The Very Online Culture Wars

CALDWELL, ID. The 2024 presidential election was at least in part a rebuke of the Very Online Left (VOL), a term that, I humbly submit, is a better description of our current Left than either progressive or liberal. Progressive and liberal are real words with histories, as are the words conservative and libertarian. VOL is a properly ugly term for a movement that does not deserve much better. It is also better than Woke for my purposes, as Woke is a term that suggests the problem is isolated to the Left, and it remains a catchall slur used by the Very Online Right (VOR). Sam Kriss summarizes the dynamics of online politics well: “Whether it calls itself the Right or the Left, the real content of all online politics is the internet itself, and the arc of online politics always bends towards a bunch of strangers who spend their entire lives on the computer demanding that you publicly denounce your friends.”

In that the election revealed to the VOL once again that a large proportion of the electorate thinks they have lost their minds, I offer no complaints. If the national electorate was voting to reject the nihilism of campus infatuation with Hamas, DEI gone wild, Drag Queen Story Hour, and the ridiculous “We Believe . . .” yard signs gracing impeccable lawns in gated communities, I applaud. The last four years have revealed the vacuousness of such posturing, and its apocalypse is well-deserved. Only a dedicated member of the VOL could believe in the real value or durability of these gestures. Stepping for a moment outside of the VOL bubble, whether online or, even better, in the real world, would have popped that illusion definitively. It is satisfying to see this form of justice play out in real time. To pun on Wilde, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the ritual outrage performed by the VOL in the wake of the 2024 election.

Insofar as the election was an affirmation of the VOR, I find much less to applaud. While members of the Trump circle such as JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr. represent potentially fresh policy directions, the Trump entourage as a whole should give any traditionalist conservative pause. Kid Rock, Elon Musk, Amber Rose, Hulk Hogan, Matt Gaetz, Greg Gutfeld, Vince and Linda McMahon—these personalities are no doubt quite at home lounging at Mar-a-Lago or partying in Las Vegas, but they are hardly representative of a durable American Main Street conservativism. The Las Vegas skyline is not known for its church spires.

Pretending to ourselves that Trump II represents a culture war victory threatens to render traditionalist accounts of the true, the good, and the beautiful incoherent. Several of the celebrities in the Trump II entourage closely resemble villains from the classical Christian education curriculum that I teach; some are hardly even wolves in sheep’s clothing and are just outright wolves. Who knew that Victor Frankenstein  was just innocently trying to benefit humanity with his bold experiments, that Boromir really knew what time it is unlike the naïve hobbits, and that Mr. Wickham would have made a great Secretary of Defense? Maybe even Big Brother was a model leader after all, given the rapidity with which archenemies become allies and vice versa in the era of Trump I and II or the all-caps and exclamation points torture of the English language that marks the social media presence of our once and future president. To step outside of the classical tradition for a moment, at least Biff Tannen ended up with the mouthful of manure that was his just desert. Maybe he can wash the cars at Mar-a-Lago.

It is true that our Very Online era hardly has a corner on decadence. Consider a few sentences from Wendell Berry’s Andy Catlett: Early Travels:

The thought has come to me that the old world, in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world. And that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable. An economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature, or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it.

The world I knew as a boy was flawed surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.

Berry’s Andy is describing the early 1980s to early 2000s, and we could go even further back to Charles Dickens’ description of the French aristocracy in A Tale of Two Cities. As Dickens caustically notes, the ancien régime rewarded “civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives, all lying horribly . . . [all] unconnected with anything that was real.” Dickens’ “leprosy of unreality” can disfigure any age.

It is also true that the rural places populated by people who live “close[r] to the weather” than most Americans —including Henry County, Kentucky—are the ones who have been most loyal to Trump from the beginning. Maybe if I made my living there I would prefer opposition and polarization to acquiescence as well. But eventually we need to recognize that we need something more than VOR opposition.

Our digital era has surely only taken us further from reality. Who can argue that the VOL and VOR are increasingly presenting to us not real political parties but a “jumble of scenery and props never quite believable,” an “economy of fantasies and moods”? It is politics as WWE, almost literally. We follow the presidential cabinet search as if we’re watching the latest Avengers spectacle. The VOL tediously checks every intersectional box possible while building its team, while the VOR just goes all-out celebrity.

