It felt like a quiet form of poetic justice: the death of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney—chief architect of the 2003 Iraq War, “enhanced interrogation” (torture) policies, and the post-9/11 security state—coincided with the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City.

Zohran is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, the famed academic and critic of U.S. imperialism, who has spent decades exposing the narratives that justified wars like Cheney’s. That his son rose to power on the very day Cheney’s era effectively ended felt like history correcting course.

North American news outlets have responded to Cheney’s death with sanitizing language by characterizing his bloody legacy as “remarkable” and “controversial.” Yet it is impossible to forget that he spearheaded one of the most disastrous U.S. foreign policy blunders of the last century, culminating in the deaths of at least half a million Iraqis.

The trillion-dollar U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was launched on the false premise that Saddam Hussein was harboring nuclear weapons (of course, none were ever found). It was a war that gave rise to Daesh, or the Islamic State (ISIS), and one that sanctioned waterboarding—a CIA interrogation method that simulates the experience of drowning—as an “acceptable” form of torture. “I’d do it again in a minute,” Cheney said about waterboarding during a Meet the Press interview in 2014. Notably, there was and still is no evidence that the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques produced reliable intelligence or prevented any terrorist attacks.

And yet, Cheney’s influence didn’t end with the Iraq War. His company, Halliburton, which he led before becoming vice president, went on to win billions in no-bid government contracts for reconstruction and oil-field services in Iraq. The arrangement exposed how the war blurred the line between public duty and private profit.

Keeping figures like Cheney in our collective memory is critical, but not merely to relitigate the past. Remembering his horrific legacy is about recognizing how the political narratives about “security” and “terrorism” he helped create have traveled across borders and become normal features of policy and public discourse without our noticing. If, for example, Canadians fail to acknowledge the origins of certain security instincts, we risk assuming they are “naturally Canadian,” rather than ideas imported from a particular era and ideology.

One of the biggest misconceptions about our foreign policy independence post-Iraq is that, because Canada didn’t officially go to war in Iraq under then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, we are somehow cleaner or less entangled in the violence inflicted upon others. Yet through the Kandahar combat mission, civilian casualties, PTSD legacies, and the Afghan detainee scandal, including government secrecy about detainee abuse, Canadian policy echoed the same geopolitical moment Cheney helped define. Ottawa’s decisions were shaped by fear, militarism, and deeply entrenched notions of an “us versus them” politics built on lies.

That history makes Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City’s new mayor all the more profound. His victory is more than political; it is symbolic of a complete shift in worldview.

Where his father gave voice and dignity to Muslims navigating suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11, Zohran now embodies that legacy. There is a reason why his campaign, which centered on challenging oligarchs and affordable housing, resonated with millions across New York City and the world. In a climate shaped by the policies and paranoia of Cheney’s era, Mamdani’s win is proof that leaders with integrity can rise to power, and that a different politics is not only imaginable, it is arriving.

If I were to walk into any major Western museum, or perhaps any major museum in the world built with Western patrons in mind, I would not be struck to find a section dedicated to Islamic art. I would likely gravitate to it before, say, the Greco-Roman section, and would expect to see ancient Qur’anic manuscripts, jewels meant for Mughal royalty, and other relics over which to marvel. What I probably would not do as I peruse these priceless fragments of history, however, is wonder why they are displayed together.

It isn’t uncommon to find Qur’anic manuscripts, Andalusian ceramics decorated with Qur’anic verses, or beautified prayer rugs grouped together in an Islamic art exhibition: all these objects are either explicitly or implicitly “religious,” and their “Islamic purpose” is presumably clear. But what we often also come across are devotional objects like Qur’anic fragments displayed alongside more “functional” ones—like apparel, paintings, photographs, and textiles—with no obvious “Islamic purpose,” all presented under the banner of being “Islamic.” This may seem peculiar, and in some ways it is, but it is not at all uncommon. Visitors to Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace Museum, for example, can find precisely that sort of arrangement. How should we understand the implications of bringing such diverse objects together under the label “Islamic”? What kind of narrative is being constructed when such varied objects are grouped together under the same religious and cultural marker?

Islamic art often lacks clear classification, and the way art galleries treat it reflects that fact. One gallery may see no issue with jewelry placed next to the Qur’an; another may deem the jewelry “not Islamic enough.” No such issue seems to follow other art forms—we generally have no trouble distinguishing cubist art from that which is “of the Renaissance,” for example. Yet for many of us, the reed flute player, with no accompanying devotional singing, might be as good an example of “Islamic art” as a tile of calligraphy from a Mamluk-era mosque. This reflects a common attitude many of us hold about Islamic art, both inside and beyond art exhibitions, museums, and galleries.

Whether such a perception of Islamic art precedes the work of modern curators is for another essay, but the fact that it exists at all suggests that Islamic art curation proceeds in a largely unscrutinized manner across continents. What both the museum and its visitors seem to be doing is collapsing all artwork made by Muslims (or in Muslim societies) into a single category based on one measure: the proximity of that art to the premodern past. For this reason, while ceramics placed next to the Qur’an might not surprise us, we likely would be surprised to see an abstract painting by a living Indonesian artist placed next to a vase with Qur’anic calligraphy from a living Iranian craftsman.

Art institutions are as confused about what constitutes Islamic art as we are. Take Sotheby’s, the British-founded auction house as an example. In overviewing their Islamic art department, they describe it as:

…a spectrum of classical arts from the Middle East and wider Islamic World, featuring a range of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Turkish as well as miniatures, paintings, ceramics, metalwork, arms and armour, glass, jewellery and many other fine decorative objects.

Interestingly, by using terms like “classical” and “Middle East” (which, notably, arrive before the word “Islamic”), this brief description channels the familiar temporal and geographic tropes that have come to constitute our imagination of Islamic art. The description shows no concern for separating between the devotional, functional, or purely decorative aspects of Islamic art; “manuscripts” rest right alongside “arms” and “jewellery.” Later, we encounter the following:

Sotheby’s has been entrusted with the most important private collections of Islamic and Indian art since the inception of the auction category on the market.

Rather abruptly, “Indian art” is now thrust into their classification alongside “Islamic,” with no mention of it in the previous section. It is unclear if they mean that Indian art is Islamic art, or why it has been singled out in this section. What is clear, however, is that modern perceptions of “Islamic art” have very little (if anything) to do with theological iconography or thought. The art industry is unconcerned with Islam as a worldview from which ideas about beauty, theology, and metaphysics emanate; the typically orientalist aesthetics associated with Islam are apparently sufficient to deem something “Islamic.” The terms are not set by Muslims.

It almost seems like there is no way to make Islamic art today, unless it is something explicitly devotional or a replication of the styles you might find at Sotheby’s. As beautiful as those works may be, this conundrum means that contemporary glasswork, jewelry, or poetry that happen to be made by Muslims may not be considered “Islamic.” What they will be considered, more often, is a type of outsider art in which the artist’s “Muslimness” may be referenced in promotional materials. Art made by Muslims in our current time is often seen through the incomplete lens of Islam as a kind of counter-culture and/or ethnic eccentricity—no different to any other identity group under liberalism’s totalizing umbrella.

For much of their history, Muslim societies did not deem the functional or the decorative as realms outside of the sacred. Strict distinctions between the sacred and the profane are arguably alien to the Islamic tradition. Both the prayer mat and the necklace could potentially carry sacred meaning because they were often crafted with what Sherman Jackson calls the “Divine gaze” in mind. Oddly, however, modern uses of the term “Islamic” sometimes have the effect of taking that sacred potential away by reifying a labored distinction between the sacred and the profane. This distinction is further reinforced when artists (Muslim or otherwise) buy into the idea that devotion to God exists only on the prayer mat or in the Mosque walls. Yet if we believe that art is properly “Islamic” only if it is from an ancient time, from faraway or forgone places, or consists in the “explicitly” religious (however that is defined), we will perpetuate the false notion that our cooking, painting, and writing are “worldly” productions which consist in no sacredness.

One has to therefore question the usefulness of “Islamic” as a descriptor. In the Islamic tradition, “Islamic” is a fairly recent lexical addition. Things like “Islamic” dress, “Islamic” food, and other such phrases would be out of place in classical legal texts. And while both dress and food have legal boundaries and are addressed by classical and modern jurists alike, it was generally understood that the particular form of what believers wear or eat would naturally differ across geographies. This is a far cry from something like “Islamic dress” referring to a white khalījī tunic, or “Islamic food” meaning biryani and mutton pilau. So, the term becomes what Muslims happen to be doing somewhat en-masse (which could very well be anything). Islamic art in particular, like Islam more broadly, cannot be limited to “devotional” expressions or attempts at recreating an already contested past. A fully “authentic” Muslim cultural production demands the emergence of a third way in which the artist can use contemporary tools and trends (be they in poetry, textiles, or any other art form) to make work that is beautiful both with and without explicit devotional elements or cultural motifs particular to the “old Islamicate.”

If we leave the term “Islamic” as it is, we risk accepting the assumptions it sits on, namely, that “proper” Islamic art is the domain of the past and a few select geographies. What becomes of the contemporary Senegalese tailor or the American poet, Muslim though they might be? Arguably better is to allow the Muslim tailor—their worldview no less Islamic than the Qur’anic calligrapher—to be seen as equally authentic. This will require a rethinking of what constitutes the “Islamic,” and one way to do this is to treat Islam itself, per Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, as a “colorless water” that takes on the culture of the place to which it meanders. The idea here is that Islam looks Nigerian in Nigeria, and Chinese in China. This metaphor might support a more flexible approach to artistic expression that is authentically “Islamic,” though not without some limitations.

What, for example, does Islam look like in the Western metropole? How does Islam “take on” the culture of the Western cities in which it finds itself, and what impact does that have on artistic expression? Islamic forms of life in a Western city, where the parents of most of the community were born in the Muslim world, potentially complicate Abd-Allah's theory about Islam as a “colorless water.” If we add the religious (and then cultural) influence of modern Saudi Arabia, globalization, Islamophobia, and social media into the mix, an “authentic” expression of Islam in the West—artistic or otherwise—isn’t as neat as simply being British in Britain and French in France. Rather than naturally adapting to its environment, Islam in the West often navigates multiple, sometimes competing pressures, including inherited traditionalism, imposed stereotypes, and reactive identity politics. Yet how we think about Islam’s place in the West matters if only because art’s seat of industrial power sits there, and ideas about what is “Islamic”—born within a Western cultural milieu—can (and often are) easily exported to much of the Muslim world. Institutional and market forces shape global art standards (including “Islamic” ones), and often, those standards are Western.

Perhaps this will strike some as a Western-centric concern. After all, why does it matter what a few million Muslims in London or Brussels are doing, and of what importance is this to the Muslim world at large? I would argue that, when it comes to art, what we often find in Cairo, Karachi, or Beirut is not meaningfully different from what is exhibited in London or New York, especially in terms of underlying curation philosophies. Perhaps more importantly, the arts are becoming as globalized as any other industry, as is apparent in funding patterns, organizational structures, and their flattening impact on taste. Indeed, the themes of institutional art are becoming common across national and continental lines. And as this occurs, there seems to be little interest in Muslim art that exists as an extension of tradition, or which is confident in itself without needing to reference its “otherness.”

What the Muslim artist should realize is that their “difference” does not need to be used solely as a point of analysis with regard to social marginalization and racial subjugation; it can also be a site of deeper reflection on the erosion of their intellectual and spiritual history, as well as what their tradition has to say when it comes to beauty, aesthetics, and art itself. Western art institutions may be uninterested in these reflections for now, but they are worth considering to inform a more confident Muslim artistic community that is as well versed in their context and worldview, including their potential points of tension or contradiction. These sites of contradiction can produce new, thoughtful work that moves beyond both a banal subversiveness of using Islam as a purely political identity, or a nostalgia (shared with orientalists) seeking what Tim Winter calls “our greatly missed dead.”

We therefore cannot ignore the role of commerce in the analysis of Islamic art as an industry. Under capitalism, art operates within an industrial framework, in which corporations, funds, and trusts patronize the work we see in galleries and the pages of our books. Under this paradigm, for an artist to survive they must respond to the cues sent out by these corporations downstream to the gallery. However, it isn’t just that the starving artist is magnetized by the allure of being en vogue. In fact, the art world is full to the brim with the already well-off, who may not be saying the same things as everyone else to put bread on the table, but to stay relevant within circles from which they procure their sense of self—circles whose concerns are quite often wildly out of touch with the people they might claim to represent. The corporate structures around art can lead to situations that would be comical if they weren’t so tragic, like British Petroleum (of all companies) sponsoring an exhibition of artefacts from modern Iraq. This kind of paradoxical relationship is baked into the structures that support art from the outset, and it will continue so long as the funding models remain as they are. Considering these facts, how “Islamic” is Islamic art when funded by forces that are murderous at worst and antagonistic at best?

Imagining the world of art outside of commerciality is a gargantuan task, but it is still something worth pursuing. To build a new model of art shielded from the tentacles of corporatism, secularity, and marginalization, we will need to ask and attempt to answer difficult questions about its public access, hierarchy structures, and the livelihoods of artists themselves. For example, what does an endowment for the arts look like in the age of crowdfunding, and how might an artist produce work freely under the weighty pressure of material need without compromise? These questions need to be wrestled with whether the art is Islamic or not. If the terms, descriptors, and trends are set by global capital, the Muslim artist, without competing structures of their own, will find no avenue for authentic expression. For the most part, the gravitational pull of the artistic industrial complex is as strong in New York as it is in Istanbul. One needn’t read the history of the gallery and the museum to know that they are unlikely to be changed from within, and so the task becomes one of experimentation and world-building that attempts—as best as one can—to produce new methods, networks, and institutions.

Onward looks backward. The apparent contradiction was immediately flagged by critics upon the film’s release a little more than five years ago. National Review called the animated feature “so reactionary it cries out for a return of the Latin Mass,” while Vulture dismissed the film as a Pixar offering that “even the ‘Make America Great Again’ crowd can embrace.”

Onward is reactionary, sure, but it’s hardly conservative (always an easy conflation), and neither epithet does right by the film’s strange topicality. This suburban fantasy is easily Pixar’s most overtly political film since WALL-E in 2008, and possibly Pixar’s most zeitgeisty film ever. That this is not obvious might be credited to the film’s unfortunate release date of March 6, 2020. Any chances Onward might have had at cultural legacy (and the box office) were summarily torpedoed by COVID-19, which the World Health Organization declared a pandemic exactly five days after its premiere; another five days, and the world was locked down. The show did not go on(ward).

It is only right that Onward’s commercial and cultural fate should be so intertwined with the crisis that inaugurated the current decade, given how totally and uncannily it is a film about the 2020s. Onward clearly comes from and belongs to a world in which the 59-year-old governor of Minnesota and U.S. vice-presidential candidate accuses his political opponent of being “a venture capitalist cosplaying as a cowboy” and slams Donald Trump for “cosplaying” as a McDonald’s worker. This is the language of nerds and the Terminally Online cannibalizing mainstream political culture, and that is one of the major stories of our own roaring ‘20s.

The accusation of cosplay—that is, of “LARPing,” short for “Live-Action Roleplay”—has become a rhetorical staple of online discourse, where users bearing anonymous names “act” in a purely symbolic world of texts and images unlinked from the “real world.” The accusation of LARP gets at the widely-felt sense that online existence is either inherently performative or tends to performance, and is therefore in some deep sense inauthentic (never mind impotent).

The availability of “LARPing” as a term of denigration is proportional to the mass of digital denizens who feel that their performative online selves are in fact realer and truer than the physical bodies they inhabit in “meatspace.” For such users, it is the face they show to “IRL society” which is the mask, the LARP, the inauthentic performance of normalcy. Online, behind their profile pictures of frogs or sculptures or cute anime girls, is where others can finally see them as they see themselves.

Onward is a Pixar film about elves and brotherhood, but it is more accurately about the LARPing ‘20s. In just under 100 minutes, it manages to suggest the rather involute thesis that ours is the age of LARP because it is the age of Nietzschean hyperreality. This is a suggestion made only partially and semi-intentionally, but it is made all the same. Our aim here is to unfurl the semiotic process by which this idea emerges. In doing so, we will discover that LARP, much like Nietzsche’s God, is already dead—we just haven’t realized it yet.

ACT I. “I USED TO BE DANGEROUS AND WILD”

Onward is set in a post-magical world of myth, where centaurs drive cars, sprites ride motorcycles, and elves watch workout videos in their suburban homes. Our protagonist, a timid elf named Ian Lightfoot, sets off into the great unknown with his swashbuckling brother, Barley, to secure the “Phoenix Gem” that would allow them to spend a day with their deceased father, Wilden Lightfoot. In the process, Ian is reborn as an elf who, like his father and brother, is unafraid of traversing paths that don’t yet exist.1

There is an undeniable anti-modernism to Onward’s story. “Long ago,” we’re told in the prologue, “the world was full of wonder.” It was “adventurous,” it was “exciting,” and “best of all: there was magic.” Only an elect few ever attained the ability to wield it, though, and so society eventually developed a more democratic method of problem-solving: technology. Why struggle with an esoteric spell when you can flick on a light bulb? Technology gradually displaced magic, until practically all had forgotten how to use it. Thus the anachronistic sight of fairies riding airplanes, gnomes snuggling by an electric fireplace, and mermaids sipping soft drinks while relaxing in plastic blow-up pools. This blunt juxtaposition of the extraordinary and the prosaic powers the film’s comedy and underlines its thematic argument. This is Onward’s conceit: depicting the disenchantment of the world through enchanted creatures.

