“Why would you say that name!” he screams.

“What? Humperdinck!?” she shrieks back, gleefully.

One gets the sense that these two do this a lot — her Humperdincking, him screaming, which only makes her Humperdinck harder. That this problem has two obvious solutions only illuminates its intractability. Valerie could stop saying the name, but then again, Max could also choose not to react to its every utterance as if he’s been electrocuted. That neither of them are making different choices suggests that something about this dynamic serves them both.

I thought of this scene when the first “Your body, my choice” post from a male Trump voter skittered insect-like across my timeline in the wake of the election — closely followed by a handful of “My body, his choice” remixes by savvy OnlyFans models hoping to cash in on the moment. This crude riff on the feminist war cry that once defined the battle for abortion rights was akin to an inaugural shout of “Humperdinck!”, designed explicitly to trigger a meltdown among liberals. And lo: if you do an internet search for the phrase now, around 5% of the results are of people posting it and 95% are critics freaking out in response. “Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers,” The Guardian announced, while CNN warned: “Attacks on women surge on social media following election.” And The New Yorker, for whom the phrase is a harbinger of a “coming era of gender regression”, described it as “A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right.”

The phrase “irony-poisoned” in that last headline — which graces an essay by Jia Tolentino — struck me as an especially savvy bit of rhetoric. It functions as a preemptive strike against the obvious counterpoint to all this panic. Namely: “your body my choice” is a repulsive thing to say, but also the furthest thing from a legitimate threat.

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The men behind these posts are not rapists-in-waiting, announcing their intent to commit sexual violence; they are trolls, gleefully trolling away in the hope of making people Mad Online. But if Tolentino knows this is bait (and she clearly does), she nevertheless cannot help taking it, hook, line, and sinker. The piece is imbued with a near-religious sense of horror at seeing the feminist catechism of “my body my choice” twisted by nonbelievers into something unfathomably malignant. This is beyond distasteful; it is heretical. And unlike the provocations in which the millennial Left once delighted, back in the days when one measly crucifix soaked in urine could trigger a weeks-long meltdown among religious conservatives, this little joke (Tolentino argues) is simply not funny.

It is, of course, difficult to have a sense of humour about the topics one takes most seriously, even for those who generally enjoy making hamburgers of other people’s sacred cows. I was recently reminded of the 1999 Onion article titled, “That’s not funny, my brother died that way,” in which an aggrieved writer takes issue with a scene in the Police Academy movie where a motorcyclist gets his head stuck in a horse’s rear end. (“His life-insurance policy didn’t cover equine-anal suffocations. So now you might understand why I don’t think it’s funny to see that sort of thing played for laughs.”) That this essay is, in itself, funny, speaks to the unfortunate truth that also animates the “your body my choice” brand of trolling: the we-are-not-amused disapproval of another person can be pretty funny, especially when that person has been attempting to scold you into compliance with their preferred political agenda for years on end. It is no coincidence that this anti-feminist edgelording comes hard on the heels of a campaign cycle in which one side’s rhetoric was almost pathologically alienating to men: the more shrill the calls for conformity, the more naughty fun there is to be had in refusing to read the room.

This was easy enough for liberals to understand when we were the architects of an intentionally edgy counter-culture, whose pleasures derived in no small part from making self-serious moral authoritarians clutch their pearls and scream. Punk rock and heavy metal, Marilyn Manson and Damien Hirst, Saturday Night Live and South Park: if we loved these things on their own merits, we loved equally as much how they scandalised the prudes. Indeed, the Left’s conception of itself as the scrappy underdog poking fun at The Man was powerful enough that a decisive victory in the culture wars hardly put a dent in it; even after the legalisation of gay marriage, the passage of the Hate Crimes Act, and the annual rainbowification of every American city during Pride Month, there’s just no joy quite as potent as triggering the cons. That memes invariably provoke outraged reactions from people who don’t (or won’t) get the joke is the entire point. What can we say? You’re just so funny when you’re mad.

Alas, we are now discovering the same unfortunate truth as generations of edgelords before us: that you either die a provocateur, or live long enough to see yourself become the Church Lady.

“Posting now creates political reality”, Tolentino writes, by way of insisting on taking dead seriously what the “your body my choice” memesters evidently find hilarious. “There are parents all over social media reporting that their kids are hearing the phrase from boys at school. A therapist at a university in the Midwest told me that a student she works with had gone to a frat party where one man had yelled it, and that the people around him hadn’t called him out.”

Perhaps, needless to say, I remain unconvinced that the inane (and yes, often intentionally offensive) banter of teenage boys represents “political reality”, let alone a material threat — but convincing oneself otherwise is both a hallmark and privilege of middle age, and one you will pry from our cold dead hands. The therapist who openly frets that a frat boy yelled bad words at a party without being called out is clearly resonating at the same emotional pitch as the teacher who, circa 1994, made a panicked call to my parents after I doodled a pentagram in the margin of a biology test. Then, as now, the suggestion that she might be overreacting only exacerbated her outrage. What did they mean, I was probably just joking around? Satanism was no laughing matter!

If there’s one big difference between the moral majoritarians of decades past and the social justice warriors of the digital age, it’s that the former group was unapologetic in their authoritarianism. Today’s progressive scolds don’t like to think of themselves as such; instead, they finger-wag with one hand while still clinging to the mantle of the countercultural cool kid with the other. At one point in the essay, Tolentino describes being unsettled by the appearance of a “VOTE RED… LOL” graffiti in her deep blue Brooklyn neighbourhood; it is, she says, “one more reminder that we are typically closer to people who find us laughable and repulsive than we think”. It’s a new riff on that churlish Pauline Kael quip about the 1972 election — “I don’t know how Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him” — in this case reinforced by years of near-total Left-wing hegemony in America’s culture-making institutions, from media to museums to Hollywood and beyond. Amid a sea of narratives that only ever validate her place among the heroes on the right side of history, of course a Brooklyn-dwelling New Yorker columnist is stunned to realise that some of her neighbours think she’s ridiculous — to the point where she can’t conceive of it without suggesting that their mockery must mean they’ve been literally poisoned. Her Trump-voting neighbours, meanwhile, have surely never not known what she thinks of them.

