It was an anxious summer. The American elections loomed, the sitting president had just been unmasked as an egomaniacal member of the walking undead, and here on the continent, across the Atlantic, Europe was about to elect the most right-wing parliament in the history of the European Union. The streets were plastered with campaign posters. In Germany, high over the boulevards, a well-known comedian gripped an enormous toothbrush and flashed her pearly whites. “Wählen ist wie Zähneputzen. Machst du’s nicht, wird’s braun!” read the accompanying text, or, “Voting is like brushing your teeth: don’t do it, and things’ll go brown.” The joke is that the Nazis wore brownshirts. To “go brown” is to go Nazi. In essence, the suggested defense against such a future was “Brush your teeth for democracy.” Or worse: “We are the guardians of oral and political hygiene—be more like us.” You slobs. It wasn’t a message endorsed by the Democratic Party or its handpicked candidate, Kamala Harris, who spent the final weeks of her abbreviated but competent campaign warning against the dangers of fascism. But it could have been.
There are lots of ways to explain today’s rightward shift, both in America and abroad. Incumbents are unpopular—governing is unpopular—and more than 80 percent of sitting parties lost in democratic elections held around the globe last year. Other, more issue-based factors have no easy solutions: tensions over immigration; fiscal threats to the social state posed by aging populations; general rebellion against the painful economic transitions yielded by globalization and required by ambitious climate policies; backlash against feminism and gains in LGBTQ+ rights; male disaffection as young men fall behind young women in education and on other measures; social media and the fragmentation of news; and the tendency, in unstable and inflationary times, to use elections as a chance to register protest votes—including against a perceived institutionalized elite. To add to this chaos, only the dreamiest of utopian dreamers would deny that entrenched sexism or racism could have affected Harris’s electoral performance. Months of expert effort have been dedicated to determining which of these factors most deserves the blame. It is likely a perfect storm of all of the above.
Still, it seems self-flattering—if not outright defeatist—to conclude, as many were tempted to do last fall, that the majority of Americans are simply too backwards, resentful or ill-informed to be legitimate objects of persuasion, especially when many are already persuaded by Democratic policies, if not by the people who are pushing them. Going into November, in blind surveys, four of the top five most winning policies were Harris’s—if and only if these policies were not ascribed to Democrats. Many could even be called progressive and/or populist, including a ban on price gouging and extending the child tax credit for low- and middle-income families. Yet Trump still won the popular vote. While some have seen this as a worrying sign that people are voting for style over content, the reality may be even worse: they are voting against leftist style. This would mean that, in addition to the myriad factors cited above, left setbacks throughout the West are also due in part to its rhetorical posture—to its insistence on clinging to a vocabulary of moral superiority that implies contempt for the very people it is trying to persuade. This is no mere aesthetic critique. The way we address each other is no side issue; it is the public sphere.
The style that produces slogans like “Brush your teeth for democracy” could, of course, hardly stand in greater contrast to the regnant style of right-wing politics, at least in America—the edgy, offensive and borderline-nonsensical oratory that revels in making its audience wonder whether to take its statements literally, as performance art, or somewhere in between. This is the sensibility that, although liberals were slow to recognize its power, has now controlled the cultural avant-garde for nearly a decade through online personalities like Bronze Age Pervert, kingpins of the once-fringe channels of the digital far right.
Yet if this far-right irony has always defined itself against legacy media and establishment (i.e. liberal) institutions, its revolutionary credentials are bound to fade now that Trump has been elected triumphantly, popularly and for the second time. His cabinet nominations have already ushered the fringe into the center of power, while every policy statement he makes registers as an unstable half-joke (I’m looking at you, Panama). Ideas floated by onetime pariahs of the New Right like Curtis Yarvin—another far-right blogger who has argued for the return of (racialized, patriarchal) forms of autocracy—are arguably part of the mainstream. Right-wing irony has officially peaked. It’s even begun to feel predictable, cliché.
This will eventually present an opportunity for liberals and leftists, but only if they know how to seize it. Doing so will require recognizing, and then transforming, an uncomfortable state of affairs. Because one of the challenges of rebounding from crushing economic and political defeat—by its nature easily overlooked—is that a reflexive contempt for one’s opponents, no matter how justified, can threaten to overwhelm the imagination for strategic political action. When it does, engagement in politics becomes an academic exercise, as action is subordinated to rote and sneering critique.
