Why the Alt-Left Is a Problem, Too

by James Wolcott,

Much of the media spotlight has been on the “alt-right.” But the “alt-left” provides a mirror image distortion: the same loathing of Clinton, rejection of “identity politics,” and itch for a reckoning.

nternet clickbait promotes mental tooth decay, squirting synthetic controversy out of a can of Reddi-wip, but an article by Eileen Jones on January 9 went out of its way to swirl it on extra thick. Headlined AGAINST MERYL STREEP, the indictment declared, “Meryl Streep’s speechifying at the Golden Globes was the worst thing to happen since Trump’s election.” Hoo-kay. If Donald Trump speaks Jerkish, according to retired novelist Philip Roth, Jones’s broadside was written in Snarkish: “That I should live to see the day when Meryl Streep’s speechifying at a Hollywood awards show is admired as solemnly and discussed as fervently as Lincoln’s second inaugural address is a personal nightmare. Lectured by Streep! And about how her and all her Hollywood pals, decked out in everything that costs the earth and sparkles in the spotlight, are among the true victims of Donald Trump’s American authoritarianism!” Streep’s chastising of Trump in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes was derided as a sniffy display of royal hauteur, as if her ladyship had gotten her blue sash in a twist. “The way she condemned the ‘performance’ of Donald Trump when he mocked disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, as if Trump were up for a rival Golden Globes Award and had disgraced the Screen Actors Guild, was truly righteous, wasn’t it? She’s so classy, isn’t she?”

Such derision of liberal Hollywood pieties—Jones ripped Streep for being the sweetheart of Hillary Clinton’s “faux-feminist ‘pantsuit nation’ ”—is familiar gargle from right-wing hucksters such as radio host Laura Ingraham, the author of Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the Media Are Subverting America. But here’s the twist: Eileen Jones is no righty coveting a rotation spot in the Fox News greenroom. She teaches film at Berkeley—and you know what it’s like at Berkeley, radical fervor springing from every hair follicle—and her Streep denunciation was published in Jacobin, which bills itself as “a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” Disillusionment with Obama’s presidency, loathing of Hillary Clinton, disgust with “identity politics,” and a craving for a climactic reckoning that will clear the stage for a bold tomorrow have created a kinship between the “alt-right” and an alt-left. They’re not kissin’ cousins, but they caterwaul some of the same tunes in different keys.

The alt-right receives the meatiest share of attention in the media, as it should. It’s powerful, vicious, steeped in neo-Nazi ideology, nativist white supremacy, men’s-rights misogyny, and Ayn Rand capitalist übermensch mythos, and it heralds a conquering hero in the White House in President Donald J. Trump … The alt-left can’t match that for strength, malignancy, or tentacled reach, but its dude-bros and “purity progressives” exert a powerful reality-distortion field online and foster factionalism on the lib-left. Its outlets include not only Jacobin but also the Intercept, …; Web sites such as Truthdig, Consortiumnews, and Naked Capitalism; and anomalous apostates such as Mickey Kaus, a former contributor to liberal percolators of ideas and opinions such as Washington Monthly, the New Republic, Harper’s, and Slate, … Other busy beavers on Twitter include Michael Tracey, Freddie deBoer, Mark Ames, Connor Kilpatrick (a Jacobin contributor), Jeremy Scahill (journalist and Intercept co-founder), and similar fun guys. A Tumblr site devoted to “Trumpian Leftism” captures the intellectual flavor of their temperaments. One of the alt-left’s political darlings is Tulsi Gabbard, a progressive congresswoman from Hawaii who met with then president-elect Donald Trump in Trump Tower and was rumored to be under consideration for a Cabinet position, and its quixotic preacher-man and noble leper is Cornel West, once an orator at every social-justice convocation who got so uncoiled by his rancorous contempt for Obama and cast adrift into the hazy fringes of the alt-left

There’s a confluence between the alt-right and the alt-left regarding Vladimir Putin and the ratfucking (to use a venerable Watergate-era term) performed by Russian hackers, trolls, and bots. The Tyler Durden Fight Club alt-right idolizes Putin as a bare-chested manly man, as opposed to a metrosexual like Obama and an emasculating harpy like Hillary. This isn’t a beefcake fetish the alt-left shares. Instead, it invokes McCarthyism and the specter of a new Red Scare to characterize rising alarm over the Russian cyber-warfare as a rehash of Cold War bogeyman tales.

here is where the alt-right and the alt-left press foreheads for a Vulcan mind-meld: the belief that the real enemy, the true Evil Empire, isn’t Putin’s Russia but the Deep State, the C.I.A./F.B.I./N.S.A. alphabet-soup national-security matrix. But if the Deep State can rid us of the blighted presidency of Donald Trump, all I can say is “Go, State, go.”

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