Revelations that Nina Power is a jk-but-not-jk-;) fascist/groyper/nutbag are not really surprising but are, at least for me, confusing, in the way that everything political for the past decade has been confusing. I share some of my confusion below, culminating in some choice bits from Power’s 2020 chapbook about an unrequited crush on some art douchebag and which is, I think, her real crime…
the groyper as yearner
These days, presumably having gotten over this guy (?), Power is on staff at Soros-funded Compact, which, from its original ostensible project of bringing together the illiberal right and left against the neoliberal (… and liberal… and capitalist?… and democratic?) center now seems to work to bring them together to play that center’s controlled opposition—much as, back in the late 70s and early 80s, the Soros-funded New York Institute for the Humanities under Richard Sennett brought post-Marxist European intellectuals like Foucault into conversation with Americans drifting away from the left like Sontag and Edmund White.
As I said in my recent essay on Larry Kramer, in regards to another liberal-imperial anti-Marxist psyop, I don’t object to such projects:
Forget, reader, the scandal of the CIA using the Iowa workshop to advance American imperialism by training foreigners to love deadened small intimate fare over social-realist political epics—because let’s face it, our empire is still the best game in town, may it reign forever, and if that means no one writes their country’s version of And Quiet Flows the Don, so be it!—but someone must pay for the crime of letting Garth Greenwell and Brandon Taylor loose on a gay community still only just recovering from AIDS.
Julia Kristeva, whose 70s turn from the radical left to the liberal center I more or less endorsed in another recent essay, was also part of this network (she was concurrently an informant for Bulgarian intelligence as well—if you can get paid by the capitalists and the communists, why not both?). It’s only proper for aging radicals, as they ‘hit the wall’, to settle down with whatever betabux Soros, Thiel, or whichever oligarch is willing to provide—I’d be happy to cash in myself if I could!
It’s probably a good thing, too, for the stability of our regime—which, with whatever qualifications and sighs I more or less support—that the posturings of resentful self-styled outsiders from the right and left, from BAP to Zizek to Fred Moten (who all have a thing for turgid prose), earn them places as acknowledged or unacknowledged court jester. The system works—except for all the parts that are supposed to build roads and bridges etc.
But I still find myself asking what really must be stupid old-fashioned questions about whether or not the people involved believe either the crazy shit (in Power’s case, saying she misses patriarchy—one hates to suggest that she really just misses the art douchebag, and thinks abolishing women’s rights might make him come back) or the saner shit (again in her case, the much more milquetoast What do Men Want? book published at the same time as the pro-patriarchy essay) they say—whether Power running groyper groupchats while she cried about being unfairly ‘cancelled’ from the UK art and theory scenes for hanging around with fascists was a bit of edgy humor akin to Bruce LaBruce’s swastika earrings or the ‘truth’ about her views.
The answer of course could be that they believe neither, or both, and that it’s a mistake to be looking amid the things people say to delineate some subset of ‘real’ views. Even if we suspend the question of what’s real and what’s fake, though, I’m left wondering what’s the ‘inside’ and what’s the ‘outside’, which persona—the liberal crybaby or the reactionary—is meant to be public, and which private. Another way, I suppose, of looking for depth where I shouldn’t.
All this bothers me, obviously, because of my own closeness to the thing. I’ve myself met with the Soros guy who funds Compact (and didn’t want to fund me and my work on gay politics/culture—I support the empire but the empire doesn’t support me!), and in any number of essays for Tablet and elsewhere I’ve defended the idea, articulated in various ways, that a churning of identitarian resentments in private life (the problematic groupchat) and commitment to universal rights, human dignity, economic equality, etc., is perhaps the best we can do, and is, at any rate, the essence, however disavowed, of conventional liberalism. Indeed, I’ve argued and do think, that dark forces of hatred, domination, inequality, etc., are the fuel of much of what is best in private life—the challenge is keeping them there!
