One of the most disconcerting things about the wake of the election result has been the steady flow of people we have come to think of as staunch critics of Corbyn and/or Corbynism making statements to the effect that they are now prepared to acknowledge, at the very least, the quality of his campaigning, and perhaps even the more general legitimacy of his project. It’s not really for me to say whether or not those who maintained belief in the viability of Corbynism should be willing to offer general conciliation immediately, but I do think it’s worth exploring precisely why there is, and will continue to be, a lingering anxiety about the trustworthiness of centrist détente. Some of the notes struck have been convincing – the oft-maligned Owen Smith’s, for one – but others have allowed themselves the privilege of vapid-sounding caveats. Here, it isn’t the fact of the caveat I want to call into question, but a growing tradition of strategic vapidity visible in the opposition to Corbyn.

Anger motivates, annoyance enervates

In 2007, the American literary critic and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai published a book called Ugly Feelings, which set out to explore ‘unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy and disgust.’

Of the affects Ngai covers, it is her discussion of stupidity that demands the most attention. Stupidity, she demonstrates, can be thought of as an unresolved and perhaps unresolvable experience that can be understood if we ‘invoke the sublime – albeit negatively’.

Ngai has clarified her argument usefully by stating that stuplimity should not be fetishized as an excuse for political withdrawal, regardless of its capacity to stymie action. To fail to counter it is to fall into accelerationism’s trap, wildly surfing the what-is in the ludicrous trust that capitalism will simply eat itself. Put more simply, it’s a species of hedonism: the bad-faith consumption of all the trash late capitalism throws at us as though there’s no space left for alternatives. Ideology no longer fools us, as Slavoj Žižek – on this occasion, I think rightly – would have it, but inculcates a knowing indolence when it comes to challenging it.

The Age of Obfuscation

This is very likely the age of obfuscation, and it’s shocking how frequently nominally ‘left’ commentators are sucked into its traps. Boris Johnson has been playing this game in the UK for well over a decade now: making inflatedly idiotic remarks which invite engagement with his putative personal crassness rather than his politics. Trump, obviously, is this to the nth degree, and I doubt I’m the only one of us who saw the ‘covfefe’ tweet and immediately winced at the thought of the inevitable, pointless ‘excoriations’ and ‘eviscerations’ from Trevor Noah and various talk-show hosts called Jon. Clintonite centrists and their wan UK analogues make hay of Trump’s connections to Russia, but the one thing they never discuss – largely because it challenges their founding principle of reasonableness – is that excremental Republicanism

Perhaps it’s risky to follow Adam Curtis in placing too much emphasis on Vladislav Surkov, one of Putinism’s evanescent geniuses,

Anti-Corbynism as Wind-up

Yet it isn’t, necessarily, only the political right who are mobilising stupidity – in the sense of statements which are incalculably empty – in the service of political ends. Where once the Blairite spin machine was about slickness and ingratiation – and, of course, these are still the values centrist politicians openly profess to admire, hence their rhetoric of Axelrodian ‘electability’ – we now seem to have entered a post-Mandelson, post-Campbell age, or else Mandelson, Campbell and their acolytes have deliberately Surkovised themselves. Fooling or ‘convincing’ people are no longer reliable communicative approaches in an age where literally everything is conceived of as spin. For several years now, anti-Corbynism has taken the form of a chain-linked deployment of bad faith remarks which seem designed to immobilise the left precisely because of its lack of desire to convince. Whether it’s from New Labour-affiliated commentators like Dan Hodges and Nick Cohen (or Jonathan Freedland, or Suzanne Moore, and so on, ad infinitum) or from the Blair – Brown PLP rump, the wind-up has replaced the sexed-up truth claim as the hegemonic instrument of choice.

There are genuinely far, far too many examples to choose from, because this dumb show, which typically throws in a salting of authentocracy

Trolling is stuplime: it both demands response and maintains, in its banally contentless nature,

Towards the election, Corbynism seemed most confident once it had seemingly laid its own claim on the meme-y aspects of the stuplime. In 2016, quite a few of us were discussing the sheer exhaustion we felt at being confronted with an opponent who swerved all debate while eulogising the principle of rational discussion.