By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Here’s a fine example of snark:
For those who came in late, the claim — which I know I could be amplifying by repeating, but I hope that you, dear readers, what the strength of character to resist it — is that J.D. Vance, in one of the editions of his book Hillbilly Elegy, wrote that he performed an analog of sexual congress involving a couch and a latex glove. Hence the couch images above. Get it? The claim is false (WaPo; Vanity Fair; Rolling Stone). Snopes has the most tellin detail, in (sorry) “No, JD Vance Did Not Say He Had Sex with Couch Cushions“:
This rumor was false. Vance’s memoir contained no such passage, including in the first edition, as we later reported in a second article. Further, as KnowYourMeme.com reported, [the originator] @rickrudescalves — who later protected his account so only followers could see his posts — ‘signaled that he was joking when he followed up the tweet with the Go on the Internet and Tell Lies meme.
This Democrat false claim is minor league stuff, not to be compared with liberal icon Barney Frank‘s boyfriend running a brothel in the apartment they shared, or whatever has been recorded on the curiously undisclosed tapes from thoroughly bipartisan Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse and tropical island. Nevertheless, it was all over my Twitter feed for days, even though those who were one degree of separation away from @rickrudescalves’s original Tweet knew it was false. And so, for days, that was all anybody who was anybody talked about when they talked about J.D. Vance. They most certainly did not talk about the populist message — pseudo or not — of Hillbilly Elegy. That was how the Kamala campaign introduced Vance to the American public. So, all in all, their initial salvo of snark was a great success, and I expect we will see more snark in the future. In fact, after I had done the research for this post, the following appeared in HuffPo: “Kamala Harris Is Giving Us Snark — And It’s The Energy We’ve Been Waiting For” (the whole liberalgasm discourse is redolent of “energy,” “waiting,” and of course “we”):
But on Thursday morning, when Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign sent reporters an email with the subject line: “Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance,” it was such a contrast from the usual stream of dry and generic emails that inundate our inboxes that it didn’t even seem real at first.
“After watching Fox News this morning we only have one question, is Donald Trump ok?” the press release began, before laying out a bulleted list of “takeaways” from the former president’s appearance Thursday on his favorite program “Fox & Friends,” where he often goes on rants and makes baseless claims.
Among the Harris campaign’s list of bullet points: “Trump is old and quite weird?” Naturally, that line quickly got the internet’s attention.
Seems like the Clinton 2.0 campaign is taking the “deplorables” tack again, except with a more youthful vibe. Something to look forward to!
There’s been a good deal of work done on snark, some of it scholarly, but as a former dedicated and long-time practitioner, I will feel free to make assertions, rather than document everything (or rather, my assertions are the documentation). In this post, I will first give define the characteristics of snark, then give a cursory history (including my own practice). I will then provide an exhibit of a Democrat’s rapturous embrace of the practice, along with a few remarks about the implications of their jouissance (which is not too strong a word.
I define the haracteristics of snark as follows, my scope being limited to extremely online electoral politics (a field in which, I might add, I have been blogging more or less daily for twenty-odd years). Snark is:
1) Reactive. From George Tsiveriotis’s Masters thesis at MIT (2017): “Blogging lends itself to snark first because it is reactive. Many bloggers [not NC!] really don’t write much at all. They are more like impresarios, curators, or editors, picking and choosing things they find on line, occasionally slapping on a funny headline or adding a snarky (read: snotty and catty) comment…. Some days, the only original writing you se on a blog is the equivalent of “Read this…. Take a look…. But, seriously this is lame…. Can you believe this?” As with blogging, so with Twitter. @EBHeater (quoted above) was reacting to @rickrudescalves’s original Tweet. @rickrudescalves was reacting to Vance’s nomination (and his book).
2) Gleefully mocking. An anthropologist, says Tsiveriotis, would consider snark a “degradation ceremony.” He writes: “[Snark is] our first tactic for desensitizing ourselves, for making it clear that the person we’re attacking isn’t human–and that since it began as a joke, we can’t be held accountable for where others take the conversation
3) Knowing. You’ve got to be in on the joke (for example, couch images in @EBHeater’s tweet). From David Denby’s Snark (2009): “This is an essay about a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation—a tone of snarking insult provoked and encouraged by the new hybrid of print, television, radio and the Internet.”
4) Virulent. Well-designed and -executed snark spreads virulently, like gossip, or an earworm (or a meme), as did the Vance/Couch conjuncture. As with blogging, and the Twitter, so with TikTok. (We’ll see how “old and quite weird” does. I’m starting to see “weird” a lot already.)
5) A form of character assassination As of, for example, J.D. Vance.
6) A team sport. Many, many accounts besides @EBHeater followed @rickrudescalves, some (no doubt) from campaign assets, others artisanal. In all cases, however, the accounts amplifying and refining the snark are engaged in a collective (“strength of weak ties“) effort. They are “friends” (and not enemies).