But for as long as the Left still prefers to think of itself as powerless and persecuted by conservative oppressors, the insouciant trolling of Trumpian youths must be interpreted as something sinister and serious. As the meme goes, are we out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong… or aspiring rapists, as the case may be.

The irony — of the literary rather than poisonous variety — is that “your body my choice”, like any offensive joke, only achieved its current foothold in the discourse through amplification by the people who take it too seriously.

And could this stop? Sure, if somebody just blinks first. But just as with the bickering Max and Valerie, the fact that neither party is making different choices suggests that the current dynamic serves them both. In this case, the peacocking insensitivity of the MAGA bro fuels not just outraged op-eds by feminist media critics, but endless, tearful TikTok videos by the women of Gen Z, which in turn fuels more mockery, and in turn, still more tears. It’s too late, now: “Your body my choice”; has achieved velocity from the viral outrage cycle and into the echelons of the attention economy, where it will live on indefinitely in a toxic, self-sustaining symbiosis with its equally attention-seeking haters… at least until someday, inevitably, it is replaced by something even worse.

Poland’s cultural renaissance couldn’t have started under grimmer circumstances. Back in 2022, when war came to Ukraine, Warsaw quickly established itself as a key player in the broader Nato network. Yet amid the turmoil on Poland’s eastern border, and its robust support for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country’s broader image was shifting too. Already, it had successfully emerged from Eastern European obscurity and taken on various associations in the Western mind, from a bulwark of Catholic traditionalism to an alternative destination for American tourists who want to experience “Europe” without the crowds or Parisians. 

Yet it’s online that Poland has truly found a new life in mainstream culture, where vodka-soaked stereotypes are falling away. Among some obscure circles, that’s been true for years: starting in the 2000s, Polish users on forums like 4chan pioneered memes like Polandball and Wojak, the “feels guy” that continues to dominate the internet today. Starting in 2007, meanwhile, The Witcher series of video games won the hearts of players everywhere, and was later adapted into a Netflix series. 

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Yet while these aspects of Poland’s digital patrimony have surely had a lasting impact among young online men, their broader reach was limited. No less important, their connection to Poland itself was often lost along the way: how many people watching Henry Cavill slay monsters really knew his character had been invented by a novelist from Łódź? In practice, that meant Poland long punched below its weight as a driver of internet culture, despite being Europe’s fifth most populous country, its sixth largest economy, and a leader in the use of digital services.

But as Poland’s political star soared, the country has secured a new and unlikely online audience: Gen Z. This odd-ball surge in enthusiasm was partly down to luck. It all started in November 2022, when an errant missile crashed in an eastern Polish field. After realising the incident was a mistake, rather than the precursor to a Russian invasion, the media quickly moved on. But, remarkably, the episode coincided with the release of Poland, a hit song by rapper Lil Yachty. 

Whether due to the fortunate timing, or anyway thanks to the absurdism of a codeine-fueled hip hop anthem, the track went viral. Despite having little to do with Poland itself, meanwhile, the song’s music video, which currently has 33 million views on YouTube, also happens to feature Polish flags flying beneath the medieval walls of Kraków. Soon enough, Mateusz Morawiecki, the country’s then prime minister, had invited Lil Yachty to explore Poland for real. Last year, the rapper ended up performing the song six times at the Open’er Festival in the northern city of Gdynia.

This past summer, Poland found itself in the spotlight again, when notorious YouTuber and streamer IShowSpeed visited the country while on a transatlantic tour. He was impressed, declaring it “low-key the best country in Europe.” That was swiftly followed by Quavo, another rapper who posted a video of himself stopping in a Polish bakery. Amid the doughnuts and animal-shaped cookies, the clip garnered over two million views on Instagram. 

Taken together, Poland had now come to the attention of Gen Z, whose memes mocking IShowSpeed run-ins with the intricacies of the Polish language have spread like wildfire. In contrast to Poland’s rather obscure online presence over previous years, these new bits of micro-culture have had tangible effects in the offline world: I soon found myself discussing Polish memes at actual parties with real people. I’m apparently not alone. Sales of a Polish bottled water brand, and accidental star of one famous meme, have apparently risen since IShowSpeed’s visit.

What stands out about the internet’s encounters with Poland over the last two years is a sense that netizens experience the country as it exists. That’s a change from the old historical cliches, of winged hussars and ugly apartment blocks, that have plagued its image for decades. Just as importantly, Poland is today seen as a standard-bearer for that “other” Europe, one online Americans are rarely exposed to. In internet narratives about Poland’s place in Europe and the world, Warsaw and Wrocław are increasingly lionised, in contrast to the over-saturated western side of the continent. Not unrelated, some recent online praise for Poland carries with it the whiff of nativism, with the country lauded for its safety, cleanliness, and supposed preservation of a “pure” and homogeneous European culture — an inaccurate stereotype that’s anyway been dampened by the defeat of the Right-wing Law and Justice Party in last year’s elections.

Yet the most enduring exhibit of Poland’s online influence aren’t fashy Instagram reels about Polish cities “free” of migrants, but rather an off-beat meme. As far back as 2012, Polish social media users started posting videos of themselves following beavers, usually at night, and exclaiming “Kurwa bóbr!” — which roughly translates to “Fuck, a beaver!” Despite an illustrious history in Polish online communities, the meme shot to wider fame in 2023, when a video of such an encounter gained 30 million views on TikTok.

While the phrases foreigners associate with Italy or France are friendly greetings, it’s been Poland’s destiny to become closely associated with a swear word. And though kurwa is used right across Central and Eastern Europe, it’s safe to say Poles have monopolised the term’s brand. As beaver memes spread across the internet, so too did the popularity of kurwa, which skyrocketed on both sides of the Atlantic from the end of last year. 

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The beaver meme phenomenon, and the associated use of kurwa, has become as intimately connected to Poland online, just as the faux pas of breaking spaghetti has to Italy and the supposed blandness of the food has to Britain. Underneath the meme’s absurdity lies an uncompromising honesty that’s unequivocally Polish, even as it hints, paradoxically, at the country’s newly robust presence on the geopolitical stage.

