Towards a Unified Theory of Posting™

Is it all just Posting? That is, can posting serve as a sort of political activity more important than venting impotent at your computer screen? Twitter swings wildly between viewing posting as almost a sort of activism and claiming that it’s nothing more than words shouted into an unfeeling void. Right around the height of the 2020 primary you could see both tendencies on full display. Bernie supporters were, broadly, convinced that they could influence the course of the election by bullying other candidates’ supporters online, and simultaneously found it ridiculous when Michael Bloomberg decided to draw attention to mean tweets about him during a presidential campaign. The more liberal wings of Twitter pivoted between scorning what they viewed as an entirely-online (and therefore trivial, insubstantial) personality cult around Sanders and, well… trying to make mean tweets about them by various idiots in Bernie’s staff into a mark against his politics. Shortly afterwards a candidate with almost no vocal online support casually steamrolled all of his opponents and everyone went on to assume (either in despair or in exultation) that the past four years of argument had meant nothing whatsoever.

Less than a year later an armed mob, led by cadres radicalized almost entirely online, breached the capitol building.

Ok, yes, no one is denying that the Internet has a frightening power to radicalize vulnerable groups of people. But that’s not the same as actually changing electoral or policy outcomes. Posting isn’t organizing. It isn’t building a base you can use to trigger a strike or win a primary or repeal a law. Social media may have facilitated the birth of a core of active white supremacists necessary for street fighting etc, but the vast majority of Republicans were radicalized by Fox News, not 4Chan. Twitter is really a sort of large message board. You can persuade a few people perhaps, meet some friends, scoop up vulnerable people into a cult, but otherwise it’s mostly just a form of perverse, sadomasochistic entertainment.

I am no longer certain of this. Obviously posting can never take up all the functions of mass politics. While it’s possible to motivate certain highly dedicated people to commit acts of terrorism or show up to protests, twitter can never replace older means like radio, tv or word of mouth. But there are other forms of politics, concentrated in elite circles. A Marxist emphasis on the masses can obscure the actual influence these forms have. Twitter on its own is terrible at shaping direct political outcomes which depend on mobilization, but at these other modes it’s quite effective. 

Let’s turn back somewhat. It goes without saying that mass politics as we know it is relatively new, and that certain segments of the premodern elite never fully accustomed themselves to it. To a variety of depressed right-wingers in the aftermath of the Second World War, (I’m speaking here of people like Pierre Krebs, Alain de Benoist, etc, all of whom are covered by Roger Griffin in his article “Between Metapolitics and Apolitea,” which this section is based on) this had been Fascism’s failure: not the monstrousness of its aims or deeds, or its colossal strategic arrogance, but that it had debased an otherwise noble far right by engaging in popular politics at all. All the abominations and disasters that followed stemmed, at least in part, from this mistake. 

Nonetheless the Fascist project had been the far right’s great attempt to claim the future, and its collapse entailed the collapse of any truly rightist high politics as well. For this disparate fascist residue, an entirely new mode of politics was necessary to keep the flame alive during the long godless night. (Given the influence of Evola on these circles, the demonic nature of liberalism and human rights is often believed in literal terms.) What they settled on is a concept generally called “Metapolitics.” The Nouvelle Droite, as they called themselves in France, led by Alain de Benoist, founded no political parties. They engaged in no street-fighting, refrained from mass rallies and imperial terrorism. Instead, they pursued a prolonged intellectual assault on the mainstream. 

They weren’t expecting to achieve substantive political goals, at least, not immediately. Rather, by the measured and somewhat covert promotion of various right-wing ideas, they hoped to influence the background within which academics, officials, and ultimately political elites worked. Through careful appropriation of left-wing jargon, a focus on general philosophical questions, and a stance of seeming openness masking a deep intellectual and organizational discipline, they might slowly shift the mainstream on certain pivotal issues (European integration, immigration, Europe’s relationship to the United States, and so forth) and, in time, permit the regeneration of European civilization. 

