How the Right Might Capture Culture

The Center Left Lost It. Can the Alt-Left or the Heterodox Artists Recover the Ball?

For the past few months, I have wondered what cultural output might come from the alt-left. Not only is there a real possibility that the answer is nothing, but I would not be surprised if the right wing — specifically the dissident right — filled the power vacuum left by the center left.

It is true that I wrote this last week:

As I have said numerous times though, nature abhors a vacuum. If there is no music act from the more subversive, revolutionary corners of the world who can replace or compete with Taylor Swift and Beyonce Knowles, then we will be trapped in a trivial pop purgatory.

The likelihood though is not all that great. I don’t remember where I read this, I’m not even sure whether it was a meme or an Instagram story, but someone somehow said that Taylor Swift is the Hilary Clinton of pop. In general, dance-pop as we know it today, along with pussy rap, is too center-left and longhouse-coded to survive today’s landscape. The right, dissident or not, abhors current top 40. The alt-left, many citing Beyonce and Swift’s cowardice in not opposing the genocide, are not poptimists either. Even Blue MAGA will demand any and all of the pop queens to put out a statement, preferably in their music, unequivocally calling out antisemitism.

OK, so where will the culture come from? From where I’m sitting, it looks like Dimes Square, or, more pointedly, the dissident right artists (I called the movement “fringe” here and will do so for the remainder of this piece) are the ones that are poised to take that mantle.

I had said here that Dimes Square discourse was declining based on Google Trends. Well, with Honor Levy’s new book coming out weeks from now, expect the discourse to gather steam again. I wrote then and I believe now:

Not only do the alt-left feel like they are not represented by their elected officials. They feel disconnected to all celebrities now. No relevant celebrity speaks to them now the way Dylan did the New Left in the ‘60s. But this was precisely why Bob Dylan had the impact he did as the voice of his generation; no one articulated what they felt so well before him. And that’s how he arrived on the scene; by giving voice to a new consciousness. The voice of the alt-left cannot come from what came before. The current celebrities took too long to press the buzzer. New artists will be needed. New musicians. New movies.

A voice of a generation may come, but it might not represent the alt-left. In the Honor Levy piece linked to above, she is the one being groomed into the VOG (her acronym) position.

OK so we’re talking about a twentysomething with a book deal and, what, a few bars in Chinatown? Are we exaggerating here? Most movements seem to have exaggerated importance before they blow up. One thing we must factor: tech. As has been mentioned here and almost every Dimes Square thinkpiece ever, there is a lot of shadowy tech money flowing here. Which on its own may not mean much. But if you read Meet Me in the Bathroom like I did, you know that tech played a significant role in fueling the hipster/indie movement of the 2000s, eventually making Brooklyn “a thing.” Right now, New York has more tech workers and VCs than ever before, making it second only to the Valley. And they are trying to make crypto “a thing.” One coin, $egirl, even has Elon Musk fighting for it.

Legacy media, the clear losers in their battle with tech, have a strategic opportunity here to mend fences by giving favorable coverage to their current stable of microcelebs. Yes, they are right wing, but even the dissident right will steer clear of antisemitism, overt or otherwise. As I said before, legacy media will first make a rightward pivot, much as it did after 9/11. There is only more reason to do so now: legacy media’s support for “wokeness” made sense only from the perspective that, ever since World War II, America focused on fighting bigotry, especially anti-Jewish bigotry. America needed this narrative. It was the first and only nation to drop the atomic bomb. Better to rebrand itself as a melting pot, no? I mean they did liberate the Jews from the Nazis so it is actually true. Israel holds a special place in America’s heart as an enduring reminder of its hard-won WWII victory, as well as a tidy conclusion to its relatively new anti-bigotry narrative, coming three years after Hiroshima. Legacy media’s current focus on Israel’s hurt feelings is a feature, not a bug, of legacy media’s support of BLM and Me Too in the ‘10s. The stigma around telling a black man what is not racist when you yourself are not black was preparation for saying you don’t know what antisemitism is unless you are Jewish. “Believe all women” was always meant to include “Believe any story about Hamas rapes.”

Now that BLM and the LGBT brigade have left the reservation, I would expect a three-pronged rightward attack from mass media that synthesizes and expands upon previous rightward pivots:

• Like the ‘80s, expect more patriotic, kick-ass blockbusters and a general patriotic pivot (even the center-left is trying to claim country music)

• Like the ‘00s, expect way more anti-woke comedy — stand-up and otherwise — this time, on actual mainstream streaming networks as opposed to just podcasts and YouTube

• Unlike before, we can expect a rightward shift even in the American literary and artistic community. Dimes Square is not the only example. The humanities in general are shifting.

Much like the ‘80s indie movement was an apolitical response to the rightward vibe shift and many ‘00s hipsters, especially those who were extremely online, had an apolitical focus on craft, whether it be music or comedy (so many Pitchfork reviews about a record being “good” as opposed to “revolutionary” or “groundbreaking”), there could be an influx of apolitical art as well. I saw Civil War in the theater this past week. It is apolitical only in our current literalist environment. If and when the rightward pivot of legacy media goes bust, I would bet on an apolitical turn before an explicit pro-Gaza turn. I don’t think we will see that from Hollywood before 2029. Withing the context of the exhausting culture war discourse, this would be refreshing. Imagine, instead of culture with good messaging but no aesthetics, a 180 degree opposite?