Search being what it is, I can’t produce anything like a timeline for the term “snark.” Certainly publications like New York Spy (1986 to 1998) paved the way for the form, if not the term: What, after all, is “short-fingered vulgarian” — coined at that venue[1] — but reactive, gleefully mocking, knowing, virulent, and a form of character assassination (however justified)? The only characteristic missing is “a team sport,” not easy in print. The first usage example I can find is from 2003, by New York Times writer Laura Miller, who applied it to book reviews: “I learned that you had to be careful in assigning books by young, celebrated authors to young, uncelebrated reviewers; the results were likely to be either starry-eyed hero-worship or (in the case of the more talented writers) a snide fury out of all due proportion to the subject at hand: snarkiness.” By that time, the liberal Democrat blogosphere was well underway, with Philadelphia, where I then, happily albeit unemployedly, then lived, as its epicenter; Atrios (my blogfather) is quoted at then-important political blog site Daily Kos as having hit a “New Snarkitude High” in 2005.
My own personal best in snarkitude took place in 2004, after Bush the Younger’s re-election. Flushed with victory, Republican talking heads simulatanously began chattering about a “Bush mandate” (“I have political capital. I intend to spend it“). In reaction, I “Google-bombed” “Bush mandate,” so that a search for that term led to the website for Mandate magazine, which featured, as I recall, the image of a fetching young gentleman in a sailor’s cap on the cover. This exploit, sadly, illustrates another characteristic of snark:
7) Lack of principles. After all, it’s not wrong to be gay, any more than it’s wrong to wear a sailor’s cap. The New York Times shows exactly the same characteristic here:
(This was too much even more Mother Jones: “There Are Better Ways to Mock Trump Than Joking That He’s Putin’s Gay Lover“).
However, snark’s unprincipled nature wasn’t the reason I gave it up (even if snark greatly influenced my style, my tone and locution). I didn’t like what it did to me personally: Always being galvanized into displays of mocking wit by events, instead of taking the time to being analytical; always outraged, and generating outrage; basically stabby. Further, the blogosphere had by then bifurcated into the Exra Kleins and Matt Yglesias’s of this world and us small fry; it was time to refocus. It was fun while it lasted, until it was not fun. No doubt the young people now discovering snark will go through a similar cycle, grid willing.[2]
I was moved to write about snark because of this thread from David Roberts (@drvolts; 221.3K Follower), late of Vox, who now has a Substack devoted to “energy and politics.” I’ll quote several Tweets from his account, where he’s reacting to @rickrudescalves:
I’m enjoying that the couch jokes are bugging Republicans but I’m enjoying it almost more that they are bugging harumphing, self-consciously morally superior Dems. “We’re better than this.” No we’re not. Knife those fuckers.
— David Roberts (@drvolts) July 27, 2024
Should be an exciting 100 days (I sympathize with the dislike of “civility”; back in the day, the late David Broder [genuflects] called us “vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the left [sic]” because we shared that dislike. Politically, it was utterly ineffective, except possibly at building an in-group). The assumption that Kamala is not “self-consciously morally superior” is interesting. More:
… “we’re mocking you because you’re pathetic & we feel like it.” The irrationality of it, the fact that it’s made up & kind of ridiculous, is the *point*. This is not about exchanging semantic information. It’s about kicking sand in someone’s face. It’s a dominance play.
— David Roberts (@drvolts) July 27, 2024
#2, Gleefully mocking: “kicking sand” is a degradation ceremony.
Let me now add:
8) Bullshit. “Not about exchanging semantic information” — as in, for example, that the couch claim is false — means, precisely, that snark is bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense (“strategic indifference to the veracity of one’s assertion“).
More:
We are in a rare moment when the left is feeling its oats. It has a little swagger! It’s been a long time. Finally, it can stick its chest out, be the one kicking sand instead of the one coughing & apologizing for putting its face in the way. Finally!
— David Roberts (@drvolts) July 27, 2024
A liberalgasm. More:
I know lots of people wish that politics were a matter of evidence & reasoned argument & coming together despite our differences. And maybe someday we can get some of that back. But right now, it’s a knife fight, and being ostentatiously high-minded …
— David Roberts (@drvolts) July 27, 2024
“Bullshit” = “muscle” is a weird flex, but OK. More:
… winning is much more important than a campaign that flatters your personal tastes & predilections. Saving actual lives, preventing actual suffering, is more morally significant than discourse that flatters your identity.
