"At last, we're the memelords!"
Why the prestige media class can't let go of losing the 2016 online wars
It’s been less than a week since my last piece, which was a fairly lengthy one. I was all set out to enjoy that nice little time in the afterglow of a recently published piece before you have to think of and draft the next one. Then I saw this New York Magazine cover.
I’d already posted a Note1 last week about how these publications like Vox, The Atlantic, Slate, etc. were going to get us Trump again by ruining the good vibes that Kamala Harris had, against all odds, built up around herself during the absentee administration of Joe Biden. That was all I’d planned to say about it. A little half-jokey, half-serious thing. And if people wanted to celebrate, let them be a little cringeworthy. They had a right to be relieved to see a potential president who’s not Trump but who’s also not a mummy.
Plus, I really don’t want to write about politics because it’s bound to make idiots out of us all. Just two weeks ago, Trump came within a slight turn-of-head away from boom headshot and everyone declared the race over. Now, we consider that story as washed up as Klay Thompson. Politics: what in god’s name do we know?
But this piece is less about politics and more about the cultural interests that feed off of it. This deluge of celebrations of Kamala as the new meme queen is just more evidence that the prestige media class has never gotten over having been the lamest online faction of 2016. All those former all-stars: the most iron-fisted editors at their university newspapers and the funniest writers at their college humour mags. They were supposed to be the best of the best. So they—or at least, that culture—never got over being outdone and humbled by unwashed irony shitposters and 4chan basement dwellers.
There’s a piece from The New Yorker2 from 2016 that I’ll never forget in which the writer, Alexandra Schwartz, wistfully expresses confusion, not to mention a little frustration, at why the kids these days are so googly-eyed over Bernie instead of Hillary:
The college students and recent graduates who fervently support Bernie are enjoying their own moment of heaven, inevitably brief. I say this in spiritual solidarity. My own phase of very-heaven fell during the first campaign of Barack Obama, another candidate whose supporters touted him as entirely pure, only to eviscerate him when that premise disintegrated under the pressure of actual politics, and so it’s impossible not to see the fervor of young support for Bernie as a reaction, in some part, against Obama the Firebrand turned Obama the Moderate.
But Obama as a candidate may be as close as many of us will ever come to a twenty-something’s ideal politician—the sheer force of that fluid, academically honed intelligence! The nuance and honesty of the race speech! The dancing!—and a comparison of the two on that count yields something very odd. Bernie’s crankiness to Obama’s cool, his age to Obama’s freshness, his nagging to Obama’s rhetorical deftness, his hokiness to Obama’s humor, his gout to Obama’s jump shot: all make for a strangely conservative vision of a youth idol. (Then there’s the awkward fact of the most diverse generation of voters in the country’s history rallying behind another white guy.)
This piece has stuck with me because of how much I unfortunately agreed with it when I’d first read it. I was an Obama true believer for a very long time, so much so that through the laws of transference of political mojo, I eventually became a fervent Hillary supporter because I saw her election as the best way to safeguard and continue his legacy. And for that, I remember having the very uncomfortable feeling that I was severely out of touch with my own generation, let alone those below me.
It’s been quite a political journey for me since then, but for those who feel as if they still have a place in that greater ideological family or are part of metropolitan media class, 2024 must now be shaping up as a chance for a miraculous do-over. What opportunity there might’ve been in 2020 was ruined by the twin facts of Biden being too old-school and that buzzkill, COVID. But this time, the cool internet is supposedly embracing Kamala. and by extension, those who are still haunted by the 2016 online wars.
This is a class that’s obsessed with its own coolness, or lack thereof. In the past few years, we’ve been subjected to article after article about Dimes Square, which is supposed to be this hollow scene that is both morally and spiritually bankrupt, not to mention totally irrelevant. Yet these writers are clearly fixated on it with a kind of covetousness underneath their contempt.3 The angst was palpable, that despite (or more likely, because of) their credentials, they weren’t looked up to as as the cultural trendsetters they felt that they ought to have been.
A couple of years ago, I stumbled upon this intriguing essay, A Dirtbag Affair,4 which I only now realized was actually written by
, whose Substack I read. The underlying drama that birthed this piece is messy and since I’m pretty ignorant about it, I’ll refrain from summarizing it in case I’d just be stirring up old online literary gossip. But nevertheless, these two paragraphs are illuminating:This poem describes the libidinal conflict between the so-called “dirtbag left” and the “left-liberal identitarians” as it could have been understood precisely at that point in time—the “ambient irony” of the discourse that has shifted ever so subtly (but unmistakably) since that particular period in the immediate aftermath of The Trump Election. It is about desiring-recognition among the hip crowd of extremely online people, the recognition of niche internet celebrities—not the real celebs, but those known among the urban coastal left-wing millennials, the people, the virtual people, who produce the ideas of this generation’s cutting edge cultural content, whatever that is and whatever that may be. The title: “follow him”—is that a command?—we know this is about a recognition mediated by followers, by fans, a relation not between two immediate individuals but between two brands passing each other like ships in the turbulent waters of public opinion.