What all this means for Poland’s future cultural impact is unclear. But what’s indisputable is that as its voice becomes increasingly vital to European politics, the country’s online clout will only grow. And if its appeal at this phase remains quirky and irreverent, the power of the Polish brand will, I think, eventually translate to cultural heft on a par with that of its famous western neighbours. Offline, the stage has already been set for such a transformation. Polish cuisine, long enjoying a patronising reputation as comfort food, lately received official recognition when a local soup was named the second best on earth.

Alongside its famous tradition of video game development, Polish cinema has also been praised by Hollywood filmmakers, even as Poles have scooped up Nobel Prizes as recently as 2018. Of course, beaver memes may seem like a long way from such highbrow engines of the country’s soft power. But in our terminally online world, one sphere drives the other. Though Poles might cringe at the thought, then, a day is coming when kurwa bóbr is as widely understood as bonjour, danke and gracias. 

The interview went viral in 2012. And the final line, shortly after it was uttered, became culturally ubiquitous, particularly on social media where it proliferated as a reaction GIF — it was also, crucially, the subject of a fierce debate about whether its popularity was racist. Did we love Sweet Brown for her story and her screen presence, or was it because she was a walking, talking stereotype of the archetypal sassy black woman?

That debate has waxed, waned and evolved over the years, but the one thing it stubbornly refuses to do is die. Five years after Sweet Brown’s original interview, it was given new weight with the coining of a phrase. In a Teen Vogue essay, Lauren Michele Jackson described the act of non-black people using reaction GIFs featuring black Americans as “digital blackface”. And so, a trend was born: The New York Times weighed in, followed by The Guardian, followed by the mommy bloggers and the service journalists. Just when it seemed like the internet had squeezed the concept dry, it returned again, last weekend, in the form of a clickbaity banner on the front page of CNN: “What’s ‘digital blackface’? And why is it wrong when White people use it?”

For those who remember this argument in its original iteration, the immediate reaction is probably best encapsulated by a meme from the pre-social internet — not one of the ones that allegedly constitutes digital blackface, but the one from Mean Girls, in which an enraged Regina George hisses: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” We do not need to do this again. This argument was transparent, racebaiting, outrage fodder even when it was new; now, it is all of that and tired.

If anything, the notion that, as CNN’s John Blake insists, employing reaction GIFs featuring black people represents “one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism” is illustrative of just how badly the discourse is foundering in the wake of the massive racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. All that momentum, all that money, all those marches and protests and pleas for real change end up being squandered again and again on luxury beliefs: galaxy-brained takes that circulate like wildfire among members of the coastal media class while being utterly bewildering to any normal person. The absurdity of Blake’s argument seems obvious even for those who think America is a long way from being a post-racial paradise. This is a country where black citizens remain underrepresented in key positions of power, and disproportionately suffer from poverty and violence. How terminally online must one be to think that the “most insidious” form of racism comes in the form of some 60-year-old Facebook grandma in Des Moines who feels that her emotions are best represented by a GIF of Stanley from The Office rolling his eyes?

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But then, one gets the sense that no one does think this. Not even the people who are earning a living — or at least, a few hundred freelance dollars a pop — by arguing as much. Every writer who tackles this topic has dutifully attempted to connect the mimetic phenomenon of reaction GIFs to the atrocious (and happily defunct) practice of minstrel shows featuring performers in actual blackface. But given the integrated state of contemporary society, and the substantive difference between posting a video of a black cultural icon and doing a mocking impression of one yourself, that’s a tough argument to sell.

Often, those recycling it don’t even seem to be trying. Women’s Health claims that using the wrong reaction GIFs isn’t just upstream from minstrelsy, but also from murder: “[As] it has been proven throughout U.S. history, a Black man can be killed for demonstrating aggression, confusion, or even indifference. Popular GIFs of Kanye West looking serious, Nick Young with question marks around his face, and others, show Black men expressing themselves which, while technically be harmless [sic], can oftentimes be fatal.”

This isn’t just unpersuasive; it’s practically incoherent. Does anyone believe this argument? Does anyone even believe that the writer believed it? The whole enterprise feels so convictionless, more like a simulation of an opinion than the real thing.

If anything, the concept of “digital blackface” reads like an attempt to meme more racism into existence by claiming that it’s already everywhere. Like the too-credulous coverage of outrageous hate crimes that turn out to be hoaxes, stories about the hidden racism of reaction GIFs suggest the need for constant vigilance, which in turn fuels perpetual mistrust. The overarching narrative, as I wrote last year, is one of a deep and roiling river of racial conflict running beneath the surface of American society. The moral of the story is that we can only ever relate to each other through the lens of power, privilege, resentment, and loathing — that, as Robin DiAngelo instructs, there can be no question of racism’s presence in any given interaction, only of how the racism manifests.

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It’s a pessimistic and profoundly superstitious mode of thinking — racism, the devil lurking in every room — and one that has spawned a particularly fervent adherence among millennial white women, for whom self-help and self-hatred have always been inextricably intertwined. Blake’s essay quotes a young woman named Elizabeth Halford who narrates her use of reaction GIFs with the ecstasy of the confessing sinner: “I’ve appropriated Black trauma as punchlines and peeled their faces off to put on my own and say what I can’t say, to make you laugh, or just because it went viral.”

It’s hard to imagine who or what is served by this confession, apart from Halford’s masochism. It is also hard to imagine that any GIF could represent a greater affront to black people than the idea that selecting said GIF is akin to peeling their faces off.

But more discouraging than the pessimism (and bizarre Hannibal Lecter comparisons) inherent to this worldview is its racism — and not the insidious, subtle kind. The original Teen Vogue essay introducing the concept of digital blackface bemoaned that “black reaction GIFs have become so widespread that they’ve practically become synonymous with just reaction GIFs”, as if the ubiquitous presence of black people in American culture is a bad thing.