Onward’s premise sets up a fable with an ethical message as simple as it is heavy-handed: abandoning “magic” for technology has won us material convenience at the expense of spiritual greatness. The film conveys this sense of civilizational decay with one of its sharper opening images: a unicorn, that quintessential creature of medieval myth, rummaging through the trash on the front lawn of a nondescript suburban household, its alabaster coat caked in filth. This image foreshadows a moral idea to which the film repeatedly returns: despite its surface advancement, this is a world that has reduced and made a mockery of itself.

“Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the start of The Wagner Case, “than the problem of decadence.” For Nietzsche, “decadence” was not merely a synonym for “decline.” Decadence is that which denies life rather than affirms it, enervating individuals and entire cultures alike. Amongst Nietzsche’s most oft-cited decadents were anti-worldly Greeks like Plato, who dismissed material reality and fetishized the “absurdly rational” subjugation of the “lower” bodily appetites. “To have to fight the instincts—this is the formula for decadence,” wrote Nietzsche. Yet the hedonistic pursuit of every pleasureful impulse is also decadent. Any denial of any aspect of life is decadent, and hedonism denies one of life’s most undeniable qualities: suffering. This “longing for bliss” but “dread of pain” sits at the very heart of decadence. “Amor fati”—one should always love one’s fate, no matter its beauty or horror. We overcome decadence only when we greet pleasure and pain with equal enthusiasm.

That Onward’s society is decadent in the Nietzschean sense is indicated by its cultural mediocrity and instinctive hedonism—the former evinced by its loss of history, the latter its unbridled consumerism. The two reinforce and accelerate one another. The city of New Mushroomton retains only a tenuous link to its rich magical past, now seen as the exclusive province of “history buffs” like Barley. Officer Bronco dismisses the ruin at the heart of the city as “an old piece of rubble,” an opinion surely shared by the construction workers who have repeatedly attempted to demolish it. Onwardlinks this historical and cultural impoverishment to the mass consumption that is both the producer and the product of technological convenience. Fast food restaurants like “Fry Fortress” and “Burger Shire” (parodying real-life chains like “White Castle”) trivialize the city’s civilizational heritage by commercializing it, reducing mythological traditions to corporate brands and tawdry products. The Manticore’s Tavern, once a magnet for the adventurous and insane, is now Chuck E. Cheese. Its owner-manager, The Manticore, is a once-mythical beast turned high-strung, high-heels-wearing businesswoman, forced to sell her enchanted sword to get out of tax trouble. The Manticore’s fear of costly litigation, negative online reviews, and angry investors has made her a risk-averse shadow of her former self. Onward suggests, through such pitiful sights as the domesticated Manticore, that capitalist liberalism has devitalized and infantilized modern culture.

For this civilizational sickness, Onward prescribes Nietzsche. The antidote to decadence is the cultivation of our immanent potential, the “magic” latent within. “There’s a mighty warrior inside of you,” Barley tells his brother Ian, our timid protagonist, early in the film. “You just have to let him out.” Nietzsche saw himself as a reviver of pre-Platonic and pre-Christian “warrior ethics,” exalting “courage, greatness, elite excellence” over and against the “pusillanimity” bred by “modern life-affirming humanism,” because the ability to “set life lower than honour and reputation has always been the mark of the warrior, his claim to superiority.”2 The Manticore comes close to reiterating this worldview verbatim when she reminisces about the days her tavern was “filled with a motley horde willing to risk life and limb for the mere taste of excitement.”

Just as The Manticore embodies the decadence of her age, so too does she manifest the film’s Nietzschean vision for overcoming it. Pushed into an existential reckoning by Ian, The Manticore decides to reject enfeebled civility for primal vitality. “I used to be dangerous and wild,” she roars, at once recognizing and recovering the ferocity that she has lost. Even as she says this, one of her employees—costumed as a mawkish mascot of her—mimics the genuine article. Like the cartoonish dragon that is the mascot of New Mushroomton High School, it is a saccharine caricature of a legendary beast and a visual shorthand for cultural devolution. The mascot is a funhouse mirror of The Manticore, a castrated version of herself that she literally sets aflame.

The Manticore proceeds to burn down her tavern, purging her soul of its commercial rot. But she isn’t simply destroying her bar-turned-family-center. She cracks the plaster masking the walls of the stonier and grittier tavern of old, stripping the corporate renovations that had, like mold, obnubilated the original structure. This is her “remodeling”—not the construction of a novel space, but the rehabilitation of an abandoned one.

The Manticore, then, emerges anew by returning to her roots. This is the argument at the heart of Onward: we can only move forward—onward—by advancing backwards. Everyone else in the film, too, must recover their better, bolder selves by progressing to their primordial roots. The sprites must re-learn to fly rather than ride motorcycles, the centaurs to run rather than drive cars, and Ian’s mother, Laurel, to prove that she is a “mighty warrior” by fighting an actual dragon rather than merely following a workout routine on television.

This is what “magic” truly signifies in the movie: an entire cultural outlook that trumpets self-reliance, courage, and strength over dependency, cowardice, and weakness. This is why Ian’s father, the reformer who sought to restore magic to his post-magic society, is described above all as “bold,” and why Ian, to successfully revive his father, must also become bold. Magic is boldness. To be magical is to be Nietzschean; to be otherwise is to be modern.

Modern civilization, by frantically shielding us from peril, keeps us in perpetual adolescence, forever immature. “I'm not ready!” Ian screams as he tries to merge into speeding highway traffic. “You’ll never be ready!” Barley shoots back, forcing Ian’s hand, and suddenly he’s navigating a high-speed car chase with nary an error. Similarly, once the sprites lose their motorcycles and are faced with an impending splat against the pavement, they discover that they can, in fact, fly. Only in times of extremes do we realize our potential. “I needed that rope!” Ian shouts at Barley, after crossing over a bottomless pit while bolstered by the false belief that he had a rope around his waist to catch him if he fell. “Oh, but did you?” Barley asks, the smug grin on his face answering the question.

Barley, more than Ian, is the film’s hero because he has neither forgotten his history nor been numbed by modernity’s luxuries. He has somehow escaped society’s programmed preference for convenience—in one especially obvious scene, Barley rejects Ian’s advice to take the speedier expressway in favor of the more taxing “Path of Peril.” Barley is cast as the brave prophet of New Mushroomton, fruitlessly but tirelessly preaching the gospel of magic to a society that has forgotten it. He is unafraid to blaze a path beyond the timorous pieties of modern society, guiding The Last Man (Ian) out of his comfort zone of safe mediocrity.3 Ian’s Last Man-ness is expressed by his refrain whenever faced with the latest mortal danger: “We’re dead, we’re going to die!” He lives petrified of the end, and so he doesn’t really live at all.

Onward, then, appears to straightforwardly celebrate a Nietzschean ethic of “courage, greatness, élite excellence.” This would be the end of our story, were it not for a few niggling wrinkles in the film’s thematic fabric. Attempts to smooth these wrinkles only create more. It doesn’t take much more failed smoothing for Onward’s philosophical tissue to begin showing signs of serious strain.

What if, by Onward’s—and Nietzsche’s—own criteria, Barley the Ubermensch is the most decadent character of all?

ACT II. “BASED ON REAL LIFE”

The Nietzschean idea that we’ve been devitalized by living in a well-ordered, materially abundant, and essentially safe society may go some way to explaining why a subculture of LARP (Live-Action Role-Play) has arisen in recent decades, and almost entirely in well-off countries. LARP gives participants an opportunity to experience a more perilous existence without any of the actual peril. It thus, in a stakes-less manner befitting a civilized people, satisfies the seemingly insatiable human need for fear and terror—an itch that polite society scratches through such diplomatic alternatives as horror films, roller coasters, and bumper cars.

Though LARP has many forms, its first and most popular is that of medieval fantasy. Well-adjusted adults with families and jobs will retreat from civilization for the weekend, donning plastic armor and foam swords to reenact Lord-of-the-Rings-style scenarios of adventure, war, and sacrifice. This style of LARP grew out of the 1970s nerd culture surrounding RPG tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).4

Barley bears more than a passing resemblance to the stereotypical LARPer. He spends his days playing a board game called “Quests of Yore,” an obvious knockoff of Dungeons & Dragons; he keeps a warrior costume complete with a helmet, sword, chain mail, and cape; and he’s painted a galloping stallion on the outside of his van, which he calls his “mighty stead” and has christened “Genevieve.” So deeply has Barley committed to his fantasy role-playing that he has little life outside of it. He is, to borrow a British term now universally associated with Japan, a NEET—Not in Education, Employment, or Training.

This character choice should strike us as a little strange. After all, the narrative idolizes Barley. It practically identifies him as his society’s Ubermensch. The Ubermensch, we’d think, cannot be a LARPer. One lives a life of real danger, whereas the other playacts it—and indeed, Barley hardly sports the ideal masculine physique of an ancient Greek warrior, of the sort trumpeted by such prominent online right-wing personalities as Bronze Age Pervert. Why, then, would the film present a LARPer as its revolutionary?

It is this discordant note in the film’s Nietzschean symphony that alerts us to the presence of a second film unfolding alongside the first. The smoking gun is “Quests of Yore,” Barley’s beloved board game and the plot device that betrays Onward’s Janus face. As established in the first act of this drama, Onward identifies Barley as our moral compass because he has supposedly overcome his society’s decadence, neither forgetting his history nor indulging a lifestyle of crippling convenience. Both of those qualities are grounded in “Quests of Yore,” at once Barley’s history teacher and moral instructor.

The problem with Barley assuming the mantle of non-decadence is that his NEET lifestyle is necessarily parasitic on modern decadence. It is otherwise unsustainable, indeed impossible. The centerpiece of Barley’s LARP—“Quests of Yore”—was sold to him by the same consumerist system responsible for New Mushroomton’s descent into decadence. We know this because it has none of the markings of a homemade game. It comes with a laminated card set, action figures, an information manual, and a stylized logo reminiscent of D&D. By all appearances, this is a slick, corporate product designed to profit off the insular interests of a passionate nerd subculture.

Barley, then, fully conforms to the consumerist lifestyle that Onward codes as decadent. Although the film positions Barley as a social heretic, it also confirms that he’s as much a participant in his society’s misguided ways as the people he reprimands. Barley’s exhaustive historical knowledge doesn’t signal his distance from society, only his particular brand of decadent hedonism. His LARPing doesn’t confirm his revolutionary credentials, only his comfortable socioeconomic bubble.

Barley’s tepid “boldness” reflects that of his father, who is eulogized as audacious for wearing “ugly purple socks” every day. This banal act, framed within the film as a deed of heterodox courage, inspires Ian to “boldly” pursue a list of similarly trivial goals, like driving a car and inviting friends to a party. These are terribly limited horizons. Everything that our protagonists think of as “bold” is either just mildly unusual or simply the norm.

The imaginative bankruptcy of the Lightfoots’ vision, and of Onward itself, is reinforced by the film’s concluding montage. It seems to show a “new” New Mushroomton, one which has rediscovered its magical roots: sprites fly, centaurs gallop, and armored waiters serve the new clientele of The Manticore’s Tavern. Ian repeats verbatim the monologue with which his father opened the film. The past has returned. “Long ago” is now. Yet the changes that Onward presents as revolutionary are cosmetic—visual shorthands for, rather than actual demonstrations of, radical change. The suburbs are cleaner and the scavenging unicorns gone, but The Manticore’s restored tavern isn’t “filled with a motley horde willing to risk life and limb,” only the usual parents and children. Barley replaces “Guinevere” with “Guinevere the Second”—the same exact van as the first, only newer and more orange.5

Onward’s characters ultimately appear unable to escape the decadence of their society. Barley’s and Ian’s journey into the wilderness, though initially promising to transport them far beyond the territorial and imaginative confines of New Mushroomton, only takes them right back to where they began. They cannot reach a world beyond New Mushroomton’s decadent horizons—and neither can Onward.

What we are left with is a timid film critical of our timidity, an imaginatively mediocre product that mourns our imaginative mediocrity. The film cannot actually commit to the radical politics at which it gestures. Much like its characters, Onward is LARPing Nietzsche.

ACT III. “IF YOU BELIEVE THE BRIDGE IS THERE, IT’S THERE”

So Onward is playing a game—or, more accurately, playing several.

One of those games is called, “Who is the protagonist?” The most obvious candidate is Ian Lightfoot. The less obvious but perhaps more appropriate candidate is his brother Barley or his father Wilden. The answer, at least within this three-act narrative, is none of the above. Our secret protagonist, like all good secret protagonists, has been hiding in plain sight, integral but invisible.

The true protagonist of Onward is Guinevere. Guinevere, as a fictitious “mighty stead” that does actually carry Barley to wherever he needs, crystallizes the tension between reality and make-believe inherent to the act of LARPing. All role-playing transpires in a nebulous space between sincerity and irony, between earnest commitment and knowing detachment. Much like the theatrics of a stage performer or the pretend of a child, “authentic” LARPing demands a degree of doublethink. To convince others, the performer must at once believe and disbelieve his performance. Hence the existential-epistemic anxiety raised by the LARPer. When, or does, play-acting become real? If the entirety of Onward is an elaborate LARP, is there a point at which that LARP ceases being LARP?

Guinevere, more than any other character in the film, forces this question to the foreground, and nowhere more acutely than in her final scene. Cornered by a platoon of police officers on a mountain, Barley decides to evade capture by sacrificing Guinevere. He solemnly plays a cassette tape titled “Rise to Valhalla,” a suitably grandiloquent farewell to his gallant companion.6 A rock on the gas pedal and Guinevere is off, racing to oblivion as Barley the Stoic salutes her. The cinematography and sound design leans into Barley’s role-playing fantasy—one of the van’s tires bursts, so that Guinevere literally gallops, clippity-cloppity, to her destiny, even as Barley’s parking tickets burst forth from her windows as wings.7 Guinevere dutifully drives off a rock outcropping and flies into the side of the mountain. Just moments before she crashes, midair with sunlight splashing across her spray-painted face, we hear her engine whinny one last time. The ensuing collision causes an avalanche that blocks the pathway of the police vehicles but also buries the mighty stead.

This entire sequence dramatizes the emotional paradox of LARPing. It is at once an ode and a joke, solemn and snickering. The inherent oddness of the situation—the tragic sacrifice of a beat-up van costumed as a pegasus—forces the scene into an indeterminate space between pathos and bathos. Beneath the operatic melancholia, there is a cloying playfulness, an irreverent wink to the audience—a tacit acknowledgement of the scene’s absurdity. Onward commits enough to the glorious tragedy of it all that one can’t help but take, or want to take, the scene seriously. All the same, there is an undeniable comedy to a van-horse hybrid “flying” and crashing to the tune of faux-epic vocalizations. No other moment in Onward so precisely captures the disorienting psychological ambivalence inherent to LARPing. Are we witnessing a heroic sacrifice, or a parody of one? (Both, of course, in the same way that “Quests of Yore” is at once a game and a map).

When contemplating how to secure the Phoenix Gem that would allow him and Ian to cast the spell that would resurrect their father, Barley immediately rushes to his “Quests of Yore” card set, which he believes has all the information the brothers need. Ian is understandably skeptical, and just a bit incredulous: “Barley, this is from a game.” Barley’s response is key: “Based on real life!” This is Barley’s refrain whenever anyone attempts to denigrate the practical applicability of “Quests of Yore.” The game is, he tells us throughout the film, “historically accurate” and “historically based.”8

This is not a film about the absurdity of Barley’s faith in the facticity of his board game; it is a film about how he’s actually totally right. “Quests of Yore” really does guide the brothers to the right places and really does supply Ian with workable magical spells. “Quests of Yore” purports to contain, and in fact does contain, an impeccably accurate record of this society’s history and tradition. In having a board game unerringly predict the dangers that the brothers encounter and successfully prepare them as needed, Onward undermines the “reality” of their hunt for the Phoenix Gem. It likens the brothers’ dangerous, deadly quest to a game that they are playing—because it quite literally is. “My years of training have prepared me for this very moment,” exclaims Barley—that is, his years of LARPing as a warrior have actually equipped him to be one.

Onward thus eschews any meaningful distinction between role-playing and reality—the skills acquired in the former translate directly to the latter. Laurel can transition from watching gym workouts on the TV in her living room to scaling the back of a dragon because both exist on the same plane of reality (as reaffirmed by the soundtrack of her workout program playing as she runs up the back of the dragon with The Manticore’s enchanted sword). Guinevere is a van, and also really a pegasus.

