The right is truly weird. It is strange, almost surreal. Especially Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance.
At least that’s the message in the flood of memes that followed the launch of Kamala Harris as the new Democratic presidential candidate, after Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy.
It’s a telling shift in tone and rhetoric – from portraying Trump as a extremist threat to democracy, to a nutcase at odds with reality. Trump’s antics must be answered with a single word: weird. Judging by the harsh reactions from the right, the campaign seems to be effective.
In the context of today’s right wing, Trump is far from alone in being weird. In the shadow of a flood of memes about JD Vance’s dolphin and couch fetishes – and reports of his connections to obscure philosophical currents – a series of chat logs between feminist philosopher Nina Power and far-right editor Daniel ”DC” Miller was made public in July.
Power and Miller had sued British-Jewish artist Luke Turner for defamation after he called them fascists, anti-Semites and transphobes on social media. He responded with a countersuit, and the legal process dragged on for years.
She joked that racism was a plot to hide that there were races of aliens and fairies living among us
In November 2023, the Supreme Court dismissed both parties’ lawsuits, but ordered Power and Miller to pay the bulk of the legal costs. This drove Nina Power into bankruptcy. To add insult to injury, Turner made public material from the preliminary investigation, material which showed why the judge had ruled that she was the driving force behind the harassment against Turner and should bear the costs.
The documents proved Turner correct in his description of the two writers. The logs proved Powers and Miller’s close cooperation with far-right websites and actors, whom they tried to enlist in a drive against Turner. Power also admitted that she was behind an anonymous troll account on X that was active in the campaign. In the internal chats, Power suggested they study Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and expressed concern that they would agree with the book’s message. She joked that racism was a plot to hide that there were races of aliens and fairies living among us. ”I’m definitely a Nazi now lol,” she wrote, after ironically suggesting they start a publishing house that didn’t publish ”no fatties, no women, no homo etc”.
”They’re jokey conversations” between two people with a ”dark sense of humor”, Nina Power explained afterwards. In a blog post, she defended herself, saying that bankruptcy was not that bad, as she got to keep her books. After this she attached a picture of her Italian Fascist books on the shelf, in another trolling provocation, balancing on the edge with an ironic grin.
Nina Power began her career as a brilliant feminist philosopher and left-wing activist. She was the queen and the philosopher Mark Fisher was the king of the young student movement that in 2010 filled the streets of Britain’s cities and occupied their universities in protest against sharp increases in tuition fees.
Both came from the experimental humanities departments at the University of Warwick, where the controversial philosopher Nick Land ran the infamous Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), which straddled the border between French continental philosophy and popular culture. Lectures there were a mixture of poststructural theory and science fiction literature, acid trips and rave parties all in one.
Mark Fisher brought that experimental spirit into the publisher Zero Books, which he founded in 2009 with Tariq Goddard, to ”counteract the anti-intellectualism of contemporary culture”. The young publishing house quickly picked up on trends and released the work of new thinkers in books of less than a hundred pages that intervened in the contemporary discussion. They picked up exciting new currents which traditional left-wing publishers such as Verso easily missed.
Real capitalism has settled like a wet blanket over the world, making it impossible to either fantasize or dream about anything else
Fisher and Power moved between music criticism, activism, teaching, philosophy and writing. They wrote columns in The Wire and The Guardian, but above all on their cult blogs, Fisher’s ”k-punk” and Power’s ”Infinite Thought”. Zero Books had an unexpected bestseller with Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism (2009), but Nina Power’s The One-Dimensional Woman (2009) also had a significant impact. It was hard to get any closer to theoretical rock stars than that.
In the blockbuster Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher takes as his starting point the claim, made by Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Fisher sought to trace how neoliberal late capitalism has become so hegemonic that we can no longer imagine alternative ways of organizing society outside of the market. Real capitalism has settled like a wet blanket over the world, making it impossible to either fantasize or dream about anything else. In doing so, it has robbed the left of the future, the political will to create an alternative. It has made the left melancholic and backward-looking, nostaligic for the welfare edifice they lost. Power described how this one-dimensional view also overlaid the notion of the sexes and limited feminism to being about consumption and lifestyle.