Blake’s CNN piece calls out specific, seminal memes: an outraged Tyra Banks on America’s Next Top Model shouting, “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”, or Michael Jordan crying at his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Maybe these are “black reaction GIFs”, in that they are reaction GIFs featuring black people. But surely what they capture is something bigger. These are American celebrities. This is American culture.

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But lately, an impulse has found a regrettable level of validation in American media, academia, and cultural institutions — an impulse to fracture and resegregate society along racial lines. American colleges hold exclusive, separate graduation ceremonies that segregate students by racial background. Lizzo, a multiple Grammy winner and one of the most famous musicians in the country, is forced to defend herself against allegations that her music is too popular among white people. An influencer goes viral for urging white moviegoers to stay away from the new Black Panther movie. Media institutions fret over race-matching the authors of book, theatre, and film reviews to the content they’re critiquing.

All of this is great, of course, if you have an economic stake in keeping Americans at each other’s throats. But for the rest of us, it only fuels polarisation and mistrust. The most incisive response to the latest “digital blackface” article came from Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, who tweeted: “This stupid article is important in only one way: it illustrates that, as actual racism continues to decline, new varieties will simply be invented/’promoted’ and used to make us fight one another.”

In a diverse, thriving, integrated society that includes people of multivariate backgrounds, of course non-black citizens are going to engage with, appreciate, and relate to cultural products created by their black countrymen — and vice versa. Not only could it not be otherwise — culture, in our highly mimetic species, has long proven itself impossible to contain — but isn’t it what we want? The popularity of these GIFs stems from the fact that they represent events, emotions, and cultural touch points that millions of people recognise and relate to; in many cases, they speak to something not just specifically American but deeply human. That something like the Crying Jordan meme has become a global visual shorthand for conveying our feelings — the fact that people of every age, shape, colour and creed feel represented by the raw emotion captured there — should be seen as a triumph of common humanity over identity category. It is, at the population level, exactly what an inclusive society should strive for.

In this context, it seems not just absurd but grotesque for our national news media to argue that we should wall off these memes from the American mainstream, or make it so fraught for non-black people to engage with them that it becomes effectively taboo. The idea that black culture, whether it’s memes or music or slang or style, needs to be kept separate for its own protection is indistinguishable in practice from the racist ghettoisation that once sidelined black artists and athletes from the mainstream, lest they pollute the spaces where white people gathered. At its root is the notion that black culture is not American culture, that black people are somehow other. And, well, you know, there’s a word (and a GIF) for that.

That, at least, is the impression given by discussion about the New Right, kicked up by two recent pieces in left-of-centre magazines. The first, a dispatch from last November’s National Conservatism conference by David Brooks, paints a dark portrait of a radicalised and paranoid young conservative movement dominated by the “psychology of threat and menace”. The second, by Sam Adler-Bell in The New Republic, is a mostly sympathetic, if somewhat bemused, profile of some of the Gen Z conservative intellectuals who see themselves as “counterrevolutionists”.

How seriously should we be taking this “threat”? Given that the New Right consists of  people who read anti-democratic writers such as Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin, who disparage “liberalism” and sound themes about family, patriotism, and the state that carry a whiff of Vichy, does it mean that fascism is the wave of the future?

There is reason to be skeptical here. It is true, as Adler-Bell notes, that the energy among young, elite right-wingers is with what is broadly referred to as the New Right. In part, this is because the “New Right” is as much a subcultural aesthetic as it is a political movement — with a lingo and transgressive sensibility that it has borrowed largely from social media. Good things are “based” and bad things are “cringe”, media pseudo-events are “fake and gay”, and virgin/Chad and wojack memes are everywhere. It is no coincidence that this is a subculture made up largely of young men, operating within the confines of a progressive elite culture in which the crude humour typical of male bonding is heavily taboo.

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But while calling things “based” or “gay” might be a political act, it is not a political program. Two years ago, I wrote a piece for Tablet on the New Right. At the time, it was possible to describe the New Right as a real political faction centred around a handful of Senator’s offices, drawing hope from Trump’s flirtations with economic heterodoxy. These were, generally speaking, young party elites and intellectuals who wanted to drag the GOP away from the neoliberalism (or “Reaganism” or “libertarianism”) that dominated prior to 2016. Some were culture warriors and some were not. What they did agree on was that the small-government politics of Paul Ryan and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had outlived their usefulness.

Today, the dividing lines between this version of the New Right and the rest of the party are not so clear. Rhetorically at least, populism is the coin of the realm. Even relatively “normie” Republicans have been radicalised by the experience of the Trump administration and the first year of Biden; as Jacob Siegel observed, you now regularly hear Republicans expressing sentiments about the FBI worthy of Noam Chomsky. Everyone on the Right is a culture warrior, including buttoned-up private-equity barons like Glenn Youngkin, and everyone is a China hawk. It is not uncommon to hear Republican politicians inveighing against “woke capital”, threatening to break up Big Tech, and speaking ominously about “the Regime”. Even the national campaign against “critical race theory” might be seen as a fulfilment of Sohrab Ahmari’s 2019 call to “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy”.

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At the same time, populist energy on the Right has been diverted away from trade and economics and toward #StoptheSteal and opposition to restrictive Covid measures. Inflation and rising crime, meanwhile, have allowed Republicans to prosper, including among Hispanics, by shifting back to their traditional themes of law-and-order and fiscal responsibility. Even the GOP’s rhetoric on woke educational propaganda and school shutdowns is merely the latest twist in a long-running war on teachers’ unions. The tone may have shifted, but the ultimate aims have not.

Parties out of power always tend to downplay their internal divisions in favour of opposing their rivals’ agenda, and we can expect the substantive political disputes exposed by Trump to re-emerge in the primary in 2024. And culture war is popular, for good reason. The Democrats’ turn toward a fundamentalist version of identity politics is, in the short run at least, a major political blunder — an example of intra-elite dynamics among the party’s leadership forcing the adoption of positions and slogans that are actively antagonistic to most Americans. As long as the Democrats are the party of permanent Covid restrictions, rising murder rates, and woke excesses in schools, they will struggle outside of their deep-blue strongholds. And conservatives are not wrong to worry about the capture of seemingly every major national institution by ideologues hostile to their existence, given the ability of media and the school system to shape the values and perceptions of the public.

