The end of irony (and maybe Europe) (jk)
EU parliamentary results and the internet-native irony of the right
Perfect storm
As the results from Brussels rolled in late Sunday night, a huge storm hit Geneva, the other European city famous for hosting embattled supranational experiments. (For newcomers, I should mention that my husband works for a refugee agency based in Geneva. I am also based here. For love.)
While the storm raged on, two Francophone friends and I took to the group chat to assess the damage on planes meteorological and political. I’d left the windows open in the back room of our apartment, with the result that the downpour flooded my desk, a rude reminder of the drawbacks to analog life. (I often write by hand.)
My other friend reported on the serious lightning show outside her window: “Divine retribution for the election results in France,” she said.
Right-wing upsets
What shocked pollsters on Sunday night wasn’t the marked success of truly far-right (not just hard right) parties, but the fact that these parties made their biggest gains in the bastions of the EU, France and Germany. In France, Marine Le Pen’s pro-Putin, deeply anti-immigrant National Rally (formerly the National Front) not only won, but received twice the support of Macron’s deeply unpopular centrist Renaissance party. In Germany, the centrist CDU came first, trailed by the far-right AfD at 16% (~30% in the former East), a clear repudiation to reigning prime minister Olaf Scholz (SPD) and his Ampel coalition.
Incumbents are usually unpopular—governing is unpopular—and the EU elections often attract protest votes. Still, the results were unexpected and not good.
The other notable result from Sunday evening was that of these far-right voters, many were young.
There are lots of ways to explain the rightward shift. The usual issue-based suspects include immigration; fiscal threats to the social state; the perception that the European left has failed to address either of these concerns; a related rise in nativism; male disaffection, as young men fall behind young women in education and other measures; general rebellion against ambitious climate policies; also against feminism; Islamophobia; and, again, the tendency to use the parliamentary elections as a chance to register protest votes against the ruling government. There are plenty of people better equipped than I, a mere American novelist with a newsletter, to hypothesize which if any of these deserves the blame – though it may very well be a perfect storm of all of the above.
What I am equipped to discuss, however, is culture and literacy, and it is on the strength of this expertise that I would like to add one more potential cause to the transatlantic decline of the left that Sunday’s results reflect, and that is the loss of a recognizable brand of leftist irony. The loss of leftist “cool.”
I’ve written about this before, but compared to the leftist counterculture that dominated the 1960s or 1970s, today, it’s the right that lays claim to the cultural avant-garde, with an anti-establishment online streak that is especially attractive to younger generations. Because in the year of 2024, if there even is an ‘avant-garde,’ it is definitely internet-native, said the woman who still writes in notebooks.
Story of my teeth: an exercise in irony
Let’s take an example.
Consider the two EU Parliament campaign posters below, chosen more or less at random. Taken together, they illuminate trends that I think can be extrapolated to left/right messaging strategies throughout the West.
The image on the, well, left is sponsored by the global youth climate group Fridays for Future, which is especially active in organizing climate strikes in Germany, and whose mission I support. It reads, “Voting is like brushing your teeth!” Subheader, which is sort of hard to translate: “If you don’t, things will turn brown.” As in, Nazi.
Despite my profound sympathy for young people’s efforts to get carbon neutrality onto the agenda and their peers out to vote, and despite the genuine threat of “things turning brown,” my immediate reaction upon seeing this poster was to take a picture and drop it in the group chat with the caption, Europe is lost. By which I meant something like, This tone probably does not bode well for the European left in the upcoming election. The former, more exaggerated articulation was obviously funnier, however, and therefore more likely to engage my audience—all of whom, like me, wish for Europe to persist.
This poster could have used, I think, more such sensitivity to audience engagement. The schoolmarmish message—brush your teeth for democracy—is hitched to the explicit pun—don’t be a Nazi—and the layers of meaning end there. I know it’s a serious situation. On the other hand, this is the scolding, tragi-uncomic humor of despair.
Defenders of the slogan have pointed out to me this is a “go vote” poster, a doomed genre to begin with, and that Fridays for Future isn’t a political party. Still, I think the point stands, which is that the sentiment “brush your teeth for democracy” fills me with a sense of imminent loss.
The AfD image, on the other hand, contains multitudes, none of them good. What could it mean?? This EU-branded piranha is perhaps poised to steal your lunch, give it to Greece, and then eat your children—implicitly establishing the imaginary threats the AfD’s anti-EU, pro-family policies are designed to neutralize. Or perhaps the piranha symbolizes a cannibalistic promise to weaken the parliament as soon as the AfD comes to power; perhaps this toothy predator will shred the euro that so famously defangs (pun intended) Europe’s national central banks.
