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The difference is that the status quo now is more socially liberal than it was in the 1950s and ’60s.
Prefatory edit: to acknowledge the elephant in the room as of Nov 2018, Nagle has been (correctly) excommunicated from the left for some pretty atrocious arguments she made.One of the most over-used (yet true) legal comparisons in Internet regulation studies is to contrast the European and US approaches to freedom of speech when it comes to cyberspace. Although Donald Trump has broken with the figurehead of the "alt-right" movement, Bannon's influence on the rise of right-wing populist and racist tendencies in the past is not to be underestimated. This short head-butt of a book taught me more about recent political events in a single rich evening of reading than I’ve learned in this entire last and very unpleasant year of obsessively monitoring cable TV, and confirmed for me something I’ve been feeling for a while now, namely that social media is a toxin we are gleefully and cluelessly injecting into ourselves, even as we ask, “Why are we getting so mean and stupid? The point the culture wars have taken us to is really a war between two irreconcilable sides and each side wants a world that the other would rather die than accept. This online backlash was able to mobilize a strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls whose dark humour and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz.
I am not saying that transgender rights are not important, but to me it was evident that this obsession was detrimental because it showcased something that was cleverly exploited by the right. Indeed, Nagle argues that the Alt-Right has co-opted liberalism’s transgressive rhetoric and aesthetic. While I normally think the correct position is to separate out the creator of a work from the work itself, it's hard not to read this as an empirical confirmation of some of the main critiques levelled at KAN, that it was undergirded by a kind of cultural conservatism. I do believe it is important to be aware of the different sub-cultures within the left and right movements.
This 'transgressive anti-moral style' of the Alt-Right, according to Nagle, is their attempt to completely break away from the egalitarian philosophy of the Left and the Christian morality of the Right. When people get so far down the rabbit hole of obscure online political subcultures and forums it becomes impossible to relate to or explain things to a normie who is also seen as being partially to blame for the problems of the world because of their ignorant unenlightened state. However: earlier in the book, on page 15, Nagle quotes this 2008 article by Matthias Schwartz for The New York Times.
Leftists who respond to her critique of toxic left-wing sectarianism with, uh, toxic left-wing sectarianism. Many people are attracted to progressive politics because they see that the world is unequal and unfair and they want better wages or education or healthcare. Nagle doesn’t spend time thinking about why the Alt-Right focuses on the left so much, saying "you may question the motivations of the rights fixation on these niche sections of online, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right is similar in scale". One should definitively leave the privilege-checking, victimhood-loving trenches of identitarian politics for a start. The Irish communications scholar Angela Nagle has been working for years on the online presence of the "alt-right" movement, which - and this is only briefly mentioned - is by no means a homogenous current and that caused by the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville in August 2017 only became visible.
Among the few distinctions she makes among the left, she hilariously claims that the ‘real left’ consists of members such as The Young Turks, Owen Jones, Jacobin, and Chapo Trap House. To me nothing speaks more about this obsession with identity than the transgender bathroom ban debate in the United States on the run-up to last year’s election. Are trauma and disabilities often undiagnosed, with some people finding help in diagnosing their problems that are ignored? On the right is the now-notorious alt-right, divided between the 'alt-light', typified by meme-making/gleefully antagonistic trolling/use of 4chan-derived argot, and the more genuinely fascistic tendencies often masked by the headline-grabbing behaviour of alt-light figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos.
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