“This is from a game,” says Ian derisively when Barley treats his gaming guide as a literal spell book, and in proving him wrong (the game is actually reality), the narrative also suggests the inverse (reality is actually a game). “Quests of Yore,” it comes to seem, isn’t “based on real life” so much as “real life” is based on it. Onward essentially “gamifies” reality itself. In its account, there is no distinction between essence and performance—and so there is no difference between reality and LARPing. This is literalized as an in-universe ontological principle when Ian and Barley try to cross over a bottomless pit. Ian casts a spell that forms an invisible bridge. The catch: it is actualized only by the power of belief. Ian finds this absurd, but Barley is unfazed. As he confidently tells Ian, “If you believe that the bridge is there, it’s there.” This is a type of logic that Barley would understand, because it is the one that undergirds and enables the act of LARPing.

“If you believe that the bridge is there, it’s there”— this is the thesis statement of the Age of LARP. It is the gospel of manifestation gurus on TikTok teaching loyal acolytes how to realize their dreams with positive thinking and techno-accelerationists waging memetic warfare to hyperstition their way to the Singularity. Neither manifestation nor hyperstition are inherently irrational concepts, insofar as they theorize, in different ways and to varying degrees of sophistication, the very real and uncanny feedback loop between intangible ideas and physical reality. Imagination expands the boundaries of the real, and the real in turn bounds what is imagined. The performance of what is not yet true can make it true—much as we put ourselves to sleep by pretending to sleep. This quirk of human psychobiology is what gives LARP its transformative potential, and maximizing said potential is the explicit goal of those on its experimental edge.

“Nordic LARP,” named after its geographical point of origin and sometimes opposed to more conventionally escapist “American” or “boffer” LARP,9 is an attempt to elevate LARP to an artform and “explicitly political project.” It is primarily “interested in character as changed and influenced by the game’s narrative,” and it achieves this goal by having players act out dramatic scenarios that are emotionally exhausting, physically taxing, and morally challenging. Player safety is a recurring subject of concern among participants, given that this is a scene that can yield games called Gang Rape.10 Unsurprisingly, Nordic LARP has also yielded “tales of real-world relationships destroyed (and created) by the shockwaves from in-game events.” Nordic LARP simply builds on the ancient wisdom of “fake it till you make it.” It is the postmodern successor of everything from Zen to meditation to intention-setting, the latest way to play with the fluidity of the self. The endgame of so much Nordic LARP is precisely this “narrative bleed,” in which the thoughts and feelings induced by the gameplay “bleed” into and change the players’ actual selves and lives.11

C. Thi Nguyen speaks of games as “the art of agency”—rather than tell stories or create worlds, they create selves. Much like fiction is a library of stories, “games are a library where you can try out different ways of being an agent.” We’re so accustomed to thinking about art in terms of beautiful art objects that we are ill-prepared for an art (games) where the object of beauty is the self. The desires that compel us during gameplay are intense—so intense, indeed, that we can be virtually different people while playing—yet we shed those desires easily the moment the game has ended. The point of any given game, from tag to paintball, is not its posited end, which is always arbitrary; the point is the gameplay itself. To paraphrase Nguyen, in life we choose certain means to achieve desired ends; in gameplay, we choose certain ends to achieve desired means. What sticks with us once a game is over is not our victory or defeat, neither of which matter,12 but rather the novel experience of selfhood created by the gameplay.13

Building on Nguyen, we might say that all gameplay is essentially a kind of LARP: an activity where one temporarily becomes an entirely different agent, obsessed with an entirely arbitrary goal hindered by entirely arbitrary obstacles. LARP, Nordic or otherwise (but especially Nordic), makes the implicit end of gameplay (self-creation) unusually clear because its explicit ends are so often unclear, and yet this unclarity hardly diminishes its appeal.

Nguyen presents us with an implicitly Nietzschean account of play and its aesthetic value. Despite his enduring reputation as an essentially artistic philosopher and philosopher of art, Nietzsche was in fact deeply suspicious of what most people call “art” (paintings, sculptures, and so on). He repeatedly opposed an “art of works of art” to art as a general principle of creativity underlying the will to power.14 Indeed, he condemns the “art of works of art” as the poisoned fruit of a decadent culture. Truly aesthetic man, artistic man, would have no need for works of art, for life itself would be aesthetic and man himself would be a work of art.15

“Art” properly understood is not to be found in any given “art object” outside of and available for the disinterested contemplation of the self, but rather is the self itself in the playful process of self-creation. It is through play that the Übermensch, the ultimate player of the game called life, creates new values. Our proper aspiration is to be the “eternal child” of Zarathustra, the man-child for whom play is not some escape from life, but the very point of it.16 From this standpoint, it is deeply misguided to treat “play” with anything less than the utmost seriousness. “I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks, than as play,” wrote Nietzsche in his last work, Ecce Homo. “This, as a sign of greatness, is an essential prerequisite.”17 So esteemed was play in Nietzsche’s sight that he favored it over “work,” which he saw as little more than self-denial. As he insists in Beyond Good and Evil: “Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”18

From a Nietzschean standpoint, then, Barley’s unemployment—his NEET lifestyle in general—might be less a signifier of decadent indulgence than an appropriately ethical rejection of work. Is not Barley a fitting avatar of our antiwork moment? Isn’t his contemptuous disregard for the labor demanded by capital the new dream of Gen Z, and the hippies and anarchists before them?19 Isn’t Barley modeling an alternative, aspirational notion of agency by insisting on the “gamification” of life—on the universal value of “the art of agency”?

“Man is a rope fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss,” writes Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is a crossing overand a going under.”20 The game of life is not valuable when it is won; it is valuable when it is played. The bridge is not valuable because by it one reaches a destination; the bridge is valuable because it is a bridge.21

Where an unbridgeable gulf emerges between Nguyen and Nietzsche is their perspective on the boundaries of gameplay, or lack thereof. Nietzsche thinks that life itself is play; Nguyen insists that play only obtains within a bounded space carved out of life proper. To say that all of life is a game is to say that football can be played outside of a football field—a nonsense, given that the field, a necessarily circumscribed space, is the premise of the game.

Nguyen is thus always careful to distinguish between games and gamification. Gamification is the extension of the game beyond its organizing limits, and thus its perversion. Gamification is not the intensification of gaming; it is its destruction. Nguyen’s go-to example of gamification is social media, which gamifies (and thereby sabotages) the act of communication by subjecting it to a points system. Other examples abound. On the grimmer end of the spectrum is the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting, where the perpetrator live-streamed his massacre in the visual style of first-person shooter video games—what has been called the “gamification of terror.” Military drones, which mimic the user interface of Call of Duty, participate in the same phenomenon.22 Nguyen casts gamification as an unmitigated evil—a desecration of the art of gaming in the name of gaming. For Nietzsche, though he never used the term, “gamification” is the truest art and the greatest way of life.

The struggle over “gamification,” personified here in the poles of Nguyen and Nietzsche, stems from an underlying ambiguity about the location of games in reality. Is life a game, a container of games, or a series of games? If the last, is life itself then not simply a game? Erik Davis argues that “the contemporary urge to ‘gamify’ our social and technological interactions is…simply an extension of the existing games of subculture, of folklore, even of belief,” which accords with the “ludic turn” in psychology and anthropology given to reinterpreting social rituals as play and play as culture. Gamification, then, is to some extent hardwired into human existence: “Human reality possesses an inherently fictional or fantastic dimension whose ‘game engine’ can—and will be—organized along variously visionary, banal, and sinister lines.”23

What the gamification debate reveals is that fiction, gaming, and LARPing are variants of the same psychic practice. All three work in exactly the same way: through a willed doublethink, a voluntary suspension of disbelief, in which artist and audience co-construct and co-inhabit symbolic universes distinct from but tethered to the physical world, between which they slip at will.24 Fiction, then, must not be confused with falsehood, and neither must gaming or LARPing. Fiction is an epistemic category of knowing make-believe, which is meaningfully distinct from either deception (persuading another that something false is true) or delusion (accepting something false as true).

The question is one of limits. We can accept Nordic LARP and games in general as social technologies which achieve their true ends (self-making) via imaginary ends (a made-up prize). However, if indeed LARP is always a performance whose ultimate end is a readjustment or modification of the “true” self of the performer, then is not its telos ultimately an erosion of its own limits? Is not the end of the game we call LARP the end of LARP?25

The true LARPer always understands that he is LARPing, just as the literary aficionado always understands that he is reading fiction—the doublethink is definitional, the suspension of disbelief necessarily willing. In LARP, as with all fiction, we will ourselves to believe that something is true when we know it is not. There is no LARP absent the will to believe; the moment the LARPer no longer wills his (dis)belief, the moment he helplessly and naively buys into his own performance, he is no longer LARPing. He is doing, or more accurately has become, something else.

We misunderstand Barley when we think that his ostracization, his misfittedness, stems from his nerdy roleplaying lifestyle. The real-life LARPer is not a social misfit; he is in fact exceptionally well-socialized. He switches easily between his many masks, because he knows the social lay of the land and adeptly navigates its variegated topographies. There is a reason that LARP (like all games) can only happen once its borders have been firmly demarcated and its participants momentarily withdrawn from “life.” So well-adjusted is the LARPer to his society that he steps in and out of its revolving door of prescribed roles at a whim, from dad to friend to coworker to medieval warrior and back. His social discernment—that is, his immunity to “narrative bleed”—is precisely what licenses his LARP.

When the “bleed” pursued by LARP is complete, such that the circles of self and performance are one, the self-making mechanism of LARP breaks down. The distance between truth and costume, between actor and authenticity, between life and play, is exactly what enables LARP’s alchemy of self. LARP simply cannot work absent this opposition. Its formal structure is necessarily Platonic—LARP operates through the mischievous interplay of the above and below, essence and appearance, reality and representation. Its thrill comes from the reckless suggestion of blurring and even collapsing these two worlds, but this must always remain a suggestion, a seduction, an asymptotic jouissance.

LARP is a bridge between two worlds or it is nothing, and the difficulty with Nietzsche is that he crusaded to bury dualism in the depthless flux of oneworldness. The entirety of his philosophical project he distilled as “inverted Platonism.”26 To expunge from human thought the Platonic “true world” of Ideas, and with it the world of appearances, such that appearance itself became the true world—this “twisting free” of Platonism is what Heidegger called Nietzsche’s “final step,” before at last “madness befell him.”27

Onward, then, is not actually about LARP at all—it is about the end of LARP. It announces a gamified world no longer capable of LARPing, a world which cannot exercise the sophisticated, childish doublethink necessary to LARP, a world for which LARP ceases to be even a possibility. Onward knows only one world, the world of appearances, where to play is to really do, to pretend is to really be.28 To the extent that Onward LARPs Nietzsche, it is really Nietzschean. There is, finally, nothing but the simulacrum. Barley never has to “grow up,” or realize that he is indeed a “screwup,” or come back down from his fantasies to the “real world” —no, the rest of the world has to come around to his solipsism, for he is after all an Abrahamic misfit. Onward is about what happens when LARP cannibalizes culture, or when culture reduces to LARP; it is about what happens when the end of LARP ends it.

Onward is not about LARPers; it is about madmen. It is a portrait of civilizational insanity. It is a portrait of our insanity.

IV. DENOUMENT: A GOING UNDER

Insanity, to be clear, is eminently rational in conditions of hyperreality. The world of digital technology and financial capitalism is a simulated one powered almost entirely by the power of belief. From speculation on the stock market to the Federal Reserve’s make-a-wish printing of money, this is a world where reality is decided by individual and institutional fiat. If you believe the bridge is there, it’s there.

Jean Baudrillard's presence is always felt whenever and wherever hyperreality is invoked, but his infamous Simulacra and Simulation is really the theoretical consummation of Nietzsche’s madness.29 Plato showed the way out of the cave; Kant sealed its exit; Nietzsche revealed there’s nothing to exit to; and Baudrillard doubled down to expose cave and outside alike as representations-in-themselves. His is a world of copies without origin and images which realize their consumer. In this society of consumption, “daily life ends up being a replica of the model,” whether that model comes from opinion polls, news stories, advertisers, film, television, or, now, the Internet. It is not that we can no longer differentiate truth from falsehood or that the Image has effaced the Real, but that such distinctions are obsolete in a cybernetic age of infinite feedback loops. When speech is “industrialized on the same basis as the production of material goods,”30 as it is by mass media, reality is tautological—spoken into existence and sustained by the repetition of the utterance.

“All it takes, when He wills something, is to say to it, ‘Be,’ and it is!”31— here at last is the madness, the hubris, the literal inhumanity, of hyperreal man. The apotheosis of LARP, the completion of bleed, is apotheosis. Hyperreal man, that is to say, Nietzschean man, is not only insane, but desires insanity. He wants to be mad—to be a Young-Girl and schizoposter and fictosexual and otherkin. He wants to kill all normies. If we’re all Nietzscheans now, it is because we finally live in his world. Reality has caught up with Zarathustra. Here, neck-deep in feeds of information and streams of code, the true world has finally become a fable. There is only the free play of signs by free spirits, the world and self nothing but physiology and will. The infonaut cosplays as himself.

Perhaps this is the only way beyond decadence. “Priests and moralists have all wanted to take mankind back, wrench it back, to an earlier standard of virtue,” wrote Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols. “There is nothing for it: you have to go forward—that is to say step by step further and further into decadence….We can hinder this development, and by so doing dam up and accumulate degeneration itself and render it more convulsive, more volcanic: we cannot do more.”32 Here is the proto-accelerationist strategy that has become one of Nietzsche’s great legacies, from the Italian Futurists to Deleuze and Guattari to, yes, Baudrillard.33 How to exit a system that permits no exit? An excess of system; to push a system so far it collapses under its own systematicity. Hence Nietzsche declared himself “a decadent” and also “the reverse;” the former because he was modern, the latter because it is by his modernity that he resisted modernity.

Perhaps the same can be said of Barley. Again, consider Guinevere. She is, on the one hand, a mass-produced automobile, and therefore yet another symbol of New Mushroomton’s decadent consumerism. On the other hand, she is Barley’s and no one else. Through dedication to his role-playing fantasy, Barley remakes his van in his image. He replaces her radio, headlights, brakes, tires, rim, and air conditioning system. The license plate reads “GWINVER,” while the sides of the van sport a painted image of a glowing pegasus. From this personalization of Guinevere comes the film’s name—taped over the “D” on the van’s dashboard is a paper “O,” for “onward.” Barley overrides the vehicle’s factory settings in favor of his own vision. Unlike his relationship with “Quests of Yore,” then, Barley’s relationship with Guinevere goes beyond one-sided consumption. There is personality in Barley’s engagement with his van. Through Guinevere, Barley becomes what Henry Jenkins calls the “empowered consumer”: a co-creator or even re-creator of an initially mass-produced, commercial product.

But is the “empowered consumer” (and, by extension, the revolutionary accelerationist) anything but an oxymoron? Even here, Barley can only re-signify Guinevere by referencing other mass-circulated signs he has consumed, and no matter how he re-signifies her, he is finally limited by her materiality as a van. That he does not perceive this is, again, because he is not a LARPer. He thinks Guinevere really is a pegasus, the same way that the anti-Trump protestors waving Andorsigns think they really are rebels, and just as protestors invoking The Hunger Games a decade before them did. This collapse of LARP is only possible in that part of the world where the Gulf War did not take place, in the capital of capital.34

But does it matter whether or not Guinevere is “really” a pegasus? Is that not, yet again, the instinctive retreat to a reality principle that misunderstands hyperreality as a synonym for non-reality? Regardless of what Guinevere “is,” what she “does” is all the same: incite a rockslide that blocks the police officers and enables the Lightfoot brothers to complete their quest. As far as the officers and the brothers are concerned, in terms of the evidence of their senses, Guinevere is a pegasus. It is, furthermore, Barley’s faith in her pegasus-ness that convinces him to send her off on her final flight in the first place. “Reality” reciprocated his mental model.

Poe’s Law is the epistemology of hyperreality.35 The performance of extremes is always liable to be mistaken as extremism, and therefore simply be extremism. Our hegemonic systems of surveillance and control are structurally incapable of discerning between the appearance of something wrong and the actual presence of wrongness, because both are translated through the same homogenizing apparatus of perception, and so are made to belong to the same order of Image. Intention is irrelevant. This is another way of saying that LARPing is not possible under conditions of cybernetic governance. Irony is over, and LARPing is inherently ironic. Neither online users nor apparatuses of power can read LARP as LARP. Perhaps the end of LARP as an intentional practice of doublethink is partly a response to the end of LARP as a social hermeneutic.

If all is already symbolic, if performance is always real, then perhaps Nietzschean accelerationism is a viable path onward. But it is only a perhaps. Onward itself dwells in an indeterminate space between commitment to and critique of its own Nietzscheanism, if only inadvertently. Recall, again, that strange final scene, where we meet the New New Mushroomtoon, same as the Old New Mushroomton, except that its people have abandoned their debilitating dependence on technology and embraced their inner magic.36 But that’s precisely what’s so odd, even absurd about it: this societal re-enchantment and collective self-overcoming does not appear to have overturned the forever status quo of postwar American suburbia. All that the return of magic has produced is newer, fancier kinds of consumption and signification—a more “authentic” experience at The Manticore’s Tavern, a prettier paint job for the Guinevere the Second, and so on. Onward seems to give us Nietzschean self-creation as neoliberal individualism: the worst-case outcome for the Zarathustrian project of play-as-revolution. It is a world of madmen, but in a world which has not reciprocated their madness—is it for this, really only this, that we killed the LARPer?

