No Laughing Matter: Taking Populism Seriously

The January 6th storming of the White House marked a turning point in the American political sphere. All of the US’s most prescient crises came into full relief and the inadequacy of our own government to protect itself from an attempted coup, one that began at the top with Donald Trump and trickled down through his allies to his followers, became startingly apparent. Irony seemed to rule the day. Complacency from the police seemed to confirm the police system’s complicity with America’s right populist movement, yet this clashed with the insurrectionist’s disparaging cries against the police when they started to respond to their rioting with force. In a moment of extreme dissonance, there appeared to be brief contact between the right and the BLM protests that they actively vilified and from which they gleaned (accurately) that the police were on their side. This inconsistency revealed to Trump supporters what the left has been saying all this time—the police serve the state and not the people.

Putting down the insurrection was an affair that took hours and demonstrated the level of incompetence to which internal security prepared for what tons of collected social media posts showed was the obvious. Even the Pentagon restricted Major General William J. Walker, the commander of the D.C. National guard, to activate his troops in response to the insurrection. The reason given was because of the critique they had received from being activated against the BLM protestors. Post-insurrection, Trump supporters began online rallying cries for follow-up marches during Inauguration on alternative social media platforms. With the National Guard activated en masse and Trump’s concession, the right began to crumble from the inside. However, such crumbling should not be taken as defeat.

The right-wing social media platform Parler rang with notes of betrayal, users described the emotional shock of realizing they had been used, and the consequences their extremism had on their personal lives began to register as actual, palpable loss. The die-hard Trump supporters began to wind increasingly wild and fantastical variations on their conspiracy theories. The inauguration was supposed to be a mass arrest event. And when that failed to occur, Trump’s announcement of the “Office of the Former President” in Florida sparked a wave of rallying cries in support of the "sovereign citizens movements" belief that on March 4th, power would once again be in Trump’s hands and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home would become the new political Capitol of the US. According to Sovereigns, an 1871 law "secretly" corporatized America. Since such a move runs counter to the sentiments of the Founding Fathers, Sovereigns believe that all amendments passed after 1871 are simply invalid and on March 4th Trump (yes, icon of the corporate world) will de-corporatize America and claim us back from the secret foreign investors to whom we are all sold.

The Mar-a-Lago delusion, Trump’s supporters most recent in a string of absolute breaks with reality, has been the source of a huge campaign of ridicule and lampooning. In fact, ridicule and lampooning has been, more or less, the primary form of combat against the Trumpist right. As a response to what we perceive as lunacy, we’ve laid out an arsenal of stock jokes and phrases to deflect and to de-platform right wingers we see on media and encounter on Facebook or Twitter. There is, however, a way in which this laughter—while a legitimate form of comfort to dissolve what is otherwise unsettling behavior—might miss the point. Jokes are not infinitely replenishable, and the overuse of a punchline often switches the butt end of a joke to the jokester themselves, rather than the audience the joke is intended for. In short, it’s time to take right populists seriously, before we become the punchline of our own jokes.

No doubt, the gut reaction to this statement will be largely negative. The impetus for this essay came from a recent conversation I had with a group of friends on this topic, and when I mentioned taking the populists seriously, there was general astonishment that I’d dare to suggest “we join forces with the right”. I would never suggest this, and it’s important to clarify from the onset that taking something seriously is not to condone, let alone show solidarity for, the item under consideration. By taking the right populists seriously, I mean examining, despite the discomfort it might cause, what we have in common with them. I hope to outline some avenues for how to accomplish this throughout the course of this essay. Especially since this kind of discomfort might be the only way to break new ground for the future.

The “we” I am describing is a globular we that includes anyone who is ostensibly against right populism. This “we” will become more specific as “we” uncover that a simple opposition, us vs. them, is not an effective route. Particularly because this “we” embodies a lot of contradictions and a large portion of this “we” adheres to ideologies that, despite being “against” right populism, actually vouchsafe it. More about this will be revealed later, but for now I want to tackle what is implicit in the logic of the jokes pitted against the right populists. In the case of the us vs. them joke, the crux of the joke being successful is in making the “them” appear to be a minority, regardless of if they are or not. The success of this reversal is what makes the joke funny. It paints a portrait in which the joker holds, whether they actually do or not, the dominant worldview. It can be a potent formula, late-night talk shows of a political nature have mastered this formula. However, it has its weaknesses.

