17 - ‘Soy Boy’, Ecology and the Fascist Imaginary

Summary

The political landscape in the United States has shifted rapidly throughout the last decade, as a far-right social and ideological formation (represented most dramatically by the populist rise of Donald Trump) has overtaken a major political party and reshaped public discourse about politics. In 2020 the global spread of the Covid-19 virus fuelled xenophobic fears of migration, while, in the face of nationwide protests in the United States against police brutality, the president turned towards a rhetoric of ‘law and order’, inspiring far-right militias and white supremacist groups to mobilise against movements for racial justice. One of the most prominent features of the rise of this right-wing formation has been a loose proto- or neo-fascist community or movement stemming from online message boards and social media accounts and known collectively as the alt-right. In this chapter we examine some of the ways in which internet-based memes have been conceptualised in order to understand how online communities act as a kind of breeding ground for affects, discourses and imagery, and how the alt-right uses memes to spread a new fascist imaginary. This task is of the utmost importance in an age in which memes are ‘increasingly central to how large numbers of predominantly young citizens experience politics’ (Dean 2018: 2). Furthermore, the necessity of the scholarly community to overcome what Dean terms ‘squeamishness’ relating to popular new media is all the more urgent if we are to account for the causes and effects of recent political events such as the Brexit and Trump votes, the ‘post-truth’ phenomenon and the global rise of a proto-fascist ‘New Brutality’ (Braidotti et al. 2017).

This New Brutality includes a new language of irony, scatology, casual racism and misogyny under the guise of ‘edginess’. This language has emerged from the so-called ‘digital natives’ of the internet age. What began as a reactionary formation in the online culture wars of the 2010s has grown into a movement embracing white supremacy, antisemitism, misogyny and violent nationalism. The vehicle for this tendency has been online meme culture, which incubated and smuggled this far-right vision into the mainstream:

what we call the alt-right today could never have had any connection to the mainstream and to a new generation of young people if it only came in the form of lengthy treatises on obscure blogs.