THE NEW RIGHT: A JOURNEY TO THE FRINGE OF AMERICAN POLITICS
By Michael Malice
In his White House memoir Team of Vipers, Cliff Sims offers up a telling bit of praise for his boss the president. Donald Trump, he writes approvingly, is “history’s greatest troll.”
I thought this a strange compliment to direct at anyone, much less the purported leader of the free world. But I hadn’t at that time read Michael Malice’s book The New Right. Malice identifies himself, I think with some pride, as a troll. This is an occupation he defines as political provocateur, someone who gets other people (those being trolled) to act out. “Trolling is meant to be clever,” he writes, immediately entering a qualification. It’s not always clever, but it aspires to some kind of cleverness. “At its best,” another qualification, “it is the art of turning an audience into a performer by exploiting their flaws for comedic effect.”
In other words, trolling mainly consists of pushing people’s buttons. This is not all that hard to do. For example, in the sentence immediately following the above definition we are told that there is “a huge overlap between racism and trolling. But this is in large part,” and so not solely, “due to race being such an easy way to get the sensitive to act out.”
By acting out I think what Malice means is being offended. So if you can find some subject that offends people or makes them angry, as for example racism, then that is good troll material.
Malice calls the New Right an innovative cultural movement (created by low-status white men), which seems to mean something different than a political movement with any sort of agenda. So, if the point of trolling is only to somehow expose its victims as hypocritical or insincere, what, I kept wondering, does the troll believe in? Or is trolling only an end in itself, a form of entertainment or even an art? As political theatre that would go some way to explain many of the successful populist leaders of our time, professional comedians who, once in power, had no clear idea of what to do aside from maintaining high ratings/poll numbers. The cynicism could be breathtaking, and indeed Malice references one media guru (Ryan Holiday) who explains exactly how manufactured outrage is used by the troll as a form of marketing:
Someone like Milo [Yiannopoulos] or Mike Cernovich doesn’t care that you hate them – they like it. It’s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful. . . . The key tactic of alternative or provocative figures is to leverage the size and platform of their “not-audience” (i.e. their haters in the mainstream) to attract attention and build an actual audience.
Cynicism, or nihilism? Does a troll care if what he says is right or wrong? Or do they even believe in such labels? Most trolling, in my experience, riots in the assertion of falsehoods. But I return to the question of what the troll believes in, aside from trying to trigger others.
We know what they stand against, very roughly. It’s something – a very made-up something, I would say – that the New Right call the Cathedral, an unholy composite of universities and the media (with the government later included as the third leg of this leftist stool). The Cathedral is the bullhorn of what, in contrast to the New Right, Malice calls the evangelical left.
But the Cathedral, progressivism, and the evangelical left are all bogeymen. Maybe it’s the perspective of living in Canada, but I have a hard time seeing a liberal media in the U.S., unless you define liberal as anything that isn’t Fox News.
What is the New Right? Malice’s definition falls back, again, on what it’s opposed to, not what it stands for:
A loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism, which they perceive to be a thinly veiled fundamentalist religion dedicated to egalitarian principles and intent on totalitarian world domination via globalist hegemony.
So the New Right is nationalist (against globalist hegemony), non-egalitarian, and . . . well, it’s hard to say what is meant by being against both progressivism and totalitarianism, since these two ideas are pretty much political opposites.
Malice himself identifies as an anarchist, but also claims Alexander Hamilton as his “biggest idol,” which he says may make him “monarchist-adjacent.” I don’t think there’s any sorting this mush out. As for anarcho-capitalism, that sounds to me like a flat contradiction in terms. But to criticize a troll for not being consistent would be missing the joke. And what’s the point of arguing politics with people who use the word Anschluss but don’t even know what it means?
Malice strikes me as a being a very shallow political philosopher, mainly interested in scoring rhetorical points that don’t stand very much looking into. In other words, pushing buttons. Some of his analysis is just plain wrong, like the idea that the Overton Window is moved to the left by progressives, with conservatives only trying to hold the fort. This is a matter that has been studied and the drift has been all the other way, led by the radical right. It could hardly be otherwise. What politician wants to raise taxes, or be seen as soft on crime? Meanwhile, under Trump, establishment Republicans who only a decade ago would have seemed fringe figures on the far right have been purged from a party that is much more extreme than in the past.
That said, I don’t think Malice is trolling in The New Right. He seems to be genuinely interested in what’s going on and in trying to get to the bottom of our current “Era of Ill Will.” And his book is a breezy and informative read. But it’s also a glimpse into a subculture that is a silo, intellectually divorced, it seems to me, not only from the mainstream (which it frankly despises) but from any kind of self-understanding. He makes a lot out of the left as being an alternative religion, and makes some good points. But the culture he describes is that of a cult.
Notes:
Review first published online March 20, 2020.
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