The degenerative aesthetics of the dankest meme lords: far-right satire in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Drawing on historical and theoretical accounts that treat satire as a mobile mode rather than a fixed genre, I argue that satire’s political orientation cannot be predetermined: satire habitually oscillates between restraint and license, enforcing norms and violating them—often at once. Reframing satire in modal terms makes visible a neglected but consequential body of visual-verbal texts: far-right memes. The analysis proceeds in four moves. First, it dismantles liberal-essentialist narratives by recovering satire’s historical doubleness. Second, it devises a modal framework adequate to satire’s cross-media circulation. Third, it situates far-right meme cultures as affective engines that create “communities of amusement” for insiders while alienating opponents, leveraging ambiguity (“lulz”) for plausible deniability and for the strategic provocation of outrage. Finally, it identifies a recurrent visual-rhetorical programme—what I term degenerative aesthetics—comprising pixel bleed, clashing fonts, crude cropping, typos, and conspicuous copy-paste traces. Far from mere amateurism, these formal choices perform a studied unseriousness that complements ironic distancing: their very look and feel, one of manifest shoddiness, in turn functions as a prophylactic against accountability (“just joking”), even as it enables the normalisation and circulation of exclusionary or extremist claims. Attending to this concatenation of affect and form clarifies how far-right satire recruits, polices boundaries, and coordinates attention. I thus redirect the debate from “what counts as satire” to “what satire does” under contemporary technological conditions, linking internet aesthetics to their political affordances, and argue that understanding far-right memes as satiric objects—rather than as mere propaganda or noise—illuminates both their theoretical intractability and their social danger.