Politics as Simulacra

Has politics become hyperreality?

In 1981, French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote a book called “Simulacra and Simulation”. At first glance, this work may seem quite confusing. Like a lot of postmodernist texts, it uses a lot of abstract and technical jargon for something that probably could be communicated in a more simple and direct manner. Baudrillard was concerned with cultural symbolism and mass media, and he argued that society and perceived reality has become so saturated with symbolic constructs and media imagery that it has become impossible to determine an underlying reality. The movie series The Matrix was partly inspired by this and adapted it.

“Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.” - Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Baudrillard, or some who followed him, went in some radical directions with this that could be considered nihilistic or to question the possibility of knowing an underlying reality at all. But the basic gist of it is a legitimate concern, and Baudrillard can be considered prophetic, as this was written long before the advent of the popularization of the internet and social media, and people ringing alarm bells about “fake news” and “disinformation”. Baudrillard’s theory refers to a degenerative process in which there is a “copy of a copy” of things until there no longer is an original to reference. A pure “simulacrum” or “hyperreality”, per Baudrillard’s terms, is what occurs when such a degenerative process reaches a point of complete artifice and spectacle.

To a certain extent, this could be seen as overlapping with Naom Chomsky’s theory of “Manufactured Consent”, written in a group effort with Edward Herman, in which corporately owned media is criticized as serving the interests of the ruling class by default and functioning on a propaganda model. But even Chomsky’s theory is pedestrian or moderate compared to Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, and Chomsky infamously has been quite hostile to postmodernists. Chomsky is at his core an enlightenment rationalist type. For Baudrillard, hyperreality is not a mere question of propaganda but a saturation of information and imagery that has taken on a life of its own, with a self-referential quality and no basis to determine the authentic.

Short of collapsing into complete nihilism about truth, there definitely are reasons to be concerned these days with how difficult it is to determine what’s true or not, especially in the political arena. We are regularly bombarded with conflicting information at an accelerated rate, the news cycle is insane and people are incentivized to automatically react, new pastiche ideologies rise left and right that can be incredibly confusing, people constantly argue about what the meaning of terms like capitalism and socialism even are, the official government story on all sorts of things we have been given ample reason to question (especially given the aftertaste of 9/11), the leadership of both U.S. political parties get accused of being groomers and rapists, the idea of Jewish cabals running things has gained traction again (which is of course dangerous anti-semitic nonsense on stilts), and so on.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are deeply engaged in marketing and propaganda, and the 3rd parties like the Libertarians and Greens do this no less than they do. And even “alternative media” sources have to be considered with a grain of salt or with its ideological bias kept in mind or sidelined; that’s not to mention that some “alternative media” is pure crankery and is precisely a breeding ground for wild conspiracy theories. At the same time, the practice of unseen internet censors officially being in charge of determining what is and isn’t valid information can get loaded and begs the question, breeding mistrust and being weaponized against some of the very groups who support it. It’s “who watches the watchers” on stilts.

You inherently have to develop a great big bullshit detector to wade through this and still maintain a viewpoint that can be considered grounded and sane. But even the things I just mentioned don’t truly do justice to why the question of hyperreality lingers. There seems to be a deeper problem in which political self-identification itself rests on illusion, in which people mine the past for something to cling to only to be unable to authentically reproduce or represent that thing. And online political identifiers can especially rest on shaky ground, functioning more as something we adopt as a posture than something that actually is reflected in who we are or is actualized in practice. This can take many forms.

Online political behavior these days is often to overlay yourself with national and ideological flags, busts of famous dead people, iconography, and long lists of ideological identifiers and causes. One could say that this is “identity politics” in the most literal or broad sense, not merely as a politics of cultural identity categories, but politics as personal identity branding as such. It ends up looking like politics is reduced to fads and a mere cultural artifact. Anyone can simply *declare* themselves a Marxist-Leninist, or a Fascist, or an Anarchist. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they actually are those things in any substantive way, when it’s just functioning as a signpost and their real actions often tell a different story. Politics as LARP. This is precisely “the postmodern condition” which, as a descriptive analysis, rings true.

March of the Symbols

Speaking of the oversaturation of images, just consider the sheer number of different flags and icons that get bandied about online. The thin blue line. The BLM sign. The rainbow flag. The Gadsden flag. The confederate flag. The hammer and cycle flag. Anarchism alone has like a dozen flags, including Black and Red for anarcho-communism, Black and Gold for anarcho-capitalism, Black and Orange for mutualism, Black and Green for anarcho-primitivism, Black and White for anarcho-pacifism, Black and Pink for anarcho-feminism. Then, of course, we get a flag for each version of nationalism for every country on earth. We get reactionaries with crowns and royalist symbols. Feminism gets its own symbol with the ankh and fist. Classical liberals get the torch symbol. Social Democrats get three arrows pointing left. And people come up with mixes of all of the above. It gets wild.