●
Back in 1931, when the West really was on the brink of being overrun by card-carrying fascists, the German-Jewish essayist Walter Benjamin found himself exasperated with exactly this kind of knee-jerk negative posture. The left of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin felt, was winning the moral high ground but losing the rhetorical (and therefore political) war. In a widely read review titled “Left-Wing Melancholy,” he took aim at the New Objectivity, an artistic movement that satirized the vacuousness of modern life. These artists and writers, he wrote, had abandoned the “gift” of disgust with present material conditions in favor of rote, routine and self-flattering criticism. Preferring to pose as a “spiritual elite” rather than actively engage with the labor movement, they were guilty of a “grotesque underestimation of the opponent” (in this case, capitalism). Where their ideals used to be, Benjamin lamented, there lay only “the empty spaces where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the feelings—nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity—once rested. Now the hollow forms are absentmindedly caressed” with a “know-all irony” that “turns the yawning emptiness into a celebration.”
For many progressives, Benjamin’s gift of disgust with material conditions has likewise been displaced, shifting instead to a disgust with the people who vote for Trump. Since 2016, it has become common across the left-liberal spectrum to argue that these voters are low-information, cast ballots against their own interests, are primarily motivated by misogyny and racism, and on top of this are just plain stupid. While a pedigreed “spiritual elite” has tried to educate these voters out of their incorrect economic assessments and backwards cultural beliefs, it has in the meantime allowed a “yawning emptiness”—a silence—to engulf issues that its ostensible base, working-class voters, say really matter to them. In an interview for New York magazine, Karines Reyes, State Assemblymember for the 87th District in the Bronx, regretted that while her community spent plenty of time before the election debating “important issues” like abortion, “sometimes we feel like if we have those conversations about the immigration process being fair and equitable, that we are somehow sounding anti-immigrant. But people want us to address those things. They feel it is fundamentally unfair.” Pressed on whether she herself avoided these issues, she replied: “Absolutely. I didn’t want to talk about it.” The Bronx, which is 85 percent black and Latino, went 27 percent for Trump, tripling its support since 2016; in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s overlapping congressional district, a third of constituents voted red, 50 percent more than in 2020.
Strategic silence, though, is not the only problem. Or rather, it is only a symptom. The real problem is a blanket disregard for how voters might describe their own aspirations and material experience. Throughout the election cycle, both presidential campaigns made repeated claims that Americans could easily disconfirm with their eyes, ears and bank accounts, ratifying that the dominant style in American politics, on both sides of the aisle, is contempt.
Importantly, though, this contempt revealed itself in the different parties in very different ways. One made easily falsified statements in earnest, or else hoped they would be seen as white lies told in the name of the greater good. The other made these statements precisely because they were norm-bustingly false. Peddling falsehoods, however, turns out to be a bigger problem for the party that places value on verification, and that has (rightly, if smugly) pegged the other side as the roost of conspiracies and lies. From the chicanery surrounding Biden’s health to silence on the migrant crisis, Democrats neglected to describe accurately—or else even outright denied—the real-world conditions people were experiencing, observing and describing themselves.
It’s worth taking a closer look at some of the most incredible statements made by both campaigns, as they reveal how a politics of contempt unfolds across the Western political mainstream—including via the strain of right-wing irony whose aim, as Steve Bannon famously stated, is to “flood the zone with shit.” Let’s start with the Democrats. Beyond the gross denial surrounding Biden’s fitness and disastrously delayed abdication (“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know,” Obama tweeted after the unmitigated disaster of the first televised debate), the most egregious claim on the mainstream center-left was to dismiss consumer dissatisfaction as a “vibecession.” The reasoning went something like this: Consumer sentiment (bad) had become spuriously uncoupled from the underlying macroeconomic data (good) and could therefore be dismissed as “bad vibes.” All Biden—and Harris after him, forced to clean up the campaign disaster he left in his wake—had to do was show us enough data to make us believe inflation was under control. Never mind that other year-over-year data for 2022-23 showed trends like worsening inequality, a deepening affordability crisis (especially pronounced in blue states, which have failed to build housing), an uptick in credit-card defaults and a 12 percent increase in the national homelessness rate. The standard political vocabulary—GDP is rocking!—failed to capture the underlying reality, which is that it rocked unequally. The Democrats used this language anyway. The idea of a “vibecession,” meanwhile, smuggled in the contemptuous suggestion that the problem lay with the voters themselves, who simply refused to admit how wonderfully they were doing.
