How the grotesque online culture wars fuel populism
A book excerpt and interview with Angela Nagle, author of “Kill All Normies”
By N.B.
Revolutionaries won’t be able to change the world until they change popular culture, argued Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher of the 1920s. Strikingly, modern-day socialists embrace this idea, as does the alt-right. In “Kill All Normies,” Angela Nagle explores the deepest and darkest sub-cultures of the internet to find out how the far-right reignited the culture wars and help Trump triumph in the 2016 presidential election.
Why did so many internet users turn against liberal democracy? Did political correctness push them away from civilised political discussion? And how did irony become one of the most dangerous weapons in online propaganda? The Economist’s Open Future initiative asked her to reply to five questions in around 100 words each. An excerpt from the book appears thereafter.
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The Economist: Who are “normies” and why do some people want to kill them?
Angela Nagle: Basically it means normal people with average tastes, opinions, political views, news sources and so on. When people get so far down the rabbit hole of obscure online political subcultures and forums it becomes impossible to relate to or explain things to a normie who is also seen as being partially to blame for the problems of the world because of their ignorant unenlightened state. Other times the term is used to describe the socially well adjusted rarely-online person being observed by the very online shut-in.
It’s not meant as a genuine call to kill the majority of course, it’s more like a radical political slogan style you might associate with Primal Scream’s “Kill All Hippies” or Philip K Dick’s “Kill All Others” or “Kill the Cop in Your Head.”
The Economist: Liberalism inherently tolerates its detractors. Yet online culture is so virulent, does this undermine the viability of liberalism?
Ms Nagle: Spend some time on Twitter or looking at YouTube comments and you'll find it hard to maintain a belief in liberal enlightenment ideals for long. The reality of what we are like when we are given the freedom to say what we like is actually extremely ugly. Public discourse has never been as idiotic, cruel, irrational and utterly pointless in my lifetime as it is now.
The point the culture wars have taken us to is really a war between two irreconcilable sides and each side wants a world that the other would rather die than accept. When you reach that point I'm not sure if a liberal public sphere is possible anymore. Those arguing for it tend to really be motivated by faith that their ideas will triumph under those conditions. But liberalism is extremely weak right now and I think much stronger ideologies are likely to trample it in the coming years.
The Economist: Does the restrictive nature of political correctness inadvertently push people away from progressive politics?
Ms Nagle: No serious person can really deny that it does at this point, if they're being honest. Many people are attracted to progressive politics because they see that the world is unequal and unfair and they want better wages or education or healthcare. But they quickly find out that this isn't enough. In order to not be purged they have to learn an ever more elaborate and bizarre set of correct positions they must hold on a range of issues and they must continue to carefully and fearfully walk on eggshells to avoid the call-out.
No humour or intellectual exploration is any longer possible in that environment. Think of any progressive intellectual of any significance from the last century and try to imagine them surviving today. They’d just be purged. They’d have to dissent on some issue and it wouldn’t be tolerated.
The Economist: How has the far-right used irony to spread transgressive ideas? Does the far-left do something similar and if so, how? (And if it doesn't, why not?)
Ms Nagle: Irony and transgressiveness have been aesthetic tools mostly used by the political left for a long time, certainly they've been ever-present since 1968. I write in the book about how the right has for a long time been dominated by a genteel kind of conservatism and that the pro-Trump rightist youth politics marked a break from that. It took the liberal cultural mainstream and the left by surprise.
Suddenly when Trump got elected, liberal or left leaning journalists were trying to catch up and work out what was ironic and what was real. So for example, punks used to use the swastika ironically in the 70s, and many of those bands have become part of the progressive canon, but when the alt right and the various pro-Trump online subcultures emerged with a similar style, it was hard to know which flirtations with fascism were ironic.
The Economist: It often seems like the culture wars are driven by young men with diminished economic prospects and an inability to find a sexual partner. Is that a problem that can be solved by policies or do liberals simply need to discover a new tone?
Ms Nagle: One of the darker products of the sexual revolution is that you have a generation of young men raised on very grim pornography and being able to be like the Marquis de Sade in the virtual or imaginary world but in the real world they have less agency, less human contact, fewer prospects and less stake in their community and society than ever before. You have unprecedented levels of celibacy and childlessness too among millennials, including women.
Unfortunately it's near impossible to have a sane or good faith conversation about this because of how heated the culture wars have become online, but the longer term social implications, which apply to men and women, are surely going to be very significant as millennials get older. I think there are economic solutions to some of it but it also requires a major shift in the culture at this point. Young people need to be able to have families and a home and some kind of job stability. We also need to restore the dignity of ordinary people.
Ruthless competitive individualism is being applied to the romantic and private realm and it's deeply anti-social. Ultimately though, the emergence of all of this is really about demographics and race. Though I've been guilty of it myself in the past, I would now caution that these issues should be considered before diving straight into the psycho-sexual interpretations.
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Excerpt from “Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right” by Angela Nagle (Zero Books, 2018)
In the lead-up to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 his message of hope was publicly, and with great earnestness, shared by vast numbers of liberals online, eager to show their love for the first black president, ecstatic to be part of what felt like a positive mass-cultural moment. After George W. Bush, who had waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and embarrassed educated people with his Southern style, his regular gaffs and ‘Bushisms’, the feeling of shame among US liberals was captured by books like Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men.
