Interesting thoughts on why cynicism works better for the right than for left; what you say feels pretty correct to me. My sense of humour probably tends toward the cynical, but it also seems obvious to me that going too far in that direction is a dead-end politically (to be clear, I don't think that left-wing humourists should trim their sails for the benefit of left-wing political movements, it's just an observation).
It feels to me like the most successful left-wing stance is, as you say, a sarcastic temperament married to an actual moral seriousness--not only Bernie, but I think even Joe Biden embodies this to an extent: I think his "no malarkey" persona is at least an attempt to embody a crusty old ethnic white guy willingness to puncture bullshit; while obviously never in danger of being mistaken for a dirtbag edgelord.
I wonder, though, if this stance is just a harder balance to strike, and that's why it has a tendency to tip over into cringe sanctimoniousness on one side, or apathetic nihilism on the other. Like, I think of John Stewart's the Daily Show in the Bush years, or the Colbert Report, which I think walked the line successfully for a while, but nowadays I would say that the Stewart/Colbert personas come off as being pretty sanctimonious.
To offer a really half-baked theory, I wonder if this is related to the more general perception that left-wing politics seeks to build something, while right-wing politics is usually obstructive or destructive--if that's so, then a misanthropic cynicism will more or less always serve the agenda of the right. But for the left, to actually put together a movement capable of achieving lefty political goals will necessarily require some bullshit and some cant; and then one is faced with the choice of calling out that bullshit and becoming a one-note cynic with nothing positive to contribute, or of pulling your punches and coming off as self-righteous and hypocritical. That's not to say it's impossible to always strike the right balance, but it should be no surprise if figures on the left, over time, fall into one of those two camps eventually.
>> I don’t try to pander, but I also don’t really know what you people even want from me, so it’s hard to pander.
I started following you because of your writing on Third Republic France, which I thought was both interesting in itself and also an unusual political analogy for modern-day America that I thought was quite revealing. But it's actually your writing on arts and culture that I find most interesting; the stuff on the interaction between irony, cynicism, aesthetics, and politics I think is insightful, clearly written, and thought-provoking; it's also not something I think anyone else is doing quite like you.
This is not me trying to say you should write more on the latter, it's me saying: I thought I wanted something specific from your writing, but it turns out, the writing of yours I find most interesting is on a completely different, unexpected topic.
Speaking personally, I think you should trust your own sense of what you should write, because if you had asked me when I started subscribing, I would have given you an answer that in retrospect was wrong.
A while back you coined a nifty description of the kind of ironic nihilism mentioned here (might have been in the context of anti-anti-Russian apologists on the left, but I can’t remember). Your observation was something like, “their most pressing concern is to never appear to be deceived.” It’s a nice formulation, not least of all because it describes a type of person for whom both knowledge/truth claims and political morality are defined by little more than how they wish to be perceived. A kind of pristine narcissism. Same mechanism at play in the only campaign platform modern reactionary conservatives need to get elected - convincing both voters and themselves that they are Clint Eastwood and not Elmer Fudd. Boasts about “never being deceived” usually mean “living in a state of permanent self-deception.”
I think one thing your examination of right-wing lib owning misses is the impact of aughts internet culture, specifically the influence of forums like Something Awful and 4chan. Of course much of the alt-right obsession circa 2016 focused on 4chan, but 4chan was just the latest in a long line. The culture of these online communities was one of confrontation and 'ironic' racism, sexism, and the like. In many cases the explicit goal was to upset the target of the harassment; you 'won' by provoking some kind of an emotional reaction. The phrase "own the libs" derives from this culture, to own someone was to possess control over them, specifically their emotions.
And who were these early online communities comprised of?
"but both reveled in being crude and nasty, were both sort of losers and creeps in high school. And both were very introverted and shy, even described as blank or without personality by classmates and teachers. But their personalities changed on the air: suddenly they could be these flamboyant characters and also be quite popular"
As slight counterexamples to the correct idea that there is a lot of humorless sanctimony on the left and left-liberal side of things currently, I'd like to mention, in addition to Bernie, Ann Richards, Molly Ivans and Michael Moore, not to mention rank-and-file workers in a whole host of local unions. The rank and filers tend to get ignored by the legacy media, and the fact that I can count the rest on the fingers of one hand, and that two of the ones I can count are already dead, does speak to a real problem.
Chacun à son goût, and probably sexist of me, but I always felt Mss Richards and (especially) Ivins to be funny people, but Sen. Sanders and (especially) Mr Moore activists who knew humour could work for them.