But there is a risk that the New Right might win the rhetorical and aesthetic victory only for zombie Reaganism to come crawling in through the back door — for everything to change just so that it can stay the same. As Richard Hanania observed, the anti-woke culture war may poll well for the Right, but it is essentially unwinnable, since “wokeness” is written into federal anti-discrimination law. Universities and corporations are militantly race-conscious in part because they are catering to progressive students and employees, but mostly because they are shielding themselves from legal liability under Title IX and Title VII. Absent some coherent plan to change these incentives, conservative anti-wokeness, no matter how rhetorically incendiary, is little more than a strategy for turning out the base. It may help to win elections, but once in office, a Republican president will have to actually govern. And if party grandees can convince the electorate that Biden really is “the second incarnation of Jimmy Carter”, they may be able to argue that the solution is the second incarnation of the Gipper.

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It is worth remembering that the main promise of the Trump-era New Right was that it had a real idea of what was wrong and how to fix it. Building on the work of the Bush-era reformicons, the intellectuals of the New Right attempted to take stock of the fact that the GOP was becoming, sociologically, a party of the less-educated, many of whom were ill-served by the neoliberal trade and economic policies favoured by the party’s wealthy donor class and intelligentsia. Given the yawning gap between the Republican establishment and its voters, and the full descent of the Democrats into professional-managerial class “socialism” (i.e., sinecures for the well-educated but downwardly mobile), the GOP was ripe for a takeover by a new generation of elites with a new set of priorities.

In the most sophisticated version of this diagnosis,  those priorities were to use the American state to re-orient the economy away from parasitic rent-seeking and labor arbitrage back toward high-productivity manufacturing, with the dual benefits of providing broad-based economic growth while preparing the United States for a looming era of great-power competition with China. Although even the most watered-down versions were regularly denounced as “socialism” in the old-guard conservative press, they received an impressive vindication in Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, possibly America’s most successful large-scale government project since the end of the Cold War (ironically, the post-2020 politics of vaccines have prevented the GOP from bragging much about it). And Trump’s other deviations from economic orthodoxy, in particular his trade war with China and restrictions on low-skill immigration, may help explain why, in 2019, the bottom 90% saw its share of earnings increase for the first time in a decade.

The pandemic and its attendant disruptions have scrambled American politics, subordinating longer term questions of political strategy to urgent questions about what to do here and now. But, on the American Right at least, the longer term questions are yet to be settled. At the moment, the great danger facing the New Right is not that it will be the vanguard of an American Reich, even if you can find some pimply teenagers on Twitter who lust for such a possibility. Rather, it is that it will meet the fate of so many other American political movements and devolve into a grift: a way for a handful of Washington-based journalists and think tank functionaries to make careers, solicit donations, and brand GOP politics for a slightly younger and edgier audience — while changing nothing fundamental about the party and its program.

This use of far-Right tropes — in particular, the Chad vs Wojak dichotomy — is telling of the two groups’ mutual mourning over modern ‘degeneracy’ and the ‘decline of the West’. But this alliance also throws a spoke in the wheel for the conventional narrative surrounding Islam and the Right.

After all, in both fringe and mainstream conservative discourses, Islam is loathed as a prime culprit driving societal decline. Whether it takes the form of European white nationalist groups such as Generation Identity blaming Muslim immigration for the ‘great replacement’ or Right-wing newspaper columnists deeming it a ‘threat to our liberal values’, hostility towards Islam seems to be a defining feature on the modern Right. No less ambiguous is Islamists’ own hostility towards the Right as the vanguard of the Western culture that they oppose; for both parties, a convergence with one another would seem paradoxical.

Islamism and the Left, on the other hand, appear to make far more intuitive allies. Most recently, it has been suggested that some Islamists may be actively co-opting ‘wokeness’ and camouflaging their agenda in the language of diversity and inclusion. But well outside the sphere of extremism, the so-called Islamo-Leftist alliance is a well-established source of analysis. A number of mainstream trends reveal the extent of a relationship between Islam and the Left, from the crossover of Muslim and Leftist causes among student activists to the fact that Western Muslims statistically tend to vote for Left-wing parties.

Yet this alliance is not without its own tensions: the modern Left has an uneasy relationship with traditional religion, and struggles to incorporate moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies, and the submission to a Divine order that is integral to Islam. In other words, while the modern Left seeks to break down ‘grand narratives’, Islam is a grand narrative, and one imbued with a profound metaphysical potency at that.

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This is not to overlook the fact that there have been numerous attempts to systematically converge Islamic and Leftist political philosophy. Most prominently in the 20^th century, movements such as the Islamic socialism of the Iranian Revolution or the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party sought to achieve their political aims through means which were, or at least strived to be, theologically sincere. It is also notable that this kind of Leftism, which was closer to orthodox Marxism, was more sympathetic to grand narratives than its contemporary forms where postmodern currents prevail (leaving aside the overtly anti-religious sentiments of Marx himself, that is).

Today, attempts by Western Leftists to form alliances with Muslims often overlook religious narratives: unsurprisingly, Islamic theological and intellectual traditions do not take centre stage in secular activism. Though modern Leftists — committed to showing solidarity with minority groups — may represent the identities of Muslims, they struggle to represent the values of Muslims. Incorporating their traditional beliefs would involve revising their own secular (and ironically, modern Western) biases, which, despite efforts to ‘decolonise the mind’, they are often reluctant to do.

In effect, the modern Left’s concern with religion boils down to identity politics; an impetus, perhaps, for practising Muslims to gravitate to the other side of the ideological spectrum. But religion is also relegated to identity politics on the modern Right, where the term ‘culturally Christian’ is commonplace. Self-styled ‘anti-woke’ commentators may invoke Christianity in their paeans for a return to tradition, but this often gives precedence to the cultural and aesthetic residues of the religion over its metaphysical and moral precepts. As far as ideology is concerned, more faith is placed in the axioms of the European Enlightenment — individual liberty, free speech and, ironically, secularism — than those of traditional Christianity, now reduced to little more than a signifier of Western heritage.