What interests us here isn’t the Nouvelle Droite’s goals, but their methods. While he would doubtless describe it in more obscured terms, the program de Benoist laid out is essentially one of constant, deliberately plotted socialization. Through a constant process of rubbing shoulders, exchanging academic bromides, and friendly “exchange of ideas,” the world the political elite swims in may be contaminated and the elite be made to ingest foreign bodies without being aware of it.

I can't claim to know how successful their strategy was. Probably not nearly as much as they hoped. Still, whenever I hear Francophones in the European bureaucracy use the term Civilization, I get a bit nervy. A survey of the Western European Far Right, which is, piece by piece, moving towards a reactionary project built around, and not against, pan-European institutions, also suggests something at least. But all this has other, much more immediate causes.

Anyhow the reason metapolitics is relevant is that Twitter is probably the ideal instrument for it. Every day on Twitter journalists, academics, staffers, politicians and apparently the entirety of Silicon Valley's upper crust engage with a semi-anonymous legion of losers, perverts and deranged teenagers on more or less equal terms. Twitter use is a process of constant socialization with a diverse online mob. Due to the addiction of our entire political class, from the lowliest activists to members of multiple national legislatures, to this bizarre website, ideas and notions which have almost no real-world cachet can very easily become common-sense to the people writing policy. 

This is what posting, as a political activity, actually is; accelerated metapolitics. Mostly unconsciously, though I suspect consciously in some right-wing circles, the goal of posting is to shift the elite's perception of the mainstream. Simply by constantly talking with them, unendingly, in an unceasing stream, you can get them to accept things they would otherwise never have considered. 

Let’s return to our initial example. During one of the usual internecine bouts of drama between the Urbanists and their usual opponents, Noah Smith, formerly of–why am I giving you his Linkedin, all of you know who he is–made some comment about how winning the dunk wars means nothing, because look at the BernieBros. But did they actually gain nothing? The processes forcing the median Democrat left of where they were 6 or 7 years ago are varied, but we’re talking specifically about the party elite here; its staffers, its activists, its media surrogates. These people have become almost uniformly more left in their manner of thinking, and in ways aligning with the stereotypical Berniebro’s prejudices. This is most obvious in the way that the party leadership views the press, the Republican party, and certain centrists in its ranks with a barely-disguised contempt.

It's hard to think of a more direct object lesson in shitposting as metapolitics than the Dark Brandon saga. Over the course of about a year a frustrated Leftist meme shimmied up the chain of accounts until it became near-official branding (brandoning?) for the Biden administration's turn towards strident, unashamed partisanship and policy belligerence. This shift can't be attributed solely to the meme, obviously. But when the official White House account makes a thread quote-tweeting a bunch of Republican politicians in the detached, mildly gleeful tone which is standard to the leftist shitposter, there's probably a causal relationship with staffers' Twitter use.

This is why I'm skeptical that "YIMBYs winning the dunk wars" won't matter. Jeopardy Sam driving a comedy writer insane isn't going to cause new apartment complexes to erupt out of the Embarcadero soil. Yet the fact remains that an ideology which has, let's face it, basically no real-world buy-in is being loudly discussed by journalists, legislators, and the staffers who actually write policy. 

These processes aren’t really deliberate or conscious. YIMBYs think of it as just trying to persuade people and your average weird left ‘Big Account’ doesn’t really disguise his views the way an ND acolyte would. Some try, to rather comical effect. This was the aim of the Marxist Edwin Ponte in cofounding Compact magazine with noted Papist Sohrab Ahmari. If I could reconstruct his thought process, he probably thought that the ‘Postliberal’ turn in American Conservatism, while poisonous on its own, was no more poisonous than conservatism generally. This was a rare opportunity to get more young, talented conservatives to take certain of Marxism’s assumptions as a given. He quickly found that he had gotten played. (He admits this openly.) Compact’s goal in bringing Marxists on was to get them to intuitively accept the view that social liberalism is merely another poison of the market. 

This raises an obvious point. The left has been playing the metapolitics game mostly unwittingly, despite its success. The right, or a corner of the right, is playing it more deliberately. Obviously the same processes are at work on the Right as on the Left. I’d like to sum this up with a tweet from a locked account. I won’t name the account, but those who know, know.