Noteworthy about this poem is that it comes from a remarkably mainstream literary voice. To talk about this poem is not to try a critical exegesis of dril tweets or the Elliot Rodger manifesto, where one must explain beyond any doubt why the “outsider text” should be treated “as a form of literature.” Right at the top of Zhang’s personal website: “WINNER of the Pen/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction WINNER of L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction FINALIST for NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award FINALIST for Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize FINALIST for The Believer Book Award NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • NPR • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Guardian • Esquire • New York • BuzzFeed • New York Magazine • Nylon”. Here we are dealing with capital-L Literature that is already recognized as such. This is what comes out of the Iowa Writers Workshop. This is the literature of the establishment, of the culture industry. Somehow this feels almost anachronistic to me, as if we (and by “we” I mean the people I presume will read this blog) have already wordlessly agreed that the contemporary literary avant-garde, or at least the stuff that is worthy of discussion, is occurring in the fragmented, marginal, liminal spaces of tweets, blogs, and shooter manifestos rather than the literary magazines, webmags, and so on. I think this tension animates this poem… but in the opposite direction.
What struck me was how even to the recipients of the most prestigious degrees, prizes, and publication credits, what they apparently really craved was approval from that “hip crowd of extremely online people.” And so we see the same behavior from all these esteemed publications. Their exuberance is less about liberation from a potential Trump Administration II and more about the fact that, finally, the meme kids have invited them to the party.
Hopefully, this phase will pass and this manic coconut era will quickly be forgotten, its only impact having been to briefly annoy people like me. Small price to pay. But I do see a danger, as Freddie deBoer noted in his piece about the often unaligned interests between media and politics5:
But Hess is not writing a piece about winning an election; she’s writing a piece about winning the game of social positioning among online-poisoned educated Millennials, which is the only game many people in the media seem willing to play - the game of trying to impress each other.
Conservatives do it too. Recently, some guy named Alec Lace went on a FOX Business show to call Kamala the “original hawk tuah girl.”6 An insane thing to say, especially if you genuinely want to improve Trump’s chances of winning. But Lace is a podcaster. He may want Trump to win, but he wants to be a media star even more. And you don’t become a star these days without being some combination of outrageous, spiteful, and/or inflammatory.
Even at the height of the Trump assassination frenzy, I never felt that the election was over. For all their histrionics and invocations of infamous communist dictators, MAGAs don’t really fear liberals as stone-cold killers. However, they do fear and loathe liberals as bureaucrats, brainwashers, scolds, cultural snobs, perverts, sneaky lawyers, pedophiles, media controllers etc. But not action-movie murderers (they’d begrudgingly respect liberals more if they did). Doing this Hillaryist maximal pop-cultural irritation through Kamala is more likely to rile up MAGA nation than even an attempt on the life of their champion (especially when the would-be assassin has been revealed as a weirdo nutjob).
To truly turn back the clock, Broad City should make a comeback with Kamala as a special guest. They’ll be trying to atone for that jarring disaster that was the Hillary guest appearance all those years ago. The episode will be about Abbi going on a date with a Weird guy. That’ll surely inspire a nation.
Note from 7/23/2024: “These publications are gonna get us Trump again”
Should Millennials Get Over Bernie Sanders? | The New Yorker
A Dirtbag Affair by | mcrumps blog
That's it. After years of hearing "the left can't meme" (they consider themselves left, natch) they are finally having their moment. Here's something though: if we can easily forget an assassination attempt, how much quicker an astroturf meme campaign.
I still feel she might win, but I feel this has more to do with 3 things: JD Vance getting dunked on daily; RFK siphoning MAGA votes; Trump truly not being the same since Butler. Mean and vindictive, yes, but his sharpness has dropped. Understandably, but that was his calling card.
I don't know -- my take is that these memes and commentary on the memes and commentary on the commentary on the memes (and so on) aren't likely to do much of anything other than generate clicks and ad revenue. They exist in a vacuum, and won't win the election or lose it. They also aren't evidence that Kamala's team is screwing up, unless someone (like FDB) thinks that memes are all she's doing. But FDB only thinks that because he's way too internet brained (in that all is his writing is just commentary on commentary).
If Kamala actually was just running for "queen of the internet" or whatever FDB claimed, she wouldn't have wrapped up the nomination so quickly and decisively. She did that by gaining real influence and making phone calls, not memes.
In other words -- memes happen, they always will. But don't take that to be evidence of anything else.