One of these I already mentioned, its overuse makes the butt end of the joke the joker and not the intended audience. But this is generally the aftereffect of what the overuse of a joke does to the joke itself. The joke disappears behind its replication, it becomes a maxim. A process that is wildly accelerated by technology, especially social media. Effective us vs. them jokes are easy fodder for viral content, and the hungry algorithms behind social media latch onto them, they proliferate, users wanting to capitalize on them copy them, making their origins hard to trace back. This proliferation becomes codified, and becomes argument, one of many stock phrases batted about in the impotent and inexhaustible (yet patently exhausting) political argument threads on social media sites, primarly Twitter. In an instant, the joke isn’t so funny anymore and we tend to take it seriously, if only as the death blow to be used in internet combat.

I want to offer here a complementary example to the present situation in the Unites States. While on the surface a possible digression, its relevance to our current discussion will become readily clear. Recently, in the Netherlands, the government imposed a lockdown to help combat the spread of Covid-19. Protests against the lockdown erupted immediately. Maskless protestors honked horns, bashed pots and pans together, and howled in order to render inaudible Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s announcement of the lockdown. This practice continued, with many Dutch people ridiculing the protestors and regarding them as clowns. Tensions nonetheless rose and the breaking point came with the recent announcement of an avondklok (‘curfew’).

As of the time this essay is being written, the Netherlands has erupted in nationwide riots. On the first day of the curfew (Saturday, January 23rd), a Covid-19 testing center in the small town of Urk was torched to the ground. On Sunday, cars were overturned in Den Bosch and rioters throwing fireworks at the police were met with water cannons. Emotional videos of a woman whose store was sacked have been surfacing. 300 people were arrested in riots in the border town of Eindhoven. Massive arrests have occurred across the industrial hub of Rotterdam. On Monday January 25th, 12 cities in the Netherlands had declared states of emergency. Several people who called for riots to occur via social media were arrested in the province of Zeeland and across Noord (North)-Holland. Cars were lit on fire in Gouda, the town famous for the cheese that bears the same name.

Many of these protests, if not the majority (this won’t be known until there is a deeper understanding of who has been arrested), have involved “jongeren” or “minors”, whose antics have been quickly turned into memes. One meme features a rioter being blasted by a watercannon to the rhythm of Bruno Mars’s song "Treasure". Another video shows a rioter attempts to out-speed, on his bike, police who are pursuing them in their vehicles. The rioter is quickly accosted and after an attempt to run away is tackled and beaten by the police. The description of this video might not sound funny, but in the day and age where all of us are thirsty for justice and are not recieving a drop, schadenfreude can make seeing someone receive their just desserts hilarious.

Those who attended the peaceful protests against the lockdown and the curfew have by and large condemned the violence of these rioters and looters, declaring they are not interested in the “freedom” the peaceful protests have organized around. But it cannot be ignored that this violence is a direct result of the rhetoric of these anti-lockdown, anti-curfew, protestors whose protests have been couched in drama. Many of the protests involve the protestors marching, a la dirge, in full hazmat suits while dark ambient music booms over a speaker. One of these protests occurred on the Pyramid of Austerlitz, a monument erected in 1804 by the soldiers of the French general Auguste de Marmont. Such drama has led the Dutch to dis-affectionately call these protestors “coronawappies”, the equivalent of the, mainly used by liberals, “Covidiot”. The protestors are also, unsurprisingly, backed by the political right in the Netherlands—most prominently the right-wing FvD (Forum voor Democratie) and the nationalist populist party PvV (Partie voor Vrijheid). They also generally share the parties anti-immigrant, white supremacist, viewpoints and are actively engaged in the same form of conspiratorial thinking surrounding Covid that exists in the United States.

It’s also important to note that these riots occur on the heels of the January 15th collapse and resignation of almost the entire Dutch government as the result of a massive childcare benefit scandal. Between 2012 and 2017, the Dutch government wrongly accused several families for claiming childcare benefits fraudulently. As a result, Dutch families in need were finding themselves forced to pay thousands in Euros back to the government. The investigation revealed that the scandal was government wide and the government had broken several tax laws, forcing the entirety of Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s four-party coalition, the four strongest parties in the Dutch government, to resign. The leaders of the former coalition, including Rutte, now only function as ‘caretakers’ until the March 17th election cycle when they are replaced. They also have no say in the decisions made in parliament.