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It follows that the Right’s contempt towards Islam does not come so much from a theological defence of Christianity, but a cultural one. Likewise, the Left’s representation of Muslims, owing to its own secular biases, also ends up reducing Islam to a cultural entity. In effect, theological and metaphysical considerations have been rendered obsolete on both the Left and the Right when it comes to religion.

This points, among other things, to a major shift within the Right: traditionally, it was the Right that served to uphold religious principles, including moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies and, in a way, submission to a Divine order. But fixated as it now is on individual liberty, free speech and secularism, the modern Right overlooks this. And in relocating its origins to the European Enlightenment, it forgets that the conservative tradition was itself born out of a hesitation towards the Enlightenment.

Roger Scruton — one of the last philosophers to defend conservatism as a counterweight to the Enlightenment, rather than a full embrace of it — saw it necessary for politics to have a metaphysical dimension. Following Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Matthew Arnold, he remained true to the origins of British conservatism as a reaction against the excesses of liberalism and secularism. This conservatism was, he wrote, “a defence of tradition against calls for popular religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress”.

With this in mind, the notion of an alliance between Islam and the Right begins to make sense. Islam poses many of the same challenges to Enlightenment liberalism as the English conservative tradition once did, with both traditions recognising the social and spiritual dangers of modern materialism. Islam, in a sense, fulfils Scruton’s definition of ‘metaphysical conservatism’ as a defence of sacred things against desecration. But today, the modern Right is more concerned with defending free speech against ‘wokeness’, individual liberties against collectivism, and freedom against censorship than sacred things against desecration.

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What does this tell us about the alleged alliance between Islam and the far-Right? Since the mainstream Right has become indifferent towards traditional values, their ideological debris has drifted downstream to be claimed by fringe subcultures. But these fragments, severed from their original contexts, have been misappropriated to suit hateful ideologies that are just as unmoored from religious virtues. Defences of gender roles, the family and community, for example, are often articulated through crude biological reductionism rather than spiritual concerns. Whether it’s the blood and soil paganism of Neo-Nazis or the New Atheism of hardline rationalists, much of today’s far-Right is just as materialistic and hostile towards traditional religion.

The fact that many look for or encounter traditional ideas in these extremist subcultures is telling of the fact that these ideas are severely underrepresented in political discourse. This was once a role fulfilled by the Right. Yet modern conservatism’s embrace of liberalism and secularism, despite originating as a counterweight to these Enlightenment ideolo­gies, excludes those wishing to defend the sacred. Without representation of such concerns, ‘dissidents’ will continue to drift to extremes — even if it means promoting a group as nefarious as the Taliban.

Humour has long been a magic ingredient in unlocking political change. In the medieval court, jesters had an almost unique privilege in being able to tell the monarch what he didn’t want to hear, and were often tasked with presenting bad news. In totalitarian regimes humour was a daily act of undermining the regime, to the extent that on Stalin’s death 200,000 of the Gulag’s 2.5m population were there for telling jokes.

In recent years, unpalatable political ideas have often been presented under the cover of humour. Nigel Farage, Britain’s most successful politician of the early 21st century, has always employed a particularly English jocularity to sell what was a controversial platform, laughing us out of the EU eventually. But he’s not alone – in Italy and the Ukraine, comedians have risen to very highest office, and France may be next.

Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals that “through humour much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously”. Or as comedian Andrew Doyle put it: “You’re far more likely to remember a joke than an argument.” But perhaps because we live in such a serious and pious climate, the authorities have never been more scared of jokes.

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The West's cultural revolution is over

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Earlier this year an EU report warned that online memes were a menace to society, potentially dangerous to social peace. These memes, it said, are being used “to rebrand extremist positions in an ironic guise, blurring the lines between mischief and potentially radicalising messaging. The result is a nihilistic form of humour that is directed against ethnic and sexual minorities and deemed to inspire violent fantasies — and eventually action.”

The document identified a number of popular Right-wing memes, including Pepe the Frog and Wojak, the former symbolising “a kind of superior nonchalance toward others, helping to normalise hostile attitudes toward minorities and political opponents” and “anti-elite arrogance and condescension”.

Pepe the Frog became a household name about five years ago during an election that involved humour to an unusual degree. At the start of September 2016, after Hilary Clinton had made a speech attacking her opponents as a “basket of deplorables”, Donald Trump Jr posted on Instagram a doctored photo of the Sylvester Stallone film The Expendables replaced with The Deplorables, with a line-up of Trumpians, including the Donald, his even more repellent son, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and… Pepe the Frog.

Pepe was originally a harmless cartoon amphibian who occasionally peed himself, so old in internet terms that he first appeared on MySpace, back in 2005, and it was only in 2015 that it begun to be adopted by users of the notorious 4chan website.

When Trump announced his candidacy in June that year countless images of Pepe wearing a Make America Great Again cap began appearing on the site, seen as a veritable womb of trolling. Clinton then denounced Pepe as a symbol of white supremacism, joining a long list of often arcane supposed white nationalist signals, from milk to the okay sign.

The frog came to represent an online movement of meme-creating, often involving quite creative pranks. During that election, countless online comment pieces and reports focused on the influence of 4chan, written with the horror of a strait-laced reporter investigating the dangerous phenomenon of Mods or hippies (and continuing a long history of journalists misunderstanding the site). Trump’s win was viewed as a sort of 4chan troll that got out of hand, or as one user put it: “We actually elected a meme as president.”

Some of the site’s users were clearly delighted about the election win, but it seemed primarily motivated by the pain it would cause to pious, sanctimonious actors, hysterical commentators and the rest of the progressive establishment. The meme-creating trolls aim to shock and to wind up, and journalists – privileged, pompous and partisan – are obvious targets.

It’s this very organic nature of memes that makes them effective, an in-joke magnified. They cannot really be controlled or faked. Their power depends on who is using them, and the Meme life cycle means that, by the time a 43-year-old journalist is writing about a meme, it’s probably dead.

