Irony Bros and the Rhetoric of Perpetual Crisis
During our holiday travels, my husband and I listened to Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals, a history of evangelicalism in the United States that details the divisions within the various denominations as well as their interactions with politics and mainstream culture. During the section of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, Fitzgerald argues that Falwell and others in his circle were the source of a “rhetoric of perpetual crisis” that has characterized conservative discourse in the United States ever since the integration of Evangelicals into politics. I was struck by this notion because I’ve been thinking about the relationship between the religious right and the contemporary alt-right — especially since there is so much mutual disgust between the two parties. While some portray the alt-right as the product of liberal political correctness run amok (like Angela Nagle), I think it’s worth considering the alt-right as a reaction to the conservative groups that came before as well.
It’s no secret that the current “alt-right” is actually a loose amalgamation of disparate groups with a handful of shared beliefs. In fact, without the presidential election giving them a goal to collectively work towards, the animosities amongst factions have come to the foreground, as they did at one white supremacist rally in Houston in June 2017. Video circulated showing a young man with is handmade signs featuring Pepe the frog and other popular alt-right memes saying, “What about the memes?” as other attendees dressed in paramilitary gear ridiculed him. One member of the ground eventually put the young man in a choke hold and he was ousted from the event. The young man, Colton Fears, was later arrested for shooting at protesters at a Richard Spencer event in Florida. While the other attendees at the Houston rally may have seen him as something of a joke, Fears obviously took his political action very seriously.
To a certain extent, we might see this incident as an example of the larger knee-jerk reaction against millennials and their ways of doing things — including online activism. Fears and his Pepe-touting friends, who primarily use social media to build their communities, seem to be struggling to integrate into previously existing right-wing groups that organized under very different technologies of communication. But there’s more at play here than just complaints about perceived slacktivism. In our household (meaning myself, my academic husband, and our pets), we call Colton Fears and his ilk “irony bros” because many of them treat their bigoted views as jokes intended to offend rather than as real beliefs of values. They are most certainly the product of the millennial sense of nihilism that people have been writing about almost as long as they’ve been writing about millennials in general — a sense of nihilism born in the face of the rising cost of education, the near impossibility of owning a home, and the depleted state of the environment. For irony bros, millennial nihilism manifests as everything being both a joke and not-a-joke at the same time, and the more infuriated your interlocutor becomes, the more light-heartedly you respond, but you never change your tune. If anything, you double down on whatever ridiculous position you’ve taken. This millennial nihilism is, in part, a reaction against the rhetoric of perpetual crisis that millennials have grown up with. While Generation X reacted to much the same thing with an attitude of apathy, Millennials have cultivated an attitude of the absurd, a sense of the carnivalesque over the impending end of the world. Nothing we can do to stop it, this attitude says, so we might as well have some fun before the big explosion.
So it’s difficult for irony bros to take rhetoric of perpetual crisis seriously — or perhaps it’s better to say that it’s difficult for irony bros to perform the rhetoric of perpetual crisis seriously, leading to clashes with other branches of the alt-right. For white supremacists, the constant threat that the white race will be wiped off the earth serves to motivate members into action, while militia movements take as a key tenet that, any second, the federal government may go one step too far. In short, even the the right-wing movements that aren’t explicitly religiously affiliated are informed by and utilize the rhetoric of perpetual crisis as introduced by Falwell and other evangelicals. Consequently, Fears’ preoccupation with memes as deserving equal weight as the key concerns of the militia movement feels like a joke because he doesn’t perform fear of perpetual crisis appropriately, according to those who ridicule and assail him. From Fears’ point of view, however, it’s the state of perpetual crisis that warrants the memes he’s peddling; when nothing else seems to be working, you might as well believe in Pepe the Frog.
