Great piece. Had yet to have seen someone articulate the curtain call for this damaging twitter driven "drop mic" era. Unfortunately, i do think what they do is effective in the bluest of blue communities around the country which unfortunately helps the Squad and similar attention seekers get elected versus traditional liberals. This is also seemingly true in the reddest of red communities and how you get MTG instead of a regular southern right winger.
I don't know about the Serfs, but I would say the 'best' example of what you're on about is maybe the Chapo guys ? I find myself listening to them on the regular just cuz they make me laugh. And I don't think they ever thought for one second they were changing anything. To their credit, they have totally accepted the fact that the Left as an agent of change is dead, worldwide, and will not be resuscitated in any like form. You may say the Left must move on, but perhaps you're the one kicking the dead horse. Especially from a European perspective where the American Left is scarcely leftier than a Macronist or Merkelite.
Before I even got a few paragraphs into this article -- in fact, upon reading the title -- I was reminded of the Kyle Kulinski show on YouTube. I'm not sure whether it at all qualifies as the type of nihilistic irony-laden leftist Freddie is criticizing (it is certainly hard-core left-wing!), but for me the main outstanding characteristic of Kyle Kulinski is his compulsion to sneer at every opinion he disagrees with by repeating the opinion in a silly voice (the exact same voice regardless of which Republican he's making fun of, so it's not an impression or anything) and adding the word "bro" at the end of every sentence or two. I find Kulinski too unbearably annoying for me to have watched more than very little of his show, so maybe I'm wrongly extrapolating here, but it's very apparent in the little I've seen.
I think of content creators as being similar to pro athletes in that the vast majority have very limited earnings windows. There are a ton of people who want their jobs, and an unending stream of new talent knocking at the door. Very few are able to stay relevant and profitable for 10+ years, and the ones that are tend to be .1% level talents who are consistently able to reinvent themselves. Think Bill Simmons pivoting to a management/podcast/eventual founder role compared to Rick Riley (or compared to a million unknown bloggers from the early 2000s- the equivalent to the minor leagues). I think of the sub-stack household names like Bari Weiss, Matt Yglasies, etc as being part of this select group (like them or not).
This is a long winded way of saying that it's incredibly difficult to adopt new material and businesses and it should be expected that the majority of successful content creators eventually flame out after their material gets stale. The Serfs are the aging veteran who made a few all-star teams and still has a solid fan base today but most likely will not have long-term staying power.
Millennial Lefitsm has attempted to delegitimize everything on New Left terms.
Every institution is racist, sexist, phobic, exploitative, etc.
So, it's a movement that is nihilistic and not generative.
Because they're lazy and self entitled, they're not interested in the type of hard fought, incremental gains that accrue over time.
This is a generation that is over socialized, highly rehearsed, and ineffectual. That their politics has devolved to the grievances of ironic midwits is no surprise.
I think this will continue to happen as long as there's a lack of national organization, and everyone with left sympathies is forced into being a kind of political entrepreneur. Why be a foot soldier when there's no officer, general, or even army really?
Of course the left needs normies but The Left will always reject normies/scare them off with their bizarre identity politics. As a former union organizer/political organizer in the pre-occupy times, I tried my hand at DSA/local socialism and it wasn't worth my time.
Time to reprise your 2021 encomium to Eugene Debs (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/read-the-bending-cross), the kind of socialist even opponents could admire (and whose real political power they needed to respect). Recently reading Adam Hochschild's "American Midnight" reminded this classical liberal of just how appealing a straight-up American socialist can be: Bernie without the "Bros," if you will.
Good stuff, Freddie. I may as well come right out and say I've never been a serious leftist or socialist, though bits and pieces of the program are okay I guess. The main reason I started following you was because I badly needed someone left-of-center to criticize the insanely mean and alienating social justice politics that developed in the mid 2010s and seemingly took over the world.
But it seems to me like the socialist left has the same problem: endless dunking and yelling on Twitter and not much of an actual popular movement. Social media really ruins everything, doesn't it?
Ouch, that was painful to watch. I like political education, but with way, way less cringe. The Gravel kids are much better. Occasionally funny but mostly pretty straight... https://www.youtube.com/@TheGravelInstitute
Liberals are far more likely to be unhappy and report worse mental health outcomes than conservatives. Are they depresses and miserable because they are liberals, or are they liberals because they are depressed and miserable?
I’ll disagree with one little bit - your writing actually *is* convincing, because you rarely display (the broadly common on the left) contempt for those who disagree with you. I think you do change minds; you’ve certainly changed mine on more than one occasion. And it’s because you lay your arguments clearly, without looking downwards upon your audience. If only more of the left would adopt that style as well, perhaps we’d be better at convincing people to vote for our candidates.
"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."
I think the answer to the question "why are they still doing it?" is the same as the answer to other relevant questions:
1) Why did they *start* doing it? Has the dynamic that drove it changed?
2) Are they still getting rewarded for it?
Perhaps it's all just inertia at this point, but I suspect the answers to 1 and 2 are they the dynamic hasn't changed very much, and that they are still getting rewarded for it.
As for what the dynamic is -- why did this ironic stance become so popular -- it seems to me that its core is in a couple of things:
1) When you have no power, and nothing you say will ever result in material change, it doesn't matter what you say, so you may as well have fun.
2) When you are in a set of circumstances where you fear having to take responsibility for anything you say, that your earnest ideas will be used against you by your peers (rather than your enemies), well, irony and sarcasm are forms of self-protection. The dramatic increase in moralism and moral ostracism on the left drives the fear that makes people reluctant to state simply and directly what they think.
