All the Lovely Little Steps

Prologonema to an abandoned political autobiography

Hi! I wrote the first version of this piece in the first year of the blog as the introduction to a never-materialized longer meditation on my interest in the then-emerging right or post-left counterculture, although bits of what it might have been made their way into these two recent posts and various thought digests over the last year and a half. I took it down in late 2023 and have intermittently worked on revising it for most of the time since, never entirely happy with the results, but I think it does fit with some of my recent writing, and so I’ve added a few new footnotes and I’m sending it back out into the world.

All one can say is that these things happen, that the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and that all you need to generate a counterculture is an orthodoxy against which it can rebel, since no orthodoxy can ever fully satisfy everyone’s spiritual appetites and all spiritual passions.

-Irving Kristol, 1994

The early 2010s were a strange time. Probably all times are strange in their way, each saddled with dreams and expectations and haunted and hamstrung by the limitations and challenges which they are ordained to grapple with, but somehow in my memory the years 2010-2014 seem especially surreal.¹ Some of this I’m sure is the decay of memory over time, as natural processes take place within the mind, but I also know that memory is conditioned by consciousness, and that there are things we choose not to remember, choose to remain obscure. Many of us are I think now nostalgic for that time. The Obama administration managed-impressively given its remarkable weakness and the electoral walloping the democrats took during its tenure- to project an aura of secure gentility. Everything was going according to plan, the increasingly dysfunctional edifice was still rock-solid. At least that was the way I felt, coming of age in Western Massachusetts. I suspect, although I cannot know, that many others in many other places felt the same. There was a very tangible vibe as the era wore on of a genteel malaise that nobody seemed particularly interested in or capable of dispelling.

Memory lies to us, distorts the image that floats before us of what has come before, rewrites our accounts to favor whatever it is we thought or did, even occludes that which we may now find unflattering. I am not sure, looking back that my feelings were in any way universal or that my perceptions were necessarily held by anyone else. What I can say is that it seemed at the time that there were two narratives of American life coexisting in different orbits passing millions of miles apart. In the first, a whiggish account of history, inevitable American progress was continuing apace- interrupted by the mishaps of the Bush administration- but continuing inexorably toward a greater democratic perfection. In the other, America was a failing state, a bloodstained imperial power irreparably tainted (depending on your ideological leanings) by racism or corruption or some combination of the two. Most of the second orbit seemed to agree that one way or another, liberal capitalist democracy in its present configuration had failed. There were flashes-most notably the Occupy protests of 2011- where the second orbit interrupted the first, but on the whole they observed each other distantly. Our story, to the extent that there is one story here, is of how beginning sometime around 2012 those two orbits drew ever closer, and eventually collided.

This began to happen online quite early seemingly: for the right and a certain frame of the left it may well be lost in the mists of time on anonymous forums.² Suffice to say, and this is the important part, by the end of the aughts an ugly form of highly ironized fascist rhetoric and race science-as-comedy had erupted on various messageboards, a sensibility both beyond the pale and more of a part with the online humor of the era than is sometimes acknowledged. Then of course something changed. A Vibe Shift if you will, ten or so years before the one everybody wrote about a couple years ago, and in the opposite ideological direction. The way I remember it, the way it felt, was that one day sometime in 2012 or 2013 you woke up and logged on and there was a mass of people roving around telling you that the way you lived, the jokes you made, the movies and games you enjoyed-all that was problematic, it was racist, harmful to women, transphobic, etc.³ Needless to say there was backlash, quiet at first, never naming itself explicitly, nor usually viewing itself as unified, but still determined, and as the years wore on, ever more vocal and flirting ever more visibly with aesthetics of outrageous transgression increasingly pilfered from the aforementioned channer tradition. which it should be noted always had a vein of actual, committed neonazism, misogynists and racists present in the adolescent murk.⁴

