Against Slopulism

3,280 words

One of the major political trends of the past decade and a half has been the rise of populism. Most notably Donald Trump, who entered the political ring as a populist outsider in 2015 and subsequently won two non-consecutive presidential terms, has become the defining political figure of the past decade. In addition, populist figures in Europe have won political office such as Victor Orban in Hungary or Georgia Meloni in Italy. Populist figures such as Nigel Farage in the UK, Gert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Marine Le Pen in France have also made political headway in their respective countries.

Google defines populism as such: “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.”

In the early 21st century, the tide of populism in Western countries has been primarily driven by demographic shifts, deindustrialization, inflation, a hostile cultural climate, and a collapse in social cohesion. As hordes of third world migrants flood into Western countries, housing prices skyrocket, job opportunities dry up, and the intelligentsia tell us were “racist” if we don’t just accept it, there’s a widespread sense in the Western world that we are being robbed of the quality of life we once knew.

This has rightfully made the political, cultural, and educational establishment in the Western world extremely unpopular as they appear to be indifferent to this plight at best or deliberately facilitating it out of malice at worse. As a result, populism has become an extremely effective political formula for formerly outsider political leaders to harness this discontent and position themselves as anti-establishment candidates on the side of the disillusioned masses against the out-of-touch ruling class.

Part of the appeal of populism is not only hearing a political leader finally address your long-held grievances, but also the sense of rebellion and vindication it offers. Populist leaders are often condemned by the political establishment as dangerous extremists who threaten the stability of “our democracy”, which only increases their appeal in this regard. One who is disaffected by the political trends of the past few decades can feel like they are fighting back against the elite class who they so revile by supporting such a candidate. Getting under the skin of someone you despise is an undeniably satisfying feeling.

It’s no surprise that populism has become a political force in the age of social media. In decades past, political discourse was limited to the partisanship of TV channels and newspapers which allowed for certain issues, such as those relating to immigration and demographics, to be kept out of discussion all together. Once it became a fixture of modern life, social media became one of the main driving forces behind populism as it enabled the masses to express themselves on the same platform as the mainstream for the first time.

Social media proved to be an invaluable asset for the 2016 Brexit campaign, Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, and various other populist political movement throughout the West. Following 2016, the establishment attempted to get a lid on the surge in populism by stifling its reach on social media via deplatforming. This lasted through out Donald Trump’s first term and the first half of Joe Biden’s, but things changed when Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, which he rebranded as X.

As a libertarian, Musk clawed back much of the strict censorship regime which existed on Twitter from 2017 to 2022 (though a degree of censorship has continued to exist). This drew the ire of the establishment as they lost their grip on the social media giant which had previously been a reliable outlet for them to promote their progressive liberal worldview. The left’s attack on Musk pushed him away and towards Donald Trump in time for the 2024 presidential election. The algorithm on X shifted from promoting the progressive left to the populist right, a shift which played a pivotal role in delivering Donald Trump a victory in the 2024 campaign.

Once a stronghold of left-wing progressivism, the platform formerly known as Twitter has now become a stronghold of right-wing populism. However, the platform now poses a new threat to the right, not from the left, but from within. Over the past year, the platform has seen an explosion of the phenomenon which has come to be known as “slop”. When applied to online content, the term “slop” is used to denote low-quality clickbait designed to appeal to the base emotions of a sub-average IQ audience.

Applying the term “slop” to political content was popularized by Academic Agent in reference to massive right-leaning accounts on X such as Libs of TikTok, End Wokeness, or Ian Miles Cheong, which have been heavily promoted by the site’s algorithm. The modus operandi of these accounts is to generate either outrage or a sense of superiority among right-wingers by incessantly sharing clips of the lowest hanging fruit of the left (Antifa, transgenderism, crazy professors, etc.) with their massive online followings.

The phenomenon of slop is nothing new on the right. This style of content garnered massive numbers of hits back in 2016 in the form of the SJW Cringe Compilation. What has changed recently is that Elon Musk has started to actively engage with and promote such content on the platform which he acquired in 2022. The top reply of any viral clip on X of a leftist protestor screaming about gender pronouns is usually from Musk himself, posting a single reaction emoji. With Musk being the richest man in the world and now taking a more active role in politics, this style of content has gone mainstream. How many likes clips of their actions in the real world will generate on social media has now become a major consideration for big-name populist political figures.

I don’t know if I was the first to use this term, but I have taken to referring to this brand of politics as “slopulism”. Going back to the appeal of populism addressed earlier, it offers followers the feeling that their long-standing grievances are finally being addressed and a sense of revenge against the ruling class responsible for their disaffection. I would define “slopulism” as populism which has forsaken the concrete issues which initially gave it its appeal (demographics, inflation, job loss, cultural decline, etc.) solely in favour of the emotional gratification derived from making one’s political opponents angry. Since Trump’s 2024 election victory, this has more or less become the aesthetic of the mainstream right.

If I could summarize the governing style of the first 100 days of the second Trump administration with one word, it would be “slopulism”. What have been some of the new admin’s misadventures so far? Calling for Canada become the 51st US state, threatening to annex Greenland from Denmark, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, proposing turning Gaza into a beachside resort, a farcically unsuccessful attempt at ending the Russia-Ukraine War, going back and forth on an incoherent tariff plan, and reintroducing single-use plastic straws.