The events of the Dutch riots and the January 6th insurrection are contemporaneous, and the similarities between them are no coincidence. While the events in the Netherlands are not an attempt to overthrow a so-called “free and fair” election, they are couched in the same right wing populism that attacked the White House. The movements are linked together in shared ideological space, constructed out of the same block of un-reality, and equally lampooned by the globular “we” that stands against “them”. It is, however, unfortunate that we turn to joking when they have shown themselves to be absolutely serious. But it makes sense that our immediate response is to continue to make them “other”, since we were given little to no time to think otherwise.

Now we are back to where the joke disappears. I have already suggested that technology and media plays a major role in that disappearance, primarily by allowing such disappearance to occur almost immediately. Media coverage pounced on the opportunity to highlight the insurrectionists at the Capitol as criminals, and the investigations have unfurled tons of information to paint them as individuals with “bent” frames of mind. The first death of the insurrection was an ex-military woman steeped in QAnon who tweeted she was part of a movement bringing “the light” to the Capitol. One of the insurrectionists was the leader of a militia who threatened to murder his wife and children if they “betrayed” Donald Trump. And discourse on alt-right media websites have unfurled tons of plans to murder and torture the politicians they fully intended to take hostage. All of these facts were pushed out in the form of thousands of tweets per minute, gaining in a few hours over a million of interactions. In the Netherlands, while nowhere near as intense, Rutte broadly declared the rioters as “criminals”, and the nearly 2,000 fines handed out and growing number of arrests reflects that sentiment.

I am not suggesting that these evaluations are inaccurate. They absolutely are not. They do, however, reveal nothing new. That is to say, they are tailored to accommodate the vision set forward by the joke-made-truth for the sake of the globular “we”. The fact that these individuals are very much “one of us” disappears behind the thin veil of moralism built around the sudden disappearance of “the joke”. To consider them as “one of us” requires us to remove the comfortable distance our jokes and moral high ground offer us, especially since considering them as ever being part of “the people” requires us to look at our own complicity in the mess surrounding us.

We are in a position similar to the one-two punch described by Slavoj Žižek as the left jab of tragedy, then the right hook of farce. One punch sends us reeling to the right, the counter-punch sends us reeling to the left. But waiting for us on the other side is the punch that reels us to the right again. Left and right here are not the political left and right. Instead, the joke is that the people reeling are the joke. Yes, this even includes the joker themselves, whose inability to perceive their reeling in real terms makes them the butt end of their own jokes. Suffice it to say, whether in this pendulum it is the reeling jokes or jokers reeling, neither are laughing. However, despite being the punchline, one is convinced in the truth of the space carved out by their joke. The other is fiercely saying, “‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!’” (Žižek 155). That is the populist.

Žižek’s tracing of this problem runs its course with a model of the Left whose radical 1968 spirit was sublimated into capitalism and resulted in the emptying of Leftist content. Only Leftism’s rebellious form was left behind and “its semi-illegality” and “[preparation] for the apocalyptic final battle in the interstices of state” was taken up by right populists as a mean to react to what they observed as complete moral dissolution in the form of sexual liberation and civil rights. We have lived to witness the end goal of this. The coup was built around the funneling of this reactivity through layers of conservative ideology and insular fear of the inside. All it needed, in America, was a leader to gather around, and to validate their suspicions to the point that they would not even see the way in which they were dispossessed and used, and the few who realized were met with psychic shock and their subsequent disavowal by those they had forged a bond with—many of whom had already lost scores of loved ones because of these illicit bonds. But many more have seized upon the opportunity to continue to thicken the clouds of conspiracy that distort their worldview.