In retrospect, this turns out to be an especially bad look for the party whose voters were, for the third election cycle in a row, on average both wealthier and better educated than the competition. In 2024, in a country with a median household income of $80,000, Democrats won the majority of voters earning less than $30,000 or over $100,000 per year, while Republicans won a majority of those with an annual household income between $30,000 and $100,000 (including the $30,000-$50,000 echelon); within these brackets, the single best predictor of voting Democrat is holding a college degree. Dismissing the economic experiences and self-perception of low- and middle-income voters is also a bad idea for a party that is still seen as having presided over the biggest bailout for banks in global history. The appeal to “vibecession,” itself a gross misdescription of how “real people” experience the “real economy,” in fact recalls the underlying causes of the 2008 financial crisis: back then, financiers chose to dress up the economic outlook in fancy math and intentionally obfuscating language that directly contradicted the underlying—and structurally rotten—material conditions.
Those to the left of party stalwarts were less likely to use such invalidating language about the economy, but they were not immune to discounting working- and middle-class Americans’ descriptions of what is important to them, most notably with respect to cultural issues. Attempting to find common ground on the sidelines of the culture wars, the democratic-socialist wing has long—and helpfully—campaigned to rechart the national conversation along the axes of economic populism and class. One weakness of this approach, however, is that it can seem to voters to minimize serious concerns—whether about crime in their communities, or the curriculum at their children’s schools. But even for those who favor an approach that prioritizes material concerns, the fact remains that, especially in America, cultural issues are not easily separable from economic ones. If wealthy people don’t like what their children are learning in school or what they see on the street, they can move districts or enroll the kids at private institutions. If there’s a spike in petty crime or drug use during a pandemic, the professional class can retreat to the country; if they lose jobs to foreign competition or new arrivals, they have the connections, degrees and geographic mobility required to find new ones. They do not see their own housing-voucher applications as competing with finding housing for migrants, shipped en masse from Texas to sanctuary coastal cities. An unintended, but subliminal, class-based message to “setting culture aside” is that working- and middle-class voters on either side of the aisle should deprioritize deeply fraught issues that in the immediate term require difficult compromise, while wealthier, more progressive Americans continue to exercise their preferences in parallel, with all the freedom and influence higher incomes afford.
Returning to the viral wonders from the Trump campaign, there are simply too many to count. On health care: “I have concepts of a plan.” On whether he conceded to losing the previous election: “We want a landslide that is too big to rig. That’s what we need because they’re going to be cheating.” On whether or not he’d be a dictator: “No, no, no, other than day one. … After that, I’m not a dictator.” These are all examples of the strain of irony long championed by the far right. It is extremely difficult to try to engage it in a rational debate, especially if you’re trying not to sound like a scold. The entire idea is to mean it without meaning it. To speak to every possible voter at once: to mere contrarians, to center-right voters who argue that Trump “doesn’t really mean” what the media says he means and finally to committed extremists, who can commend themselves for “seeing through” the apparent joke to the deadly serious intentions behind it. It is the equivalent of adding “lol” to the end of every sentence to maintain plausible deniability in a dicey group chat where everyone is holding their cards.
It’s a strategy that works best when practiced at rapid-fire. The ultimate aim of “flooding the zone with shit” is to ensure that no one, above all the media, is certain whether those at the highest levels of government are serious or not. As we now know, plenty of people voted for Trump precisely because they believed he won’t really do what he says he will. And if you do not believe that Trump will implement Project 2025, or carry out mass deportations, or start a trade war, or embolden white supremacy, or become a dictator for one day or more, or transform the Southern border into a spectacle of cruelty, and that he will, at worst, be just as bad as the Democrats have been on foreign policy in Gaza and Ukraine, then this is all just vaudeville entertainment, and you might as well have a great time.
●
How should the left counter right-wing irony, if not by adopting the same destructive rhetorical strategies as Trump, or else slipping back into its own contemptuous habits? I have no wish to transform leftist rhetoric into a Trojan horse for chaos and conspiracy. But there are, happily, other options. In particular, other types of irony. A more productive left-wing irony might be rooted not in the ideological certainty of the smug critic—the “know-all” irony of Benjamin’s “spiritual elite”—but in ideological humility. The irony, that is, of holding two thoughts in mind at once: my experience, and yours.