[Election Twitter Conservatives]

TheRacistPrognosticator: North Dakota is more working class than Rhode Island

TheModerateMapmaker: haha what do you mean by that?

48 year old staffer for James Lankford with a glowing eyes profile pic: new England Protestants arent Christian

\(the editing tool wont let me remove this\)

Obviously this dynamic, while funnier on the Right because career Rightists are fundamentally unserious and immoral people, is a mirror of the one found on the Center-Left and Left. Like on the Left, I think this happens more or less autonomously. Unlike on the Left, there are also figures on the Right doing it much more deliberately.

Sohrab Ahmari and indeed his entire clique are case in point. Neither he, nor any of them, ever say what they truly believe, though most of us know it anyway. The pseudo-marxist drabble is meant to create a slow drift in the academy towards social conservatism. The "postliberal" right's rhetoric aimed at fellow conservatives is every bit as dishonest. Ahmari, Vermeule, etc, want, or at least think they want, a Catholic absolute monarchy. But when they wanted to convince other Conservatives of something, they didn't start with "I want a Catholic monarchy." They spoke in vaguer and much more general terms, tailored to the biases of culture war-addict mainstream rightists. Vermeule has been remarkably frank about his overall program, which is to train conservatives in positions of power to love authoritarianism now, that they might learn to love his sacralized version of it a generation or two down the line. This set of tactics is more or less exactly the set Alain de Benoist and co. championed. Metapolitics is a game open to anyone, but the rightist origins of the idea makes their conscious adoption of it easier.

That these bizarre corners of the right have been successful at shaping the views of the conservative policy elite is freely admitted by the shaped elites themselves. Nate Hochman, a loathsome little gall wasp currently working for Ron DeSantis, got a bit of attention for himself a while ago by writing a piece about the influence of Costin Alamariu, alias "Bronze Age Pervert." Hochman noted, quite rightly, that his idiotic book was one which practically every junior Trump admin staffer has read. This is somewhat amusing because one of the core intellectual goals of the DeSantis-aligned firmament in which Hochman is a rising star is finding a secular justification for queerphobia, while Alamariu is, not to put too fine a point on it, gayer than a catgirl polycule orgy under a pride flag outside Stonewall. 

Regardless, Alamariu's shock tactics fit into a mold that should be familiar. Although less methodical than the Nouvelle Droite, he’s still operating in a consciously metapolitical way. John Ganz and Blake Smith wrote pieces outlining this in much more depth. I assume all of you have already read the Ganz piece, so I’ll keep this brief. In a nutshell, Alamariu’s Yale thesis presents what looks in retrospect like an intellectual justification of his online antics. Through such rhetorical shock tactics sensitive souls may be drawn to insight and an aristocratic sense of self, by which the education of a new masculine elite might begin. It’s probably not a stretch to say that every single Republican staffer who read his book has a twitter alt following him; a subterfuge which, in true Nouvelle Droite spirit, encourages them to feel like persecuted initiates.

All this more conscious manipulation still doesn’t operate in the conspiratorial way its practitioners desire. None of the postliberal crowd have anything approaching the intellectual vision or discipline of de Benoist’s gang. Their ideas may indeed be infiltrating the upper echelons of the Right, but this owes much more to the autonomous processes outlined earlier than their own smug attempts at manipulation. But those processes do stem in part from their efforts.

Hold on a second. Isn’t all this theorizing about “metapolitics” simply a version of the most banal, exhausting narrative about social media? Surely this is a wordy way of saying what every idiot already believes, that social media creates online echo chambers that further radicalization. 

Well, not really. The trends I’ve described are dramatically different from simply radicalized versions of established politics. The Right is much more obvious about it. Even as white American evangelicals radicalize in an increasingly insane direction, the elites managing the party they vote for are radicalizing in an entirely different one. It feels like they are, if anything, desperately trying to escape the gravitational pull of their own constituents’ aesthetic vulgarity. The media which “every junior Trump admin staffer reads” is all about trying to root the right in some sort of social tradition other than white American Evangelicalism. The soup they swim in is filled with visions of a much more dramatic sort of thrill than American Protestants can provide, whether that’s marching lockstep in a torchlit vigil, the bright colors and Latin chanting of the auto-da-fe, or raping one’s catamite before going out to ransack a village. This isn’t merely an aesthetic difference. While the conservative rank and file become more and more pathologically paranoid about conspiracies, the conservative elite have become more and more enamored of the idea of engaging in conspiracy themselves. 