Notes

I recently rewatched the acclaimed sci-fi drama Black Mirror in preparation for the release of the latest season on Netflix. Working my way through the third season while sitting in my Prague apartment, an episode called “Nosedive” caught my attention. I had seen the episode when it first aired in 2016, but this time I noticed something different.

Set in a near-future dystopia (like most episodes), “Nosedive” centers on the cut-throat world of social credit scores. Digital eye implants and smart phone swipes enable individuals to rate each other, creating an incessant need to maintain the approval of fellow citizens. Our protagonist is a woman trying to get to her childhood friend’s wedding—the friend is an elitist snob with a very high credit score and makes no secret of this—but, due to a day of altercations, her credit score has fallen below the required level to board her flight. She tries to rent a car instead but, following another argument (this time with the car rental attendant), her score drops even lower, forcing her to take the oldest and worst model the rental company had available.

As she gets in the car and presses the central control panel, the vehicle (more of an autonomous futuristic pod) comes to life. The onboard AI begins talking to our protagonist in a foreign language: “Ahoj! Řiďte opatrně (Hi! Drive carefully),” it repeats in a monotone voice. Her failure to understand the language only exacerbates her general frustration. She cycles through the incomprehensible digital menu trying to find the ignition button, accidentally turning on the onboard entertainment system, which begins playing a TV show from the 1990s, dubbed in the same unknown language. She becomes increasingly agitated, impatiently fastening her seatbelt and finally getting the engine started. Sometime later, after a disappointing call with the snarky bride, the car again begins to speak in the same foreign tongue: “Baterie vybitá, nedostatek energie (Battery depleted, insufficient energy),” repeating itself over and over. “What do you want?!” she exclaims before spotting the flashing “low battery” sign and pulling over. Failing to find a charger that fits her outdated car, she ends up on the side of the highway, utterly dejected, thumbing for a ride. —End scene.

Unbeknownst to most of the show’s primary audience of Western (and specifically Anglo-American) viewers, the language of the onboard AI was in fact Czech. This is not important for the episode’s storyline but cleverly guides us toward subconscious feelings of discomfort and confusion, mimicking the feelings of our protagonist. To a Western audience, the use of Czech creates feelings of something that is both known and unknown. What is “known” is that Czech sounds Slavic (or Russian to the untrained ear), and this subconsciously unearths negative Eastern European tropes: bleak, backward, and basic, much like the retrograde car rental. Presumably “unknown,” however, is that Czech is not Russian (far from it in fact). But what are the odds a Western viewer can successfully differentiate one from the other? These subconscious sensations enable the viewer to experience the protagonist’s feelings of isolation and inferiority through nothing more than a carefully chosen sociocultural-linguistic trigger. To be clear, the show’s writers did not choose Kazakh or Tamil or Maltese for the onboard AI—Czech was deliberate. Incidentally, the dubbed TV show that was playing in the background was the 1990s American sitcom Home Improvement, starring Tim Allen as “Tim the Toolman Taylor,” serving to situate the Western viewer in their own past by amplifying the feeling of outdatedness.

Surprisingly—or perhaps not so—the only article I could find on this was a short piece written on the Prague-based website Expats.cz: “And to emphasize just how shitty the car is, it happens to speak Czech,” writes the local American journalist Dave Park. No further analysis was given. What we can say, however, is that the effectiveness with which Black Mirror utilizes this trigger is nothing new. Propelled by essentialized Western propaganda about the adversarial East during the Cold War, blockbuster films and shows have been saturated with orientalized stimuli and “common enemy” tropes for decades. What caught my attention was that it still works. But why?

Ezekial Adamovsky’s notion of “Euro-Orientalism” will help us answer that and the following three questions:

1. When did the concept of a so-called Eastern Europe emerge?
2. How did this concept lead to a “Euro-Orientalist” discursive system?
3. To what extent is “Eastern Europe” still conceptually relevant?

Euro-Orientalism and the Invention of Eastern Europe

Edward Said’s influential opus, Orientalism, deftly explains how Western colonial discourse creates an exoticized, essentialized, and totalized “Other” that stands as a deliberate counterpoint to the modern, rational, and civilized Western “Self.” Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Said argues that with the projection of power from the core of hegemonic societies comes the means to produce knowledge—including knowledge of the “Other” and “Self”—which may in turn be used to justify power. This basic idea will help situate our concern about Eastern Europe.

Euro-orientalism is a type of Eurocentrism, but it is not to be understood as a mere duplicate of the orientalized discourse present during the colonization, subjugation, and scientific racism of nineteenth-century European imperialism. What is comparable, however, is the emergence of a discursive system in academic and civic circles that normalized ideas surrounding the conceptualization of an Eastern Europe which was barbarous rather than civilized, traditional rather than modern, totalitarian rather than free, and homogenous rather than diverse.1 Divisive dichotomies are inherent in civilizational discourse, and as Piotr Twardzisz argues, “[t]he primary division into Western and Eastern Europe would not be possible at all if the latter were not ascribed the quality of ‘otherness’.”2

For much of its history, Eastern Europe has been viewed by its neighbors as a “land of absence.”3 Like most “imaginative geographies,”4 it remains largely ambiguous, or, in the words of Twardzisz, “subconsciously indeterminate.”5 Whether categorized geographically (as a hinterland to warring empires), ideologically (due to the influence of Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, and communism), or ethnoculturally (as the home of the Slavs), there is no overriding consensus on what Eastern Europe was or is. Yet feelings about its “otherness” endure, often in socioeconomic and political terms.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, in their influential book Why Nations Fail, argue that the first notable West/East divisions of Europe were socioeconomic, becoming visible in the aftermath of the Black Death during the middle of the fourteenth century. In Britain, the deadly plague—killing fifty percent of those it infected—led to the Peasants Revolt in the late fourteenth century and the beginning of the end of serfdom. This, in turn, led to a more inclusive labor market, greater commerce, and urbanization. In Eastern Europe, however, it caused the expansion of landlord controls, the prolongation of the feudalist system, and an increasing reliance on Western European demand for grain—a period known as the Second Serfdom.6 As Acemoglu and Robinson tell us, within a relatively short time, socioeconomic fortunes had dramatically changed across the continent: “Though in 1346 there were few differences between Western and Eastern Europe in terms of political and economic institutions, by 1600 they were worlds apart.”7

It was not until the “long nineteenth century” in France, however, that derogatory constructions of Russia and Eastern Europe—often viewed synonymously—gained greater currency within public discourse. Though Ezekial Adamovsky admits that German and Nordic cultures referred to an Eastern Europe earlier than the French, the influence of the Napoleonic era cannot be overstated.8 The French philosopher and political theorist Germaine de Staël, for example, picked up on the idea of the “inauthenticity of Russian civilization,” first popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and further extended her critique to Eastern Europe in general.9 A recurring theme in Saidian orientalist discourse is that what the East lacks (rather than what it possesses) is what defines it. Adamovsky suggests these “missing elements” of civilization in Russia included: an independent nobility, intermediate bodies, urban development, a large bourgeoise, and an independent civil society.10 For Staël, though she felt the Slavs would one day become influential, it was Latin Europe’s classical legacy and Germanic Europe’s feudal institutions that made the continent what it was—“[the] ‘Slavonic civilization’ was still too recent, and for the moment […] had [only] produced cultural “imitations” […] and nothing ‘original’.”11

As nationalism grew in mid-nineteenth century Western Europe, so too did Russophobia. This led to a reactionary Russian nationalism as a countermeasure to Prussian and French nationalism. As such, the Russians created their own derogatory tropes about what they thought constituted a typical Prussian or Frenchman, while welcoming romanticized ideas of what it meant to be Russian. This is apparent, for example, in the concept of the “Russian soul.” Initially coined by Nikolai Gogol and Vissarion Belinsky as a critique of Russian feudalism, it later morphed into a new brand of Russian exceptionalism through writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky.12

The “Slavic Soul” was another similar and recurring theme, perhaps best captured by the Czech secessionist painter, Alfonse Mucha, in the pieces comprising his Slav Epic—a cycle of twenty unique canvases completed in 1928. Though produced after the pan-Slavism movement had subsided, Mucha’s canvases are an excellent example of the marrying of Slavic culture, history, and ethno-nationalism to create an embellished sense of Slavic destiny.13

Simply, pan-Slavic counter-nationalism was a response to Western European chauvinism. In Prague in 1848, Bohemian-Czech revolutionaries—keen to break away from Austro-Hungarian rule—hosted the first pan-Slav Congress. The movement sought to distance Slavs from their non-Slavic rulers and, like all pan-nationalist movements, to establish a common thread that unified the Slavs as a collective national body. It was during this period that usage of the term Europe Orientale became especially popular among Western Europeans who were “concerned” about the growth of Slavic national consciousness.

Liminal Lands: Geographies of Eastern and Central Europe

For much of its history, the region encompassing Central and Eastern Europe was a land occupied and strategized over by multiple regional powers, including but not limited to the Habsburg Monarchy, the Prussian Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. The disadvantageous geography of the Eastern European plains and lowlands meant much of the region’s geopolitical experience was defined by conquest. This was perhaps best understood in modern times through the German concept of Lebensraum (living space)—an idea thought up by the Prussian geographer Friedrick Ratzel in the early days of the Second Reich, but put into brutal effect by German eastward expansionism in both world wars.

In the words of Alan Palmer, “[t]he lands which separate Germany and Italy from Russia lack natural frontiers; they are organisms with vertebrae and arteries but no external shell.”14 The ultimate division of these vulnerable lands was sealed in 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, when Winston Churchill declared that “[f]rom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” As Churchill’s words destined Europe to ideological divergence, the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe found themselves contained within a variety of communist, socialist, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes. From this point, it was the West that would see itself progressing into a modern democratic future, while the East was to remain static, despotic, and inherently limited.

During the Cold War, the West went to great lengths to understand and document this new eastern adversary of the USSR and its satellites. Government funded research institutes, numerous university study programs, and influential texts like Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism created a West/East anxiety that centered on “the metaphysical issue of the limits between Europe and Asia.”15

Notwithstanding the caricatured portrayal of life behind the Iron Curtain in Western discourse, socioeconomic opportunities and political freedoms were, by design, considerably fewer in much of the Eastern Bloc. Though these trends are rapidly changing in a globalizing Europe, in the case of what was once the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or more commonly East Germany), there remains a visible relic boundary between it and what was once West Germany, revealing the socioeconomic fallout of a bygone era: less disposable income, higher unemployment, fewer registered companies, higher agrarianism, more right-leaning voters, and fewer young people. The impact of the communist era—combined with ineffective post-communist integration in Germany—is undeniable. Interestingly, even the city infrastructure between what was West Berlin and East Berlin is visibly different.

One people who have been keen to disregard the remnants of the Cold War and establish themselves as the most “West of the East” are the Czechs. Positioned at a cultural and geographic crossroads, where Germanic and Slavic Europe meet (and with its capital Prague located further west than Vienna), the Czech Republic (or Czechia, as the locals refuse to call it) fervently insists that it is in Central rather than Eastern Europe. The Czechs stand with Lithuania and Slovenia as the most economically prosperous post-communist nations in Europe. But despite this, they are still generally viewed by the West as Eastern Europeans.16 Once situated at the center of European culture and influence (Prague was twice the capital of the Holy Roman Empire), the Czechs have to some extent been forgotten—relegated to the periphery of Western civilization. Tourists journey in droves to see the Charles Bridge, the Prague Castle, or the fifteenth century Astronomical Clock. But it is the wonders of the museum of human history they seek, not to marvel at modernity; they come to see what was, not what is.

Relabeling Eastern European regions in the hope of exorcising the ghosts of the past is riddled with issues. Central Europe, for example, or Mitteleuropa as it was called by the Germans, is historically linked to Germanic influence. Slovenia and Croatia—the two most affluent states in ex-Yugoslavia—are generally considered Central European due to the influence of Catholicism and the Austo-Hungarian Empire. Due to this imperial history, the Czechs have a lot more in common with Slovenes or Croats than they do with Serbs or Bulgarians, despite their collective Slavic ancestry. Yet notwithstanding their fiery political rhetoric, within the Western Balkans many people consider themselves part of a Yugoslav family, often harking back to a better time when they were unified under Josip Tito’s beloved republic.

However you slice it, the controversy around the etymology of Central and Eastern Europe is clear. East-Central Europe is now a more widely accepted term and comprises a vast transnational zone between historically German, Russian, and Ottoman-influenced Europe. Paul Robert Magocsi, in his prolific Historical Atlas of Central Europe, breaks East-Central Europe into three zones: The Northern Zone, the Alpine-Carpathian Zone, and the Balkan Zone.17 Though Magocsi admits there is no consensus on European regions, his delineations attempt to provide socio-geographic nuance by shifting focus away from historical preconceptions.

The example of Europe teaches a wider lesson about the nature of socioeconomic division and its impact on our values and perspectives. Civilizational dichotomies are nothing new in European history. In the days of antiquity, it was the civilized Greco-Roman South versus the uncivilized barbarian Germanic North. In time, the South/North binary rotated 90 degrees clockwise, leaving Paris, London, and Amsterdam as the “new Romes,” and Eastern Europe—with its Ottoman and Russian influencers—the new barbarians. Europe has always been keen to establish its periphery and its Others who sit beyond it.

The hope for a unified Europe that finds common ground with all of its composite parts has plagued the European Union for decades. Some suggest the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the catalyst that pulls Europe together, driving Eastern European states closer to the Western core. This of course negates Russia’s own Europeaness. Though there is an inevitability about civilizational polarities and their need for largely fictionalized supporting narratives, the very notion of an Eastern Europe (or a Western Europe for that matter) derived from anything other than geography is based on abstract tropes that, when socioeconomically or politically reified, prevent Europeans from seeing each other as equals rather than counter-points to different national agendas.

History often repeats itself in the world of Palestine activism. One of the first articles I published over twenty years ago was about the brutal murder of Rachel Corrie, the American activist who was bulldozed by an Israeli tank in Gaza. At that moment, I (like many others) believed Corrie’s death would invite a serious response from the U.S. government. I thought that, although our elected officials had been callously indifferent to the suffering and deaths of Palestinians, perhaps they would spring into action in response to the murder of an American citizen. In hindsight, that was a naive expectation. The two decades since Corrie’s death have witnessed repeated offenses against Americans by Israeli forces, followed by inaction from our government and a muted response from the establishment media. This is evident in the lack of accountability for the recent murders of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh and teenager Tawfic Abdel Jabbar.

One glimmer of hope I had in the aftermath of Corrie’s tragic death—and which I hold onto yet—comes from Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig, who have continued advocating for their daughter when virtually everyone in power seems to have forgotten her story. As they have aged, their strength and sense of resolve has only seemed to grow. Since the death of their daughter, Cindy and Craig Corrie have remained unwavering in their pursuit of justice, not only for Rachel, but for various other oppressed people too. Together, they founded the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice to promote grassroots activism, human rights, and nonviolent resistance in Palestine and beyond. Through the foundation and their personal advocacy, they have traveled to Gaza, the West Bank, and across the United States to speak with local communities and policymakers in order to amplify Palestinian voices. They have stood beside families mourning similar losses and called attention to cases like those of Abu-Akleh, Abdel Jabber, and others whose deaths at the hands of Israeli forces have been met with silence or denial. Despite the indifference of those in power, Cindy and Craig have continued to remind the world that Rachel’s life—and the cause for which she died—still matter. Little did I know our paths would eventually cross under the grimmest of circumstances.

In 2020, I became the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington—the very state where the Corrie family is from. A few years later, in September 2024, I received a phone call early in the morning from a community member informing me that a young woman we knew had been killed by Israeli forces. Her name was Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi and, like Rachel Corrie, she was an American activist from Washington in her twenties. Everyone who I knew in the scene of Palestine advocacy had some connection to Ayşenur. She was a committed activist and human rights defender who cared deeply about the suffering of the Palestinian people and resented her government’s involvement in the Gaza genocide. At just twenty-six years old, she traveled to the West Bank to oppose the expansion of new Israeli settlements south of the Palestinian city of Nablus. While international attention was focused on Gaza, the ongoing tragedies in the West Bank received far less notice. Ayşenur was committed to shedding light on the daily realities Palestinians faced there, and she stood in protest alongside them as an act of solidarity. While in the West Bank, however, she was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper that killed her instantly. Her death was not only a deep personal loss for me and those who knew her, but another tragedy for the State of Washington.