Fisher and Power were not alone in thinking along these lines. Out of the student protests had sprung a whole new scene of theoretical left-wing blogs that tackled the questions that would stimulate a new belief in the future. Were there new combinations of technology and society that could move beyond capitalism? Could contradictions within production be accelerated in the direction of post-capitalism? Why not go for what Aaron Bastani called fully automated luxury communism, mining asteroids for precious metals?
The discussion was provocative, visionary and wild. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek summarized their thoughts in The Accelerationist Manifesto (2015), which became of great importance for the development of a British left-wing populism and renewed, radical social democracy. The left dared to dream about the future again. The odd and strange had become a source of strength.
The left’s innovation was completely in line with Mark Fisher’s vision, where imagination and desire would be freed from the shackles of capitalist realism. In order for the left to be able to develop an alternative, it needs to practice a ”surrealist” thinking that is opposed to the ”realism” of capitalism. Fisher’s contribution to the discussion was to explore the countercultures of the 60s, consciousness-raising through grassroots groups and psychedelic drugs, and a Communism on acid. From the initiator of Dadaism, Hugo Ball, to Trotsky’s association with the surrealists, the left has always been close to the strange.
In his book The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater 2017), Fisher took a different approach to finding something outside of real capitalism. He turned to gothic horror novels, ghost stories and kiosk literature about the encounter with the unknown and inexplicable. The weird, was an aesthetic form to ”denaturalize all worlds, by exploring their instability, their openness to an outside”. Fisher brought it back to the wonder of our everyday lives in capitalism: the feeling of unreality in a crush, a concert experience, when learning something new or having to pay a bill. Little cracks where capitalist realism breaks and we get glimpses of other ways of living our lives.
Then something happened — something weird. After years of financial crisis and austerity policies, the neoliberal hegemony began to falter. A fissure opened in capitalist realism. It came to be challenged by a surrealism — not from the left, but from the right. The culture war swept in from the US and took Britain by storm. There, Brexit was voted through in the summer of 2016, and in the United States, reality show celebrity and upstart Donald Trump won the presidential election that fall. Trump was brought to the fore by a strange movement of cyberwarriors who used memes, trolling, provocations and conspiracy theories to short-circuit the public conversation.
The radical British left was knocked flat. ”This was the left’s first major loss of the new culture war. A new right, native to the internet, seized upon a sort of Gramscian model of political action that began dreaming a new future — a Trumpian future — through myth-functions that the left had long presumed belonged to it alone,” writes Mark Fisher’s student Matt Colquhoun on the blog ”Xenogothic”.
A surrealist right had taken over not only the methods of the radical left, but also its ability to dream
A surrealist right had taken over not only the methods of the radical left, but also its ability to dream. Faced with this old capitalist realism and new capitalist surrealism, the British radical left fragmented, notes Colquhoun. Instead, it turned inward and became quarrelsome. When the momentum created by the student movement began to crumble, left-wing winds weakened and work assignments began to disappear, it was necessary to shout louder and make increasingly daring moves to get continued attention, says Colquhoun.
Mark Fisher and Tariq Goddard had already left Zero Books in 2014 after conflicts with the parent publisher and instead formed Repeater books. What was left of the accelerationist milieu enlisted in the campaign to get Jeremy Corbyn elected Labor leader and helped create what the papers called Corbymania. Acid communism became acid Corbynism, accelerationism became left-wing populism. When Corbyn spoke at Glastonbury Festival in 2017, the entire audience chanted ”Oh Jeremy Corbyn”.
For Mark Fisher, on the other hand, who suffered from depression, the development of events in the world was devastating. On January 13, 2017, he took his own life. The week after, his book The Weird and the Eerie was published, and at the same time Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States. Now it was the right’s turn to be weird.