On the Left, YIMBYism especially is a thing which simply would not have happened without the internet. It doesn’t actually emerge from a radicalized version of either American Liberalism or American Socialism, which the grim example of the Bay Area should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. Its prejudices (against cars, suburban homes, low property taxes) are almost perfectly calibrated to ensure it loses every single fight in any of the cities it might take root in. Yet it has very rapidly become something like unquestioned common sense among a plurality of twitter users on the center-left. 

Undoubtedly, this is because this group consists mostly of downwardly mobile bourgeoisie and intelligentsia who stand to benefit from it. This doesn’t make its spread on the internet into corners ranging from statue pfps to open Maoists any less remarkable. I can’t imagine its quick entrenchment in such hostile corners without this continuous process of socialization through posting. (Though, again, the fact that most of these people are probably also downwardly mobile bourgeoisie and intelligentsia doesn’t hurt. A Vulgar Marxist analysis doesn’t explain everything. It explains a hell of a lot, though.) 

YIMBYism’s spread into statue pfp territory brings up another interesting point. The overall effect of Twitter hasn’t been merely to pull elites in a variety of directions, but to pull the political elite as a whole somewhat left. No matter how humiliating I find every single Leftist attempt to make common cause with the Populist Right, it is true that the average twitter-addicted Republican staffer is more skeptical of free markets, low wages, and weak unions than he was ten years ago, and certainly much more than the chair of his local party is now. The overall momentum of the right on twitter is indeed further right, but the left has influenced them, and they’ve largely failed to have a corresponding influence on the left. (I am aware, of course, of the aforementioned humiliating attempts by leftists to make common cause with the right, all of which have made converts out of them and not the rightists. The Red Scare girls are basically conservative influencers now, for instance. But while they may have been easily enticed right, the left as a whole ultimately, if far too belatedly, spat them out.) I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. The language of twitter is saturated with right-wing memes. Obviously there’s a large right-wing presence on the internet generally. Internet-savvy right-wingers have repeatedly outplayed and humiliated the media’s attempt to cover them. Yet the direction which Twitter has dragged the political elite remains a few notches left. 

This is very visibly the actual reason Elon Musk bought the website. His failure to turn the tide is just as visible, and doesn’t need much commenting on here. I’ll simply note that all of the changes Elon wants to implement to convert Twitter from a metapolitics engine for the left to one for the right (though, as established, it is one for rightists too, it’s just that the scope of their influence beyond the conservative world is more limited) will simply break it as a metapolitics tool in general. It’s precisely the thing Elon most dislikes about the site, that it places powerful, important people and weirdos named garbage ape or bronze age pervert on an even footing, that makes Twitter such a potent influence tool. But others have made this point more eloquently than me, and made it on Twitter, which is where it’s best made, so I’ll leave off for now.

I think the idea of metapolitics makes most leftists somewhat uncomfortable. The Left is supposed to win by creating a material base for redistribution. It’s about mass movements, organizing, creating institutions that punch from the bottom up. It’s not supposed to gain ground by simply swaying elites to its positions. Such gains obviously can’t compensate for the absence of said mass movement. But, as I hope I’ve managed to lay out here, there have been actual gains. Possibly, the broad nature of social media makes it conducive to a sort of–forgive the pile-on of clichés–a sort of mass metapolitics, which the Left need not be as hostile to. But that’s just speculation.

It’s probably best that none of us consciously pursue a metapolitical approach on twitter. That’s no fun for me at least. I don’t want to be one eight-thousandth of a political operative, I just want to post. But I also think that posting isn’t really as vapid or hollow as it’s made out to be. We are engaging in a political activity which has a lot of cumulative weight, it’s just difficult for us to see that weight.