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Authenticity is the key, and Clinton’s attempt at making popular cultural references aimed at younger voters always sounded flat. Similarly, just as Hillary’s Twitter account was clearly written by a group of insufferable Ivy League graduates, especially crafted for the election strategy, Trump’s tweets were obviously written by the mad bastard himself; they were authentic, just as he was authentic, and, despite his immense faults as a human being, also very funny.

Many memes aren’t necessarily far-Right or even Right-wing but are just socially obscene, which is basically the same thing now. For example, Norf FC, a satire of English football fans, would certainly be considered “problematic”, to use the language of sanctimonious bores who police discourse. Originating on 4chan, it’s decidedly offensive but also funny, at its best a modern-day Hogarth, making fun of certain aspects of English life, including the English abroad, their obsession with football above all else, and their tendency to drink and fight. But it has also expanded organically to cover our history, including the Napoleonic Wars and the Roman invasion. (A remake of Our Island Story but illustrated with Norf FC would make an excellent book).

Then there is Wojak, perhaps the most popular of Right-wing memes, and arguably the bleakest. The EU report describes how the meme “has gradually been adapted and advanced by far-Right meme culture to portray liberals with blank expressions” who “do not question the information that comes from mainstream press and politics”.

One of the earliest variations of Wojak was NPC, or Non-Player Character Wojak, a grey, lifeless figure who repeats empty phrases like ‘‘The future is female” and “Reality has a liberal bias”. “NPC” comes from online gaming, and reflects the view that most of the population are mindlessly conformist, lapping up the low-brow mass culture which carries a shallow progressive message, and repeating it.

Wojak has evolved into various other forms — Withered Wojak is a favourite, often used in response to the latest self-harm masquerading as life advice spread by journalists and other opinion formers, or to children being exposed to drag queens, or the most recent race-baiting directives from on high. He represents despair that this will never be over and will only get worse.

Then there is Soyjak, who with his mouth agape in pathetic admiration is not just physically unimpressive, but mentally emasculated, desperate to win the approval of women and of polite society. The name stems from the common Right-wing belief that the consumption of soy reduces testosterone, while the facial expression – also known as “cuckface” – comes from the idea that an open mouth is associated with lower social status and submissiveness among male primates. This was a scientific theory first posted on a 4chan messageboard, which is good enough citation for me.

Soyjak is often paired with Gigachad, a manly, ubermensch figure (in reality an Azeri model called Ernest Khalimov, who apparently is vaguely aware of how his image has become a meme but otherwise lives a wholesome life far away from this madness). Soyjak and Gigachad often appear together in memes, the former hysterical about something of little real importance, the latter relaxed and happy, unafflicted by modernity-afflicted neurosis.

Strangely, the Soyjak and Gigachad meme has its antecedent in Soviet propaganda about cuckface factory bosses and Gigachad communists. However, the muscle-bound Gigachad is a sort of Right-wing masculine ideal, although a cynic might suspect that most of the people posting these memes have a stronger resemblance to Soyjak (just a wild guess).

Some of the memes are funny and imaginative; “Should have let us grill” pays tribute to Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed guns at Black Lives Matters protesters trespassing on their estate. It’s a play on “grillpill”, a Left-wing meme about babyboomers and their “I don’t care about politics, I just wanna grill” mindset. The McCloskey meme, in contrast, laments a hellish progressive world where everything is political and no one can be left to grill in peace without being bothered by ideological fanatics. Those ideologues now seem to be in control, which explains why so many popular memes come from the Right; hence the popular expression “The Left can’t meme” – which is a meme itself.

If this is the first art form since the late 19^th century in which the Right has dominated, that only reflects who is in control of culture, and particular its taboos; it’s the very willingness of meme-creators to upset these taboos that the likes of the EU Commission find so disturbing, since without them all sorts of social norms might break down.

Yet that is what art has often sought to do. While writers, playwrights and artists from the late 19^th century increasingly saw themselves in moral opposition to the establishment — the monarch, the church, even to bourgeoise sexual morality — since the 1960s progressives have taken over the commanding heights of culture both in the United States and Britain, meaning that much of the art world has lost the place of opposition in which it feels most comfortable.

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Revolutionaries in the past have faced a similar problem. The EU report looked at the possibilities of “attempting to counter extremist humour with a form of alternative humour”, which it concedes is very difficult, and this is indeed what was attempted after the revolution in Russia. There, political jokes were banned as “anti-Soviet propaganda” and were replaced “with their own brand of dull official humour, which they disseminated in satirical magazines”, in the words of Ben Lewis, author of Hammer and Tickle.

These new official jokes were often about peasant stupidity, or when they made fun of the system, it was because it wasn’t being properly implemented by local officials; the beliefs behind that system were sacrosanct. As a result “there were now two kinds of humour: official and unofficial – the written and the spoken, the public and the private. In the censored void, a culture of the spoken joke would develop, a collective satirical work produced by the whole population”.

A similar pattern occurred in the West when, following our cultural revolution, new taboos replaced old ones, but mainstream humour failed to maintain its role of undermining them. Satirical comedy stopped laughing at prevailing ideas but instead, with Michael Moore and then The Daily Show, began making stupid peasants – older, rural Republican voters – the punchline.

The same is true in Britain, where the Right has limited political power and the Left has unlimited cultural power; following the American lead with Wojak-like conformity, British clapter-comedy such as the Mash Report, where the audience applauds rather than laughs, has made the political out-group the butt of jokes, while avoiding the sort of unspoken, absurd truths that make political humour bite.

The same is largely true of consciously “anti-woke” comedy, much of which is very poor quality; or, if I were to be charitable, is aimed at older people. Perhaps it is because it employs a similar tactic to clapter, using a political out-group as a punchline, without in any way hitting a taboo. Memes, in contrast, are more provocative and darker, coming from a place of genuine contempt and despair.

Whoever the people making it, anything that grinds away at taboos is going to be at least mildly funny; laughter is a release from social norms. When I was a child, there was still the great British tradition of schoolboys drawing pictures of penises on religious figures in books, an almost instinctive desire to shock and mock; it’s funny because of the reaction it would provoke. Today even publicly desecrating Christ barely registers, yet when a pissed Man City fan drew a willy on a Marcus Rashford mural it led to a public meltdown — and even a vigil — because of a fear it had broken our number one taboo, race.