In Great Britain, Zero Books became a gathering-place for the so-called post-left, a left that took the problem formulations of the culture war right for granted. The marketing was based on provocation; new book releases would upset people on the same side, push boundaries and ”talk about what you are not allowed to talk about on the left”. The left-wing surrealist fantasy against real capitalism was replaced by a restored real socialism, an ”anti-woke” traditional left, with writers from groups like Spiked and Platypus, in an odd borderland between right-wing conservatism and Marxism-Leninism. Zero Books’ new bestseller was Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies (2017), which described the American alt-right on online forums like 4chan and its fight against the ”toxic identity politics left” on the Tumblr blogs. The book that was supposed to be a warning became a manual.
Nick Land, Fisher’s old mentor and colleague from the University of Warwick who had fled the public eye in the 1990s, returned with an extreme right-wing version of accelerationism, neo-reactionary theory, which gained ideological influence on the American alt-right. Accelerationism began to be filled with a new political content and, after being used in the manifesto for the mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, it became a term for far-right terrorism. The online warriors of the left met those of the right, in ironic and provocative conversations about neo-fascism and radical conservatism.
The online warriors of the left met those of the right, in ironic and provocative conversations about neo-fascism and radical conservatism
It was this journey Nina Power made, with increasingly provocative outings shutting herself out of her earlier venues and circles with her increasingly provocative positions. In connection with the 2018 changes to the British Gender Act, Power became radicalized. Her participation in a right-wing live broadcast on YouTube the following year, which also featured Daniel ”DC” Miller, caused large parts of the left, academia and the art world to break with her.
When one door closed, another one opened. The newly launched American right-wing magazine Compact hired her as a columnist and editor. In her columns, Nina Power has developed her critique of social constructivist feminism and the theories of gender and socially embedded sex. Instead, she has made herself a mouthpiece for what has come to be called gender criticism, a biologically essentialist view that has historically been called specialism feminism. She claims that there is a gender ideology, an ”internet-driven cult”, which manipulates children into becoming trans. She describes how she herself, as a young person, was seen as a tomboy, and claims that today there is a ”trans war” being wages against people like her, against lesbians and tomboys, which pressures them to identify as the opposite sex. In her article ”Welcome to Terf Island”, she introduces the British gender-critical movement, whose members are accused of being ”trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (‘Terfs’), with famous names such as Kathleen Stock and JK Rowling.
In her review in Flamman of Nina Power’s What Do Men Want (2023), Rojin Pertow highlights how she portrays ”woke” as the reason for increasing gender power gaps and concludes that the cancel culture is the great threat of our time. After Power’s chat logs were made public, Compact announced the end of their collaboration. The magazine that was supposed to fight against cancel culture itself chose to bring out the scissors of censorship.
Now, Nina Power stands alone again. Her provocations have become a self-harming behavior that even the extreme right does not want to engage in. Being weird costs a lot for the conservative right, whose ultimate goal is to represent the normal.
Therefore, it is not strange that the left has now started to compete in who can be the most normal. If the right can’t protect tradition, biological essentialism, the nuclear family and the homeland, maybe the left can make it their hallmark?
That is the road the post-left wants to take. It wants to defeat the right on its own turf, change the game and portray the right as the strange ones. Instead of a real alternative, they offer a market-friendly social democracy, a contemporary Blue Labor which does not challenge actually existing capitalism. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before the American fundraising campaign ”White Men for Kamala Harris” gets its offshoot in a ”White men for Magda” [Magdalena Andersson, leader of Sweden’s Social Democrats].
But maybe the left needs to get weird again. Mark Fisher’s companions continue to resonate for a left that dares to dream, that can think outside of capitalist realism. Fisher’s student Matt Colquhoun has published a solid compilation of Fisher’s lectures and blog texts on Repeater books. On the old student Corbynists’ media channel Novara Media, the Acid Communist FM (ACFM) podcast is broadcast — calling itself the ”home of the weird left”, it attempts not to drown in realpolitik and create a space where the vision can live on.
Without strange new perspectives that shake our realism – and make us think outside the politics of ”there is no alternative” – we will not be able to find the space where the future can take shape. That means the victory of capitalism. Weird or not.
