What the Left can use to influence liberals and beat reactionaries at their own game

The Trump presidency is in full swing and liberals are still toothless. Their resistance, if it can be so called has hardly escalated from its pre-election gnashing of teeth. It first came as anodyne SNL sketches, Lena Dunham fan-fiction, and John Oliver video-shares amongst insular networks of political dilettantes, angry just like the rest of us, but totally powerless. Now links with Russia trickle in, culminating most laughably in Rachel Maddow’s ratings-record tax reveal, possibly among the most cynical ploys witnessed in modern cable news, as liberals are all too happy to climb into bed with any three-letter organization that might undo Trump, exemplified nicely by Larry Wilmore’s “fuck you” to the right’s persona non grata Milo as he fellated a deep state agent on the perpetually dull Real Time with Bill “I Shit On My Desk and Force America to Savor the Smell With Me” Maher. Liberals have no viable political vision negative or positive (see the clamor for a Chelsea Clinton senatorial bid).

So what is the Left to do? Our numbers swell by the day. Democratic Socialists of America have seen their ranks triple since Trump’s ascendancy to the throne. We have more and more bodies, but purely electoral politics are built to thwart us. The primaries were successfully geared to prop up Clinton, and we see even the potential olive branch of Keith Ellison’s DNC head position shoved back in our faces with the astroturfed Tom Perez taking the seat instead. So we must take our battles to other fronts. But where and how?

Perhaps the Alt-Right has some answers. They were instrumental in Trump’s propaganda war, churning out their putrid ideology through thousands of memes, Milo/Gavin troll sessions, and the elevation of far-right publications into the national conversation. They have even installed one of their own in the White House in the form of Goebbels-reincarnate, Steve Bannon. The Alt-Right have radicalized large portions of the electorate and now set the political agenda from above. In short, they’ve been crushing it.

So let’s look at how they have achieved their aims in the past year. The Right have historically stolen ideas and tactics from the Left without a shred of shame. Richard Spencer’s “white identitarianism”, for instance, is the not-so-funhouse mirror of modern identity politics. Let’s take a page out of the Right’s playbook by taking a page out of the Right’s playbook. Perhaps there is wisdom to gleaned that can be used against liberals and the Alt-Right alike.

1. Accelerate and Multiply Signs

Let us begin with the current political victors, the men that so brilliantly played liberals all the way to the White House, the gruesome twosome of Bannon/Trump for guidance. Trump’s nonstop gaslighting, self-contradiction, doublespeak, and “alternative facts” have been discussed and dissected to death, but few have seen how they connect to produce power. I’ll point you to Ian Alan Paul’s exceedingly insightful post titled 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump. All are must-reads for understanding his media campaign, but I’ll excerpt a few below (bold emphasis mine).

Trump’s power is fundamentally virtual in form. Propose this, suggest that, lie about yesterday, declare the inevitability of that which is yet to come, retreat from one position while advancing on two more, contradict oneself, tweet about the greatest possible number of arbitrary things, attack, provoke, feign movement, never apologize or restrain oneself, hint at gesture, sound the dog whistle, appear still, expand interpretations, proliferate noise, introduce turbulence, obscure predictability in dense fogs of possibility. Trump’s power arises not from any individual act but from the multiplication of possible acts.

Call him a bigot. Call him a fascist. Call him an unhinged, petulant toddler with the capacity to start nuclear Armageddon. It makes no difference. Trump and the Alt-Right behave similarly here and we can speak about them in the same way because they operate as similar machines. They embrace hard nationalist rhetoric and then distance themselves from the label. They are at war with speech one moment, defenders of free speech the next. Their signs, like their memes, are provisional, nonessential, and disposable. They are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s war machine.

Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive… Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and they have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. — Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus p.352

Unlike other political fighters, the Alt-Right war machine is not moored to principles, hierarchy, or consistent tactics. This is anathema to traditional political discourse which is locked to the highly conceptual handcuffs of ideological signifiers. Democrats must be for “social justice” and “tolerance” while Republicans must be “fiscally responsible” and for “family values”. The reactionaries have no analogue, and if they did, it would be “power by any means”.