The problem is that the Very Online are not only Very Online but also act in the real world where some of us ignorant benighted ones are trying to reckon with the “real cost and worth of things” without being caught up in the capricious whims of the Very Online. In a pithy description of the January 6 Capitol riot from the brilliant book A Web of Our Own Making, Antón Barba-Kay has described this Very Online mode of politics well:

The Capitol riot was an extraordinary exhibition of just how online nationalism now is: the rapid mobilization of a crowd, its ambiguous political status and intention (a coup? A dust-up out of hand?), the thorough digital coverage by all parties, the high number of social media figures present in the crowd, the fantastic (and ambiguously ironic) costuming, signaling, and aestheticizing of these figures by and through the event itself—all taking place in and around the single most venerable edifice in the United States. It was an online mob irrupting into ‘real’ life, the perfect selfie surrealized into political action.

I’m online more than enough myself, but at least I think I can still see that the emperor is wearing no clothes and that the Very Online are working on a different plane of existence than the one in which I try to live my life. And in the case of some of these interminable debates that seem designed merely to keep the site meters spinning and the clicks clicking, the consequences are very real indeed. These online mobs truly do irrupt into real life, and vulnerable people remain vulnerable, regardless of which Very Online virtue is demanded to be duly signaled on any given day.

This is not an argument for culture war pacifism; I’m with my fellow FPR editor Adam Smith on the need for a just culture war. It is an argument for real distinctions on what kind of culture we are actually fighting to build, and where such culture war should be waged. Only by straining credulity to the breaking point can Trump II be called a victory for any real conservative principle as articulated, say, by Russell Kirk in his concise list.

Is there anything truly conservative about Trump II? Can a party whose convention platforms an unrepentant stripper with a face tattoo be conservative? Can a party that valorizes a techno narcissist who has proudly fathered twelve children, one of whom is named X Æ A-Xii and another of whom is named Techno Mechanicus, with three different mothers still pretend to be conservative? And this is not even to mention Trump himself, whose public persona is built on violations of nearly every verse from Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount. The VOR represents the Silicon Valley mantra “move fast and break things” with more enthusiasm than it does any of the principles articulated by Kirk.

There is no place in the VOR for Kirk’s elaboration of the conservative principle “that there exists an enduring moral order” and that this order “is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent”:

It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society—whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society—no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.

I am not so high-minded as to think that our politicians must be perfect or that lawmaking brooks no compromise. I know the George Washingtons only come around rarely (and here I must beg to differ from Sylvester Stallone’s absurd claim that Trump is a new Washington–though it is amusing to imagine Trump riffing on Washington’s “Rules of Civility”), which is one of several reasons that I respect the separation of powers in the American Constitution. I have tried in each election to spend at least some time thinking beyond the people involved, and to consider each situation in relation to broader political platforms and policies.

But I remain wary. The slippage on the basic character issues that we have witnessed in the last few decades is utterly farcical. While there are real consequences to the outcomes of our cultural and political conflicts, the Very Online culture war is not worth fighting. It looks too often like scorched earth total war. Almost a century ago, in 1934, the Great War veteran Edmund Blunden wrote, reflecting on the Battle of the Somme: “By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.”

As with the Very Online culture war. The Very Online Moment has won the culture war, and seems poised to go on winning, at least for the immediate future. The VOR might be riding high now, but I anticipate that the election jackpot of the moment will not last and that this victory will soon look more like Las Vegas at noon, beaten down and tawdry under the merciless exposure of the midday western sun.

Fortunately we are not bereft of some basic wisdom for living hopeful lives in the midst of this dismal and at times darkly humorous spectacle. Barba-Kay concludes A Web of Our Own Making with this advice for reminding ourselves of what is actually real:

Work to cut it [digital technologies] down (or out). Reduce your dependence. Do not address it as you. Uncouple your mind from what is mindless aggregate. Do not fight it directly (since that too is its power to shape) but work to change the subject altogether. At any rate, work not to see yourself reflected in this mirror. At any rate, work to see that part of what we are buying into is an instrument for forgetting the meaning of what’s most meaningful—an instrument for forgetting death and therefore an instrument of death itself.

This is at least a starting point, even if resisting the digital creep is not enough to save us from the decadence of our Very Online moment. A refusal to participate is not always complacent acquiescence. I’m with Eric Voegelin: “No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.” A culture in its fullest sense, one worthy of preservation and respect, is built slowly, unglamorously, and through the hard work of countless people. The best and most lasting of these contributions are left in real places among real people. Tweets, NFTs, and the fever dreams of the AI bots are no foundation for a culture.

Regardless of what time the Very Online think it is, God is not mocked. We cannot afford to let the drone of TikTok drown out the music of the “timely world of nature” or “the eternal world of the prophets and poets.”

Image credit.