Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Zero Books (Winchester, UK and Washington D.C, 2017) 120 pp., $16.95.

Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies is a felicitously-written account of the contemporary online culture wars of both left and right. The ease of reading Kill All Normies certainly doesn't mean Nagle's short book is not serious; on the contrary, it is both in-depth reportage and a thorough, analytical study of not only contemporary online culture but of politics as culture wars and the nature of cultural transgression, expressed pithily yet fully with proper attribution, despite the absence of footnotes. Indeed, a good part of Nagle's ability as both writer and researcher is her ability to form a complete documented thesis in one paragraph! She appropriately and relevantly references those she has drawn upon, while also providing a much-needed, "call-out" (to use a widespread online argot) of Postmodernist feminist philosopher Judith Butler (70, 84-5). Not, as so much left online blaming and shaming does, for alleged personal failures and moral transgressions-but for ill-conceived ideas. A master critique as well as an excellent documentary of contemporary phenomena, Angela Nagle's slim book succeeds both as relevant journalism and well-formed analysis that give it enduring value.

Key to understanding Nagle’s book is her thesis that cultural and moral transgression of “mainstream” norms is not at all necessarily progressive, liberating, and automatically of the left. If anything, as Nagle repeatedly notes and thoroughly documents, the alt-right, that snarky online army of pro-Trump enthusiasts, and its boosterist near relatives, the alt-light, or “more respectable” supporters of the alt-right such as Breitbart, its former editor and Trump advisor Steve Bannon, speakers and luminaries such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, have excelled in cultural and moral transgressiveness, undermining left utopian visions of a decentralized people’s democratic Internet space with a trove of nihilistic, cruel, white nationalist, anti-Semitic, notably transphobic as well as generally misogynistic, memes and posts, a transgressiveness that freely partakes of a certain part of Internet culture’s allowance of anonymous, unmoderated posts (4chan, for instance, an open forum for the alt-right). In this, the deliberately transgressive styles and content of the notorious sexual libertine Marquis De Sade and the Nineteenth Century German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche have been adopted, most of all, Nietzsche’s concept of the “Superman,” that person so superior he need take no heed of the mere “conventions” of the benighted, domesticated masses—though without the erudite literacy of either.

As Nagle pointedly notes, the online culture of the alt-right, far from being neoconservative (a position, and group of thinkers, vigorously mocked by the alt-right as “cuckservatives,” from “cuckold”), is instead “a pretty dramatic departure from the kind of churchgoing, upstanding, button-down, family values conservative.” (56-7) This is because, as is implicit and explicit in Nagle, in the culture wars from the 1960s on not only did the left win them, it won them so decisively that what was once troublesome counterculture became thoroughly “mainstream,” especially in the media, in academia, and on college campuses. (But as Nagle also rightly notes, the triumph of economic neoliberalism sidling beside cultural tolerance and liberalism means that “the right won the economic war and the left won the culture war.”) (57) But the rise of transgressive, openly mocking and offensive, cruel, nihilistic and decidedly non-“mainstream” cultural expressions on the alt-right, something the 1960s counterculture started but which was effectively co-opted by its Nietzschean opposite in the mid-2010s, causes Nagle to properly note early on: “The ease with which this broader alt-right and alt-light milieu can use transgressive styles today shows how superficial and historically accidental it was that it ended up being in any way associated with the socialist left.” (29) Also: “The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right.” (39)

Nagle justly calls out the online culture of the left for significant political and cultural drawbacks as well: one whose stuffiness, moralizing, calling-out for lack of virtue anyone on the broad left seen as not upholding properly-PC moral and ideological codes, and extreme subjectivity, especially as expressed in category-exclusionary “identity politics,” is both driving especially the impressionable young to the right reactively, as well as undermining serious left politics, ideas and programs; not to mention left focus on broad-based economic appeals. Thus does online left culture undermine the left itself, notably the programmatic, issues-based left that understands basic economics most associated with Bernie Sanders, and one with which Nagle herself implicitly identifies with. But she is absolutely correct in this, though not, of course, “politically correct” by left online standards. Indeed, the same cruelty and nihilism that is so easily found on the alt-right is found on the left as well, as Nagle points out in a very notable way (117): the glee in which the January 2017 suicide of Marxist online cultural critic Mark Fisher was greeted, his suicide prompted by the vicious reaction to his erudite critique of that culture published in the British North Star online magazine, “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” “Dancing on his grave,” as Nagle puts it (117), a moral nihilism we of the thoughtful left would associate more with fascism than with leftism, causes Nagle to properly take note of and conclude, also all on 117, “…the anti-intellectual, unhinged culture of group hysteria that gripped the cultural left in the years preceding reactive rise of the new far right online…There is no question but that the embarrassing and toxic online politics represented by this version of the left, which has been so destructive and inhumane, has made the left a laughing stock for a whole new generation.” And this despite the popularity of Bernie Sanders’s explicitly democratic socialist Presidential campaign also among members of this “whole new generation”! Yes, we of the left can often be the left’s, and broader left mass appeal’s, own worst enemy. All of which makes Nagle’s small but potent book a must-read, if only as a cautionary tale.

George Fish
socialist writer and poet
georgefish666@yahoo.com