As with Rachel Corrie, my naive impulses returned in response to Ayşenur’s murder. I once again told myself that her murder had to be “different,” and that our government was sure to respond forcefully. Amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza, I pleaded with elected officials to recognize the gravity of what happened to Ayşenur, but to no avail. It was especially hard to humanize Ayşenur to elected officials—Democrats and Republicans alike—who, at precisely the time of her murder, were working to criminalize speech and campus activism since the onset of the genocide. They simply did not care.

As I scrambled along with my community members to assist Ayşenur’s family, I found myself on a Zoom call to help coordinate statewide efforts. Among the many who joined the call to help were Craig and Cindy Corrie. It was a surreal moment. They clearly felt a deep responsibility to be present for Ayşenur—a responsibility shaped by a kind of grief that only parents who have lost a child can truly understand or express. In the state’s thriving activism scene, the Corries are mainstays, often lending their voices and platform to those who seek justice in Palestine. In the past few years, I have been able to closely witness their continued fight for justice amidst an unprecedented pushback against Palestine activism by local, state, and federal policymakers. They are always present, no matter the nature of the event. I even saw them in the crowd at a small banquet CAIR organized shortly after I became Executive Director; their commitment to community organizing and justice is profound.

The Corries are always present because they understand the political stakes we face. They understand that we now find ourselves in an environment where advocating for the very humanity of Palestinians is being punished and criminalized at the highest levels of political office. This is visible in the recent arrests and ongoing cases of Mahmoud Khalil, Badr Khan Suri, Rümeysa Öztürk, and others who were punished for exercising their first amendment rights to speech and assembly. Is it any surprise that the same people pursuing these policies are apparently indifferent to the repeated killing of American activists, journalists, and even children by Israeli forces?

As American and global public opinion shifts against Israel for its atrocities, there has been an all-out offensive to try and silence any form of dissent. I have personally sat face-to-face with members of Congress, pleading for a ceasefire resolution and to end our government’s blank check policy which enables Israel to conduct its genocide. My impassioned pleas have only been met with robotic responses about Israel’s right to defend itself. Meanwhile, Ayşenur’s family has been traveling to Washington, D.C. to push for an independent investigation of her murder. The irony is that the very same members of Congress who have supported the Gaza genocide are the ones Ayşenur’s traumatized family members must communicate with in order to achieve any potential justice for her.

But it is not enough that the ruling class ignores American deaths at the hands of Israel, they also pursue draconian legislation at home, such as the “nonprofit killer bill” and the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” aimed at silencing Palestine advocacy. If passed, the consequences will be disastrous. Free speech has already been chilled on campuses across the United States, and encoding such acts or bills into law would only further push our country in the direction of outrightly criminalizing speech that criticizes or antagonizes the State of Israel—in complete violation of the Constitution. It does not get much better at the state and local levels, where genocidal war criminals such as Itamar Ben Gvir are being invited on speaking junkets, and “Gaza Real Estate” events are being callously advertised in anticipation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the strip.

Despite these immense challenges, this past April I joined Ayşenur’s husband (Hamid) and sister (Ozden) in seeing the Washington State Legislature recognize her in a symbolic House Resolution. This was a chance for lawmakers to take seriously the need for an independent investigation into Ayşenur’s murder. To the extent that our hopes are restrained, we remain energized by the commitment of our community, including the Corries, who stood right beside Ayşenur’s family for support during their recent attendance at the Washington State Legislature. Through all the grief, political indifference, and systematic repression of dissent, the presence of Cindy and Craig Corrie has remained an enduring moral constant. They are living reminders of what it means to carry trauma forward in service of something larger than oneself, and their authenticity as activists is reflected in their willingness to act year after year without the promise of reward or recognition. Without needing to be centered, they always show up and refuse to stay silent even when doing so might be easier for them.

The Corries’ presence in these moments might not resolve the ongoing violence of the Israeli state, nor galvanize our officials into action. But, in the long run, it will force our officials to confront what that violence continuously depends on: their complicity, and the myth that no one will persist in naming what is being done to the Palestinian people and those who stand by them.

Critics of “wokeism” and “cancel culture” often reproduce the very same nihilism and despair that fuel wokeism itself. The woke/anti-woke pipeline functions as something of an echo chamber that feeds into “anti-politics,” understood as the success of establishment politics (or what Marxists used to call “bourgeois politics”) in effectively pacifying movements that aim to upend and revolutionize the class and material bases of political life. The concept of anti-politics is useful here because it helps explain the tendency for political ideology to collapse into an aesthetic or symbolic form that gestures toward power but relies instead on slogans, generalized outrage, and protest. This is the objective of bourgeois politics within the Democratic Party in the United States: to absorb and neutralize outlier protest and agitational movements—from Black Lives Matter, to Bernie Sanders, to more recently Zohran Mamdani. The Democratic Party is perhaps the single most efficient force by which truly agitational political energy in American life becomes overwhelmed by inertia and subordinated to the establishment’s own political machinery.

A good example of how the inertia and pacifying machine of the Democratic Party operates is observable in two recent protests movements: the No Kings protests and anti-ICE uprisings in Los Angeles. Because these movements are qualitatively different in terms of strategy, optics, and messaging, the appropriate way to analyze them is to locate the class basis from which they both emerge. The anti-ICE protests emerged from some of the poorest working class neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and the tactics they deployed against the police (like burning, looting, and effacing property) recall the Rodney King riots of 1992, which Mike Davis referred to as the “first postmodern bread riot.”1 The No Kings protests, on the other hand, are a largely middle class movement sponsored by over 200 civil society nonprofits from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to MoveOn.org, all of which are deeply ensconced in the Democratic Party. These two movements should not be seen as separate; they are interrelated but also antagonistic to one another. The best way to clarify the distinction between them is to invoke what the late poet and communist thinker Joshua Clover once called the “split” that occurs in any riot—between a “practical” side that aims for maximal agitation (and thus a true overcoming of ICE as a repressive agency of the state) and a “communicative” side which seeks to pacify and redirect the antagonistic energies of the “practical” riot.2

Clover was a “communization” theorist who saw the task of communist activity as rejecting the building of institutions within capitalism to prepare the working class for revolution. Communization is fundamentally skeptical of socialist parties, aiming instead for a worker-led model of “council communism.” But in an era when just over 10% of workers are unionized, it is unclear how such a strategy could effectively organize the working class. For Clover, capitalism has been in a “long downturn” since at least the early 1970s, which means the ruling class cannot regenerate a social contract with its citizens that would make the institutions of capitalism reformable or even oriented towards social welfare. In Clover’s view, class forces are to some extent already fixed in such a way that class struggle, should it appear within the day-to-day inertia of bourgeois politics, is destined to be pacified.

This, then, is one of the downsides of communization theory: how it construes the working class. If riot or spontaneous uprisings are the sole horizon for anti-capitalist politics, how can the working class develop a collective consciousness beyond them? How can militant organization take place outside of the maximal expression of what are in reality rare moments of riot and insurrection? Moreover, is the wider presupposition of communization not an appeal to a theory of immiseration of the working class which maintains that novel political activity is largely driven by populations formally excluded from wage labor? This is in fact one of Clover’s core claims, namely that “surplus rebellions” are the predominant site of agitation.

What Clover’s thesis amounts to, however, is a repetition of some of the theories of Black Panther figures such as Eldridge Cleaver who argued that the lumpenproletariat—the unemployed, gig employees, and those on the margins of stable work—will become the vanguard of communist class politics. Yet recent work by Clyde Barrow has shown that the class demands of the lumpenproletariat are often more easily manipulated by the Democratic Party and funneled into its preferred arena of political agitation: identity politics and civil liberties.3 In other words, at a class level, there are inherent limitations to a “lumpen-centered” theory of communism today because of the ideological hegemony of bourgeois politics and its capacity to effectively turn this class and its spontaneous interests away from those of labor and the working class. For wage laborers, maximalist slogans about “the abolition of work” are often neither acceptable nor appealing as they undermine the social conditions that define them as a group within the labor market. Within the arena of bourgeois politics, the lumpenproletariat are what Claus Offe refers to as “policy takers,” that is, prone to following consumption-based concerns and not economic-based concerns.4 When the lumpenproletariat or “surplus populations” are mobilized in riots, it becomes unclear how their class interests (evident in their antagonistic relation to labor demands) might be reconciled through the riot’s force alone.

The recent work of Jasper Bernes—a close comrade to Clover and communist poet associated with the wider California Communist current—frames the 2020 George Floyd uprising as a rupture, a moment in which communist and abolitionist politics might have found a new center outside the capture of bourgeois politics. In his new book, The Future of Revolution, Bernes situates his method within the tradition of the “ultraleft,” which like communization theory, holds that genuine communist activity emerges only in specific revolutionary conjunctures, “when particular forms of practice, whether commune, council, or something else, open up a path toward a communist horizon, a communist prospect, visible from some point of rising action.”5 Although Bernes is cautious not to classify the George Floyd protests as “revolutionary,” the book nonetheless links it to a wider communist genealogy in line with the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

As we saw in Clover’s distinction between the practical and the communicative dimensions of the riot, Bernes appears interested only in its practical expression. This leads to a one-sided analysis that overlooks the broader conditions under which class struggle persists within capitalist politics. This limitation likely stems from a core ultraleft assumption: that the inward transformation of individuals is impossible so long as capitalism endures. But what would it mean to analyze the communicative side of these political events? What would it mean to confront the class ideology embedded in left-liberalism?

The Upper Middle Class and its Ideological Discontents

Most analyses of “woke” ideology mistakenly but persistently tell us that the phenomenon emerges out of Marxist theory. In reality, many Marxists do not take the construct of “wokeism” seriously enough to develop a full critique, precisely because the term has become so nebulous as to be meaningless, and so overused in popular discourse that any response risks being both too personal and too general. Yet in two recent books—Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke, and Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It—we find a sustained engagement with the idea that “wokeism” emerged from the far left, and specifically Marxist ideology.

In al-Gharbi’s account, we are given a clear explanation for why the George Floyd protests shifted from a maximalist phase of burning down police precincts and removing confederate statues to a more symbolic path focused on renaming schools, implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and pursuing other norm-based reforms within corporate and institutional life. For al-Gharbi, woke politics is defined as a symbolic demand for norm corrections, not material or revolutionary alteration to the prevailing system of power. Its origins are not found in movements such as Occupy Wall Street or even the George Floyd uprising itself. In al-Gharbi’s analysis, woke politics is a reaction to capitalist crisis and stagnation, and rather than emerging from the masses, it stems from the frustrations of the upper middle class during periods when their career expectations go unmet. Woke politics is thus a confused and neurotic projection of a segment of the middle class that has shaped the postwar period to such a degree that it is no longer clear whether all politics has been subordinated to the hallucinations of the upper middle class, or whether more serious and emancipatory movements (such as the civil rights movement) were exceptions to, rather than expressions of, “wokeism.”

Al-Gharbi does not seem to think that the working class had any historical agency in the postwar period whatsoever. In his reading, the locus of political activity has centered on three “Great Awokenings” which started first in the 1960s, then in the 1980s and 1990s, and most recently in 2020. Relying on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who theorized the discontents of students in the May 1968 uprising as a dynamic involving a collapse in the implicit promises for job placement (and hence of “elite overproduction”), al-Gharbi sees the upper middle class as the driving agent of history.6 Some of this argument of course has a good deal of validity, as nearly half of upper-middle-class children born in the 1980s failed to replicate the class position of their parents by age thirty. Out of revenge, the upper middle class sought to indict the system that let them down. But because these downwardly mobile upper middle class aspirants are still ensconced in capitalist institutions, they seek ideological outlets in socialist, feminist, antiracist, or queer critiques of the prevailing order. Here, “ideology” is understood as a substitute for class resentment among a coddled elite seeking to overthrow a “rival tier” within the broader elite class.

With this analysis in place, al-Gharbi then claims that Marxism becomes the predominant ideology that motivates the vanguard of the upper middle class. But Marxism, in this reading, is personified as an ideology that ultimately becomes a cudgel against a working class-centered form of politics, and that is adapted to the whims of the habitus of the upper middle class. Marxism, in other words, is completely shorn from Marx’s main principles. Marxism for the upper middle class effectively becomes what existentialism became on behalf of its proponents in the mid-20th century—an ideology that compliments, and does not challenge, the need for subjective authenticity.

In The Jargon of Authenticity, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno develops a critique of existentialist philosophy as a movement of thought that celebrated the authentic inward state of the subject but held no self-critical relation to the Other. This led to a philosophy that was fully in line with the existing status quo.7 The emphasis placed on inward authenticity was elevated to an ideal that had no need for any self-critical position, and this meant that the existentialist was vulnerable to administrative authority. Al-Gharbi quotes George Orwell’s critique of socialists in his time, who states that “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”8

Yet nowhere in al-Gharbi’s analysis does he consider the possibility that Marxism might take a different non-elitist controlled form in the world or in politics. And nowhere in al-Gharbi’s analysis does one find where authentic emancipation might come from. If the professional is fully compromised and fated to resentful narcissistic projection and control, gone is any possibility of the figure that Lenin used to refer to as the professional revolutionary. We end up coming full-circle from a pessimistic, anti-universalistic woke politics, to a critique of woke politics that seems to produce a similar anti-politics. Yet the challenges facing the left are too great to permit a retreat into a reactive pessimism that judges all gestures toward emancipation as inevitably collapsing into group narcissism. If history is indeed driven by the upper middle class, we may be at a dead end. But the task remains to identify class agents capable of igniting history, and it is to that task that Marxism points the way.

Be Careful Fighting Monsters…

In I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It, the well-known critic of Israel Norman Finkelstein similarly blames “wokeism” and “cancel culture” on elements of the Marxist left. Specifically, he draws a parallel between these phenomena and Maoism, particularly the party line during and after the Cultural Revolution in China.9 At that time, the ideological line could shift abruptly, and failure to keep up with those changes could lead to punishment. In Finkelstein’s view, the same dynamic applies today: fall behind the current line, and you are canceled. Thus, both al-Gharbi and Finkelstein see cancel culture as emanating from the top-down, never from the bottom up. While al-Gharbi notes many cases of elites “canceling” working-class people, there are not many cases of non-elites successfully canceling elites. Cancelation is like cricket or lacrosse—it is invariably an elite sport designed and enforced by people with power, deployed against those with less power.

Cancel culture is a class conflict scenario executed by an executive class. Al-Gharbi quotes the culture writer Bertrand Cooper who wrote that “were [George] Floyd still alive, or somehow reborn, he would not be hired to work within any of the institutions which now produce popular culture in his honor because he never obtained a bachelor’s degree. No matter how much Michael Brown or Breonna Taylor might have impacted a living Floyd, he would not be eligible to work at The Atlantic, at the New York Times, at HBO, or at Netflix.” At the heart of woke ideology, then, is an uncritical politics of “authenticity” that affects minority communities differently, but which is driven consistently by elites policing their own. So, for example, Black elites tend to leverage the struggles and experiences of lower-to moderate-income, nonimmigrant, monoracial Black communities to enhance their own credibility and life prospects by claiming to speak on their behalf. When what is politically judged to be authentic in the struggles of the subaltern or the working class subject is ultimately decided by the whims of the elite (whose ideology is forged on intra-elite resentment), then woke politics not only becomes anti-politics, it becomes a class politics that is indistinguishable from bourgeois politics itself.

Finkelstein’s book is less academically rigorous than is al-Gharbi’s, and it is full of memoir-style reflections on his own denial of tenure on spurious grounds related to his advocacy of Palestinian rights. The son of two Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein’s lack of patience with elitist woke politics is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is the extent to which he appears unable to see a way out of woke politics. It may be that his more than fifty years of tireless work exposing the crimes of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine—and now the genocide in Gaza—have left him with little hope that the excesses of woke politics can ever be tempered or redirected away from their extremes. As he says:

“The woke crowd latches onto the furthest-most limits to manifest just how cutting-edge, how much better and purer, it is. Gays and lesbians are so passé, so humdrum. At its worst, the woke cult of transgenders is a cross between voyeurism and morbidity, a fascination with the sexually bizarre, a politically correct version of snuff pornography.”10

In another passage, Finkelstein allows all good sense and decency to escape him:

“Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns. Here’s my shout-out to the snooty, self-indulgent, virtue-signaling Harvard-Hamptons-Hollywood crowd: “I’ll tell you my pronouns if you tell me your net worth.”11

Why would the great Norman Finkelstein—a tireless advocate of the Palestinian cause and a man who has spent decades mastering the art of principled debate in the face of Zionist witch hunts—undermine the basis of his own argument by falling sway to such vulgar bigotry? One might think that a critic of the excesses of woke ideology would be especially attuned to the danger of reproducing those same excesses. As Nietzsche warned, be careful in fighting monsters.

Although it may be too early to tell, and contrary to Finkelstein’s apparent sentiments, the Zohran Mamdani campaign suggests that the class driving “wokeism” is indeed capable of tempering some of its earlier excesses. Mamdani is the son of upper middle class immigrants—his mother a filmmaker, and his father a professor known for having expressed maximalist policy preferences including police abolition. Mamdani’s 2025 Mayoral campaign has shown a refusal to be defined in terms of identity when pressed by the bourgeois press. Mamdani himself has also steered clear of maximalist demands—such as police abolition—that often alienate working-class voters as much as they are seized upon by the right for being unrealistic and extreme.