These policies bear very little resemblance to those promised by Trump and other populist candidates which gave them their initial appeal. The only resemblance they bear is that they make the liberal establishment angry. The problem is that the Trump administration and its imitators abroad aren’t angering the liberal establishment because they are transgressing the universalist egalitarian foundations of their worldview, but by violating general standards of political decorum which anyone would expect regardless of their ideology.

These antics will no doubt garner countless likes from 90-IQ MAGAtards on X, but in real world terms, they don’t even begin to address any of the societal issues which gave rise to the populism to begin with. The only real-world effect is that it makes these figures appear boorish and unprofessional to anyone outside the online slopulist echo chamber. Furthermore, the populist right is now part of the establishment, meaning they share now in the responsibility for the problems which they promised to address.

Anyone who genuinely cares about these issues should hold the populists’ feet to the fire along with the rest of the establishment. However, slopulism allows these leaders to satiate their supporters by keeping the political circus going while ignoring the concrete issues themselves. Since Trump is now in office, him and his administration should be the ones bearing the brunt of criticism, but holding them accountable would require introspection which would take MAGAtards down a notch from their jingoistic fervour.

Now that the emotional high of defeating the Democrats in the 2024 election has worn off, they want their next hit of slopulist euphoria. So, they’re off calling for the US to invade and annex Canada and Greenland. In this outlandish hypothetical scenario, US cities would still be unliveable, crime-ridden, multicultural hellholes, but liberals would be triggered and MAGAtards could continue to feel like they are rebelling against someone, so they lap this kind of rhetoric up.

Excessive contrarianism against the liberal establishment has also resulted in slopulism spiralling off into the most moronic of conspiracy theories. I must say that I don’t believe all conspiracy theories are incorrect. The Great Replacement is called a conspiracy theory, but it’s easily statistically verifiable and clearly motivated by either ethnic resentment or delusional utopianism. While I do believe that the climate is changing, I also believe that the threat of climate change is being overblown to justify vastly expanding managerial control. The establishment line on COVID was clearly incorrect. A degree of scepticism is always healthy.

However, slopulism interprets each and every event in history and the present day into some kind of incoherent grand conspiracy by a vague all-powerful elite. It has almost become mainstream on the right to believe that the moon landing was fake, the Titanic was sunk by central bankers, that Hitler escaped to Argentina where he made Klaus Schwab his protégé, and that Bridget Macron is actually a man. While the mindless NPC of the liberal left whose entire consciousness is formed by the media is a problem, the paranoid schizophrenic of the populist right who believes the WEF is controlling his toaster isn’t a solution.

Despite believing in an all-controlling, globe-spanning conspiracy, these types always exempt populist icons like Donald Trump or Elon Musk from culpability because the slopulism friend-enemy distinction is who makes you feel like you’re owning the libs on social media. They also exempt people like Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin from blame because they have erroneously projected their political identity onto these figures. This is how they can simultaneously believe that globalists are plotting the creation of a one-world government while also cheering on the US President as he proposes the idea of turning North America into a single massive superstate.

So as to not throw too much of the blame on American populists, the right in other Western countries is also guilty of adopting this crass and anti-intellectual brand of politics. In my home country Canada for example, a segment of the populist right has embraced the idea of Canada becoming a US state. While this idea remains extremely unpopular among Canadians across the political spectrum, accounts promoting annexation have built a sizeable following on X with considerable assistance from the site’s algorithm.

The most pressing issue facing Canada, like every other Western country, is demographic replacement. With that in mind, Canada becoming a US state is totally counterproductive in reversing this trend. The United States is less white per capita than Canada, meaning it would speed up the fall to minority white status. Additionally, this would only further deracinate Canada from any authentic ethnic and cultural identity, further disempower Canada’s European founding stock politically, and subjugate us to an even larger hostile state than the current one.

When asked why they think becoming a US state would be a good idea, this slopulist cohort on the Canadian right usually answer that it would liberate Canada from the WEF (somehow) or that it would give us the Second Amendment to fight government tyranny. However, what you’ll find is that they primarily desire the populist aesthetic of MAGA, not tangible political aims. Canada becoming a US state would make Canadian liberals angry and since that’s the vector through which they form their political views, they are convinced it’d be a great idea.

Slopulism typically distracts from the fundamental issues (immigration) by making a giant scene out of minor issues (women’s sports) or non-issues (plastic straws), but even when it delves into these fundamental issues, it usually only serves to poison the well. Let’s take JD Vance saying Britain will be the first Islamic state to obtain nuclear weapons as an example. The assertion that Britain has a problem with Islamic immigration is certainly true, but this philistine manner of addressing this really only makes having a serious discussion about the threat of demographic shifts more difficult.