The late socialist pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, widely lauded as having “predicted” Trump’s victory in 2016, imagined just such a form of irony. An admirer of Wittgenstein, Rorty placed a premium on empiricism and verifiability, a style of thinking that rejects confidence in a priori ideals. There is no truth “out there” waiting to be discovered, Rorty believed. Nor is there a truth that, having been discovered, can be appealed to in order to dismiss others’ views out of hand, before the debate has even begun and our experiences compared: in short, one cannot begin an argument with the assumption that history, or reality, is on one’s side. There is only the world, and our descriptions of it.
Rorty captured this political identity in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity under the umbrella of the “liberal ironist.” “I use ‘ironist,’” he writes, “to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires,” who has “abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance.” The term “liberal,” meanwhile, denotes a political commitment to reducing human cruelty through the expansion of public solidarity. Put together, the task for “liberal ironists”—whether activists, intellectuals or elected officials—is to come up with the most compelling, because most accurate, description of how we are living. The one that, without betraying core convictions, is most convincing to the largest group of people. When successful, this kind of description expands the public imagination for who is included under the sign of “we.”
While right-wing irony operates in the distance between what is said and what is meant, Rorty’s liberal irony maintains its fundamental conviction in reducing human suffering and promoting equality, while recognizing that multiple meanings and conflicting experiences can be true at the same time. Those who do not assume their vision is self-evidently superior and their opponents’ self-evidently base and corrupt are left to contend with how people might actually think or feel, and to imagine how they might be persuaded to adopt one or the other view. This is irony as reconnaissance mission: it requires paying attention to a wide range of experiences in order to accurately describe how people are living today and what they desire—especially people whose experiences are different from yours. It provides a blueprint for the contemporary left-wing irony American politics so desperately needs.
Because of its focus on describing the present, Rortian irony is constantly being replenished with new, more resonant vocabulary for conditions both material and spiritual. It is by definition responsive to new evidence. Ever suspicious that she may have missed something, the Rortian ironist is afraid of getting stuck in the “know-all irony” of reflexive critique. As a matter of strategy, adopting this lexicon would preclude silly mistakes like “vibecessions can be defeated with charts” and “brush your teeth for democracy”—phrases that attempt to impose priorities onto voters rather than allowing a vision to emerge from their own descriptions of their experience. Rortian irony requires us to listen and, ultimately, present resonant alternatives. This is so much harder to do than simply pointing out—even though it seems so obvious, so right!—that the other side is “going brown.”
That ideological humility and a focus on description could help left-of-center parties win more elections, in America and elsewhere, is a matter of no small importance. But the ethical imperative to practice this kind of irony, for liberals and for leftists, extends beyond electoral strategy. For those who claim to have a politics grounded in democratic pluralism and evidence-based reasoning, it is a matter of both logical and moral consistency to take others’ good-faith descriptions of the world into account. It’s part of modeling what liberal values actually look like in the public sphere. Even more importantly, it’s about expanding our individual and collective imagination for what it’s like to be alive, and using that imagination as a basis for the creation of public solidarity. This imperative for the moral imagination means just as much to me.
●
Some of this may sound discordant to those who are familiar with the most common criticisms of Rorty’s liberal irony, leveled since he began talking about it in 1989. In response to his claim that there could never be any final or indisputable goods in politics, critics on both the left and right accused the post-metaphysical Rorty of evacuating public life of seriousness and meaning. Often, he was grouped with Francis Fukuyama as an avatar of a relativistic, technocratic liberalism that neglected to concern itself with either spiritual or secular values. From the perspective of Rorty’s critics, the end of history would arrive only when we had moved beyond ironic detachment and learned to embrace politics as, once again, an arena of ultimate ideological struggle.
Indeed, recent reconnaissance suggests that many young people throughout the West, most of them men, are today moving to the right in search not of ironic fun but its opposite. They are looking for frameworks that satisfy aesthetic or spiritual appetites. In an essay written before the election for the New York Review of Books, the liberal-centrist political philosopher Mark Lilla noted that among his highly educated students, the brightest are increasingly turning to right-wing, “postliberal” Catholic thinkers to address the alienation of modern life: “They feel the hollowness of contemporary culture,” he wrote, a state that is “heightened by the ephemeral yet fraught online relationships they have with others.” These new right-wing supporters are post-irony, pro-Spirit, possibly post-internet. They are seeking not to drain public discourse of sense, but to re-enchant their lives with higher meaning.