But cases like Power remind me that there’s an unfortunate spiral at work by which liberalism being another name for “war crimes in the sheets, human rights in the streets,” tends to make liberalism look like a mere front to protect vicious hateful people waiting to turn back the clock on human rights, and to make fascism look like a sad little game losers play with each other on their phones. That the members of the far right—like the far left—appear even to each other silly phonies actually propping up the center sets off rounds of not-false accusations that this or that apparently anti-liberal figure is in fact a plant, agent provocateur, etc. It keeps the enemies of the center busy in pointless bickering about who is actually a Soros agent (maybe they all are!), and pushes some of them to take up the most heinous positions in order to prove that they’re not. Which all perhaps helps keep liberalism going a bit longer by making its foes ever-more paranoid and retarded.
Even without the sort of broad, organized, popular base it had in the days of the New Deal, even without delivering the economic goods to any but the top 1%, even without the support of competent administrators and intellectuals invested in a coherent, actionable ideology, our system—I suppose the logic goes—can keep running on the fumes the far-right shoots out of its ears as its members scream their way into culture-war sinecures.
If this strategy went hand-in-hand with some program of, say, restoring good working-and-middle-class jobs, providing healthcare, controlling crime and immigration, protecting democracy, etc., then I’d have more confidence in what seems to be the plan of gassing up fascists and having them play liberals—or is it having closet liberals play fascists to the gallery?
After all, the one time I met Nina Power—at a party in London three years ago—she seemed at first like a tender sweetie, hugged me and handed me her chapbook of yearning, telling me she was a fan of mine. I’m always suspicious when someone says that they like my work, since it’s surely for the wrong reason, and I think Power, who particularly said she liked my 2020 essay on how all the insane race shit of that summer was sure to alienate white people who don’t have a humiliation kink, probably saw me as a fellow-traveler in her quest to imagine that she’d been unjustly persecuted for hanging around with reactionaries.
Which, sure, I don’t think people should be ‘cancelled,’ generally speaking—I have myself all sorts of cancellable views (although is anyone is still getting cancelled these days? How embarrassing to be the last one!). And I stand by that essay—DEI shit in that year really was an insane embarrassing psychodrama almost designed to alienate regular whites and to distract collective attention from reasonable, desirable goals like stopping police from murdering people.
I did however get the conversational ick as Power started banging on about the evil of pornography (did her art douchebag prefer the gooncave to her attentions?). The next morning I looked at her pamphlet, which conflates being ignored by the guy she’s into with discovering that modernity, indeed life itself, is a sham… and somehow gays’ fault:
The prose is some Sam Kriss on an off-day shit. The ideas are a female version of the incel-to-fascism pipeline—or of the no less common on the left phenomenon whereby ‘Why Can’t My Loser Nonbinary Friends Get Laid?’ fuels demands for cultural revolution. Everyone really just wants some dick—and in its absence starts spinning up political accounts of how they’ve been robbed of it by Modernity… which, inevitably, means not just a bleak grey matrix of disenchantment and atomization but a scheme by some evil minority (I’d have a boyfriend if it weren’t for Pride!).
There are now three masks to be confused about. Not just the roles of the good goy for Soros and semi-ironic (?) Nazi for the groyperchat—and the question of whether the fascist serves the interests of the liberal or vice versa—but the role of the Lover. At the end of the 70s Roland Barthes, as he came to write Fragments of the Lover’s Discourse, began to definitively abandon Marxism in favor of what he called a ‘second liberalism,’ premised not so much on abstract universal rights and a neutral state as on an ethic in which private life is made bright by passions that are kept, however, from turning us into zealots, fools, or madmen—helping us, as he put it, live within ‘the neutral.’
Shortly thereafter he got hit by a truck (was this too, the work of Soros? to what end?). With his system only a sketch, love—the totalizing desires, the dangerous yearnings, the wild fantasies and will-to-power of private life—keeps turning away from its disappointments in the realm of coupling towards the arena of politics and commentary, where liberalism and the enemies on its payroll keep fighting, and tainting, and resembling, each other.