Of course, Finkelstein’s book is not all bluster and bigotry. What it lacks, however, is a sincere effort to clarify Marxism beyond an appeal to a vague, pre-New Left version—one that was more basic and more directly aligned with working-class issues. The mere suggestion that Marxism centers the working class is not taboo or old-fashioned, it is foundational to Marxism itself. Affirming this need not make one a persona non grata, old-fashioned, or subject to cancelation. In this sense, Finkelstein seems to long not for a more rigorously Marxist left but perhaps for a better liberalism. He writes:

“To be proud of being Black, a woman, or gay defies rational sense; one cannot be proud of what one is; only of what one does.” But identity politics asserts the primacy of these biological givens in one’s self-definition. On the one hand, identity politics decries these invidious “social constructs”— Black, woman, gay—to which a negative valence has been attached by the world at large. But, on the other hand and simultaneously, identity politics elevates racial, sexual, etc. data to the overarching aspect of one’s being; a positive valence is imputed to them, something that one is supposed to embrace as of one’s essence. Now, it is true that no one comes into this world tabula rasa, “that to a great extent, he is formed by his race, his surroundings, his nation.” But what sense is there in making a “cult” of that over which one has no choice; why be enthralled by that to which one is, as it were, in thrall? Why would one want to be defined by an imposed identity, an identity determined at birth and overdetermined by society?”12

It seems that Finkelstein wants “the woke” to learn more from Martin Luther King Jr. than from Marx. He wants people to be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character. There is a senselessness and a brutality that is at the heart of cancel culture, a perniciousness and even a sadism that is often completely untethered from reason or ideology. And Finkelstein and al-Gharbi are therefore right to point to the petty resentments over intra-elite aspirations which primarily drive that intensity, but this does not mean that these developments are overwrought with Marxist ideology. Cancel culture is mediated through politically low-stakes conflicts—it most often occurs in digital interfaces—and because it often involves firings or the threat of career death, its logic is best analogized to market competition (ideology stands in as a superficial, secondary factor).

One of the important contributions of al-Gharbi’s and Finkelstein’s books is this reminder: that woke politics is in fact driven by a very specific sentiment of the upper middle class. Its mantras and maxims are detectable as reflections of class interest, and so the first task of any criticism of woke politics should be to avoid reproducing its underlying frameworks of understanding. The excesses of “wokeism” are not authentic excesses of the disconnects of the masses of the working class; if anything they are only partial expressions of those discontents. Any alternative to the hegemony of woke politics would have to prioritize solidarity over exclusion, and critical ideology over a sacred and uncritical conception of the left. Everything hinges on the class dynamics and the class forces that shape woke politics. The upper middle class will have a reluctance to shrugging off woke politics—we should expect them to remain uncritical to it and especially to the reconstitution of a class-centered orientation to the left. In lieu of reaffirming the woke-to-anti-woke pipeline or other pessimistic conclusions, socialists critical of “wokeism” need to cultivate a more principled assessment that clearly delineates the problem.

Notes

In October 2024—one year into Israel’s ongoing campaign of extermination in Gaza—Vox’s podcast “The Gray Area with Sean Illing” released an episode featuring acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates discussing his new book, The Message. As a fan of Illing’s show and a close observer of the media firestorm that accompanied the publication of The Message, I eagerly tuned in. As it turned out, however, the conversation went beyond Coates’ argument about Israeli apartheid; it spoke directly to a subject I had dedicated the past decade of my life exploring: doubt, moral conviction, and commitment.

Illing’s exchange with Coates centered around the latter’s forceful insistence that what is happening in Palestine is quite straightforward and easy to understand. As Coates says, “The math is clear…It’s so obviously Jim Crow.”

The ensuing exchange is worth quoting in full:

Illing: I’m glad we got here. You know, because, you’re on the show, it’s called ‘The Gray Area’ for a reason, right? And—

Coates: and I’m giving you black and white [chuckles].

Illing: No, I love that. I mean, this is the shit, man. This is what we’re here for. It’s called that because I think life is messy and complicated, and the temptation to blot out complexity for the sake—

Coates: [cackling in knowing laughter]

Illing: Hold on now [laughing], hold on professor…Just, the tendency to blot out complexity for the sake of a more simple story is understandable. But I do think it can become dangerous in its own way. And I’m constantly attuned to that threat. Maybe too attuned, actually. And I like that this is a reflex you challenge in the book and you’re challenging here, because it really forced me to think about it.

Illing’s faith in the principle of doubt is by no means unique. Doubt is widely celebrated as an enriching and liberatory orientation to the world, even as the liberal order that helped elevate this principle is coming apart.1 Yet valorizing skepticism often amounts to little more than a sophisticated cover by which to dress up existing commitments while avoiding any real reckoning with them. Between stable certainty and endless suspension of judgment, there is another option: sustaining commitment to a collective cause or form of life, while still acknowledging the uncertainty and ambivalence we inevitably carry as individuals.

Doubt Is Not a Useful Principle

Illing’s invocation of the virtues of doubt and uncertainty draws its appeal from a longstanding celebration of skepticism that is traceable to the European Enlightenment. Thinkers like Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Mill, among others, prescribed a hermeneutic of skepticism as the only reliable path to truth and freedom. It is now a cultural commonplace to claim that we must be unrelentingly skeptical of inherited truth-claims and communal commitments until proven by the light of reason and evidence. The problem is that partisans of the Enlightenment rarely, in actual practice, call for doubt as a universally applicable principle. Invariably, skeptical questioning is reserved only for certain normative claims, and suspended for others.

The mid-twentieth century scientist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, demonstrated this point in a brilliant critique of scientific objectivity that anticipates the kind of later critiques we usually think of as postmodern. In a chapter titled “The Critique of Doubt” from his book Personal Knowledge, Polanyi engages in a multi-pronged analysis to show that the “principle of doubt” is in fact “illusory.”2 He argues that there is no clear way to know when to subject particular truth-claims to doubt and when to passionately defend them. Polanyi persuasively shows that there is no “valid heuristic maxim” in the process of scientific inquiry “which would recommend either belief or doubt as a path to discovery.” There is no generalizable rule by which we can determine when doubt is warranted, and when doubt is paralyzing. As he puts it, “some discoveries are prompted by the conviction that something is fundamentally lacking in the existing framework of science, others by the opposite feeling that there is far more implied in it than has yet been realized.”3

Elsewhere, in a more expanded version of this argument, Polanyi states:

Caution is commendable in science, but only in so far as it does not hamper the boldness on which all progress in science depends. And there is no rule to tell us at the moment of deciding the next step in research what is truly bold and what merely reckless, and we can therefore have no rule either how to distinguish at such a moment between doubt which will curb recklessness and will qualify as true caution, and doubt which cripples boldness and will stand condemned as unimaginativeness or dogmatism. We call ‘caution’ only that kind of doubt which we consider to be, or to have been, reasonable. Hence ‘doubt’ described as ‘caution’ acknowledges our appreciation of a successful operation of doubt, without telling us how to achieve such success...‘Caution’ is a form of approval, masquerading as a rule of procedure.4

This fundamental ambivalence in the application and value of doubt is quite apparent in our contemporary political landscape. The public discourse around us is in many ways defined by highly charged claims about truth and belief, credulity and skepticism, or conformity and free-thinking. Consider, for example, the various contentious controversies over science in the public sphere, from vaccines to climate change and beyond. Those who entertain “conspiracy theories” are often regarded by the “mainstream” as far too gullible, believing far-fetched claims without proper evidence. Yet a common response to the proliferation of such conspiracy theories is the mantra, “believe science.” In other words, it is the opponents of conspiracy theorists who demand assent to authority, while the conspiracy theorists themselves honor the Enlightenment’s deep skepticism about officially authorized truths. This is what Naomi Klein refers to as our “doppelganger culture,” in which the highly polarized ideological camps of our society actually mirror each other in striking, uncomfortable ways.

Speaking about the conspiracy-theory-laden culture of the far-right, Klein points out:

When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to play-acting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, is that’s what they see when they look at us. They say we live in a ‘clown world,’ are stuck in ‘the matrix’ of ‘groupthink,’ are suffering from a form of collective hysteria called ‘mass formation psychosis’ (a made-up term).5

This doppelganger culture highlights how the ideals of doubt and skepticism continue to have purchase today, despite the advent of an absurd “post-truth” era. Across the political spectrum, each ideological camp proclaims its superiority by invoking the virtue of critical thinking and painting the other side as mindless sheeple (and their claims to skepticism as mere foolishness and false posturing). This doubling or mirroring effect demonstrates that skepticism in and of itself is no guarantee of careful thinking and proper judgment, and that merely advocating for doubt will not resolve our societal dysfunction.

So why do we often sing the praises of doubt? Why is skepticism made out to be such a vital epistemic value? Polanyi argues convincingly that the invocation of doubt is most often just a way to mask and validate our preexisting commitments by pointing to our supposed independence and the superiority of our critical faculties. Suppose that we take seriously the glib advice of Bill Maher—the notoriously polemical defender of Western civilization and liberalism—who, in his documentary Religulous, sagely decrees that we “question everything.” Polanyi points out that if we were to truly apply such a program of absolute and universal doubt, we would necessarily question every framework of understanding we have available to us, and thereby devolve into “imbecility” and an inability to communicate or think about anything at all, rather than arriving at more certain knowledge.6

Total doubt would offer no foundations from which to reason to better knowledge. Such an application of doubt is of course rejected by its proponents. Yet rarely is a basis for such a rejection articulated, and Polanyi argues that their own principles demand such a conclusion. The principle of doubt simply does not provide its defenders any logical means by which it could be contained. As such, the appropriate scope of doubt is simply asserted rather than argued, by sheer ideological fiat:

Philosophic doubt is thus kept on the leash and prevented from calling into question anything that the sceptic believes in, or from approving of any doubt that he does not share […] Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of ‘rational doubt’ is merely the sceptic’s way of advocating his own beliefs.7

An illuminating case study of how the defenders of doubt delineate its boundaries in purely self-serving terms comes from the 2009 book, In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic, co-authored by Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld. Berger’s earlier work was influential in my own thinking on modern doubt, but where his work becomes more forcefully prescriptive and polemical, it betrays the incoherence of doubt-positive discourse. Berger and Zijderveld call for a measured embrace of doubt to keep at bay the fanaticism of “true believers.” This amounts to making a case for a centrist white liberalism as the one true ideology, as it exhibits the correct balance of doubt with certainty, commitment, reason, and basic moral intuitions. All other ideologies—communism, Nazism, Islamism, fundamentalism, relativism, post-modernism—are fanaticisms that insist on one certainty or another. Meanwhile, the authors’ own brand of moderate liberalism is without a hint of irony presented as worthy of “passionate commitment”—one can indeed be “passionately, indeed immoderately, committed to these values,” they insist.8

The problem with “true believers,” Berger and Zijderveld tell us, is that when faced with uncertainty (as we all inevitably are in today’s pluralistic world) they suppress their doubts in an attempt to hold onto their commitments. The authors condemn this instinct, arguing that one must embrace doubt rather than push it away. But that instinct is also exactly what the authors recommend in relation to the moderate liberalism they uphold. Given “the permanent threat to democracy on the part of ideological true believers,” there emerges for them “a remarkable paradox: In order for doubt to exist, it needs to shield the constitutional state and the democratic system from doubt.”9 They do not try and address this paradox. Instead, they proclaim:

It’s not our intention here to deny anyone the right to doubt the institutional arrangements of democracy and to freely express this doubt, as long as there’s no active attempt to overthrow the democracy. But those of us who cherish democracy will seek to quiet such doubt within ourselves when true believers, of whatever ideological coloration, threaten the very existence of the democratic order.10

Berger and Zijderveld’s tribute to doubt as a fundamental virtue rings hollow. They insist on interrogating others’ absolute certainties, while declaring their own absolute certainties off-limits in the name of resisting relativism, cynicism, and nihilism.

This is but one example of how calls for doubt as the cornerstone of objective inquiry tend to be self-serving, presuming the outcome in advance and reserving doubt for those positions with which one disagrees. Moreover, in distinguishing between their own reasonable doubt and the fanaticism of “true believers,” such rhetoric is not only self-congratulatory but also frequently racialized. It typically devolves into a secular ideology of Western civilizational supremacy, whereby “our” doubt and critique is rational and enlightened, and “their” doubt and critique is just stubborn refusal to acknowledge the obvious truth.11

Ambivalence, Practical Commitment, and Palestine

Returning to the conversation between Sean Illing and Ta-Nehisi Coates on Palestine, Illing begins their exchange with the recognition that the suffering of the Palestinian people is indeed tragic and horrifying. In his words, what is happening to the Palestinians is “a moral obscenity.” In the same breath, however, Illing also insists that the situation is “complicated.”

Coates responds by considering two comparable historical episodes from American history: slavery and Jim Crow. He points out that those situations were also quite “complicated” in their own time, in that they seemed very difficult or near impossible to resolve, and the solutions on offer raised serious concerns about the potential consequences. But Coates insists that such complexities do not render us incapable of making categorical moral judgments on the matter—of declaring that these systems of domination and discrimination were wrong, unjust, even evil. Coates pushes Illing to recognize that, though the path forward or solution might indeed be difficult and complicated, we must begin from the basis that the current reality of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing is categorically wrong and must be challenged and dismantled.

Throughout this conversation, we see how the rhetoric of uncertainty and complexity is at times invoked as a cover for fear. Illing says in the outro: “This is a topic I don’t feel like I understand very well, and I try not to weigh in on things I don’t understand very well. But it was important to talk about this, and I didn’t want to let not understanding it perfectly be a justification for ignoring it altogether.” Yet the fact is that Illing not being an expert on various subjects has not, in the past, stopped him from hosting episodes about them, especially since the whole point of his podcast is learning from experts on any given subject and addressing the difficulties therein. But in the case of Palestine, Illing had simply avoided the topic, likely from fear of condemnation. He asks Coates what compelled him to write about Palestine given that it is so “impossibly charged,” betraying his fear of censure from “both sides.”

To the extent that we can take Illing’s uncertainty at face value, it does leave us with some important lessons. The first is that the posture of agnosticism does not translate to neutrality in practice. Quite often, an inability to take a position on a contentious issue means accepting things as they currently are. Ultimately, by refusing to challenge the status quo, we implicitly lend our support to a particular reality and state of affairs—in this case, the hegemony of the Zionist narrative and project.

When Illing is pressed by Coates in the conversation to articulate what exactly is complicated about the situation in Palestine, he simply regurgitates some basic Zionist talking points: that many Palestinians reject the idea of a fully democratic state with equal rights for all (and would seek to end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state if given the chance); that Jews are indigenous to this land and have nowhere else to go; and that Palestinian violence renders questionable their status as oppressed victims. As the conversation unfolds, Illing appears reluctant to accept these claims fully, but is nonetheless beholden to them, enough so that he is left feeling stuck and paralyzed. In this, he unwittingly aligns himself with Israeli propaganda and indirectly accepts the facts of Israeli settler-colonialism and genocide.

Even when we feel uncertain and position ourselves as agnostic, we ultimately still inhabit some ideological formation or another. We do not exist in a vacuum that affords us the privilege of pure intellectual abstraction and non-commitment. The rhetoric of doubt and agnosticism too easily overlooks and obscures how we are all inevitably committed (practically speaking) to particular forms of life regardless of intellectual posturing. As Polanyi observes in the case of scientific inquiry: “A scientist must commit himself in respect to any important claim put forward within his field of knowledge. If he ignores the claim he does in fact imply that he believes it to be unfounded. If he takes notice of it, the time and attention which he diverts to its examination […] are a measure of the likelihood he ascribes to its validity.”12 The idea here is that complete agnosticism is only possible when the subject lies entirely outside one’s field of concern—when one, in Polyani’s words, “knows little and cares nothing” about it. Within one’s domain of knowledge, however, inaction or inattention is never neutral; it is a form of judgment.

In Illing’s case, refusing to confront Israel’s ongoing colonial apartheid and genocidal campaign in Gaza amounts to shirking the responsibility that he bears as a prominent American journalist and public intellectual. As Coates points out while urging him to visit Palestine, Illing’s role demands that he engage seriously with one of the world’s most urgent moral and political crises—one in which he is especially implicated as an American.

Uncertainty cannot become an excuse for silence on matters of critical importance. Illing himself haltingly and hesitatingly acknowledges this, but continues to waver when it comes to Palestine. Yet toward the end of the episode, he summarizes his view on the matter (in abstraction) in light of Coates’ provocation:

I come on the show every week, man, and I praise the virtues of doubt and uncertainty. And I believe in that. But refusing to describe things simply and clearly can become a kind of moral and intellectual crime. Orwell was right about that. You’re right about that too. And I still think sometimes things really are complicated and not so neat, and maybe the challenge of being a writer and really just a human being is being honest and wise enough to know the difference. And yeah, sometimes it is really, really hard. But you know what else? Sometimes withholding moral judgment can be its own kind of cowardice.