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It’s not that the Left can’t meme, it’s just that Left-wing beliefs don’t trigger taboos, even quite extreme Left-wing beliefs, so there is no need for them to employ the memetic equivalent of criminal cant to conceal their views. The sort of internet culture epitomised by 4chan aims to shock, and as the prevailing culture has become more progressive and censorious, it has grown more outrageous in blaspheming that new moral code.

If the likes of Wojak are popular, it’s partly because the cultural atmosphere feels quite heavy at times, so much so that many conservatives live a sort of coded existence in public life, the equivalent of taqiyya, the Shia Muslim practice of shielding your true opinions. They can either learn to keep their views quiet, or heavily-qualified, or they can become social pariahs. Humour, especially arcane, coded humour, is an escape.

Offensive as these memes are to polite society, the idea that Pepe and Wojak are going to normalise extreme-Right politics, or even centre-Right politics, is outlandish. Much of the time they are shared to provoke, or as a joke, but it’s also the case that much of the online Right is play-acting anyway, whether pretend trads or fake fascists – they’re all the children of liberalism. The problem is that, like the Russian revolutionaries before them, the post-1968 progressives now find themselves no longer rebels but rulers, and facing the difficult task of policing social norms and keeping the peasants in line.

The complex relationship between leaders and satirists is as old as politics itself. Aristophanes attacks Socrates in his comedies, Plato accuses Aristophanes of misrepresentation and whipping up the mob. Nearly two and a half thousand years before the invention of the internet, the same issues surface again and again: hypocritical public figures, comedic put-downs, public anger, the manipulation of public anger. But have satirists ever had this much of the upper hand? Those who would expose political deceit have so many more means of detecting hypocrisy — cameras in Government offices, for heaven’s sake — and increasing access to audiences to expose it to.

The jester used to sit in the corner of the royal court, occasionally telling the truth about the king in the apparently innocuous form of comedic banter. Now the jester has a court of his own. Sometimes he is better paid than his targets. He may have a larger public profile, perhaps even more political clout that those he mocks. As the satirist Steve Punt joked on Private Passions, there are some young people who watch Have I Got News For You but won’t watch the news itself. Comedians have real power in holding politicians to account; but how do we hold them to account?

Part of the trouble is to be found in the complex eddies of truth that swirl around the notion of hypocrisy. The exposure of hypocrisy is the satirist’s stock in trade. The danger however is that the satirist can all too easily presume that he or she is above it. As R. Jay Magill writes in his fascinating little book on Sincerity, “satirists mean sincere things by saying them insincerely, hypocrites say sincere things but actually mean them insincerely.” In other words, despite their superficially self-deprecating irony, the purpose of the satirist is one of deep sincerity and moral seriousness. They possess the true heart, so beloved of religious Puritans since the sixteenth century.

And this may be part of the problem: the mocker becomes the moral hero. Those who would cast our political life as a parade of stupidity and hypocrisy understand themselves to be above the very things they point to in others. Often, we don’t even know who they are. Who produced all those Hancock memes? I have no idea. And no idea whether their own lives match up to the moral seriousness they see lacking in their target.

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One explanation for our increasing concern with sincerity — with whether people are who they say they are — is that it came about following the Industrial Revolution, as people moved from a settled rural life to an increasingly transitory urban one. In the rural village setting, if you are born and die in the same place, people can eventually work out who you are. If you say one thing and do another, others notice. Your true nature emerges over time. But when people move about more frequently, the question of whether someone is as they profess to be becomes much trickier to establish.

Something similar is also produced by the way our relationships are now so mediated by technology. Where there is a screen between you and me, I no longer feel I have access to the social cues that can reassure me of your sincerity. In such a context, we often insist upon our own sincerity by signalling it to others in increasingly deliberate ways. Ironically, there then becomes something increasingly artificial about the profession of sincerity – which only intensifies the cycle of distrust and the need for a more genuine expression of sincerity. With so much work, and even socialising, done on Zoom, the whole of our lives seem to resemble a kind of demonic Turing Test, an attempt to work out the truth of the other at some impossibly digital distance.

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There are many echoes of the past here. The Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries were gripped by the fear that others did not sincerely hold to the faith that they professed. Was the conversion of others genuine? Or was it mere outward performance? How could you tell? It is no coincidence that with this Puritan anxiety came a new proliferation of testimonies and autobiographies, all attempts to show the inner self to the outside world, proving sincerity.

Much has been made of the idea that we are now in an age of New Puritanism, a new era of moral intensity. Some call it woke, but I wonder if the more interesting comparison is with the anxiety about sincerity. As our lives are more mediated by technology, and as the wearing of masks has become standard practice, the question of the truthfulness of the other is once again intensified. The very word hypocrisy derives etymologically from the Greek for play acting, referencing actors who wore masks on stage. Now we all wear masks. And so now the question of hypocrisy has intensified, generating renewed social anxiety.

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This is where the satirists come in, and why they are the crack troops of the New Puritanism. Imbued with a sense of moral righteousness, they set about trying to unmask the deceivers. And politicians make for a ready and easy target. Don’t get me wrong, they often deserve it. And satire is a vital component of a society saturated with bullshit, political and otherwise. But the rise in the importance of, and our need for, satire is also a consequence of the weakening of the social bonds that used to form the basis for our mutual understanding. Increasingly, is is also a consequence of the kind of mediated and distanced lives we are being forced to live through technology.

Like the Puritans of old, we are obsessed with the fact that others might not be as they seem, with hypocrisy, with transparency. And like the Puritans, we are obsessed with parading our inner righteousness in moral testimonies for all to see, making public demonstrations of sincerity. We now call this virtue signalling — which is not about younger people being more self-righteous, but more about the need to demonstrate moral sincerity in a context where so many of the traditional mechanisms for establishing it have collapsed.

In the end, however, the old-style Puritans had God to settle the matter. He alone would know the secrets of your heart, He alone would unmask the truth. The new-style Puritans give this role to The Now Show and Mock the Week.