Such an image doesn’t even scratch the surface or do justice to my point. But if you’ve spent a good amount of time on the politicized internet, you should know what I’m talking about. Flags doesn’t even cover it either. People post images of themselves with busts of Marx. Heck, people make social media profiles named “Joseph Stalin” or “Pierre Joseph Proudhon”. Dead famous people. Some people don’t even have images of themselves on their social media, while their profiles are literally 5000 meme images. The internet is utterly flooded with meme images, many of which the original context for is lost from one media or election cycle to the next.

People overlay their social media profiles with who they are voting for, and with marketing taglines for political campaigns and parties. For the Libertarian Party, it’s “All Your Freedoms All the Time”. There are mass amounts of public political pages entirely devoted to creating low-brow memes and soundbite sized, sensationalist political messaging. This includes pages that post image-capped text overlays claiming a celebrity said something that is purely made up just to stir the pot, which people share unthinkingly even when the page itself says it’s satire at the top corner. Speaking of not being able to determine reality from fiction, sheesh. And have you seen how some people format their social media profiles? It’s literally a laundry list of self-branding hashtags about which causes you support. This gets cringe.

This general trend of politics as image play reduces politics to aesthetics, and this phenomenon is most acutely felt in the realm of radical politics. Anarchists often dwell in 19th and early 20th century nostalgia, basking in images of old dead men with beards, attempting to revive lost apocryphal ideas from the days of early capitalism that can’t possibly apply to the modern world or entertaining agrarian formulations of socialism, while when the rubber hits the road, end up campaigning for Democrats and picking up progressive talking points. Marxists often do much the same thing, dwelling in nostalgia for the early days of the Soviet Union, reviving Soviet style art, and likewise riding the coattails of the Democrats and strategizing for them. That is, when either of them are not falling into reactionary intrigue and moving rightward. In a sense, in authentic original form, both Anarchism and Marxism’s historical moment already passed in the early 20th century. What we have now is a “neo” version.

This even applies to the reactionary right in some ways. People can idolize Hitler or old-world monarchies all they want, but they can’t actually realistically recreate the original conditions of Nazi Germany in a modern cosmopolitan America or actually bring back old-style monarchy in a modern technological world where what remains of monarchy has largely been consigned to symbolic figurehead status. The alt-right, while it may pander to or ride the coattails of traditional conservatives, is also not traditional conservatism. It’s an incoherent pastiche politics that can randomly swing liberal or libertarian, and it actually has a lot of gay people and atheists involved in it.

What’s especially striking about all of the above is that practically no one alive today even was around during the original glory days of what they are nostalgic about. In this way, Millennials and Gen Xers, and even Boomers, can only have a nostalgia for something one has no “lived experience” of, pining for another time and place without any reference beyond what they read about it. And there have been layers upon layers of someone’s interpretation of someone’s interpretation. Good luck sorting out a stable and coherent reality from that which can be applied to today. This isn’t to discount that such things can be relevant or that aspects of them can live on or be reformulated. But it can only be a reformulation. The original is lost to history.

To be clear, none of this is meant as apologetics for the status quo or to argue that we should safely stay within the Overton Window of business-as-usual politics. But it is to say that the status quo, in conjunction with the oversaturation of image play and a strong sense of alienation and disempowerment, has created a situation where much of politics is symbolic in nature and we are seemingly trapped in a loop. The apparent paradox is that, on one hand, there is information overload, and things are changing at an accelerated rate that is impossible to keep up with, while on the other hand, nothing fundamentally changes at all (“nothing will fundamentally change”, as Joe Biden said) and people at best begrudgingly are roped into functioning as liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Then the LARP returns after election season is over. And election season is precisely when people show who they are.

For example, to put this in a context of current relevance, the moment that Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party nominee, and even more so the moment that she announced her Vice Presidential candidate the other day, you can observe a whole cadre of Social Democrat style Marxists, and even some anarchists, essentially pivot to strategizing for the Democratic Party and making mainstream progressive style talking points in favor of who they intend to vote for. And we’re not just talking harm reduction logic here. We’re talking sudden enthusiasm and false hope, or the delusion that they are going to be some sort of significant influence on the Democrats.

