Why Irony, Bro?

a case of arrested development

My retrospective on the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war is live on the Daily Beast.

This is the kind of thing that I write and which some people represent as terribly mean or motivated by personal animus. But it’s not, at all. I’m sincerely trying to grapple with a phenomenon that confuses me, one which is relevant to some political communities I am (more or less) a part of.

So there’s this group (I think it’s a duo but I’m not sure) called the Serfs. They have a YouTube channel and a Twitter account. They only popped into my headspace recently, but the accounts are years old. They offer a truly novel combination for Twitter and YouTube, leftist politics plus an ironic and insouciant sense of humor. Their entry on the “Breadtube” Wiki says that their YouTube channel focuses on “dunking on right-wingers.” They’ve mastered that irony boy leftist thing of being unblinkingly sarcastic at all times except in those moments in which social justice mores demand the right-thinking be sincere, at which point they transition seamlessly to witless sincerity. They tell jokes, they affect a weary and all-knowing tone, they share little factoids that undermine the right-wing worldview, they betray no hint that political questions are ever difficult or that compromise is ever necessary, they make more or less compelling arguments. They satisfy the communal dictates of the worlds of leftist YouTube and Twitter. And I’m sure they’re really good guys.

What I can’t help wondering is… why? Why keep doing and being this, in 2023? Is there really any utility to be found, in 2023, in getting a Twitter pile-on going, in participating in meme politics, in being the sneering leftist at the back of the class? I think it’s far past the point where we should be asking how exactly this addiction to derisive jokiness and showy superiority is helping us advance a political project. If the point is just that they want to make a living doing political commentary, fair enough. Anyone who does this professionally, I at least understand. But my point isn’t really about the phenomenon of professional leftist comedian, which is fine on its own, but rather about the continuing prevalence of a kind of leftist political engagement that’s at least seven years old and which seems to me to have little left to offer. All the irony leftist fruit has been picked, long ago, but people still do the dance. And I genuinely don’t get it.

I should say upfront that I have never thought that my writing “makes a difference.” I vote, I organize in the tenants rights movement, I donate money, I am a little involved in local politics; that’s how I try to influence the world. With my writing, you know…. I am trying to advance a point of view, and I do often wish that I could change people’s minds and influence political culture. But I’m not deluded enough to think that I’m doing that. When I write about politics, I’m doing so almost entirely out of selfish motives, specifically to satiate the part of myself that feels like it absolutely can’t sit still until I let my thoughts out. I also hope to offer some relief to people who think the way that I do and who are made to feel crazy by our current, absurd political moment. And I do hope to entertain. But I don’t mistake what I do as having real political stakes. That just isn’t what I do. So you could fairly say that I’m being a bit hypocritical in asking what, exactly, people in the socialist left are doing right now, what the point is of their approach to politics, whether our rhetoric makes any sense…. I guess my feeling, in general, is that any individual person or podcast or publication shouldn’t be expected to defend their style as an emblem of where we are overall. But I also think that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, as a movement, with the relentless reversion to irony and casual nihilism, and it’s worth looking at.

Once upon a time, there was this thing called Weird Twitter. Pretty much everyone who took part in it hated the label, and its genuine form didn’t last long at all. Much of its vocabulary and perspective were developed on the forum Something Awful, which along with early Gawker and Bush-era Daily Show Jon Stewart went a long way to defining the default rhetorical style of much of the internet. Weird Twitter was initially too absurdist and insular to be very political, but as time went on, the Weird Twitter style was absorbed into leftist Twitter, to the point that it became genuinely hard to find left-of-liberal accounts on the service that didn’t use self-impressed ironic detachment as their basic mode of engagement. In 2016, whatever may have been left of Weird Twitter was absorbed fully into socialist Twitter/DSA Twitter/Bernie Twitter. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Sanders resulted in deep and broad enmity between the establishment supporters of the Clinton dynasty and the leftists who felt that only the bold social democratic vision of Sanders could create necessary change. And while I don’t believe that Clinton won because of dirty tricks, there’s no doubt that the Dem establishment was unambiguously opposed to Bernie. The style that developed then, combining acerbic and intentionally childish insults with righteous political rage, was a response to the feeling that everything was broken and the system was rigged.