Or perhaps the piranha represents the more fearsome, anti-immigrant EU Parliament that will be realized under AfD leadership—a veritable attack shark to defend Mother Europe from outside influence (America if you’re voting in East Germany, France, Hungary, or the Balkans; Russia if you’re in Poland or the Baltic States), from obligations to other European countries (Ukraine), and from asylum-seekers (Muslims and Africans).
We could go on, but it gets even darker and more ludicrous. This a piranha that eats its own tail.
Crucially, the AfD ad communicates all of these potential messages simultaneously, but never so explicitly that the party could be accused of actually supporting or articulating any single one.1 It is a decent example of a strain of irony currently championed by the far-right, and which is indebted to selective readings of Nietzsche and Leo Strauss. It is extremely difficult to try to engage this kind of irony in a rational debate, especially if you’re trying not to sound like a scold.
The entire idea is to mean it without meaning it. To speak to every possible voter at once: to mere contrarians; to center-right voters who argue that the party “isn’t really that bad” because they “don’t really mean” what the leftist press says they mean (a common explanation given by Trump voters when asked to explain their motives following the 2016 election); and finally to committed extremists, who can commend themselves for “seeing through” the apparent joke to the deadly serious intentions behind it.
This is the way to shoehorn anti-democratic, anti-liberal views into mainstream public discourse without being tried for hate-speech (a lot easier to do in Europe than in America) before you even hit the campaign trail. It is the equivalent of adding “lol” to the end of every sentence to maintain plausible deniability in a dicey group chat.
It should also be no surprise the AfD and National Rally are the parties most fluent online, where this kind of irony thrives. Both parties have large followings on TikTok, where younger voters apparently get their news. In Germany, by contrast, Olaf Scholz’s a) late arrival to the platform and b) general persona were received as “maximal cringe” by both pundits and Gen Z alike.
There is no future for the brush-your-teeth brigade. We all have smartphones, therapists, invisible braces.
A new leftist irony?? (lol)
This is really the subject of a whole other post, one that I may possibly write depending on time and popular demand, but for now I’ll just say that, no, I’m not suggesting the left simply copy far-right irony and sub in progressive policies to win elections.
In the very broadest strokes, the brand of irony I am drawn to—politically, aesthetically, personally—is a kind of nimble irony that serves as a collective coping rather than manipulation mechanism, as a mode of survival even, one that is especially well-suited to leftists, whose fate it is to be permanently disappointed by the distance between the ideals they hold dear and the actual world, which tends to fall far short. Hence the inexhaustible need for progress. (And yes, for voting.)
But as I said, that’s the subject of an entirely different and possibly forthcoming post, building on thoughts I presented at a panel NYU sponsored earlier this year. (If you’re interested, recording here.)
Plausible deniability
It is less than wise to wade into the piranha-infested waters of commenting on the far-right and then publishing those comments online. On the other hand, the decision to write novels (let alone a story collection) in 2024 already suggests a serious lack of survival instinct on my part. Meanwhile, all the ink will be washed away, and this too will soon dissolve behind a paywall and into the ether—the only platform that matters anymore.
In other news…
My short story collection Ghost Pains is now three months old. It has been fêted, praised, glorified, receiving incontestably deserved accolades such as: “Stevens as one of the sharpest, most playful young prose writers working today”; “Stevens’ writing is so witty and startling that Ghost Pains feels entirely unique”; “sardonic and elegant”; “Stevens’ writing tempts me toward the grand statement…I want to hold her work up as an antidote to this or that literary malaise. My tone becomes oracular, apocalyptic, even when the register of the text in question would seem to be anything but.”
I recently spoke to The Nation about Ghost Pains. Managing editor Rose D’Amora, who came up with the questions, is extremely smart, and it’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve done. The collection thinks a lot about history and undigested legacies of the 20th century, and we focused especially on a story in which a contemporary woman can’t stop acting like it’s the Weimar Era.
My probably favorite review, published in 4Columns, highlighted the collection’s attention to the historical unease of our moment in a way that—given Sunday’s elections and the topic of this post—feels particularly resonant to me:
There’s fun throughout Ghost Pains, but there is also an ambient dread that never quite goes away. The situation, in any case, is unsustainable…To Stevens’ enormous credit, the point, which builds in clarity and intensity from a dizzying array of angles throughout the collection, seems rather that whatever these forces of destruction are, the ones that we begin to hear through the din of the party, the chatter at the bar, the static of the screen, they will not be content to go unnamed for much longer.
Thanks for reading, chin up etc. ~
Not so with AfD main candidate Maximilian Krah's überexplicit remark, mere weeks before the election, that “not all SS officers were war criminals.”