<nettime> The Revenge of Folk Politcs

…...The Revenge of Folk Politics……..

2016 witnessed the revenge of “folk politics”. Of all the assumptions that were

overturned by the success of the Alt-right insurgency, one of the most surprising

is the widespread belief on the left that we have outgrown grassroots media activism.

Increasingly, activists have come to be seen as victims of “communicative capitalism’s

perfect lure in which subjects feel themselves to be active, even as their every action

reinforces the status quo. A general assumption has taken root along the lines that if

these interventions posed any genuine threat to the status quo, they would be

immediately suppressed. However, the success of the Alt-right in using the full armory

of tactical media in the meme wars of 2016 not only repudiated this assumption it also

reminded us that there is nothing intrinsically progressive about transgressive subcultures

or the disruptive aesthetics of the avant-garde….

Background

It is important to see the rise of the Alt-right against the background of a profound political

reorientation based on two parallel strategies; firstly, the US far right has effectively occupied

established leftist counter-cultural territories, deploying tactics of subversive humour and

transgression while moveing to replace the traditional conservative Right. This was the point

empahsised by Florian Cramer in the discussion as he described a new kind of politics in

which the "fire walls separating traditional conservatism from the new generation of far right

extremism as part of a larger tendency to effectively replace mainstream conservatism”.

These short paragraphs are extracted from an essay building on earlier reflections on the

issues raised in Better Thik Twice: Subcultures, Alt-s and the Politics of Transgression a

conversation between Florian Cramer and Angela Nagle in Transmediale 2018 face value..

read full text https://transmediale.de/content/the-revenge-of-folk-politics