And it was genuinely therapeutic, back then. The crazy-making elements of the primary process, set against the backdrop of the unhinged and yet remarkably successful Trump campaign, called out for some sort of communal release of frustration. I engaged in the Bernie-Hillary Twitter wars as loudly as anyone, and I did a lot of the dunking and such. I wouldn’t even really say I regret any of it. The establishment really was so full of shit - they got Matt Bruenig fired for using the Scumbag Steve meme against Clinton apparatchik Neera Tanden - and the horrific absurdism of the Trump campaign contributed to the sense that something had gone very badly off the rails and if we couldn’t stop it, we at least had to object. So object we did.

The thing is… that was seven years ago. Bernie ran again, and sadly lost again, in large part because of his difficulty in courting the Black moderates that have a disproportionate influence in the Democratic party. In fact, Bernie badly underperformed the fundamentals of his campaign. I’ll always love and support Bernie, and his primary campaigns were absolutely worth the time and effort and hope we invested. But Bernie’s now 81 years old, and we’re still figuring out what the American socialist movement should look like moving forward. And so often, I look around and see a socialist left that’s choked by the same tired jokey culture, one which people seem resistant to changing. So much contemporary radical left culture is still defined by a droll, withering superiority. People love to reply to this thinking by saying that it’s just online, that social media doesn’t matter…. But I’m not convinced. I spend time in IRL far-left activist spaces, and yes, it’s true that this dynamic is far less prominent there. But the simple fact of the matter is that the socialist left is still very small in the United States in 2023, and like it or not, the internet remains a disproportionate influence on our movement. You can’t simultaneously say that you’re attempting to organize people online and that online discourse norms don’t matter.

And what online socialist culture teaches young leftists is that you do socialism by telling jokes on Twitter and treating all political questions as so obvious that anyone who professes to struggle with them deserves contempt. It also promulgates the flatly incorrect notion that things have never been worse and there were some halcyon days of yore when things were better, that there was some vague “before times” where life was easier. There wasn’t, and it’s terribly misleading for leftists to believe as if there were.

As with so many other things, the question is one of proportion. Of course I think we should have entertainers and provocateurs on the left. I haven’t heard Chapo Trap House in a long time, but I always found it funny and informative. It’s not like I think the show shouldn’t exist. And I don’t even really have any enmity for the Serfs, particularly. The problem is not that these guys are doing what they do but that so many other people are doing it too. You can’t have a political movement made up entirely of podcasters and YouTubers; everyone can’t be the class clown. Some people have to simply be earnest foot soldiers who make the case without quotation marks. It’s always fun to be the kid at the back of the class, throwing spitballs and making fun of everyone and everything. Too fun, as it turns out. Because socialists are so far from power, it’s always tempting to devolve into politics as a form of aggressive self-care, a means of working out frustration and disappointment rather than as an organized process of pursuing political power. I don’t agree with everything in this piece by Dustin Guastella, an organizer for the Teamsters, but its basic diagnosis is entirely correct: the left has become captured by a toxic and self-exonerating nihilism, an “everything sucks and nothing can ever get better” attitude that’s fundamentally an antipolitics. And we have to get back to our basic job, which is reminding everyone that “a better world is possible.”

As is always the case, the cure here for the left is to build institutions. Of course that’s easier said than done. But the only way forward is to start attracting some normies to our cause by having radical-but-boring institutions that allow for day-to-day organizing, strategy, fundraising, and professional responsibility. We need to make radical left politics a matter of boring quotidian human life. Which is part of why, despite some real reservations, I’ve been supportive of post-Occupy DSA; they understand that showing up is half the battle. And generally they recognize that the caustic rejection of all institutions that’s become prevalent since 2020 leaves no place for a socialist left.

Of course, there’s the broader question of why people still do irony online at all, totally separate from politics. And I don’t know there, either. That oral history of Weird Twitter I shared above is now ten years old. People from that piece are still doing it, still trotting out zingers after literally a decade-plus of doing so. You have people who are drifting into their mid-50s out there who are still being performatively sarcastic on social media. And I can’t help wondering… how long are you going to do this? Are you still going to be corn-cobbing people when you’re in the 70s? The internet is choked with these accounts, a largely-anonymous troll army that adds bile to every forum but not much else. In the Bernie days there was an edge of countercultural politics to it, but that’s mostly gone now, and nobody can now delude themselves that being a shithead online is a political act. I’ve found that a lot of the verve and glee that used to attend this stuff, which you can see so clearly in that oral history of Weird Twitter, is long dead. These accounts have mostly slid deeper and deeper into an empty bitterness. I suspect that most of them have no idea why they still do it at all.

Well, whatever - they’re entitled to act however they would like, on a personal level. But it’s time for the left to move on.