How to move forward then? One move is peeling apart the conglomerate "we" standing against the populists. This move actually returns us to the joke. Zizek provides us with a joke from the early days of socialism. Its content is graphic (cw: rape, sexual assault) its a tale involving a Mongol who accosts a traveling couple and tells the husband he is going to violate his wife, but in order to so the husband must hold his testicles so they don't touch the ground. The husband does not oblige. Afterwards, the husband is laughing and the wife is flabbergasted that he could be laughing after witnessing her assault. "But I got him! His balls are covered in dust!" (22)

This is the situation we are in, we are continually being pillaged by forces asking us to hold their balls. We refuse, laugh at their soiled genitalia, while they continue to pillage us. This joke is at high-risk of not being funny, but it is where we are: screaming "Trumpet" and "Covidiot", convinced we are owning the "deplorables" of the right while they continue to move on unabated--stopped neither by a punchline, nor by gestural censorship on social media platforms that come too late.

"Trumpist" and "Covidiot" are not creations of the Left. In general, (viable) leftism has no room for the inertia of such vocabulary. Mostly because it both misses the point and widens the gap between us and the target. Chantal Mouffe writes:

Classifying right-wing populist parties as 'extreme-right' or 'neofascist' and attributing their appeal to lack of education is of course especially convenient for the forces of the centre-left. It is an easy way to disqualify them, without recognizing the centre-left's own responsibility in such an emergence. By establishing a 'moral' frontier so as to exclude the 'extremists' from the democratic debate, the 'good democrats' believe that they can stop the rise of irrational passion' (22).

And such a 'moral frontier' fails time and time again. The fact that there is an anti-vocabulary on the right ('Libtard') marks the joke's failure. Moreover, it has to fail. It must fail. It must keep us laughing while continuing to do nothing. For in the liberal topology, both the extreme Left and the extreme Right are enemy territory, forces that threaten liberalism's role in sustaining the crisis and their power to exploit. The Left and the Right are not laughing.

It is additionally telling that the above antagonistic vocabulary is an online one. The center has grown more complex since it is now organized by the internet, the same internet that displaced the center-left by latching onto the profibility of the right fringe, algorithmizing right populism, squeezing it for cash, and, to satisfy hand-wringing liberals, switched gears only when it was profitable to do so, and every time too late.

There is nothing funny about 13,000 bot ran accounts whose influence tipped the election in Trump's favor despite being ran by non-American entities. There is nothing funny about deleting the accounts of dangerous right extremists after they demonstrated their seriousness. There is nothing funny about the media latching onto sharing every possible ugly thing that can be unearthed about the White House rioters in a move to distract the role the media had in capitulating to in order to benefit directly from.

The path forward from this debacle is neither a clear one nor an easy one, especially since its core demand is unsettling. Right populists need to be taken seriously, that is, we need to recognize, as Mouffe states, "the democratic nucleus at the origin of many of their demands." The lines need to be drawn, the jokes reformulated, a space needs to be opened for us to laugh together at who is currently laughing at us: the oligarchs who exploit all of us, the "people", regardless of who is laughing or who is not (22).

We are all the punchline.

We share that in common, and finding those things we share in common are the first steps towards building a new people able to push back against right populism, and to squeeze into the center and expand it. This is not the cozy utopia it sounds on the surface. I chose the figure of the 'joke' for the tendency jokes have to reveal they do not mark out a neutral zone. We are all the punchlines of the various articulations of jokes that exploit us. And the proper way to resolve that problem is to re-write those jokes at the various levels they occur. The problem is, despite our feeling the opposite, and despite the fact its not actually the case, there is only one joke. Think of the child who repeats the same knock-knock joke over and over again.

After a period of time, even when we have laughed at the absurdity of the repetition, it is no longer funny.

The moment I have set forth to describe, this populist moment, is notorious for, and will no doubt be remembered for, being one of the most intensely divisive moments of history. However, the moment is not as simple and as lateral as that. A flurry of divisions causes cloudiness and confusion, a powerful tool all too easily placed against us. Good jokes might be hard to come by for this very reason, and this might also explain the proliferation of nonsense humor exemplified by the contemporary meme. We can go one step further than this though by understanding that the current 'joke regime' (if I may humour such a phrase for a moment) has made it difficult to discern what we are laughing at, making it even harder to discern what we are to take seriously. Faced on every side by the distortions of the contemporary, the clown, so-to-speak, is everywhere.

If that is the case, it is time to re-design the circus. And that's serious business.

Works Cited

Brindle, James. New Dark Age. Verso Books, 2019.

Mouffe, Chantal. For a Left Populism. Verso Books, 2018.

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, then as Farce. Verso Books, 2009.