For the first time in this young Substack’s history, I made a thread asking readers what they thought the political tenor of culture will be in the future before writing the piece myself. Here was a response from

Adam Pearson

:

[I]s it possible the center left won’t be altogether replaced but divvied up amongst growing camps? We all know that legacy media is contracting, which has propped up the center left for decades. How can any movement (for the lack of a better term) take up the same cultural real estate without it?

Exhausted as I may be with online balkanization, it is difficult to imagine an alternative. If the Democrats and Republicans are funded by the same lobbyists, why wouldn’t Dimes Square playwrights and transgender hyperpop divas drink from the same tech trough? Nowadays, it seems that a prerequisite for online fame is questioning the legitimacy of mainstream media.

Derek Thompson, in a Vox interview:

Today, especially in the media and entertainment space, we have this really interesting popularity of new influencers or new media makers adapting as their core personality the idea that the mainstream is broken, that news is broken, that mass institutions are broken, that the elite are in some way broken and elite institutions are broken. The fragmentation of media that we’re seeing and the rise of this anti-institutional, somewhat paranoid style of understanding reality, I see these things as rising together in a way that I find very interesting.

Balkanization is especially likely if nightlife continues to decline in popularity. Live performance helps advance any cultural movement and has been responsible for almost all great artistic movements for the past century or so. It is the reason that stand-up comedy now is completely conservative. To the chagrin of liberal critics, Joe Rogan still has the #1 podcast, which he has built not only off his own touring, but promoting comedians that have had staggering ticket sales thanks to the Rogan bump. Shane Gillis’s ticket sales and Patreon sales have been so high, he hosted “Saturday Night Live,” which fired him before he even got on the air in the ‘10s. In contrast, female and LGBTQ comedy has not had one or two great ticket draws to hang their hat on, but several niche acts that are more likely to perform on group shows than make money headlining themselves. With no live entertainment economy and no legacy media, balkanization may be all that’s left.

What about the campus protests? They are everywhere. They are not backing down. Is nothing actually going to come from this?

Well….there is…The Bonk Song (ahem).

The protests have led to a significant police presence on campuses. In response, some 1,000 people have been arrested. During one altercation between protesters and police at Cal Poly Humboldt, a protester hit a police officer in the head with a large, empty water jug, which is now being referred to online as the "Jug of Justice." It quickly went viral on social media and led to many people calling to "bonk the police" and making the water jug recognizable anti-police imagery. 

No$hu, a 29-year-old artist, saw the video and turned it into a now-viral trap song. The song starts with "I hate the police," and ends with "If you're resourceful, anything can be the right weapon." But the tune is so upbeat and auto-tuned that it makes the lyrics' radical politics palatable.

A novelty song? A FUCKING NOVELTY SONG? The alt-left movement has many refugees from the woke army who have brought their poptimist, algorithmic trivialization over with them. A wacky TikTok video may seem slight compared to the novels, plays, artworks, music and movies of downtown Manhattan. What’s worse: the left can’t meme.

No one is denying the alt-left has a rocky road ahead. But there is a possibility of alt-left cultural capture (if they ever produce anything culturally) for one big reason: many of them, especially those who emigrated from the woke side, grew up expecting pop culture to echo their beliefs. They demanded more black characters; they got them. They demanded more trans characters; presto! They are not used to being told no, but they will need to find other ways and strategies to advance.

They would do right to learn from their dirtbag left peers. Chapo Trap House and TrueAnon are successful podcasts that express alt-left beliefs. Notorious Twitch troll Hasan Piker recently went viral for shutting down a panelist on Piers Morgan.

None of the aforementioned are cultural figures per se. They are more pundits than anything else. But they do have cultural figures on as guests. Those artists might end up forming the nucleus of an alt-left cultural movement. Joe Rogan had a blues musican on and his streams shot up 500%, Hope that musician doesn’t mind being right-coded.

There is one more thing, one last thing, to take into account: information hoarding. Cultural critic W. David Marx recently said in The Atlantic:

The internet arrived at a time when we gained social clout from arbitraging information, so our first instinct was to share information online. Perhaps we are now entering an era of information hoarding. This may mean that, for a while, the most interesting developments will happen somewhere off the grid. But over time, this practice will restore some value to art and cultural exploration, and bring back opportunities for tastemaking.

This is an illuminating breakdown of the ‘00s Internet and what made it so great. With a strong, indie-rock based mesoculture, bloggers flaunted their cultural tastes. Now that the algorithms turn all this into fuel for AI-generated playlists, information hoarding might be a strategy that creatives employ. If that’s too extreme, perhaps they move to the further corners of the Web, or what the fringe artists call the “dark forest.” Billboard magazine took it upon itself to profile indie musician Mk.Gee, who has built notoriety out of being so media averse and secretive.

Let’s end this with a juicy paradox, yeah? Back in November 2022, I said the fringe movement might suffer from being as under the microscope as it is. Now I am saying it might be the only cultural force other than center-left pop. But how do I — how do we — know there isn’t any live, mesocultural, alt-left work being created in venues or small galleries right now? Just because I didn’t see it in my Instagram stories? I haven’t gone to any protests in person. What do I know? I am a 48 year old man, so I must acknowledge there may be some things outside my scope, especially when it comes to what will come next from Gen Z. Or, to paraphrase the voice of another generation that I am not a member of, there might be something happening here and I don’t know what it is, do I?