Illing’s willingness to engage in some level of self-critique is commendable, but we must move beyond the vague sentiment of “how terribly sad” with which he begins the conversation, and the imperative of moral judgment with which he concludes. The assessment that this system is unjust and unacceptable cannot simply remain an individual moral conviction, as Illing’s language suggests, but rather must translate to a collective commitment and movement against apartheid and genocide.

Those of us who privilege intellectual or academic discourse—the vaunted life of the mind—often balk at the idea of committing ourselves to one side of a partisan struggle. We feel that our internal reflections are nuanced and particular, not fully represented by any existing ideological camp. We harbor too many doubts, perhaps, about the claims made by this or that side. To join a side, we may feel, would be inauthentic to our own genuine convictions. Yet we must be wary of allowing such reservations to paralyze us from necessary action. The fact of the matter is that in the real world of political struggle, there is no free-flowing ether of discourse in which we can simply float and express our personal convictions fully. There are, rather, well-defined camps that are actively working towards conflicting aims, and if we do not align ourselves with one of them, the most powerful side will simply swallow up our highly nuanced neutrality and convert it into support for its own hegemonic project. Ultimately, the stance of agnostic doubt belongs to an individualist and individualizing logic, which disempowers and blinds people from working together towards shared objectives.

But to commit ourselves to a collective movement does not mean we must eschew all uncertainties or ambivalences. Whether it is the ethics and politics of anticolonial resistance, the demands of global solidarity, the strategic considerations of political mobilization, the historical and philosophical concerns surrounding Zionism and antisemitism, or any number of other questions and contestations, there are inevitably a multitude of issues that supporters of Palestinian liberation will struggle with in some way or another. It can indeed be important and constructive to acknowledge and sit with our uncertainties, as part of cultivating the kind of communities that mobilize collective action.

This is not to return to the triumphant, prescriptive valorization of doubt that I have already critiqued, but to offer the more modest recognition that we do not necessarily have all the answers fully worked out, and that there are indeed gray areas in grappling with these issues—as Sean Illing and even Ta-Nehisi Coates would insist.13 Nor will there be, given the competing orientations within a broad coalition of those who share a common cause of liberation, a single stance on all issues with which we must agree. But unlike Illing’s more nefarious sentiment that “things are complicated,” this embrace of uncertainty must not justify neglecting a just cause or enshrining an impossible ideal of absolute ideological agreement as a prerequisite for Palestinian advocacy. It is indeed possible to face our ambivalence without falling into the common binary: either suppress our questions and discomforts and simply get in line, or give up altogether on taking action as part of a shared moral and political project.

Whether it is on the Palestine question or beyond it, sustaining and upholding any form of life or collective movement (particularly a counter-hegemonic one) requires this balancing act. As I ultimately propose in my book Dilemmas of Authenticity, drawing on the lessons learned from my American Muslim interlocutors who grapple with doubt: “When we share certain key axes of belonging and vision, we must often fit ourselves into the larger collective’s normative standards, at least provisionally and to some extent, if we want to achieve certain shared goals. We may experience ambivalence about those norms at times, we may grapple with unresolved questions about certain matters, and we may express these reservations and challenge community expectations; yet such ambivalence does not mean that we do not share an overarching commitment or vision that we can work toward, nor does it need to translate into disengagement or paralysis.”14

In this way, the gray area that Illing celebrates need not remain an individualized arena of abstract pontification. It can be the grounds of thoughtful action. Even as we recognize the complexity and messiness of our world, we can and must uphold our commitments in the gray.

Notes

Less than forty-eight hours after Bashar al-Assad’s ouster in December, the interim Syrian government, led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, announced plans to transition to a free-market economy. It was a peculiar and seemingly premature declaration; there was scarcely a functioning state, let alone an economy, to speak of. Under Assad, Syria endured decades of crippling economic sanctions but was able to manage a crony state through its strategic alliances, primarily with Russia and Iran. The new leadership effectively inherited these sanctions without the state apparatus or international partnerships that had long sustained Assad. With their swift takeover of multiple cities and towns on the path to the presidential palace in Damascus, the new Syrian leaders had not simply captured the state but effectively ended whatever remained of it. This reality was thrown into sharp relief by the Israeli invasion and bombing of Syria which began immediately after Assad’s departure. As Israel expanded its occupation in the southwestern part of the country and escalated its aerial campaign against hundreds of military targets—including air bases, munitions depots, research facilities, and other sites containing sensitive equipment and data—the al-Sharaa government could offer no response and had no allies upon whom to call. Even localized sectarian clashes have proven difficult to regulate and contain, including the recent attack on the Mar Elias Church in Damascus.1

In the immediate aftermath of Assad’s ouster and Israel’s belligerence in Syria, what the new leaders effectively possessed was a proto-state with minimal military resources, no clear international partnerships, and a heavily sanctioned economy, all while facing various domestic and foreign threats. A statement of allegiance to the free market may have seemed bizarre and misplaced under these conditions, but it was likely the opening move in a calculated campaign to secure international legitimacy and new lifelines. To build the Syrian state anew, the fledgling post-Assad government needed access to global capital, trade routes, and the support of diplomatic recognition. And to gain such access and support, al-Sharaa, as Syria’s new leader, had to become acceptable to the very powers that once branded him a terrorist—they held the keys he now needed to drive his country forward. In pursuit of these objectives, the new regime emphasized shared security interests with the West and its international partners by identifying Iran as the region’s greatest threat, remaining rhetorically reserved about Israel’s bombardment of Syria and Gaza, and even signaling a willingness to become a signatory to the Abraham Accords.2 This shift is particularly apparent in al-Sharaa himself, who, under his former identity and nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, once claimed Palestine as the wellspring of his political consciousness and denounced the Gulf monarchies as servile, decadent rentier states. Upon becoming president, however, he has remained fairly muted about the Gaza genocide and warmly embraced the very rulers he previously condemned.3 In one especially obsequious moment, al-Sharaa publicly welcomed the prospect of building a Trump Tower in Damascus. The very next day, Donald Trump announced that U.S. sanctions on Syria—decades old and once seen as immovable—would be lifted.

In theory, post-Assad Syria was a blank canvas upon which the revolutionary movement could realize its vision for a new kind of state. In reality, the political and economic conditions in which Syria’s emergent leaders found themselves sharply delimited the horizon of revolutionary possibility. As many continue to hail the success of the Syrian revolution, it is increasingly clear that what is materializing is not a revolutionary state, but a political order shaped by the same structural pressures and conditions that have historically defined state formation in the post-colonial Middle East. Among these pressures and conditions is the imperative to prioritize capital investment to satisfy what Fred Block calls “business confidence,”4 which is bound up with the viability of statehood in the contemporary global economy. In this context, the rhetoric of economic “reform” and “openness” expressed by the new Syrian government is less a reflection of ideological orientation than a currency of survival in a world shaped by asymmetric flows of capital and power. Accordingly, the new regime’s calculated flirtation with the Abraham Accords and its overtures to the Gulf investors and Western developers it once sharply criticized are also not mere “smart policy choices,” but incentivized rituals of compliance pursued in exchange for access to the material conditions that permit state-building.

Syria’s new leaders thus find themselves in a position emblematic of what Immanuel Wallerstein describes as the double bind of the weak. For the weak, the “gift” of being politically and economically welcomed into the international system by the powerful confers a dilemma: “to refuse the gift is to lose; to accept the gift is to lose.”5 Incorporation into the international system is never a no-strings-attached affair, least of all for states emerging from the rubble. Accepting the “gift” demands serious concessions, while refusing it often means forfeiting even the most basic conditions for long-term survival. This is not to suggest that al-Sharaa’s government lacks agency, but that its agency is circumscribed by structural pressures so deeply ingrained that necessary political compromises often appear as shrewd or pragmatic choices. What may look like political savviness or moderation is in effect submission by other means and an embrace of neoliberal6 logics that secures short-term survival at the cost of long-term autonomy.

Debating the Day After the Revolution

Writing for Al-Jumhuriya, Yasin al-Haj Saleh describes the collapse of the Assad regime as a “monumental event” and a “tectonic shift,” but argues that it does not represent the successful culmination of the Syrian revolution that began in 2011. As he puts it: “The enormity of [Assad’s fall] is one thing; claiming the revolution has triumphed is another. Toppling the regime was a core objective of the Syrian revolution—but as a means to greater ends, not an end in itself.” For Saleh (as for many Syrians), the revolution had already failed by the mid-2010s when it became entangled in various regional and sectarian conflicts “and was ultimately recast as a ‘war on terror’ that, in effect, rehabilitated Assad’s rule.” These regional and sectarian dynamics persist today and, ironically, played a greater role in the regime’s downfall than the popular movement that defined and animated the uprising’s early years.

But even if Assad’s ouster was less a delayed flowering of the Arab Spring than a sudden winter power grab by a faction that, in Saleh’s words, “played no role in the early stages of the Syrian revolution,” it is not clear that this is the most important measure of the revolution’s failure. Nor, for that matter, would resolving the ongoing violence, sectarianism, or absence of democracy that (rightly) preoccupy Saleh necessarily constitute its complete success. Saleh does well to address the developments and realities that hampered the revolution’s full fruition, but he appears to sidestep a number of more pertinent questions in the process. Even if the revolution had succeeded on his desired terms (by producing a democratic, pluralistic, and non-sectarian regime), what would that success amount to if the new government still had to submit to the imperatives of international capital and the interests of the dominant powers to which Syria is presently beholden? Why should we assume that a “democratic” regime would not have, like the current one, taken the exact same path in response to the exact same pressures? And even if an “authentically” revolutionary government had refused the same path, given the conditions Syria faced after Assad’s fall, would it not simply have encountered the other side of Wallerstein’s double bind: isolation, economic collapse, and political failure? The seemingly inescapable constraints that any post-Assad government would likely have faced should invite some renewed consideration of how we evaluate the success or failure of the revolution itself. If Syria’s conditions post-Assad would have steered any new leadership into the same corner, then the exclusive focus on ideology or individual figures becomes a distraction from the deeper forces shaping the post-revolutionary state.

This neglect of sustained structural critique extends well beyond Saleh. It also appears in the broader discourse surrounding Syria’s leadership after Assad. The debate over al-Sharaa, in particular, has become a misplaced site of contestation over the revolution’s legacy and generally falls into two reductive camps. The first camp asserts that al-Sharaa has always been a duplicitous agent of the West and is now merely revealing his true allegiances. The second camp maintains that he remains ideologically consistent and is simply playing the long game by yielding to external pressures temporarily with the intention of returning to the commitments he appears to have set aside (like Palestine) once conditions permit.7 Both positions are ultimately feeble, not only because they rely on unverifiable or even absurd speculation about al-Sharaa’s inner convictions, but because they reduce his political conduct to a form of calculated deceit—malicious in the eyes of his critics, virtuous in the eyes of his defenders. The second camp, specifically, romanticizes the idea that al-Sharaa can accumulate power from within a system fundamentally hostile to his project, and eventually redirect that power toward revolutionary ends. But this view fails to apprehend the structural realities of state dependency and the disciplinary force of global capital. It may well be the case that al-Sharaa retains the beliefs he once articulated, but the more salient fact is that he no longer operates in conditions that allow him to act on them, even if he wished to. His overtures to the Gulf monarchies and Western powers are not simply “tactical performances,” they are the imposed terms of political survival. There is no compelling evidence to suggest these concessions are temporary or even presently reversible. This is why fixating on whether al-Sharaa has “really changed” is both analytically unproductive and politically distracting.

The point here is that even if al-Sharaa does not envision the current orientation of the Syrian state as permanent, the long-term intentions of a dependent leader matter far less than the systemic logics within which he is embedded. Syria will not be rebuilt without embracing free-market reform, aligning with powerful financiers, and presenting itself as a cooperative node within an existing capitalist order. This is not simply al-Sharaa’s personal trajectory but, increasingly, the condition of possibility for state-building itself. On some level, then, the question is not, per Saleh, whether Syria has betrayed its revolutionary ideals; it is whether any incipient revolutionary state facing comparable conditions can reconstruct itself from complete collapse without treading the same path. Can a newly born state thrive under different conditions? Or is freedom won through revolution ultimately consigned to the fate imposed by capital and its dictates?

Of course, some will insist that Syria’s current path was not inevitable and that its new leaders did, in fact, have the option of refusing to genuflect before international power and capital (thereby preserving a “pure” revolutionary stance). But this framing misrepresents and misunderstands the nature of the dilemma that Wallerstein presents. It is not a real choice, in any meaningful sense, to suggest that the alternative to eating carrion is to starve, when carrion is the only “food item” on the menu. The more relevant question is not why the new Syrian leadership chose to eat carrion, but why that was seemingly the only “dining option” available in the first place. Who provides the carrion and under what terms—indeed, to what end? Is there even a feasible point of exit from this dependency? More to the point, if a political faction that built its reputation railing against the terms of the international order now finds itself forced to operate entirely within them, what does that portend for the trajectory of the state it now leads? These are the questions the al-Sharaa government’s more strident defenders and critics often avoid, preferring narratives of conspiracy, strategy, or resilience over structural evaluation. It is entirely possible to welcome the end of sanctions and the prospect of improved material conditions for Syrians while still grappling with the deeper implications of the country’s double bind, in which the gift of inclusion by powerful actors (à la Wallerstein) ensured varying degrees of loss whether accepted or refused.

Whither Islam(ism)?

In addition to raising fundamental questions about the fate of the Syrian revolution, the post-Assad government’s rapid acquiescence to international capital bears wider implications for the trajectory of political Islam itself. If the Syrian revolution was once hailed as an arena in which Islamism could reassert itself as an emancipatory force capable of offering an alternative to Western hegemony, then the subsequent path taken by the country’s new leadership compels a reevaluation not only of the revolution’s prospects but of Islamism’s capacity to meaningfully resist incorporation into the dominant global order. Generally seen as a counterhegemonic response to Eurocentrism and Western supremacy, Islamism has long derived part of its normative appeal from its perceived potential to contribute to the unfinished project of decolonization. Whether framed as a rejection of Kemalist secularism or as a call to revive the moral economy of the Umma, the promise of Islamism rests largely on its claim to an authentic and structurally distinct alternative to the prevailing order.

This promise has been under sustained critique in the wake of the Arab Spring, as multiple Islamist movements have either collapsed under external pressure or been subsumed into existing power arrangements. While some observers rushed to declare the arrival of a post-Islamist era following the Arab Spring, others rightly warned that such proclamations were premature. Yet the recent trajectories of several Islamist movements suggest that these warnings underestimated the depth of the ideological and structural transformations already underway. In Tunisia, for example, the leadership of the veteran Ennahda movement returned after more than two decades in exile in London and dominated the post-revolutionary political landscape, only to then engage in a series of calculated compromises with the country’s entrenched secularist establishment. Eventually, Ennahda’s leadership moved to rebrand the party as a secular organization of “Muslim democrats,” essentially distancing itself from its foundational Islamist identity in a bid to broaden its electoral appeal. Yet this reorientation completely backfired. It not only alienated the group’s core supporters while failing to attract new ones, but also precipitated both its own electoral decline as well as President Kais Saied’s authoritarian consolidation during the 2021 coup. What began as ideological accommodation ended in political failure and irrelevance.

In Egypt, the lesson of the Muslim Brotherhood is even starker. Long before the 2011 uprising, the Brotherhood had already begun enthusiastically embracing neoliberal policies and practices, which were later formalized as official economic policy during its brief time in power under President Mohamed Morsi. More than any other factor, it was this—along with its overly pragmatic (if not outrightly cynical) relationship with the military establishment—that damaged the movement’s credibility. Rather than positioning itself as a clear alternative to either neoliberal economics or military authoritarianism (both hallmarks of the Mubarak era), the Brotherhood attempted to negotiate its place within both. Ironically, these “pragmatic” moves were intended to shield the Brotherhood from the system’s disciplinary mechanisms, yet ultimately rendered the group more susceptible to them.

Even in Afghanistan, where the Taliban succeeded in expelling a major imperial power through a twenty-year insurgency, the post-occupation reality reveals a paradox of continued dependency. Despite the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s presumed independence from the Western order—evident in its burgeoning relations with Central and East Asia, most notably China—it remains entangled in that order’s gravitational pull in several key respects. This entanglement is not merely geopolitical but institutional and symbolic as well. The terms of the negotiated U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, though publicly framed as a clean break, remain murky and suggest ongoing security cooperation from some elements within the new government. There are, additionally, serious indications of direct financial support from the U.S. government, ranging from millions to billions of dollars. The endurance of this American inheritance can even be seen in the aesthetic ideals internalized and adopted by the Islamic Emirate’s special forces, which in turn reflect a deeper material legacy of the U.S. occupation. More consequential, however, are the Taliban’s increasingly vocal calls to forge deeper relations with Western powers, reflecting an apparent acceptance of market dependency and a growing reliance on foreign aid driven by the structural realities of global power. There is no “autonomous Islamic path” visible in Afghanistan; the Islamic Emirate remains tethered to and reliant upon the order it ostensibly rejects.