First of all, lacking any kind of standards of decorum makes sensible people less likely to take what you’re saying seriously. Secondly, it’s factually incorrect. Pakistan, a 96% Muslim country which punishes blasphemy by death, has nuclear weapons. Muslims make up a larger share of the populations of France, Russia, and India, all of whom also have nuclear weapons, than the UK. Britain most certainly will not be the first Islamist country to have nuclear weapons. Thirdly, while Muslims certainly are a problem in the country, the real threat facing Britain isn’t sharia law. The real threat facing Britain is that the indigenous Europeans of the British Isles are being replaced by a third world biomass imported from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Muslims only constitute one of the many groups displacing the native Brits. Fourthly, on the issue of demographics, the United States is worse off than the UK. As of 2020, the United States was 57.84% non-Hispanic white while the UK was 75.98% white British in 2021. Both countries are facing demographic replacement, but the US is further down the road.

Again, sharing clips of JD Vance joking that the UK will be the first Islamist country with nukes is sure to score Wall Street Mav and Catturd a hefty paycheck of Elon bucks, but what is the real metapolitical effect here? For the left, it hands them an easy victory because the assertion can be so easily shown to be factually untrue. This yields the high ground to the left on the issue of migration, allowing them to denounce concerns over Muslim immigration as baseless fearmongering.

For the right, the first problem is that such a statement implies that the only problem in the UK is Islam, not the demographic replacement of the native British. The largest migrant group in the UK is Indians, but I doubt Vance would denounce that fact seeing as he’s literally married to the Great Replacement via India. More importantly, Vance is the Vice President of the United States. This assertion implies that the United States, the country he is responsible for, doesn’t have a problem with migration. Rather than addressing the issues they were elected to address, slopulists just need to give their base an opportunity to grandstand over someone else, giving them the feeling of “winning”, and they are just let off the hook.

While the populist movement might have done some good over the past decade, slopulism has become a plague on the right. What are some lessons which we can learn from this phenomenon? Firstly, policies matter more than personalities or political allegiances. Slopulism doesn’t offer a coherent worldview. It only offers the feeling that one is on “Team Anti-Establishment” and fighting “Team Establishment”. This results in slopulism junkies becoming contrarians, simply supporting the opposite of whatever the liberal establishment want, regardless of the idiotic conclusions this brings them to.

Plastic straws are a total waste. They don’t need to exist. Liberals wanting to ban them does not make me think they are among man’s greatest inventions. The fact that liberals say that Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler doesn’t mean that him launching a massive invasion, killing hundreds of thousands of Europeans on both sides is actually totally based and red pilled. If liberals panic at the potential consequences of Trump’s crackbrained tariff policies, that does not mean I should jubilantly cheer on the prospect of an economic catastrophe. If you have a coherent worldview, then you would support whatever is conducive to your understanding of the good, regardless of which individual or political party is advancing it.

Secondly, the Internet and the real world are different realms. Antics which may receive enormous numbers of likes on X don’t necessarily play out well when attempted in the real world. Slopulism might have started as an Internet phenomenon, but it has leaked over into mainstream real-world politics. You get the sense that populist leaders in the West are now premeditating their antics real-world based how they will be received by their fanbase on social media. However, this brand of politics hasn’t translated well from online spaces to offline ones.

For example, the debacle which took place in the White House between Zelensky, Trump, and Vance almost felt as if it had been pre-planned with the knowledge that a clash between the two sides would go viral X. There are legitimate arguments both for and against the continuation of United States’ military support for Ukraine, but regardless of where you fall on that issue, turning the White House into the Jerry Springer Show for hits on the Internet is not good foreign policy.

It isn’t “woke” to expect standards of decorum in politics. Challenging the universalist egalitarian foundations of progressivism is a surefire way to get liberals and leftists frothing at the mouth, but the value in doing so is that undermining the falsehoods they believe, not the entertainment derived from their reaction. Angering political opponents through simple vulgarity and boorishness does not advance one’s political goals. It might be popular on social media, but in reality, it is counterproductive.

(Note: There’s nothing wrong with the existence of online spaces, but they function very differently from IRL ones. As an online commentator, my realm is the Internet meaning that’s the domain which I cater to. Public officials, on the other hand, operate in a very different realm and inevitably are subject to different expectations.)

Lastly, populism is simply a bad political formula. Any political cause which hopes to bring about change needs to appeal to the upper 20% of Pareto’s 80/20 principle. The problem with populism is that it neglects the upper 20% in favour of the masses of lower 80%. In the absence of top 20% leaders dedicated to a set of principles, populism has become nothing more than a vibe which it’s bottom 80% followers identify with. Since the masses always look to be led, it is quite easy for someone of stature to step in, capture some of that vibe, then redirect that energy into whatever they want. That’s how a movement originally concerned about mass immigration now considers the profitability of Tesla a measure of political success.

It has been known that ruling elites can easily distract the masses from societal issues with “bread and circuses” since Roman times. It is said today that professional sports or pop culture fandoms serve a modern version of bread and circuses which keep the masses satiated and ignorant of the societal issues we face today, the same issues which gave rise to the wave of populism in the West over the past decade. While the impetus behind populism may have been legitimate concerns over the future, slopulism has been able to prolong the satiation of a lot of this discontent with what amounts to a political WWF match. The masses still desire bread and circuses. Slopulism is just a new form of them.