I read Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies when it first came out. I was curious about online subcultures, worried that the anglophone “left” had been eviscerated by identity liberalism, and interested in the rise of the “alt-right” and what that term might actually mean.

Within days, the reviews attacking the book started showing up online in all the usual spaces.

The mortal sin Ms Nagle had committed was apparently “blaming the rise of the right on Tumblr liberalism”. The fact that she does no such thing in the book or in the lectures and interviews that pop up on YouTube is immaterial to the people pumping this view. The identity liberal version of “If it bleeds it leads” is something along the lines of “If it can be twisted to even remotely resemble racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia, call it Fascist and let them howl.”

I liked the book, especially its laid-back knowledgeable tone. I agreed with its take on contemporary leftism and the need for a return to an “Old Left” emphasis on class politics. I was amused by her take on “Tumblr liberalism”, but never confused it with some idiotic “presentist” argument that right wing politics were somehow caused by outrageous identity claims being made online by teenagers.

And I understood her argument that because deliberate, and deliberately offensive, transgression can be used by either or any side in a conflict, it is in itself value-free.

It was Stanley Kubrick I think who first introduced me to a similar argument in Clockwork Orange, and I can never stand up and wave my arms around while roaring “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” without thinking about Little Alex kicking someone in the bolshy great yarblockos.

I agreed with her that transgression has been associated with “left” politics for decades, even if some of that association was mistaken.

But I did not agree with her argument that because transgression can be and has in fact been weaponized by the extreme right, particularly in online politics, that we need to put transgression away and beat the swords of offensive wit into the plowshares of sober argument. That, to my way of thinking, would be too much like throwing out the baby with the bathwater just because the little bugger wouldn’t shut up.

Few people are aware of the backstage couplings and jouissance that was the essence of The Beaver

And so we come to the point.

We now have people like Peter Frase conflating Intellectual Dark Web types like Jonathan Haidt with out-and-out socialists like Angela Nagle under the rubric “Normcore Left” as an intervention on behalf of Kate Doyle Griffiths and her celebration of Transgressive Communism vs Normie Socialism.

As is the case with so many of the promoters and defenders of leftist identity politics, both Frase and Griffiths rely on an utterly false binary. There are lesbians and then there are white cis hetero males as the “norm” against which lesbians must struggle for liberation. There are black women and then there are white cis hetero males against whom black women must struggle for liberation. You get the point. Capitalism might just as well be the cape that WhiteCisHeteroMan wears once he gets done jerking off in the phone booth.

They want to view the world in this black-and-white reduction where you are either transgressive- black, trans, woman, lesbian, gay- and queer and therefore left, or you are normcore and therefore a supporter of or apologist for white cis het male hegemony and therefore either a traitor or a bad faith practitioner of leftist politics. What are we to do with gay men who vote Republican or black Americans who identify with the Intellectual Dark Web’s assault on identity politics?

Another way of looking at what they are doing is to ask ourselves who decided that gay and trans were transgressions to be celebrated and almost automatically identified as socialist in orientation? Why isn’t NAMBLA offered as transgressive and queer? And what about the man in Thailand recently being investigated for fucking the dog in a non-metaphorical cry for free sexual expression?

How have we managed to ignore the rather large numbers of transsexuals, both kathoey and toms, who supported the proto-fascist street protests that brought down an elected government and called for a military coup here in Thailand. Oh yeah, I forgot. Transgressive weirdness is exclusively an Anglosphere concern and who cares what happens off that radar anyway?

Something is rotten in the assumptions of queer politics.

Fear of “norms”, which even after the liberal-capitalist hegemony has been shattered will continue to exist because in any population there are always going to be majority trends and tendencies of one kind or another, is very likely just another manifestation of the very normal liberal fear and loathing of democracy, if we allow ourselves to imagine a democracy unconstrained by liberal individualism.

Identity politics, whether it claims to be radically left or just putters along in the liberal tracks it is the inevitable destination of, is always going to be a form of hyper-individualism and about as anti-left as it is possible to be. Fear and loathing of “normal” people is never a road to socialism.