Loser Politics

The market is based on a zero-sum game logic, according to which the world is split between winners and losers. This logic shapes our political culture and points to a contradiction of liberalism.

The market is based on a zero-sum game logic, according to which the world is split between winners and losers. The crudeness of this logic shapes our political culture. According to the discourse of the right, the liberal left is made up of people who cannot face up to the reality that there are losers in the world. This is part of the reason why the popular rhetoric on the right chastises soft “snowflakes” on the left who are too weak to accept the market’s logic. This also helps explain another canard of the right, that everyone to the left of them is somehow communist because they want a world of acceptance and affirmation of all people. But this image of the liberal left is a total fantasy. We live in a time when the establishment left of the Democratic Party has no problem affirming the very same worldview of political winners and losers. This was evident in the 2024 election cycle, when Joe Biden referred to Trump’s followers as “trash people”—a phrase as tone-deaf as when Hillary Clinton called Trump’s movement a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. To many liberals, the political coalition of misfits and losers that Trump has assembled are thought to possess an intractable resentment over the loss of their cultural hegemony. But the resentments of Trump’s base are rarely discussed from the lens of economic deprivation.¹ Without an analysis of the economic and class inequalities that drive the resentments of Trump’s base, liberalism only exacerbates the myth of the political loser. This can only lead to more and more communities continuing to sprout up that organize according to this unacknowledged logic.

The politics of the loser points to a deeper contradiction of liberalism on both the right and the left. Namely, the winner-loser dichotomy creates immense subjective alienation, which in turn creates the need for political resistance and defiance to liberalism. The liberal tendency to deny the importance of class, poverty, and economic inequality in the consideration of politics is inversely related to the intensification of the myth of the winner-loser society. This contradiction was on full display in the high-profile debate between right-wing philosopher Jordan Peterson and erstwhile leftist provocateur Slavoj Žižek in 2019. Peterson’s widely popular brand of bootstrap libertarian self-help and individual initiative appeals quite naturally to the “basement dweller,” the “incel,” and other cliché manifestations of the loser. Although he is a highly contradictory champion of Marxism, Žižek championed a left that would be capable of organizing this same alienated contingent of young men; he acknowledges that the left has struggled to integrate the political loser and that his objective was to turn Peterson’s fans to the left. After all, the Marxist insight into class conflict can help challenge the winner-loser vision, revealing it as a total fantasy. This fantasy is revealed precisely in the notion that, for Marx, class is a relation, not a fetish, and thus class power does not function as a personification of the elite or the oligarchs. The ruling class is not a personification of some aristocratic cabal; they are a personification of the whims of capital.² Marx’s insight into class tempers the liberal tendency to individualize social conflict. This individualizing tendency leads to political communities that are constantly caught up in seeking a resolution to the alienation that liberal systems of class exclusion have brought about in the first place. The vicious circle of capitalist politics cannot escape the winner-loser myth.

This cycle gives way to a politics of resentment that marks a blemish on liberal politics, and there is no more important—if not provocative—thinker of resentment than Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche places the problem of ressentiment at the center of his wider theory of the crisis of political values ushered in by modernity. Modernity, he argues, is shaped by movements of leveling, from socialism to egalitarian Christianity, to the revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution. These social forces and values of massification—such as demands for equality, rights, justice, and so on—are thought to be driven by feelings of revenge amongst the lower classes. Nietzsche argues that these forces agitate to remove the very split in society that defines the contemporary liberal idea of the winner-loser split—an idea that Nietzsche wishes to defend. He argues that while political resentments must be overcome, this must be achieved by forging a political community that can affirm that social life is constituted by a winner-loser dynamic. The problem of modern egalitarian movements, in his view, is that they obscure this natural set of differences, and a political operation must be enacted so that a truer “ascending” and “descending” line within humanity can be located and affirmed.³

Although contemporary liberals seldom think of their wider political vision in such terms, they share much in common with some of the most reactionary elements of Nietzsche’s political thought. Nietzsche is one of the most important intellectual allies to the liberal order because his political thought supports the “winner-loser” mythology. At the heart of Nietzsche’s political thought is a community-building objective in which the liberal mythology of the winner-loser society is affirmed by an Übermensch that actively shapes a world in which the descending and ascending lines of humanity are affirmed. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has argued that there is a danger implicit to the Nietzschean call to affirm oneself above the herd in that it has been the source for reactionary and fascist community-building. Sloterdijk does not blame Nietzsche directly for the rise of early 20^th century fascism, he rather claims that fascism is a movement of losers who effectively abuse Nietzsche’s insights for the purposes of ascending to the top. For Sloterdijk, fascism is a movement of losers who usher in an upside-down world, and thus Nietzsche’s elitist community poses a fatal risk to the liberal order because it can easily be co-opted.⁴

In our age of extreme class stratification and inequality, the winner-loser myth is a near-inescapable commonsense on both the political right and left. Political communities sprout that openly embrace the winner-loser myth to confront the resentment and alienation of capitalist society. To internalize the winner-loser myth is to affirm as natural a society governed by aggression and resentment. This is why, as the psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion points out in his studies on groups, political communities form to allow members to flee this sense of persecution. In his Experiences in Groups, Bion describes a similar logic of group belonging, in what he calls the “fight–flight group.” Here, group members identify with a leader by forming a dependency structure that is violent and exclusive.⁵ The emergent fight–flight group affirms the zero-sum logic of the capitalist market interior to the group, but it does so on terms that are perceived as fairer and more satisfying than mainstream groups, such as the school, the church, or the army.

In the fight–flight group, the leader plays the role of forming an artificial environment in which the competition of the wider society is reenacted within the group, but on terms that are more transparent. Like the Nietzschean community which affirms the winner-loser myth by active separation and division from those deemed weak or inferior, the fight–flight group does the same thing, but they rely on a leader to enact this separation from the wider society. The fight–flight group thus sustains the winner-loser mythology by rejecting the dominant liberal version and fortifying the community as a perfect alternative to it. Problems inevitably arise within the fight–flight group because the leader, as a savior figure takes it upon himself to perform victoriously against a hostile world. The fight of the group thus becomes the reserve of the leader alone and they leave little to no room for group members to enact their power. This results in the inability of the fight-flight group to satisfy the independence of each member, and they become what Bion refers to as a “dependent group.” A dependent group is formed around a leader whose authority is taken to be benevolent but who remains the only actor within the group that can confront the hostile outside world.

Backlash to Liberalism: Gen Z and the Rise of the Parasocial Left

The alienation brought on by today’s rapacious, austerity-driven capitalism has given rise to all sorts of strange political ideologies, especially among young people. The fallout from Bernie Sanders’ second presidential campaign in 2020, combined with the zombie-like blunders of the centrist Democratic Party, has contributed to a highly confused series of political ideologies across the online left. Social alienation is not homogenous, but it is shaped by