The internet was a bigger space in those days, more diverse politically and at least publicly less so racially or sexually. That this was so is curious to behold when one considers how many fewer people were online a decade ago, and yet it seems in retrospect that there were many more platforms and many more voices, and that much more separation. It was possible in those antediluvian days to miss the rise of something like the nebulous sensibility that arose through some admixture of teenagers on Tumblr and assorted blogs (Shakesville in particular is often named by my interlocutors on this point) and academic feminism and critical theory until it was already upon you.⁵

I don’t want to pretend that what we had back then was good. When I remember the culture of the aughts and early tens I think of the rampant cruelty, the circuslike atmosphere of ogling at the car crash, the malevolent sneer at a woman’s ass just a bit too tightly crammed into the low-rise jeans, the casual racism of a middle-class-white-as-default culture that found the very existence of blackness and its patterns of speech and culture amusing. I remember the militarism and the conformity, the transphobia so casual it barely even registered as conscious action, the homophobia only slowly and painfully becoming not so. None of this came from nowhere. Far too often people who stand against what that nebulous sensibility became absolve the world it replaced, absolve themselves. I don’t want to do that.

We were living, it becomes increasingly clear, in a lawless interregnum between the widespread desublimation that began in the 1960s, and whatever lies ahead of us, when new rules couched in the language of safety and respect will regulate us.

Wesley Yang, 2017

When this all began happening around 2012-13 I was much more sympathetic to it than I am now. In part I was naive, blind or in denial of the less savory aspects of the countercultural swing I was observing. I never participated in it exactly, but at the same time I shifted in opposition. It was never anything radical really on my part, just sympathy, which it took me a long time to understand. The political apostate characteristically imagines that they have seen down to the fetid core of their former beliefs, that there is some subterranean essence of sin to be retrieved and displayed to those who have not trodden forbidden halls. Generally this is a somewhat narcissistic gesture, people who at one time held the politics of Mitt Romney talking about Nazi phases and the like. I don’t want to do that either. I was never really formally at the party, just someone who wandered in through an open door, and in any case I left before the masks really came off.

One of the most insightful responses to my recent piece on the contemporary right or post-left posited that what really made the original neocons so to speak, was the de-conversion experience: the exit from Trotskyism leading to a mistrust of mass passions and social energies as merely destructive to the fragile core of civil society. This has tended to be the grounds on which I am most sympathetic to these original disillusioned postwar liberals, as my own political experience has over the years left me feeling mugged by reality as well. Of course in this case rather than in the celebrated series of Kronstadt’s ensconced in recollections from The God that Failed to Breaking Ranks, representatives from both sides of the aisle made off with my metaphorical wallet at times over the last decade, but that’s a story for another day.

1. There is a way in which the entire decade up to the 2016 presidential election perhaps could qualify as “early 2010s” and for better and worse that’s largely the methodology I’ve followed here.

2. Which is partly why I initially didn’t want to write this essay [and didn’t write the one it was meant to be the prologue to]. I don’t want to excavate ancient 4chan screenshots or laboriously trawl through Something Awful’s LF board to trace the origins of various modes of political hipsterdom.

3. Of course much of it was-the archetypal early example of an online controversy like that is the 2011 Penny Arcade “Dickwolves” incident, which was caused by a not especially funny rape joke- but the significant thing at the time was how sudden this all seemed at the time if you weren’t plugged directly into the specific veins of culture this stuff flowed out of.

4. I want to mention this especially because one of the primary (and from what I remember mostly valid) criticism’s of Angela Nagle’s Kill all Normies is that it’s a bit too credulous to the “the internet was at peace… And then the SJW’s attacked!” narrative what was then the alt and is probably now just the New New Right tells about itself. There was a far-right infiltration of 4chan going way back, and decisions made by sympathetic moderation seem to have worsened the situation. There absolutely were people who memed themselves into white supremacy to own the SJWs-I knew a few!- but there were also a core of true believers fanning the flames.

5. There have been attempts, most notably by Wesley Yang, to define this set of tendencies as one definite article, a left-corporate illiberal “Successor Ideology” but I’m highly skeptical that it can be reduced to one unifying tendency or ideology, at least when we’re talking about this early phase. There is something unifying later on, something that I like to call the “vulgar left” but that’s also not quite what people like Yang are referring to either.