Thatcher years. However, the socially and morally permissive, transgressive, nonconformist cultural project within the US New Left had by then emerged triumphant and, as it turned out, coexisted quite comfortably with the scorched-earth free-market economics of the right –a fusion that reached its fullest expression in the Blair/ Clinton era, when a non-conformist cultural gesture could still cover a multitude of economic sins. So because of the upheaval of the 60s, by the 1990s you end up with anti-establishment non-conformism and self expression acting as wedge issues to undermine appeals for economic equality. The result is that both the left and the right are unmoored from their traditional concerns and turn into primarily cultural or tribal entities. This sets up the dynamic in which the right was able to steal transgressive ideas from the left and deploy them against the now hegemonically liberal popular culture of the early 20th century. Nagle then turns to a description of some of the divisions between Never Trump conservatives and the alt-right. She argues that to understand this division you need to look to the past: quote:To understand these fault lines it is worth remembering that after the cultural revolution of the 60s in the US, it wasn’t the old-fashioned conservatives (whose entire way of being was seen as hopelessly square and un-modern) who really succeeded in taking on the cultural left but the much more intellectually equipped and rhetorically gifted neoconservatives. Nagle seems to think the neoconservatives were sort of like the alt-right of their day: adapting to circumstances that the Old Right couldn’t understand by harvesting some of the left’s ideas. quote:As Hartman elucidates in his book, many of the early neocons were New York Jewish intellectuals who had come to politics in the 30s through the City College of New York. These were smart, often working-class Jewish students who started out as Trotskyists and learned their style of debate in CCNY cafeteria’s Alcove No. 1, where they argued with the Moscow-loyal communist students who occupied Alcove No. 2. During their later rightward turn, they worked on magazines Commentary and Encounter, the latter becoming the literary organ for the anti-Soviet soft-power CCF. This period produced writers and polemicists like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol. At this point Nagle’s argument becomes clearer. On a first read it seems like she’s going to argue that both Nagle and Buchanan were similar because they pursue a cultural politics. But it turns out that on Nagle’s telling this is unremarkable because apparently almost everyone on both the right and in the liberal centre as well as on tumblr is pursuing identitarian or cultural politics. Instead, I think that what Nagle is really doing is demonstrating how the alt-right is only repeating an old pattern. Like the neoconservatives before them, the alt-right is a vibrant new movement which defends conservative ideas by stealing ideas and tactics from the left. Nagle describes just how different Yiannopolous’ intentionally shocking and transgressive views are from Buchanan’s conservative and pro-censorship opinions. quote:Unlike Milo and his followers, Buchanan was also a supporter of censorship, especially for pornography, and in his culture-wars speech he said: ‘we stand with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture.’ It’s hard to imagine anything farther from the free-speech absolutism, the potty-mouthed black anal sex jokes, and the defense of rudeness against the ‘pearl clutchers’ of Yiannopoulos’s camp persona and his cosmopolitan multicultural background. Nagle then points out that contrary to what we assume, there’s no necessary relationship between the defense of economic privilege and the defense of traditional culture. Nor, for that matter, is there any necessary link between celebrating transgression and fighting for economic equality. In essence Nagle argues that it’s an accident of history that socialism and social liberalism came to be associated, on the one hand, or that Christian morality and right-wing economics came to be seen as a package deal. Instead these are reified by-products of the mid 20th century, and there are numerous examples of alternative sets of arrangements. quote:The alt-right have described their movement as a reaction against establishment US conservatism, saying that there is a ‘deep continuity’ between the Buckleyite movement and the neocons. Spencer has also said, ‘The left is the right and the alt-right is the new left’ and that ‘We’re the ones thinking the impossible. We’re the ones thinking the unthinkable.’ On Radix Journal they draw on the idea of the ‘The Fourth Political Theory’, with reference to the Russian theorist Aleksandr Dugin and the French New Right’s Alain de Benoist, an entirely new political ideology that integrates and supersedes liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. Right-wing voices that claim to have been purged from the conservative movement, like Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire, have formed part of the alt-right. It primarily opposes establishment political conservatism, as Kevin DeAnna explained in his influential essay for the alt-right, ‘The Impossibility of Conservatism’. By this reckoning the conservative movement’s alignment behind Trump is largely an act of desperation. Having lost the culture war, Buchanan and other traditionalists had little choice but to embrace the only potential ally who seems to have any capacity for fighting the cultural left. Nagle writes in conclusion: quote:"In the end, Buchanan was one of the paleocons to back Trump and many of those who formerly loathed most of what Yiannopoulos and what he represented decided to change their minds and back the winning horse, not only of Trump, but also of the new libertines of the online irreverent ‘punk’ right. Having lost Buchannan’s conservative culture war, they were perhaps strategically right to calculate that the only way they can ever have at least some of their ideas heard again would be to back a groping, lecherous, godless presidential candidate and a libertine figure such as Yiannopoulos and his army of online racist, foul-mouthed, porn-loving nihilists, who in many ways represent everything people like Buchannan are supposed to stand against. The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake –an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right. This chapter contains some interesting ideas, especially regarding the idea that both the left and the right had to adapt to the victories won by the other side, producing bizarre new political formations that are far removed from the alignments of the 20th century. I also think it's interesting to see someone explicitly discussing the way the United States adopted non-conformism and the cultural liberalism of the post-war era into a form of anti-communist propaganda. However, this is one of the chapters that most clearly illustrates the failings of the book. I think this was one case where we really would have benefited from a deeper discussion of the relationship between the alt-right and the rest of the conservative movement.
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Jul 26, 2017 15:08
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The Time Dissolver posted:E: thread necromancy, sorry. I didn't care for this book, not sorry. I've been meaning to update the thread but my personal life has been busy and I hit the limits on my kindle's copy/paste function so until I bother to find a workaround for that things have been moving a bit slow. Any thoughts you have on the book or its subject matter is welcome. I liked the book but it was flawed in a lot of ways so criticism is welcome.
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Aug 4, 2017 12:23
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The last month was ridiculously busy and I was travelling a lot but now that I'm settled in again I am going to continue updating the thread, so hopefully some interest remains. Obviously the book is going to read differently post-Cville but it'll be interesting to evaluate what Nagle get's right / wrong by comparing it to subsequent events.
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Sep 8, 2017 17:00
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This is a stray thought that occurred to me while browsing other threads in this website but despite all the flack it received I think Nagle's insight about the feedback loop between 4chan and tumblr identifies one particular example of something that is almost universal to online communities now. You actually see the same kind of dynamic at play here in CSPAM threads like the SuckZone, where one of the primary topics of discussion is dissecting and mocking the latest tweetstorms or fundraising e-mails sent out by centrist Democrats. The same kind of dynamic happens in D&D and Ask Tell when it comes to libertarians, neoreactionaries, and of course back in the day Fury's, Juggalo and a thousand other weird subcommunities that got featured in Awful Links of the Day, etc. Chapo Traphouse also performs the same service in longform every time they feature a terrible conservative op ed or book in one of their reading series. A lot of people jumped on Nagle for supposedly implying that tumblr kids somehow caused Nazis to radicalized, and obviously on its face that is an absurd charge. But when you step back and think about how internet communities - especially insular or politically oriented ones - go about defining themselves then it becomes easier to understand Nagle's point. In the internet age communities define themselves and create solidarity by identifying rival communities and mocking them. Something Awful was an early pioneer in this regard but it's hardly unique or unusual.
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Sep 12, 2017 18:33
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A Buttery Pastry posted:This is like completely upside down to me, though it does make sense in the context of liberals redefining the left as what they support. You're just being properly traditional. You formed this sweeping judgement based entirely on that one bolded sentence?
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Sep 14, 2017 18:09
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