Get a taste for blood. Fight! pic.twitter.com/lhjzXeF4qW
— David Roberts (@drvolts) July 27, 2024
Well, at least we’ve only got “blood” and not soil. First, this is exactly same logic that led to the madness of RussiaGate. Second, it’s the same logic that will lead to Democrats denying Trump office, in the case of victory, by any means necessary (including, as we see, outright lying as a basic tactic[3], but going on from there). Third and finally, if liberal Democrats really want to play “dominance politics”, I think FAFO is in order as a reminder. And finally:
Just think about the evolution from Biden’s “threat to democracy” language (high-minded harumphing from a soapbox) to the Harris/Walz “good lord these are some creepy, weird fuckers” language (what you’d say to a friend). Same basic message. But it *feels* different.
— David Roberts (@drvolts) July 27, 2024
Well, I’m happy to see the “our democracy” put to bed because it was obvious nonsense. But if Clinton 2.0 thinks that running against “creepy, weird fuckers” (unlike, say, the totally not creepy convicted felon Anthony Weiner, whose Clintonian staffer, Huma Abedin, is now engaged to the totally not weird Alex Soros) instead of against “deplorables,” good luck to them.
If this is the reaction of a level-headed energy geek like Roberts, Lord only knows how more volatile liberal Democrats are reacting.
There remains the question of whether snark is effective (unaddressed and assumed by Roberts, presumably too enthralled by his calls for blood).
Twenty years ago, I don’t think snark was effective; Democrats took back the House in 2006 not because bloggers were foul-mouthed and snarky, but on two policy issues: The Katrina debacle, and Social Security, which Bush had threatened to spend some of his political capital cutting. (I believe that insiders familiar with that effort will argue that Pelosi was swayed by various online presences not to compromise with Bush, but I am very dubious that snarkitude had anything to do with it.) These were, in any case, policy issues. God knows we snarked on Bush for his stupidity, his religion, his towel-snapping, his Bushisms, for being a dry drunk, for his frat boy person, and on “Mission Accomplished,” and on and on and on, but none of it took. Policy did.
It may be that today, things are different. The Internet (social media, search) scales out to millions instantly in a way that the blogosphere did not. Arguably, Fetterman’s god-tier social media team kept his campaign alive and brought him to victory despite the stroke that disabled him (and I would be very interested to see if any of them are working for Kamala; something to research). For example:
TV: There were so many headline-worthy social media moments in the campaign. What was your favorite?
[Sophie Ota]: One of them has to be the crudité moment.[4] It really utilized every single part of my team. We got out a video and photos and I literally had my staffer run and get a veggie platter on her way to film time. And that photo was our most engaged-with post. We raised half a million dollars within 24 hours just off a sticker someone on my team designed. Then we were able to use that moment to get more people to volunteer with us and sign up for our relational organizing training and canvass-your-friends-on-social-media training. It went viral on Twitter, but it was also a big moment for every corner.
Of course, the the crudité moment was true; but as we have seen with the couch example, the truth is no longer needed.
If were a Republican, and still in the snark business, felt that the fate of the nation was at stake, and was convinced like Roberts that “dominance politics” is the order of the day, well… Two can play the game[5]. The phrase “la grande horizontale” comes to mind (along with “plausible deniability”). Not that there’s anything wrong with either of those two things. The next hundred days should be a wonderfully clarifying spectacle for voters and non-voters alike.
NOTES
[1] Fittingly, the phrase appears in a parody advertisement:
[2] Time presses, so I pass over the 2005 example of “Box Turtle Ben” (still virulent after nineteen years!), and sightings from 2020, and 2024 (very much everything old is new again).
[3] As, for example, Kamala did, along with every other Democrat who said that Biden was “sharp as a rack” (sorry, “tack.” MR SUBLIMINAL See how easy?)
[4] The moment, from Teen Vogue:
In a video originally posted in the spring, the heart surgeon, who was propelled to fame by Oprah Winfrey, walks through a grocery store. Things are rocky from the start: In the first five seconds of the video, he calls the store “Wegner’s,” and it turns out he was actually shopping at a store called Redner’s. “My wife wants some vegetables for crudités,” Oz says before picking up broccoli, asparagus, and carrots in turn and stating their prices. He goes on to include guacamole and salsa, commenting that it would cost “$20 for crudités, and this doesn’t include the tequila. I mean, that’s outrageous. And we got Joe Biden to thank for this.”
A 22-year-old Twitter user who goes by the handle @umichvoter and asked to remain anonymous to protect his privacy (and now has a Twitter following of over 27,000), shared the video with a simple message: “Who thought this was a good idea.” The tweet quickly went viral, with Fetterman sharing the original video from April with the message: “In PA, we call this a veggie tray.”
Notice that ‘Who thought this was a good idea” is almost identical to George Tsiveriotis’s example: “Can you believe this?”
[5] From a master of the art:
Reminds me of when LBJ was running for Congress and told his campaign manager to say his opponent was a “pig fucker.” But he isn’t a pig fucker, his manager protested. LBJ responded, “let him deny it.”
— Democracy Pursued by the Furies (@bluescat47) July 25, 2024
