How’d it go with the recipes from Enoteca? Great.
Over the weekend, I read an interesting rumination by John Ganz about the time he accepted an assignment from The New Republic to try and get to know some far-right activists.
He found that he was able to have comfortable, amicable conversations with them but also that the world they were in was shot full of rivalries, feuds, and clashing egos. He also saw that they’d fixate on what he viewed as “mentally disturbed shitposters” whose writing they would eventually turn into a dogma through repetition. As Ganz describes it, the process reminded me of Angela Nagle’s argument in Kill All Normies, that provocative positions originally taken on for the lulz just to get a rise out of polite society somehow became real beliefs. That has happened a fair amount in modern intellectual and political history on the right and the left—subversive or provocative intellectuals and readers going down their own rabbit holes and getting profoundly lost in the process. You can see that with someone like Ezra Pound, or the Italian Futurists, or the Situationists and Yippies in the 1960s.
Ganz reminded me of a thought I’ve had before, which is that one of the problems with efforts to explain Trumpism is that those efforts often settle into the pattern of a great deal of social science, which is trying to identify a single dominant cause of a social phenomenon or to reduce a complex situation down to some sort of binary opposition. While it’s true that the bitter divide in the United States has increasingly become a two-sided affair, when you poke around inside each of the coalitions on the two sides, you find a lot of different histories and causalities adhering to particular fractions within those coalitions.
With the extremely online far right, my own long-standing experiences have led me to see a couple of distinctions, some of which I think figure into the ugly internal rivalries that Ganz observed.
There’s one group of people involved who have been voices on the right for purely self-interested reasons. Major conservative organizations realized in the late 1960s that they needed to provide a substantial financial pipeline that would help to recruit young public intellectuals on the right. That pipeline filled up with cash after 1980 and became even more bounteous in the early 2000s, just as commercial social media began to really take hold alongside the kind of talk radio that had flourished in the 1990s. When you took that funding into your mid-20s, you often found that you’d done enough to brand yourself that coming back out again was impossible, even if you tried to keep passing the word to people outside the far-right mediasphere that you were just playing a role. (Tucker Carlson has been reported to have done just that multiple times, but at some point he clearly realized there was no way out and he would have to push it to the limit.) Even with so much money on offer, the space also got fairly crowded, which meant that to get attention, some of the people who were on the gravy train had to stoke the fires and make the train go faster than ever. Which in some cases—Alex Jones, say—led to acquiring financial liabilities that counter-balanced the financial advantages.
There’s also some people who are in this space out of genuine no-fooling convictions that rest on a more-or-less coherent philosophy, who are not just grifting or trying to make sure they keep the sweet, sweet Mercermoney flowing into their bank accounts. Those are the folks who I once would have thought I could have a discussion with, but most of them are subscribers to some form of Brand-X Straussianism (even if they don’t know who Leo Strauss was) and thus see no value whatsoever in having legible conversations with people they see as enemies. The only value they see in engaging a liberal or progressive like me is to try and manipulate their hapless liberal fair-mindedness in order to move the Overton window to the right or to elicit a statement of liberal-left perfidy that can then be quietly reproduced or distorted elsewhere to stoke up far right readers in more gated or backchannel discussions.
But what Ganz made me think about is another fraction of extremely online alt-right folks that I’ve come across who I think are caught in an intensely contradictory set of feelings: they are simultaneously intense meritocrats who hate and resent the outcomes of actually-existing meritocratic systems. E.g., they believe they have good ideas for novels, comic-books or movie scripts; they believe they would be excellent journalists or public commentators; they believe they would be strong managers or leaders of mainstream organizations; they believe they should be at the top of a professional pyramid; they believe they should be the P.I. on a major research study at a top research university. And they believe that the people who are at the top are not only less talented than they are but are only at the top because they recite progressive dogma obediently if insincerely and because of pedigree.
They have a point. Many of them do have talent and skill equal to many people who are holding prestigious, rewarding or powerful positions. And it’s true that many successful meritocrats hold to various positions on social responsibility, ethics, justice, etc. because they perceive that as being what one does rather than as values that they believe in deeply. (At the very least, it’s pretty common to run into influential or powerful professionals and cultural producers whose actual behavior in the workplace or in private life profoundly violates everything they pretend to believe in.)
The thing is, what do you do with that insight? It seems to me if you’re a keen observer, you’d notice that the problem is the scarcity that meritocracy nurtures and intensifies and the way it allows those who have ascended to the top to then control all points of access and keep the winners’ circle reserved for their own clients and allies. So if you have the luck to prove once that you can write a screenplay that gets produced to great acclaim or the chance to secure a top-level promotion (or perhaps the cunning to claim more credit for something than you deserve), you can often lock in a cycle where work comes back to you again and again and your merit becomes a kind of perpetual-motion machine. Digital culture helped to prove how many talented artists and writers there are out there, and organizations plainly abound with people who can do terrific and distinctive work if they’re given resources and opportunity. But somehow the number of not-bullshit jobs gets smaller and smaller all the time, and the number of people left out in the rain grows.
My thought about some of the bitter, angry extremely online people on the far right is that they don’t take up that keen observation and demand that the system be changed. Instead, what they mostly think is that there should only be a few plum jobs just like there are now, but they are the ones who should have them, they are the only really perceptive and talented people, and everybody else is a poseur, a phony, an empty bunch of silly slogans. It’s a kind of ressentiment that is protean: it attaches easily to racial minorities and to women, but often almost as easily to people who are actually quite proximate to the resentful writer, to white men of the same social class and background. It’s an angry structure of feeling—never introspective, never doubting, and never really seeking solidarity or connection. It’s an army of people who are always the one and only person who is really right—and thus the only really entitled to be King of the Hill. (This, mind you, is not an attitude limited to the extremely online of the right: there are others who rhetorically inhabit the same affect even if their politics is centrist or leftist.) I think that’s why the men Ganz spoke with were always plotting against one another, always undercutting each other. Even if there’s no self-interest at stake, no gig that can only go to one person or another, there’s some shred of reputation capital to be accumulated, some acknowledgement, some dues—and always, always, a need to nurture the sense that what they are owed is being denied to them.