Even the reactionary support for Trump is riddled with contradictions. Trump is actually attempting to pander to Jews (regarding Israel) and Blacks in his campaign rhetoric, which does not fit with the rhetoric of traditional White Nationalists or Nazis. Trump was symbolically picked up by the alt-right as someone to project their wildest fantasies onto, but even he could not realistically represent their wishes full stop at the end of the day. Some of them were indeed actually disappointed with him by the end of his term. For that matter, Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance has an Indian immigrant for a wife, and he has taken a number of populist positions on economic policy that certainly no free market libertarian type would be happy about. Make it make sense. It doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t mean they’re not legitimately dangerous. But the symbolic play is in overdrive with this stuff.

Progressivism as Symbolic Politics

What has become the standard ideology and practice of progressive politics is also, in many ways, a matter of symbolism. One of the most common manifestations of this is the belief that making the ruling class more diverse is a win. By making the ruling class more diverse, I mean the idea that more POC or women or gay people being members of the political elite is a win for members of such groups as such. To be clear, I’m of course not arguing against the inclusion of such groups. But the political elite is still the political elite. You can make it more rainbow, but the incentives of the political elite remain the same, as does its inherent exclusion of the masses.

It should be clear that just because a politician is, for example, gay or a woman, doesn’t mean they’re inherently good or better than any other politician. Hillary Clinton was arguably the worst candidate on foreign policy when she ran for president, and this runs counter to the cliched notion that “if women were in power there would be no more wars”. She wanted to wipe Iran off the face of the planet. Another example would be Pete Buttigieg. He was a somewhat popular young gay man as a Democratic Party candidate, but as a matter of policy he was quite lukewarm if not a conservative Democrat, and his political history was quite elite.

An even more starke example would of course be the Obama presidency itself. Obama continued and expanded the “war on terror” of Bush Jr., was controversial for his policy regarding drone strikes, and oversaw a massive Wall Street bailout. One could argue that he did some good things, but there were literally mass left-wing protests during his administration during Occupy Wallstreet that he put down with the police state. And while it is true that Obama was unfairly subjected to a degree of legitimately racist attacks by a lot of white conservatives, there was also a whole cadre of young black males who did not feel that Obama did the black community well at all either. Some of them actually have pivoted to being Trump supporters. What’s more, some black people feel patronized and condescended to by white liberals who assume that they must be liberal Democrats. That strategy has stopped working for some.

The logic of symbolic racial politics and token inclusion also extends into the economic realm, not merely a question of political elites. For example, some groups advocate so-called “Black Capitalism”, in which there is advocacy for there to be more “black entrepreneurs” who join the economic elite and who promote “hustle culture” where people are encouraged to be self-employed workaholics, rather than support for bottom-up economic policies that more directly address the systemic poverty issues that the black community faces. I’ll leave it to black leftists such as Jason Myles and Pascal Robert to truly get into the weeds on that, but suffice to say that many white liberals may be surprised by what they have to say. In fact, Jason Myles has spoken and written about much the same topic as this piece before.

From an anti-capitalist perspective, it does not matter if the CEO of the company I work for is a woman, or gay, or POC. They’re still the CEO of the company I work for. Nor does it matter, from a consumer perspective, if the products I am sold comes with a rainbow flag on it. This too is purely symbolic politics, as well as a reduction of politics to the logic of the market. No doubt, conservatives engage in silly reactionary responses to products being branded in a so-called “woke” way and engage in their own ridiculous boycott wars against “woke” media. “Anti-woke” politics is just an inversion of “woke” politics. But “woke” politics is, indeed, a reduction of politics to pandering consumerist branding and token inclusion in the economic elite, within the context of economic mechanisms that are at their core objectionable.

Symbolic politics also has manifested in the form of, for example, the demands in recent years to take down confederate statues and monuments. No doubt, I don’t really principally object to such things being taken down, and there are some who cling to confederate nostalgia and the decision of people in the south to keep such things around as some sort of proud “heritage” may be questionable. But in a sense, this is not a substantive political issue, in that we are not really addressing anything that materially benefits anyone or any real traditional question of politics pertaining to the legitimate use of force or what rights people ought to have. It is a purely symbolic matter to make ourselves feel better.

A more local example I can refer to, as a Clevelander, was the controversy over The Cleveland Indians and Chief Wahoo. For many years, some Native American groups objected to the Cleveland Indians logo as insulting, as it depicted an exaggerated cartoon image of a Native American man’s face. In recent years, both the baseball team’s name was changed to The Cleveland Guardians and the old logo was replaced. Since I never really cared for or followed sports, I especially was never invested in this question. I certainly understand why some people might have been offended by the logo though. Nonetheless, this is an example of purely symbolic politics in which the upshot is just some of us feeling better about something. I felt lukewarm about it.