Compared to these examples, the case of the new Syrian government is particularly acute because it represents perhaps the sharpest and fastest shift from resistance to alignment with the very political and economic order it once opposed. Might this simply mean that Islamism has lost the ability to signify a genuine political alternative in the world? Perhaps more cynically: did it ever possess that ability? If, as the above examples suggest, every principle is subject to compromise, and if the only surviving commitments are rhetorical or aesthetic invocations of Islam devoid of structural consequence, then what really remains of the project of political Islam? What is the content of an Islamism that finds no contradiction in capitalist integration and political subservience to the prevailing order? Syria—like Egypt, Tunisia, and Afghanistan—seems to demonstrate the narrowing of ideological horizons under global neoliberal hegemony. That all of the aforementioned regimes arose from revolutionary upheaval or resistance to military occupation only magnifies the scale of this consideration. If even movements born of political and military resistance are ultimately reabsorbed into the dominant order, then merely focusing on ideology—rather than critically examining the global conditions that make ideological absorption inevitable—seems to miss the forest for the trees.

Is There No Way Out?

What we are witnessing transpire in Syria is a predictable consequence of the material conditions under which modern proto-states are compelled to develop and operate. The same conditions and dynamics impacting Syria are increasingly shaping the trajectories of contemporary Islamist movements across North Africa, Central Asia, and beyond. Syria’s new state-building efforts have been largely subsumed into an order where legitimacy is conferred through adherence to market discipline, investor confidence, and the policy frameworks favored by the international actors that govern access to power. Rosa Luxemburg’s assertion that “political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process”8 echoes with particular clarity here. The contours (and, indeed, imperatives) of international capital are clearly impacting Syria’s state-building efforts and will continue to mold the possibilities of its political reconstruction. The apparent success of the Syrian revolution did not exempt the country’s new leaders from bowing to the rules of the global capitalist system; if anything, their rise to power just rendered them more vulnerable to its disciplinary pressures and effects through a kind of structural capture. The recent economic, diplomatic, and political decisions of Syria’s new state-builders are dictated by the same constraints that shape virtually all modern statecraft projects, even ones that are far better positioned than Syria.

When the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in post-apartheid South Africa, for example, it did so on the promise of a socialist mandate. But in just a few years, and under various pressures from global markets and institutional investors, the ANC government pivoted to a neoliberal model that embraced market liberalization and austerity. Similarly, in Greece, the SYRIZA government rose to power for its anti-austerity platform but eventually capitulated to the terms of international creditors when it faced the reality of imminent financial collapse and expulsion from the eurozone.

While not neat one-to-one analogies, these cases nonetheless show that the adoption of capitalist norms is not always “one choice among many” but rather the precondition for political legitimacy and survival. International recognition, foreign aid, infrastructural investment, and diplomatic credibility are extended primarily to those who conform to the game of the international system. This is, for better or worse, the terrain upon which modern political legitimacy is made. And, perhaps, it helps situate Hannah Arendt’s more perennial insight that “the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”9 Once power is won, the stakes shift. The imperative is no longer transformation, but preservation. In Syria’s case, ideology yielded to survival, and in the neoliberal world order, survival begins with submission to capital.

This article first appeared in The Nation on March 19, 2025 under the title “What Aaron Bushnell Is Still Teaching Us.”

It may seem like a distant memory, but it was only just over a year ago—February 25, 2024—that 25-year-old Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington in an act of protest against the Gaza genocide.

In live-streamed remarks just before his self-immolation, Bushnell declared: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” He then set himself alight. The last words of his life were “Free Palestine.”

There were two broad responses to Bushnell’s protest and death. The first, from the political and media establishment, was mostly patronizing, mawkish, and bereft of serious reflection. Performative sorrow and confusion quickly gave way to cold deliberation over why he chose such a macabre form of protest, followed by gratuitous speculation about his mental health and “cultish” religious upbringing. Pathologizing Bushnell was the easiest way out of what Mark Fisher calls the “possibility of politicization.” Even some who recognized the political nature of Bushnell’s act rushed to flatten his message by insisting he was a coward for dying by suicide. As far as political obfuscation goes, however, the Biden administration’s response stands out as a master class. Bushnell’s death was treated like a natural disaster, with then–White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre calling it “a horrible tragedy” while completely ignoring its political context. Gaza was not even an afterthought; it was simply absent.

Amid these shallow and evasive reactions, a second response emerged from students, activists, and alternative media figures who shared Bushnell’s revulsion at the United States’ involvement in the Gaza genocide. For them, there is no mystery: Bushnell set himself ablaze to express his rejection of the genocide, expose its gravity, and presumably galvanize action that would hasten its end.

Bushnell’s sympathizers take his parting words as an unambiguous expression of his protest’s core logic and intent. The only debate is whether his act was effective and laudable or ineffective and tragic.

Yet between the feigned stupefaction of the ruling class and the sympathetic if varied conclusions of activist circles, an important consideration was usually missed: What if, beyond his immediate message about Gaza, Bushnell intended to dramatize the limitations of confronting power through gestures of speech—including a protest as bold and fatal as his own? What if the message behind Bushnell’s protest was not “Take notice, we need to do something,” but rather “Take notice, this changes nothing”? Permitting the obvious point that the Gaza genocide drove Bushnell to perform what he called “an extreme act of protest,” there is still reason to believe he knew—and sought to tell us—that his self-immolation would occasion no change. Perhaps that was his point.

Notably, Bushnell qualified his “extreme protest” by claiming that “compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.” This is no minor addendum. In the context of his broader message, Bushnell arguably meant: “I can burn myself to death in public and nothing will come of it, even if many are horrified by my act—this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

We may never know exactly what the words this and normal refer to in Bushnell’s final statement. Analyzing them with closer scrutiny indicates multiple possible referents: Gaza’s suffering, Bushnell’s impending immolation, the apathy and culpability of the ruling class, and our collective impotence as eager but defeated spectators. What we do know, however, is that anti-war activists have been yelling fiery words demanding change since the genocide began, and that Bushnell was not oblivious to this fact. His statement was different—it was about when fiery words fail. His protest was both a rejection of the idea that human life is expendable and an acknowledgment that, for so many, it already has been.

Intending Failure

Reflecting on Bushnell’s protest in TomDispatch last year, Nan Levinson admits she was initially puzzled by his act. As she came to terms with his reasons for committing it, however, more questions arose. Was Bushnell’s protest effective? And why, despite being so clear, did his message about Gaza not resonate more widely? Perhaps, Levison guesses, it is because “witnessing someone dying in flames, even online, is simply too disturbing to let witnesses easily absorb its intended message.” She says “the shock…of the image of him burning to death seemed, if anything, to blot out the purpose.” The implication here is that Bushnell’s protest was a clear but unsuccessful call to action, as he sought but failed to garner “widespread attention” and did not “make a dent in Israel’s belligerence or limit the weaponry and intelligence his country still sends Israel.” But is that what Bushnell was after? Nowhere in his statement does he ask anyone else to take action. Levinson, like many others, conflates the inspiration for Bushnell’s protest with its intended purpose. She assumes that because he protested in response to the Gaza genocide, his direct aim was for his self-immolation to end it. Taking this view, we have no choice but to conclude Bushnell failed.

There is another way to understand the “failure” of Bushnell’s protest: as a premeditated part of its message. Whatever else it may be, self-immolation is an act of dissent that reflects systemic social and political failure. It is both a consequence of political foreclosure and a stark illustration of its scale. Accordingly, Erik Baker notes that asking “whether self-immolation is good or bad, justifiable or non-justifiable, effective or ineffective is in large part to miss the point.” We must understand Bushnell’s act as part of a broader history of anti-war activism where self-immolation conveys what Baker calls “the near-total impotence of protest—and even public opinion as such—in the face of a military apparatus completely insulated from external accountability.” Setting oneself on fire in protest has little to do with shocking the world in the hope of putting an end to war. Rather, as Baker writes, it is a way “to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.”

This, then, is what Levinson’s interpretation misses. If anything, the “image” of Bushnell’s protest was not numbing but revealing, as it showed that even the most horrifying death cannot shake power’s indifference. Taking Levinson’s view risks framing the establishment’s passivity as the consequence of misguided tactics or decisions on the part of dissenters. Yet Bushnell’s point was precisely that we have reached the end of the road with “effective messaging” on Gaza; there is nothing left to say. After all, the deaths of Palestinians—many of them, like Bushnell’s, livestreamed to the world—carry a message more visceral and urgent, yet the genocidal war machine was no more impeded by their cries than by his. Had the people of Gaza died with some indefinable kind of decorum instead of a “too-disturbing,” bloody impropriety, would the genocide have stopped?

If anti-war protests have historically aimed to sway power and reverse foreign policy, that was almost certainly not Bushnell’s goal. In The Nation, Daniel Bessner notes that “[w]hen it comes to changing US foreign policy, mass action alone has never realized the dreams its advocates have set out for it. While protest movements are preferable to lethargy, inaction, and nihilism, by themselves they are just not enough.” Bushnell appears to have (ironically) acted on this understanding, namely, that protest is insufficient because, as Bessner says, “the US national security state has been specifically designed to prevent the solutions” anti-war activists seek. We can see this plainly realized, for example, in the incredible disparity between the hopes and consequences of last year’s student-led encampment protests across college campuses. Despite the protesters’ best efforts, they did not bring about an end to the genocide or institutional complicity in it but faced severe repercussions, including police brutality, arrest, disciplinary action, the threat of deportation, and protracted harassment. By the time Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, secured a ceasefire deal just days before Joe Biden’s presidency ended in early January, the protests had dwindled to near silence. More importantly, the Trump-led ceasefire was driven by far more sinister ambitions: the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza, followed by US occupation.

This is not to say the protests were meaningless or pointless—after all, they galvanized a generation of students around the cause of Palestine—but that they were trapped in a political environment designed to preclude their effectiveness. Responding to the college encampments, Samuel Catlin notes that protests typically aim “to direct public attention in exactly the opposite direction. A protest demands that we look toward it, but only so that it can reroute our gaze to the thing being protested.” What happened, however, is that “the mass media turn[ed] away from the referent and toward the protest” in the propagandistic effort to relocate “the theater of war” from Gaza to the American college campus. The protests became a self-contained spectacle and vector for debates about free speech, antisemitism, vandalism, and other issues in which Gaza was a footnote. A similar dynamic played out in the media and political establishment’s response to Bushnell’s protest: virtually no discussion of the Gaza genocide, but much scrutiny of his mental health and personal history.

If the “Streisand effect” describes how attempts to suppress information paradoxically draw more attention to it, the “Gaza effect” describes how amplifying a cause leads to muted responses and misdirected attention. But this “effect” is not the fault of the protesters—reframing dissent to neutralize its impact (e.g., by labeling protesters as mentally ill or violent) is a mechanism of establishment power and propaganda. Bushnell’s protest diverted attention from Gaza for the same reason it spurred no action (except further protest, including another self-immolation in Boston): because confronting its political significance means challenging a consensus reality on Palestine the establishment wishes to maintain. Even when the concerns of Bushnell and the college protesters were acknowledged, it was often to cynically capitalize on public demands for a ceasefire by promising meaningful action while ensuring no meaningful change. As the repression proceeded, “official statements” were offered to plausibly deny accusations of inaction. The Biden administration, for example, repeatedly claimed to be “working around the clock for a ceasefire” while, in reality, escalating support for the genocide. These statements served to preempt and deflect accusations of complicity; when criticized, officials could point to their words and say, “We are working hard to address your concerns.” To echo Amy and David Goodman, this allows the ruling class—including corporate Democrats who LARP as “resisters”—to “complain politely, and then resume their deferential posture to enable the next disaster.”

The difference between Bushnell and the campus protesters is just that his message was not directed at those liable for Gaza’s suffering, but to us—to highlight that the situation is worse than we might imagine, and that our capacity to effect change is more limited than we believe. This is especially evident in his final words. Rather than calling for an end to genocide, he grimly declared he would “no longer be complicit” in it. Bushnell’s protest thus pushes back against a political moment where “making a statement” is considered a legitimate form of action. For him, the only road to action—the only statement left—was that of perdition.

Beyond Truth

Belén Fernández argues that Bushnell “put Western corporate media to shame” because, unlike them, he spoke “truth to power.” But did he? If anything, Bushnell exposed the limits of this idea. The ruling class already knew the truth about Gaza and still chose to abet its annihilation—that was his point. Noam Chomsky has long argued that speaking truth to power is futile because the powerful already know the truth—they simply do not care. The real task, he insists, is to speak truth to the powerless, to empower them and confront the ruling class together. Salman Sayyid puts it more plainly: “Truth and power are not opposite relationships—only power can speak to power.”

Yet even this perspective understates the complexity of our present moment. Returning to Mark Fisher, the idea of speaking truth to power misunderstands how the space of belief operates in the age of capitalist realism. One defining feature of our age, he notes, is “the overvaluing of belief—in the sense of inner subjective attitude—at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.” The same logic applies to Gaza. The ruling class can profess horror at genocide while actively enabling it, precisely because acknowledgment and action have become uncoupled. It is not simply that power can only speak to power; rather, claims to truth are often wielded to justify expressions of power that flagrantly contradict it.

But the bigger problem with Chomsky’s “speak to the powerless” model is that it assumes the powerless need the truth revealed to them, when in reality, they already know it—and they know the powerful know it too. Bessner is right to note that in the 2020s, “we all know the horrors of the American Empire, and yet these horrors persist[.]” If awareness alone were enough, the world might look very different today. The challenge is not uncovering hidden truths but confronting a system that is fully aware of its own brutality and continues undeterred.

Murmurs from today’s “culture wars” insist that our troubles stem from the fact that we now live in a “post-truth” era in which objective reality has lost its appeal with the masses. The implication here is that an embrace of truth is the key to a more humane society. Setting aside the fact that opposing factions of the so-called culture wars proclaim dominion over the truth (this is the hidden object of the “wars”), this attitude neglects a significant reality to which Fisher points our attention: believing in the truth is no guarantee of correctly acting on it and may even serve to justify or preclude action with the power one knowingly possesses. Gaza bears this out. The “truth” of the genocide—the tens of thousands slaughtered, the children under the rubble, the famine and disease—has never really been in dispute, even from Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That did not stop either of them from consistently supporting Israel.

As we continue to debate whether “truth” exists or matters on the sidelines, the ruling class will continue to weaponize, recontextualize, and reframe truth in ways that align with their interests and enable them to maintain or enhance their power behind a pretext of moral concern.

Consider how the establishment responded to Bushnell’s self-immolation versus Mohamed Bouazizi’s, the Tunisian street vendor who set off the Arab Spring in 2010. Shadi Hamid makes an interesting observation in The Washington Post about the double standard surrounding these two protests, noting “I don’t recall anyone wondering whether [Bouazizi] was mentally ill.” President Obama lionized Bouazizi and said the conditions which led to his self-immolation were “not unique” because he faced “the same kind of humiliation that takes place every day in many parts of the world—the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity, only this time something different happened.” Obama added that “there are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years,” likening Bouazizi to various renegades in American history—among them Rosa Parks and the Boston Tea Party patriots.

The reason Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation did not spark the same concern as Bouazizi’s among the establishment has nothing to do with knowing the truth in one case and missing it in the other. The truth of Bouazizi’s protest was instrumentalized to justify “benevolent” American involvement in the Arab Spring. Bushnell’s protest didn’t serve US interests. He thus had to be made into a symbol of self-centered psychological despair and illness. Here, then, we must observe a limitation to Samuel Catlin’s suggestion that protests function to seize and redirect the gaze. Framing protest as an effort to capture and redirect attention presupposes that those in power are not already aware of the issues protesters seek to expose. It also risks shifting blame onto protesters when they “fail” to redirect focus as expected. As Bessner notes, most of the time, protest is ignored, especially when the strategy is to “speak truth to power.” Perhaps this is because, per Fisher, protest has become “a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism.”

Bessner thinks that these realities should push the anti-war left to recognize that if it “ever hopes to change US foreign policy, it needs to move beyond the shibboleths of the past.” He contends that the left “must stop fetishizing information politics and mass protests and instead must develop an institutionalist understanding of how state power functions.” This means spending “less time disabusing people of myths they no longer believe or organizing mass protests that go nowhere.” Bessner may be correct, and he helps us understand why protests, including ones as extreme as Bushnell’s, are bound to be drowned out in a world increasingly impervious to outrage because it already knows the truth. Yet even if everyone knows what is happening in Gaza, it remains crucial that some pretend not to know or feign detachment as passive spectators. This furnishes the political environment in which, and the consensus reality against which, activists find themselves fighting and struggling to succeed.

At the very least, Bushnell’s protest forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about the systems we live under and our own complicity within them. In this regard, he “succeeded” in revealing the cruelty of a world that demands protest but treats it as background noise in the end. To the extent that protest remains morally urgent, its practical limits are continually exposed in the face of power. And if that is the case, then maybe the question Bushnell’s death leaves us with is not whether we should resist, but whether we are capable of imagining a form of resistance that power cannot ignore.

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