The Post-Ironic Right

Or: A Response to Hanania

[epistemic status: this is complete nonsense that I had fun writing]

I told

Richard Hanania

I’d briefly write about how he uses X (twitter). Initially I was going to send this to him by DM, but I opted for the less heterosexual approach. In that thread I said he’s post-modern and sort of Straussian, but I’m not sure I stand by that, at least not entirely. I actually think Richard’s writing is more post-ironic, but first let’s talk briefly about the vibe in our political discourse.

We live in a sardonic age: politically everything seems to be filled with a cynical irony and a defeatist tone. Even in victory the celebrations are few, and despair quickly finds a way to seep back into the discourse. I thought about googling “New Yorker comic strip with two depressed women making political comments,” but what’s the point? You’ve already seen them weekly. Just, you know, conjure one up in your head. Maybe one women is taking anti-depressants and saying like “election season?” I don’t know.

Even still, at least the New Yorker attempts some form of wit within its high-iq neuroticism. The right version of that has gone entirely off the rails. Right-wing discourse is at its best sardonic, since that might suggest there is some amount of wit. Mainly it’s now weird deranged Trumpslop. In fact, the only high-iq right leaning commentary I’m exposed to these days is in a X.com group chat for film reviews, with unusually smart mostly tech adjacent anon posters. The tendrils of power on the left still connect through to the elites, but who are the elites on the right?

I’m not even posting this tweet because I’m appalled at the racism, although it’s unusually low-brow. Keep in mind Laura Loomer was with Trump on the plane to his debate, and was advising him.

Anyway, let’s return to Richard’s posting style. What is post-irony? It is the countervailing force of our time. Post-irony is a form of sincerity that is a reaction to the dismissive attitude of the ironist. Yet it’s not pure sincerity either, as the post-ironist leaves the reader guessing if they are actually taking something absurd seriously, or if they are intending to be ironic.

It’s one thing to be sincere from the start, but few things are less cool. Actually caring about things, and speaking about it honestly and from the heart will have people calling you a faggot online in short-order. Weirdly enough, from both left and right very-online posters these days. If you’re only an ironic poster though, then how do you cut through the fact that everyone is exactly like you online? The most popular approach I see now is to ramp up the racism to 10/10, or to become increasingly cruel.

Richard’s tweets are largely a reaction against this. This one below is particularly great. He is being sincere, but in a way that’s only funny due to his history of being ironic. So the whole thing is kind of unclear, and that’s what makes it funny (thatsthejoke.jpg). In some sense what he writes is true, the authoritarian tendencies to suppress this type of thing basically always make those countries worse to live in. At the same time, you can tell this does probably disgust Richard. But what are you going to do about it, huh? Move to Russia? Be real.

This can also be seen as a response to the increasingly unhinged right-wing posters with hundreds of thousands of followers who for a while seemed huge on Putin, but recently seem to be pivoting to Hitler (as I wrote about here). In fact, whatever you think of the Elon’s takeover, I think it has killed a lot of the Straussian aspects of the site. You know, now that people just keep tweeting slurs.

The first order effect of Straussianism on Twitter was to send a lot of more base racism offsite, and for the remaining posters it was necessary to be… thoughtful in how they wrote and communicated their thoughts.

This results in a second-order effect, which is that the need for Straussian posting acts as a filter to only allow more intelligent conversations. As an example, I watched My Own Private Idaho (1991) a couple weeks ago with Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, who play two gay homeless prostitutes in Portland. It’s a great film. It also couldn’t be made well today without being heavy-handed and moralizing, as these topics are no longer taboo. Making art for the mainstream is almost always terrible. Yet in 1991 it was not shown in many theaters due to its content, and the directors had to use clever devices both in the shots themselves as well as the writing, to convey their artistic message.

In many ways, Hanania is making his own version of a film about gay homeless prostitutes. But instead of a film, they’re tweets. And instead of it being about gay homeless prostitutes, it’s social commentary.

For example, has there ever been a better tweet than this one? This is an anodyne tweet, not in reality but in substance. It’s identifying a specific group of people, something we constantly do, and saying something good about them. It also flags the weird reactive obsession with specific speech norms regarding race in America. It’s provocative despite being textually boring and reading like a children’s book.

Yet we could even view this as itself being the post-ironic Straussian form of anti-racism. Whereas plain anti-racism is heavy handed with mainstream moralization. The post-ironic form is plain in its sincerity, yet the Straussian framing forces the reader to examine the sub-text for the author’s true beliefs. Upon gazing into the sub-text though, all we see is our own reaction. Does our reaction serve the purposes of racial harmony? Does policing boring language bring us closer to any sort of utopia? No? Hanania, you son of a bitch, you did it again.

The reality is a correct right-wing movement in America needs to be built around our uniquely powerful economic engine. American invention is the primary driver of human flourishing, both present and future, for our entire world. Which is what I believe, and what Richard believes, I think. Everything else is fluff. The larger picture of what Hanania is doing here is presenting an alternative for how to be “right-wing troll.” One that actually tries to reshape the right into something worth fighting for, rather than a headless embarrassment that at best offers refuge from the excesses of the left.