In stark contrast Obama was articulate, sophisticated, erudite and cosmopolitan. In the media spectacle of his election Oprah cried, Beyoncé sang and crowds of young, adoring fans rejoiced. Even some of the icy hearts of those significantly to the left of the Democratic Party were temporarily melted in what felt like a mass outpouring of positivity and hope, an egalitarian dream realized.
Hillary Clinton tried to repeat this formula in 2016 by dancing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, drafting in Beyoncé once again, assuring listeners of her penchant for hot sauce and attracting feminist celebrities like Lena Dunham with the ‘I’m With Her’ slogan. However, instead, she became a source of comedy and ridicule among large online audiences from right across the political spectrum. When she solemnly condemned a new Internet age right-wing movement as part of Trump’s ‘basket of deplorables’, the massed online ranks of the target of her comments collectively erupted in memes, mockery and celebration.
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 the 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 humour 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 all 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.
Through this period we can also see 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. The triumph of the Trumpians was also a win in the war against this mainstream media, which is now held in contempt by many average voters and the weird irony laden Internet subcultures from right and left, who equally set themselves apart from this hated mainstream. It is a career disaster now to signal your left-behind cluelessness as a basic bitch, a normie or a member of the corrupt media mainstream in any way. Instead, we see online the emergence of a new kind of anti-establishment sensibility expressing itself in the kind of DIY culture of memes and user-generated content that cyberutopian true believers have evangelized about for many years but had not imagined taking on this particular political form.
Compare the first election won by Obama, in which social media devotees reproduced the iconic but official blue-and-red stylized stencil portrait of the new president with HOPE printed across the bottom, a portrait created by artist Shepard Fairey and approved by the official Obama campaign, to the bursting forth of irreverent mainstream-baffling meme culture during the last race, in which the Bernie’s Dank Meme Stash Facebook page and The Donald subreddit defined the tone of the race for a young and newly politicized generation, with the mainstream media desperately trying to catch up with a subcultural in-joke style to suit two emergent anti-establishment waves of the right and left.
Writers like Manuel Castells and numerous commentators in the Wired magazine milieu told us of the coming of a networked society, in which old hierarchical models of business and culture would be replaced by the wisdom of crowds, the swarm, the hive mind, citizen journalism and user-generated content. They got their wish, but it’s not quite the utopian vision they were hoping for.
As old media dies, gatekeepers of cultural sensibilities and etiquette have been overthrown, notions of popular taste maintained by a small creative class are now perpetually outpaced by viral online content from obscure sources, and culture industry consumers have been replaced by constantly online, instant content producers. The year 2016 may be remembered as the year the media mainstream’s hold over formal politics died. A thousand Trump Pepe memes bloomed and a strongman larger-than-life Twitter troll who showed open hostility to the mainstream media and to both party establishments took the White House without them.
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The once obscure call-out culture of the left emanating from Tumblr-style campus-based identity politics reached its peak during this period, in which everything from eating noodles to reading Shakespeare was declared ‘problematic’, and even the most mundane acts ‘misogynist’ and ‘white supremacist’. While taboo and anti-moral ideologies festered in the dark corners of the anonymous Internet, the de-anonymized social media platforms, where most young people now develop their political ideas for the first time, became a panopticon, in which people lived in fear of observation from the eagle eye of an offended organizer of public mass shaming. At the height of its power, the dreaded call-out, no matter how minor the transgression or how well intentioned the transgressor, could ruin your reputation, your job or your life. The particular incarnations of the online left and right that exist today are undoubtedly a product of this strange period of ultra puritanism. These obscure online political beginnings became formative for a whole generation, and impacted mainstream sensibilities and even language.
The hysterical liberal call-out produced a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC, typified by charismatic figures like Milo [Yiannopoulos]. But after crying wolf throughout these years, calling everyone from saccharine pop stars to Justin Trudeau a ‘white supremacist’ and everyone who wasn’t With Her a sexist, the real wolf eventually arrived, in the form of the openly white nationalist alt-right who hid among an online army of ironic in-jokey trolls. When this happened, nobody knew who to take literally anymore, including many of those in the middle of this new online right themselves. The alt-light figures that became celebrities during this period made their careers exposing the absurdities of online identity politics and the culture of lightly thrown claims of misogyny, racism, ableism, fatphobia, transphobia and so on. However, offline, only one side saw their guy take the office of US president and only one side has in their midst faux-ironic Sieg Heil saluting, open white segregationists and genuinely hate-filled, occasionally murderous, misogynists and racists.
Before the overtly racist alt-right were widely known, the more mainstream alt-light largely flattered it, gave it glowing write-ups in Breitbart and elsewhere, had its spokespeople on their YouTube shows and promoted them on social media. Nevertheless, when Milo’s sudden career implosion happened later they didn’t return the favor, which I think may be setting a precedent for a future in which the playfully transgressive alt-light unwittingly play the useful idiots for those with much more serious political aims. If this dark, anti-Semitic, race segregationist ideology grows in the coming years, with their vision of the future that would necessitate violence, those who made the right attractive will have to take responsibility for having played their role.
