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If you've browsed alternative politics communities for any period of time, you've noticed that people on supposedly opposite sides tend to use each other's language and terminology "ironically". (IE, "Moid"/"Foid", "Incel", "Chud", "Libtard", "Dudes rock") Likewise, people tend to enjoy the same entertainment media: Strategy games, dialogue heavy RPGs, The Cyberpunk genre and it's associated political themes. Why do supposedly "leftist" subreddits (stupidpol, Redscarepod) get flooded with rightoids when there's a banwave?
I have a theory that many people are actually sort of a meta-fan of the politics fandom. When you're into weird, obscure political philosophers like Julius Evola or Ted Kaczynski or Max Stirner or whoever, you're not actually "more right" or "more left", you're into alternative politics itself.
If you believe that the US government is controlled by a select group of international enthonationalists, it's not that hard to generalize that belief to a class-struggle framework. Likewise, if you believe in class-struggle, it's not crazy to notice that certain upper classes, particularly in Washington DC, have over-representation from certain groups and strong in-group political loyalty to those groups.
Anyone else notice a similar effect? I'm still trying to develop my thesis.
RedScarePod isn’t a “left wing” subreddit, the hosts of the podcast were vaguely connected to the Chapo ecosystem but have drifted rightward over the years, but in any case they’re largely irrelevant - threads about the latest podcast episode get only a handful of comments compared to hundreds on many regular threads daily. There is some generic performative conservatism, but I wouldn’t describe it as a right or a left wing sub. It’s a contrarian subreddit for shitposting by young-but-not-zoomer smart-ish people who understand a decade or more of internet culture references. Reminds me of somewhere else…
The subreddit’s main audience is the same group of people who once posted on /r/drama (in fact, it’s pretty much the same picture, and almost every rdrama.net regular who is still on Reddit is on RSP), ie. very online 25-35 year old urban PMC late millennials who grew up in the early 4chan/SomethingAwful era and whose politics, such as they are, are largely unchanged from those shitposting days. Many of those people are also here, of course. The language is generic very online language (“we’re so back”, [x]cel, “it’s all over for [x]”, -pilled) you see it all the time on Twitter and even elsewhere on Reddit. Whenever a very online term breaks into the actual mainstream on TikTok and generic meme pages (eg. “-ussy” posting, remember those days on /r/drama?) it becomes déclassé and is slowly dropped in most contexts.
I agree that there are people who are meta-fans of politics, but I think they’re more likely to be found on other politics subreddits, on Twitter and on Substack. Richard Hanania, for example, is a politics enthusiast. So is Nate Silver.
Most RSP posts aren’t particularly political, it’s less political than Drama was back in the day even before the mods cracked down under admin pressure. Disliking fat people and an endless series of jokes about borderline personality disorder and being gay don’t map neatly into the American political spectrum. There’s a trans-critical contingent but ‘misgendering’ is usually downvoted. Views on abortion are progressive and the occasionally anti-abortion podcast hosts are clowned on by the subreddit’s users regularly for their stance.
To some extent, Drama, RSP and KiwiFarms (in the last case with caveats) are the last remnants of the pre-Gamergate internet, when politics was a thing and people had stances on these issues but they were not always the central and defining character trait that motivated online discussion.
I was thinking about writing an RSP-explainer effort post some day, and here you've scooped me already.
Eh, I'm sure I can still get mileage out of the baby chiropractor affair.
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I don't think RSP is vocally leftists but there's always a general agreement whenever the topic comes up that capitalism is terrible and everything would be better under socialism. That might just be what literally every millennial in America believes though.
It seems like extremely online and not terribly economically successful people just use socialism to refer to whatever changes make them, personally, better off.
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