They are active, because they put tactics before abstract values. They will crucify Hillary for her private server and happily endorse President Trump’s. Contradiction is encouraged. When “the narrative” is the buzzword of the moment, reactionaries multiply narratives. You can barely track them all: The NY Times is fake news, “alternative facts”, the election was rigged against Trump. They may be spinning transparent fictions, but the memory fuzzes under the stress of their aggregation. Was that a fact? Was that under dispute? Was that merely a lie? Who can tell anymore? I feel my memories bleeding and my sense of reality shifting under me. Liberals are on the run because they are, once again, reactive. The Alt-Right speaks and invariably entails moral denunciation from the flaccid liberal. If you’re inclined to spend any time on social media, you’ll see it in the form of a 1:1 mapping of Harry Potter villains onto the Cabinet, showing all the nuance of the age bracket the books were written for. The Alt-Right does not trade in morality, but rather post-ironic mockery which self-replicates and proliferates. The Right moves while liberals bark, heads cocked and hackles raised.

This is why the Alt-Right loves memes. Their content arouses anger, glee, but never thought. Memes debase language as information; they are symbols for the viscera. Information must be considered and articulated. Memes can be vomited and swallowed almost instantly. Speed and flexibility are the greatest assets of the war machine.

This amounts to Point One: having one message makes you slow. Having many messages makes you faster. Language is only for communication when there is shared ground for communication. Otherwise it conceals movement, and can be effectively weaponized as an excess of information.

2. Make your enemies’ bodies an asset

Perhaps the most revealing story of the presidency was Steve Bannon’s declaration of war against and through the NY Times:

“You’re the opposition party,” [Bannon] said. “Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.”

Liberal after liberal spit fire at this bourbon-soused sack of gristle, but their rage proves they don’t understand a thing happening before them, to them, and through them. The words are calculated invective, sure, but Bannon speaks through the NY Times, like a voodoo wasp infects and controls a zombified caterpillar. The body is the NY Times, but Bannon pulls the strings.

I would be shocked if Bannon were not familiar with media savant Marshall McLuhan, but he’s obviously well versed in his lessons. The most important lesson: THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE. That is to say that the form of the message is equally, if not more important than the content. In this way, Bannon/Trump (they are one unit for our purposes) controls the political spectacle, feeding the media its daily bread in the form of polemicized outrage for its consumers, all the while their message floats through unimpeded. The media is at once his official enemy and the trumpeter of their war machine. Trump can say anything, at any time. He only need be shocking and it is now in the popular consciousness, and entire fields of possibilities extend forward from this point. When he speaks, he sparks millions more to repeat his words, if only in red hot anger. How many times have you, personally, discussed “grab them by the pussy”? How often have you tweeted about his #FuckingWall?

Liberals can do nothing but react with foaming, useless mouths, those very mouths acting as complicit advertisers for his messages. He speaks, and the fingers begin pecking away at the keyboard exactly as mine do now produce this sentence. You’re another computer in his botnet, unwittingly distributing malware behind the scenes even to yourself.

This culminates in Point Two: become at once nutritionist and a parasite of the opposition. Study what they feed on, produce that, and slip yourself like a tapeworm into their intestinal tract. The enemy spreads your message because it has become integrated to the host.

3. Shed static identities and create a deluge of narratives

Now to Paul’s Second Thesis:

Defending truths against Trump is to mistake the present battlefield entirely. Journalists and politicians alike are unable to meaningfully respond to, resist, or rebuke Trump because they approach him as something singular and consistent, whereas he acts multiply and chaotically. They aim to pull down something which already is, whereas Trump has already departed from the here and now towards any number of things that could possibly be instead. While everyone keeps busy defending fragile shelters of truth, Trump has moved into his golden palace built on a foundation of a glistening “what if?”

To understand Trump as a coherent whole with “positions”, “beliefs” and “values” was the first mistake of the media. Trump is not a static figure but a mobile conduit for atavistic populism. Trump’s inconsistency is not a flaw, it is his central feature. Wherever the winds of fear and hatred blow, his sails are positioned to ride them to consolidated authority. He only denies his positional inconsistencies now because he has not conditioned us yet to accept the inconsistencies as normal and desirable. Extrapolate his presidency in two years, and we will have always been at war with Eastasia. And this will be true not under threat of the State’s physical force, but because it will be a reality, as Karl Rove once described. They create realities (plural), we live in them.