By coincidence perhaps, I made a note of your work ethic when it comes to your Substack. It may be difficult to write on a deadline/schedule over a long period of time judging by many of the Substacks one reads, and one can observe this in the output of columnists. So I appreciate how much I get out of these, due to how much you put into them.
There are some people who have kept up the quality of their writing for a long time in other periods. I wonder if the attention exhaustion of our current era is crushing our ability to reliably produce good prose, just as it seems to be inhibiting the capacity to read. (Or many people lament this online anyway.)
Thank you so much for those recommendations for books on cynicism. This discussion illuminates so many things that were murky in my brain. What bothers me about a certain kind of cynicism is that it’s fundamentally a product of a certain kind of intellectual laziness. The cynic will always have something to say, and whatever it is they say usually doesn’t require very much in the way of reflection or investigation. In an economy of hot takes, this is a handy short-cut. Right wing cynicism is born of reaction. They are often uninterested in building or changing anything, as the comment above mentions. The right might as well be lazy in their reactions but it’s not really getting leftists anywhere to do this. We can’t get rid of it though because left-wing cynicism is probably the safest social attitude at the moment. Cynicism is related to coolness in this way, since one can be ridiculed for earnestness or passion but it’s usually difficult to ridicule someone for debunking or dismissal.
Ridicule is also a very handy tool for social dominance. Maybe this is why it seems so essential to men to be funny in that way. The right wing version of ridicule generally falls flat except for dittoheads, since it’s rarely artful. Left wing ridicule tends to be more artful, but if too mean-spirited also only hits with an in-crowd. Ridicule seems like a weird double-edged sword in that it brings people together in a sense but deflates any impetus to action. On Twitter, much of the shared moments involve dunking on somebody, which many people seem to find powerful and even thrilling. But I have to wonder if a successful verbal attack is so satisfying it destroys the urge to do anything about whatever harmful absurdity prompts it.
Maybe I am too into Bernie but he seems able to call out BS without being cruel or contemptuous. What people disliked was that he was honest but this is also why he’s able to be funny. I found it fascinating the way that people would project malice on Bernie when, compared to so many other people in politics, he’s obviously free of genuine malice. But his critique landed squarely on the self-concept some people have of themselves as politically beneficent, since they didn’t want to care about the things he wanted them to care about but knew they should given the commitments they had.
>> We can’t get rid of it though because left-wing cynicism is probably the safest social attitude at the moment. Cynicism is related to coolness in this way, since one can be ridiculed for earnestness or passion but it’s usually difficult to ridicule someone for debunking or dismissal.
>> Ridicule is also a very handy tool for social dominance. Maybe this is why it seems so essential to men to be funny in that way. The right wing version of ridicule generally falls flat except for dittoheads, since it’s rarely artful. Left wing ridicule tends to be more artful, but if too mean-spirited also only hits with an in-crowd. Ridicule seems like a weird double-edged sword in that it brings people together in a sense but deflates any impetus to action.
I think these are both interesting observations. Being earnest about something more or less necessarily exposes you to attack in some way, and combined with the idea that ridicule is an expression of social dominance, this suggests that an easy way to never be at the wrong end of this is to just cultivate an aura of negativity about everything. But as you say, it is impossible to organize a positive agenda around an attitude like this.
I also feel like the last 8-10 years have been a social moment where this attitude has been dominant; I feel like the phrase, "lol, nothing matters" is sort of the pithiest expression of this attitude and it would be a lie to say I never felt that way in recent years.
But I do think reflexive cynicism is itself open to attack and ridicule, as a faux-sophisticated, pretentious pose--in a funny way, the effort to always find something dismissive to say can begin to look affected, and can then be attacked as a too self-serious pose, just like other forms of moralizing.
I think the effectiveness of such an attack probably depends on circumstance, but I wonder if the nothing-matters cynicism of the Trump years is beginning to wear off a little, giving that line of attack a little more traction? Or maybe that's just earnest, wishful thinking on my part, and some cool kids will be able to mercilessly ridicule me for this hope in another year or two.
On Bernie: I definitely agree, but I do think he owes some of his success walking this line to the fact that he never actually won; in a world with Bernie as the leader of the Democratic party, or President, I think he would be seen as a lot more sanctimonious; I often think of the Tweet that said something like, "On Earth 2, President Bernie Sanders just authorized his first drone strike"--in that world, I think Bernie's reputation as a BS-caller and truth-teller would be compromised. Of course, that would have been a price well-worth paying in my opinion, but if my whole persona were built around remaining above-it-all I would feel differently.
Sen. Sanders avoids the worst of it, but I have often felt the presence on the American Left of persons unconsciously dedicated to the Absolute Purity of Absolute Irrelevance.
