Wyatt Verlen: This Isn't Fun Anymore

By Wyatt Verlen (currently perched atop a mountain in Tibet, looking longingly at the simplicity of the life of the common Tibetan peasant)

It really might come as a shock to some of our readers just how much fun it was to be on the right. Having spent time in both camps, I must admit, the left has plenty of fun (this will not be a generic diatribe about how woke made everyone boring; the truth is there is plenty of space on the left for fun), but the right, often, has more fun. There was a time when this was especially true (say, 2019-2024). More than perhaps any other ideological “grouping”, the right’s level of fun seems to ebb and flow.

The forward thinking Gabrielle D’annunzio adjacent movement(s) in the 1930’s probably were the peak of right-wing fun-ness (I mean, it had free love paired with blackshirts and poetry, what is not to like?). But echoes of it have lasted. I am not here making a “Trump is a fascist” claim (if he was that might be more interesting), but a segment of his younger voters certainly are or were in tune with what the avant garde of 20th century fascist thought was (and no, I am not talking about the Groypers here, who are sort of the lame type of fascist, with backwards catholicism and lame diatribes about women in the kitchen). It is rather unfortunate we are in a moment wherein this has been erased, and that moment in the early 2020s has been lost, washed away in a sea of boring influencer anti-semitism (the idea one has to have a manosphere guy selling you supplements tell you about the Gaza genocide is remarkable to me, as an aside) and an equally boring takeover of MAGA by some of the world’s dullest people (say what you will about Mark Levin, but the man is not a genius).

Maybe I just got too old to be a rightoid, and don’t see the fun the kids getting their politics from Fresh and Fit are having. But I suspect it is not that fun. I also suspect that the constant infighting which was already perking up by 2022 or so and is now rampant, has rendered moot the kind of feeling of belonging to an actual countercultural undercurrent. In 2020 or so, everyone was on the same team, now not only are you not on the same team, but you are simply part of a fan base for your favorite influencer, which isn’t very fun.

To be right wing now is not to be picking up reading recommendations from avowed neo-fascists and avowed libertarians at the same time, while attending underground fuck covid gatherings. Instead it is consuming youtube content.

And what a tragedy it is that the left’s only offering is pablum social democracy with identitarian characteristics instead of something more fun than the ghetto of what has become of the right.