This headline from Breitbart alone is sufficient to demonstrate the point:

Steve Bannon’s Real Crime: Providing Deplorables with News Alternative

The time of objective, shared reality is over, even as liberals cling desperately to it, their reactivity rearing its head once more. What now counts as reality is up for grabs all the way down to your browser’s homepage. This has probably always been the case, but now it is explicit and in plain view. Trump’s election was an elegy for Fukuyaman neoliberal technocracy. Our political realities are no longer only the provinces of wonks. Ironically, they must now compete in the marketplace alongside conspiracy theorists and partisan propaganda for public support. Everyone is now gunning for the title of “objective” in the eyes of everyone else.

Point Three: Construct not one reality but several. Present them five Left narratives and insist on the illusion you have captured the full gamut of options that can be thought. Neoliberals themselves have had tremendous success with this strategy, selling the delirium of the cereal aisle as human liberation. Multiply your narratives; they will lose the forest for the trees. This requires a sacrifice of your single political identity for several. Nothing you do should require coherence.

4. Control territories

Just prior to his percussive decking by an anonymous Antifa, Richard Spencer was in the process of distancing himself from Neo-Nazis. Spencer understands the moves I’ve described above. Neo-Nazis probably get punched. But do “white identitarians”? This terrain had not been decided until the memetic thud. The good news is that Spencer has been subsequently captured by the sign, “Nazi”. In a rare instance, the media was faster than the Alt-Right. They own the prevailing narrative on Spencer, at the moment.

At this moment as well, the media and its fawning liberals have not yet captured socialists. In fact, the Bernie campaign has given us a head start. Socialism far outranks fascism in positive associations among political terms in the popular lexicon and this is highly useful playing politics within heterogeneous political bodies.

But just because socialists are in the clear now mean it will stay that way. Socialists cannot and should not attempt to justify the term to liberals from singular, immobile positions. Socialists must blaze lines of flight ahead of them. Perhaps this will be done in tiny steps and lengthy bounds simultaneously. You do not radicalize a liberal all at once. Appeal to their sense of righteousness, democracy and free speech. Slip in socialism obliquely, through the back door. Make them step an inch to the left. Speak like radicals to each other, then speak like liberals to liberals. Multiply the lines and in time the lines will converge. DO NOT BE STATIC. The Left will need liberals soon so generating common ground and engendering sympathy now is essential. Give them positive connotations. Put militaristically, this is Point Four: Control territory. There is cultural territory, linguistic territory, electoral territory, and the Left must control any territory as yet unclaimed or undefended.

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Facebook friends remind me: “Resist Trump. Do not normalize him.” This is a barely a goal, and it is certainly not a means. In this mindset, we are still reacting. The means for resistance is to seize our own negativity, douse it in kerosene, and have a party beside the flames. Stop merely standing against things, because the Right will always dictate the territory on which you stand. And stop standing for things, for that matter. Standing is an immobile activity. Begin running for, around, and amongst things.

Yes, we should still be protesting and yes, we should still be organizing. This is important for cultivating our solidarity with liberals, mobilizing our power against the opposition, and finding like-minded political actors. But our defense must be complemented with offense as well. This will mean hitting Trump and the Alt-Right head on in public, but we should also battle them obliquely, like guerrilla fighters.

Penetrate the Right. Masquerade as one of them to troll and jam their discourse. Use their means to push them around. Call them “cucks” and proceed to cuck them, doing so only with the bare minimum of earnestness. Skew them a few degrees off course. Amplify, deface, and distort their messages. This strategy has been taken up by artists like Ben Frost, musicians like Negativland, and the merry pranksters of the Billboard Liberation Front and Vic Berger’s Super Deluxe videos. Do not aim for a decapitation yet. Aim to be another in a distributed assault of a thousand, weeping pinhole bleeds. Swarm them. And do it mirthfully when possible.

The Alt-Right machine has the initiative and is already inflicting enormous damage. It’s time we put our own reactivity aside. We must start producing our own machines and let us stop at nothing to fuel those machines. This is a race against time, speed, and signs and they’re about to lap us. Best get moving.