This is true, but it's not a tendency that I'm completely unsympathetic too. There are times and places where I'd be pretty loathe to feel responsible for supporting any of the political factions with a real chance at holding power; I suppose if I had been a Hungarian voter in the elections last year I'd have voted against Orban, but I'd definitely feel pretty skeezy about supporting a coalition with Jobbik.
I think what makes the *American* left's tendency in this direction frustrating is that they have a much worse excuse for it: if the stakes are low enough you might feel safe sitting an election out, and similarly if the competing parties are all bad enough in different ways that it's hard to feel confident in your evaluation of the lesser of two evils.
But America satisfies neither of these: Democrats, for all their flaws, are better than Republicans more or less universally across all issues, at least at the national level. And the stakes are pretty high! Republican governance is genuinely really bad, for America and the world! The left throwing their influence, such as it is, into Democratic, center-left politics, is basically all upside!
I think this actually is bound up with the fascism debate: very uncharitably, you could argue that the reason to claim that the fascism accusations are overblown is because it serves to minimize how bad Republicans are, and maybe also to minimize the difference between Dems and Reps, so as to have an excuse to hold yourself aloof from having to get too involved. The charitable version has the causation running the other way.
Or maybe I'm just too caught up in the Unpopular Front Cinematic Universe, trying to find crossovers where there aren't any.
"For the same reasons, some of these shows and figures tend to just become explicitly reactionary"
I am going to cite this in a few weeks when we read an article from one of the CTH hosts in a grad class (you can guess which one would have written a scholarly article)
I haven't paid much attention to him beside reading his platforms, with which I largely agree (except thinking that a French- or German- or Japanese-style pseudo-Market universal health-care solution were better suited to a very American need to believe that we're no Commies). I don't recall his being charged with sexism nor heard such from him, but definitely heard accusations against some of his supporters and heard some dubious remarks, e.g. calling her 'a reactionary bitch'. This was especially so back when it was 'Bernie versus Hillary'—I loathe these usages of given names, we don't know these persons and it could be dangerous to believe that we do—and the Democratic Party had the temerity to tilt the process toward a Democrat.
Interesting thoughts on why cynicism works better for the right than for left; what you say feels pretty correct to me. My sense of humour probably tends toward the cynical, but it also seems obvious to me that going too far in that direction is a dead-end politically (to be clear, I don't think that left-wing humourists should trim their sails for the benefit of left-wing political movements, it's just an observation).
It feels to me like the most successful left-wing stance is, as you say, a sarcastic temperament married to an actual moral seriousness--not only Bernie, but I think even Joe Biden embodies this to an extent: I think his "no malarkey" persona is at least an attempt to embody a crusty old ethnic white guy willingness to puncture bullshit; while obviously never in danger of being mistaken for a dirtbag edgelord.
I wonder, though, if this stance is just a harder balance to strike, and that's why it has a tendency to tip over into cringe sanctimoniousness on one side, or apathetic nihilism on the other. Like, I think of John Stewart's the Daily Show in the Bush years, or the Colbert Report, which I think walked the line successfully for a while, but nowadays I would say that the Stewart/Colbert personas come off as being pretty sanctimonious.
To offer a really half-baked theory, I wonder if this is related to the more general perception that left-wing politics seeks to build something, while right-wing politics is usually obstructive or destructive--if that's so, then a misanthropic cynicism will more or less always serve the agenda of the right. But for the left, to actually put together a movement capable of achieving lefty political goals will necessarily require some bullshit and some cant; and then one is faced with the choice of calling out that bullshit and becoming a one-note cynic with nothing positive to contribute, or of pulling your punches and coming off as self-righteous and hypocritical. That's not to say it's impossible to always strike the right balance, but it should be no surprise if figures on the left, over time, fall into one of those two camps eventually.
>> I don’t try to pander, but I also don’t really know what you people even want from me, so it’s hard to pander.
I started following you because of your writing on Third Republic France, which I thought was both interesting in itself and also an unusual political analogy for modern-day America that I thought was quite revealing. But it's actually your writing on arts and culture that I find most interesting; the stuff on the interaction between irony, cynicism, aesthetics, and politics I think is insightful, clearly written, and thought-provoking; it's also not something I think anyone else is doing quite like you.
This is not me trying to say you should write more on the latter, it's me saying: I thought I wanted something specific from your writing, but it turns out, the writing of yours I find most interesting is on a completely different, unexpected topic.
Speaking personally, I think you should trust your own sense of what you should write, because if you had asked me when I started subscribing, I would have given you an answer that in retrospect was wrong.