Conservatism as Symbolic Politics

We can’t let conservatives off the hook in our analysis here. They play a game of symbolic politics as much as anyone, draping themselves in the American flag and the cross, and clutching their pearls at the sheer spectacle of The Olympics and the horror of no longer seeing Elmer Fudd or Aunt Jemima. They also blatantly have a politics of nostalgia for a 1950’s America of perfect harmony that never existed, of the “shiny city on a hill”, and of a uniform vision of “the founding fathers” that never existed. They’re also perfectly willing to endlessly support politicians who are not religiously noble, as long as the bait of the bible is lingered before them.

Indeed, who could possibly be more of an empty symbolic vessel than Trump? Appearances are everything with him. Trump is a pure capitalist opportunist, but he symbolically represents the strong man figure that conservatives yearn for. He literally tear-gassed a crowd of protesters to take a photo op with the bible. Immediately after the recent failed assassination attempt on him failed, he immediately posed for a picture with his fist in the air. Pure strong man symbolism and cunning opportunism. Then, the conservatives all wore bandages on their ears in a show of solidarity. Pure symbolic play, no different in principle than liberal women wearing pussy hats.

Cultural conservatism is itself a LARP. Guys deck themselves out in camo gear and engage in prepper delusions, on the bogus pretense that they’re going to overthrow the U.S. government with rifles. They would be obliterated by the U.S. military in a hot second. Lots of tough guy posturing. The phenomenon of January 6th itself culminated in one of the most absurd LARPs ever for all to see in the media, with the image of a ridiculous New Age guy decked out in face paint and horns making O-faces at the congressional podium. What an absurd spectacle that was! That was enough to scare most of the remaining RINO’s into joining forces with the Democrats.

Welcome to the society of the spectacle indeed!

Cultural conservatism and conservative nationalism is also largely based on manufactured threats. It traffics in paranoid absurdities about Muslims imposing Shariah law in America, roving bands on criminal Latin and southern/central American immigrants coming to steal your job and rape white women, Satanic pedophile cults who steal and murder babies for fun, the idea that the trans community is a front for groomers, the idea that vaccines are merely a population control scheme. They think that centrist liberal Democrats are communists and that even the most innocuous of relatively neutral, liberal public education is propaganda.

In a way, much like many anarchists and Marxists, they also take up lost causes of history, such as the Confederacy or the pre-civil-rights-movement system of the 50’s. They wave around the Confederate flag and the Gadsden flag, as if the former isn’t a symbol for losers and the latter isn’t self-contradictory balderdash. Not to mention all the talk about “the founders”, many of whom would have heretically spited their funky interpretation of Christianity and their Christian Nationalism. The founders, for conservatives, are the ultimate cultural relic to appeal to the authority of, even though the beliefs of the founders are mutually contradictory. We can cherry pick from them all day to make whatever point we want, much like the bible. For example, in one possible reading of the bible, Christianity is socialist because it’s against usury and Jesus overturned the moneychangers. Or are we to believe Joel Olsteen, a rich con?

There is little to nothing in the manner of a coherent underlying reality here. The America of conservatives is very much a pure simulacrum.

Cultural conservatives, like the progressives, also fight for token representation and think that leadership will inherently be more virtuous if it is represented by the right identity groups. It’s just for different groups, such as Christians and Strong Men. They also play a game of victimology in which Christians are portrayed as the ultimate victims of modern society. And they inherently play the game of identity politics, just in an inverted way to progressives and frequently on the behalf of what already are dominant groups, such as white people and men. On the flip side, some of them have no problem opportunistically using black people and Jews as tokens, as long as it suites their purposes, which is their way of playing the progressive’s game.

Conservative “anti-wokeness” has amounted to merely engaging in their own version of product/media branding, boycott campaigns and so-called “cancel culture”. You can’t argue about “cancel culture” and “identity politics” with a straight face while simultaneously calling for “No Muslims in Congress!” and trying to kick out the only 2 Muslims in congress and positioning yourself as more-pro-Israel-than-thou! Or when your president tells you what companies to boycott. Or when you’re calling to ban books from schools and libraries. The paranoia and incoherence goes to 11.

Hide your kids, hide your husband, hide your wife!

Smash the Simulacrum!

All of the above, and the precarious nature of media and internet in our current times, makes maneuvering through politics weird as hell. It behooves us to tread carefully and to maintain some semblance of self-honesty and integrity. The world won’t end if radicals admit that they are too often functionally liberals and conservatives, or if liberals and conservatives admit that they are too often basing their politics on artifice. It’s easy for all of us to get entrapped into this maze. Self-awareness is the first step, just like it is with kicking a drug. Anarchists and Marxists talk of smashing capitalism and the state. I agree. But perhaps first we must smash the simulacrum!