Great piece. Had yet to have seen someone articulate the curtain call for this damaging twitter driven "drop mic" era. Unfortunately, i do think what they do is effective in the bluest of blue communities around the country which unfortunately helps the Squad and similar attention seekers get elected versus traditional liberals. This is also seemingly true in the reddest of red communities and how you get MTG instead of a regular southern right winger.
I don't know about the Serfs, but I would say the 'best' example of what you're on about is maybe the Chapo guys ? I find myself listening to them on the regular just cuz they make me laugh. And I don't think they ever thought for one second they were changing anything. To their credit, they have totally accepted the fact that the Left as an agent of change is dead, worldwide, and will not be resuscitated in any like form. You may say the Left must move on, but perhaps you're the one kicking the dead horse. Especially from a European perspective where the American Left is scarcely leftier than a Macronist or Merkelite.
Before I even got a few paragraphs into this article -- in fact, upon reading the title -- I was reminded of the Kyle Kulinski show on YouTube. I'm not sure whether it at all qualifies as the type of nihilistic irony-laden leftist Freddie is criticizing (it is certainly hard-core left-wing!), but for me the main outstanding characteristic of Kyle Kulinski is his compulsion to sneer at every opinion he disagrees with by repeating the opinion in a silly voice (the exact same voice regardless of which Republican he's making fun of, so it's not an impression or anything) and adding the word "bro" at the end of every sentence or two. I find Kulinski too unbearably annoying for me to have watched more than very little of his show, so maybe I'm wrongly extrapolating here, but it's very apparent in the little I've seen.
I think of content creators as being similar to pro athletes in that the vast majority have very limited earnings windows. There are a ton of people who want their jobs, and an unending stream of new talent knocking at the door. Very few are able to stay relevant and profitable for 10+ years, and the ones that are tend to be .1% level talents who are consistently able to reinvent themselves. Think Bill Simmons pivoting to a management/podcast/eventual founder role compared to Rick Riley (or compared to a million unknown bloggers from the early 2000s- the equivalent to the minor leagues). I think of the sub-stack household names like Bari Weiss, Matt Yglasies, etc as being part of this select group (like them or not).
This is a long winded way of saying that it's incredibly difficult to adopt new material and businesses and it should be expected that the majority of successful content creators eventually flame out after their material gets stale. The Serfs are the aging veteran who made a few all-star teams and still has a solid fan base today but most likely will not have long-term staying power.
Millennial Lefitsm has attempted to delegitimize everything on New Left terms.
Every institution is racist, sexist, phobic, exploitative, etc.
So, it's a movement that is nihilistic and not generative.
Because they're lazy and self entitled, they're not interested in the type of hard fought, incremental gains that accrue over time.
This is a generation that is over socialized, highly rehearsed, and ineffectual. That their politics has devolved to the grievances of ironic midwits is no surprise.
I think this will continue to happen as long as there's a lack of national organization, and everyone with left sympathies is forced into being a kind of political entrepreneur. Why be a foot soldier when there's no officer, general, or even army really?
Of course the left needs normies but The Left will always reject normies/scare them off with their bizarre identity politics. As a former union organizer/political organizer in the pre-occupy times, I tried my hand at DSA/local socialism and it wasn't worth my time.
Time to reprise your 2021 encomium to Eugene Debs (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/read-the-bending-cross), the kind of socialist even opponents could admire (and whose real political power they needed to respect). Recently reading Adam Hochschild's "American Midnight" reminded this classical liberal of just how appealing a straight-up American socialist can be: Bernie without the "Bros," if you will.
Good stuff, Freddie. I may as well come right out and say I've never been a serious leftist or socialist, though bits and pieces of the program are okay I guess. The main reason I started following you was because I badly needed someone left-of-center to criticize the insanely mean and alienating social justice politics that developed in the mid 2010s and seemingly took over the world.
But it seems to me like the socialist left has the same problem: endless dunking and yelling on Twitter and not much of an actual popular movement. Social media really ruins everything, doesn't it?
Ouch, that was painful to watch. I like political education, but with way, way less cringe. The Gravel kids are much better. Occasionally funny but mostly pretty straight... https://www.youtube.com/@TheGravelInstitute
Liberals are far more likely to be unhappy and report worse mental health outcomes than conservatives. Are they depresses and miserable because they are liberals, or are they liberals because they are depressed and miserable?
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/
I’ll disagree with one little bit - your writing actually *is* convincing, because you rarely display (the broadly common on the left) contempt for those who disagree with you. I think you do change minds; you’ve certainly changed mine on more than one occasion. And it’s because you lay your arguments clearly, without looking downwards upon your audience. If only more of the left would adopt that style as well, perhaps we’d be better at convincing people to vote for our candidates.
"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."
I think the answer to the question "why are they still doing it?" is the same as the answer to other relevant questions:
1) Why did they *start* doing it? Has the dynamic that drove it changed?
2) Are they still getting rewarded for it?
Perhaps it's all just inertia at this point, but I suspect the answers to 1 and 2 are they the dynamic hasn't changed very much, and that they are still getting rewarded for it.
As for what the dynamic is -- why did this ironic stance become so popular -- it seems to me that its core is in a couple of things:
1) When you have no power, and nothing you say will ever result in material change, it doesn't matter what you say, so you may as well have fun.
2) When you are in a set of circumstances where you fear having to take responsibility for anything you say, that your earnest ideas will be used against you by your peers (rather than your enemies), well, irony and sarcasm are forms of self-protection. The dramatic increase in moralism and moral ostracism on the left drives the fear that makes people reluctant to state simply and directly what they think.