Thank you!
A while back you coined a nifty description of the kind of ironic nihilism mentioned here (might have been in the context of anti-anti-Russian apologists on the left, but I can’t remember). Your observation was something like, “their most pressing concern is to never appear to be deceived.” It’s a nice formulation, not least of all because it describes a type of person for whom both knowledge/truth claims and political morality are defined by little more than how they wish to be perceived. A kind of pristine narcissism. Same mechanism at play in the only campaign platform modern reactionary conservatives need to get elected - convincing both voters and themselves that they are Clint Eastwood and not Elmer Fudd. Boasts about “never being deceived” usually mean “living in a state of permanent self-deception.”
"the non dupes err" as lacan once said
I think one thing your examination of right-wing lib owning misses is the impact of aughts internet culture, specifically the influence of forums like Something Awful and 4chan. Of course much of the alt-right obsession circa 2016 focused on 4chan, but 4chan was just the latest in a long line. The culture of these online communities was one of confrontation and 'ironic' racism, sexism, and the like. In many cases the explicit goal was to upset the target of the harassment; you 'won' by provoking some kind of an emotional reaction. The phrase "own the libs" derives from this culture, to own someone was to possess control over them, specifically their emotions.
And who were these early online communities comprised of?
"but both reveled in being crude and nasty, were both sort of losers and creeps in high school. And both were very introverted and shy, even described as blank or without personality by classmates and teachers. But their personalities changed on the air: suddenly they could be these flamboyant characters and also be quite popular"
I think john was bang on here.
yeah good point
As slight counterexamples to the correct idea that there is a lot of humorless sanctimony on the left and left-liberal side of things currently, I'd like to mention, in addition to Bernie, Ann Richards, Molly Ivans and Michael Moore, not to mention rank-and-file workers in a whole host of local unions. The rank and filers tend to get ignored by the legacy media, and the fact that I can count the rest on the fingers of one hand, and that two of the ones I can count are already dead, does speak to a real problem.
Chacun à son goût, and probably sexist of me, but I always felt Mss Richards and (especially) Ivins to be funny people, but Sen. Sanders and (especially) Mr Moore activists who knew humour could work for them.
By coincidence perhaps, I made a note of your work ethic when it comes to your Substack. It may be difficult to write on a deadline/schedule over a long period of time judging by many of the Substacks one reads, and one can observe this in the output of columnists. So I appreciate how much I get out of these, due to how much you put into them.
There are some people who have kept up the quality of their writing for a long time in other periods. I wonder if the attention exhaustion of our current era is crushing our ability to reliably produce good prose, just as it seems to be inhibiting the capacity to read. (Or many people lament this online anyway.)
Thank you so much for those recommendations for books on cynicism. This discussion illuminates so many things that were murky in my brain. What bothers me about a certain kind of cynicism is that it’s fundamentally a product of a certain kind of intellectual laziness. The cynic will always have something to say, and whatever it is they say usually doesn’t require very much in the way of reflection or investigation. In an economy of hot takes, this is a handy short-cut. Right wing cynicism is born of reaction. They are often uninterested in building or changing anything, as the comment above mentions. The right might as well be lazy in their reactions but it’s not really getting leftists anywhere to do this. We can’t get rid of it though because left-wing cynicism is probably the safest social attitude at the moment. Cynicism is related to coolness in this way, since one can be ridiculed for earnestness or passion but it’s usually difficult to ridicule someone for debunking or dismissal.
Ridicule is also a very handy tool for social dominance. Maybe this is why it seems so essential to men to be funny in that way. The right wing version of ridicule generally falls flat except for dittoheads, since it’s rarely artful. Left wing ridicule tends to be more artful, but if too mean-spirited also only hits with an in-crowd. Ridicule seems like a weird double-edged sword in that it brings people together in a sense but deflates any impetus to action. On Twitter, much of the shared moments involve dunking on somebody, which many people seem to find powerful and even thrilling. But I have to wonder if a successful verbal attack is so satisfying it destroys the urge to do anything about whatever harmful absurdity prompts it.
Maybe I am too into Bernie but he seems able to call out BS without being cruel or contemptuous. What people disliked was that he was honest but this is also why he’s able to be funny. I found it fascinating the way that people would project malice on Bernie when, compared to so many other people in politics, he’s obviously free of genuine malice. But his critique landed squarely on the self-concept some people have of themselves as politically beneficent, since they didn’t want to care about the things he wanted them to care about but knew they should given the commitments they had.
>> We can’t get rid of it though because left-wing cynicism is probably the safest social attitude at the moment. Cynicism is related to coolness in this way, since one can be ridiculed for earnestness or passion but it’s usually difficult to ridicule someone for debunking or dismissal.
>> Ridicule is also a very handy tool for social dominance. Maybe this is why it seems so essential to men to be funny in that way. The right wing version of ridicule generally falls flat except for dittoheads, since it’s rarely artful. Left wing ridicule tends to be more artful, but if too mean-spirited also only hits with an in-crowd. Ridicule seems like a weird double-edged sword in that it brings people together in a sense but deflates any impetus to action.
I think these are both interesting observations. Being earnest about something more or less necessarily exposes you to attack in some way, and combined with the idea that ridicule is an expression of social dominance, this suggests that an easy way to never be at the wrong end of this is to just cultivate an aura of negativity about everything. But as you say, it is impossible to organize a positive agenda around an attitude like this.
I also feel like the last 8-10 years have been a social moment where this attitude has been dominant; I feel like the phrase, "lol, nothing matters" is sort of the pithiest expression of this attitude and it would be a lie to say I never felt that way in recent years.
But I do think reflexive cynicism is itself open to attack and ridicule, as a faux-sophisticated, pretentious pose--in a funny way, the effort to always find something dismissive to say can begin to look affected, and can then be attacked as a too self-serious pose, just like other forms of moralizing.
I think the effectiveness of such an attack probably depends on circumstance, but I wonder if the nothing-matters cynicism of the Trump years is beginning to wear off a little, giving that line of attack a little more traction? Or maybe that's just earnest, wishful thinking on my part, and some cool kids will be able to mercilessly ridicule me for this hope in another year or two.
On Bernie: I definitely agree, but I do think he owes some of his success walking this line to the fact that he never actually won; in a world with Bernie as the leader of the Democratic party, or President, I think he would be seen as a lot more sanctimonious; I often think of the Tweet that said something like, "On Earth 2, President Bernie Sanders just authorized his first drone strike"--in that world, I think Bernie's reputation as a BS-caller and truth-teller would be compromised. Of course, that would have been a price well-worth paying in my opinion, but if my whole persona were built around remaining above-it-all I would feel differently.
Sen. Sanders avoids the worst of it, but I have often felt the presence on the American Left of persons unconsciously dedicated to the Absolute Purity of Absolute Irrelevance.
This is true, but it's not a tendency that I'm completely unsympathetic too. There are times and places where I'd be pretty loathe to feel responsible for supporting any of the political factions with a real chance at holding power; I suppose if I had been a Hungarian voter in the elections last year I'd have voted against Orban, but I'd definitely feel pretty skeezy about supporting a coalition with Jobbik.
I think what makes the *American* left's tendency in this direction frustrating is that they have a much worse excuse for it: if the stakes are low enough you might feel safe sitting an election out, and similarly if the competing parties are all bad enough in different ways that it's hard to feel confident in your evaluation of the lesser of two evils.
But America satisfies neither of these: Democrats, for all their flaws, are better than Republicans more or less universally across all issues, at least at the national level. And the stakes are pretty high! Republican governance is genuinely really bad, for America and the world! The left throwing their influence, such as it is, into Democratic, center-left politics, is basically all upside!
I think this actually is bound up with the fascism debate: very uncharitably, you could argue that the reason to claim that the fascism accusations are overblown is because it serves to minimize how bad Republicans are, and maybe also to minimize the difference between Dems and Reps, so as to have an excuse to hold yourself aloof from having to get too involved. The charitable version has the causation running the other way.
Or maybe I'm just too caught up in the Unpopular Front Cinematic Universe, trying to find crossovers where there aren't any.
"For the same reasons, some of these shows and figures tend to just become explicitly reactionary"
I am going to cite this in a few weeks when we read an article from one of the CTH hosts in a grad class (you can guess which one would have written a scholarly article)
I haven't paid much attention to him beside reading his platforms, with which I largely agree (except thinking that a French- or German- or Japanese-style pseudo-Market universal health-care solution were better suited to a very American need to believe that we're no Commies). I don't recall his being charged with sexism nor heard such from him, but definitely heard accusations against some of his supporters and heard some dubious remarks, e.g. calling her 'a reactionary bitch'. This was especially so back when it was 'Bernie versus Hillary'—I loathe these usages of given names, we don't know these persons and it could be dangerous to believe that we do—and the Democratic Party had the temerity to tilt the process toward a Democrat.
If you think trying to make a living with your opinion writing is tough in a market society, try it in a non-market one.
Where did I say it was tough?