The left, understandably reeling from growing political threats, has not seemed, at least not to these students, to make space for the vocabularies of spiritual, alienation-reducing pursuits, vocabularies that have traditionally drawn from religion and the arts. Again, that leftism and liberalism quash these very appetites for the romantic, religious or sublime is a long-standing right-wing criticism, firmly rooted in the nineteenth century. I’m not sure if we’ve realized, however, that the ball will soon be in our court. How many of these serious students are going to be satisfied by the culture that is likely to be created by Trump and his flood-the-zone compatriots? How much edgy, irony-poisoned humor can the next generation take before it looks out onto a culture drained of any stable meaning and desiccated by contempt with something like despair?
The question is whether the left will, by that time, be capable of presenting an alternative that addresses this despair, both substantively and stylistically. Before the election, I found myself at a dinner party where a young Marxist influencer (in her own words: she commanded a significant online following) proclaimed her hatred first for every living novelist we could collectively name and then for all the dead ones, on grounds of their not being Marxist enough. “I just don’t like novels!” she finally exclaimed, only half-joking. “I was indoctrinated too early!” It’s an extreme example that nevertheless points to a persistent suspicion of nonpolitical forms of meaning-making on the left. Luckily, neither leftist convictions nor the kind of irony I am recommending here are so incompatible with spiritual or aesthetic experience as the influencer’s sentiment suggests. I know because I myself first discovered left-wing irony—however ironically—through church.
I grew up in Indiana, in a household of lapsed, leftist Catholics with Vietnam protest records. Outside our home, I was surrounded by conservative evangelicals. My peers and neighbors were obsessed with other people’s souls; I was obsessed with other people’s suffering. This was a recipe for becoming an incredibly serious, spiritually paranoid and morally severe child. Safe to say I had no sense of irony at all. At the age of ten, after hearing on the radio (NPR) one afternoon that the majority of the world’s cocoa passes through supply chains tainted by child slave labor in the Ivory Coast, I boycotted chocolate for the next decade. In high school, I embarked on an embarrassing campaign to live on a dollar a day (or as close as is possible in deep-red suburban Indiana) in apparent solidarity with those living below what was then the global line for extreme poverty. This required elaborate calculations, down to the cost of turning on the lights, and culinary work-arounds like making “juice” for breakfast from hot water and a jumbo jar of grape jelly. Around this time, someone’s pharmacist father went to jail. A friend regularly self-medicated by mixing sleeping pills and alcohol; a psychologist would have been better, but neither she nor her parents had health care. Someone else’s older sister returned from freshman year at NYU. Listening to our anxious discussion about a local politics shaped by demographic shifts, religion and polite Midwestern racism, she corrected us: “It’s Latin-x.”
I went to Catholic schools. My classmates and teachers, greater believers than I, were also in possession of a greater sense of irony. I learned from them. They were Catholic and gay. They did drugs—we all did—and then attended confession. They believed in the mind-warp of the Holy Spirit, but also in salvation through concrete acts. People were against abortion, but for the death penalty. Or they prioritized option-for-the-poor and liberation theologies—over and above the Vatican’s position on abortion. Protestants regularly blew a fuse over the rituals of a Catholic mass, when wine becomes blood and wafers become flesh: If I believed what you believed, I would crawl down the aisle, they said. We puzzled over how literal they were. The bread really is transubstantiated into Christ’s body, the wine really is His blood. Then again, it’s also a metaphor; it’s both at once.
Are the recent political failures of the American left due, as we are so often told, exclusively to the failure to offer an attractive economic and political vision of the future—a public project that appeals to worker solidarity and materially liberates labor from corporate and market oppression? Or might our failure—now or in the immediate future—be equally due to the neglect of vocabularies of the self that appeal to the spiritual pain of alienation—vocabularies that present an alternative to the comforts of ideological certainty, that make irony and skepticism spiritually and intellectually attractive again? Is it stupid to ask this many questions, in particular these questions, in a public forum? Is it symptomatic of hysteria? A sign of despair? Should I narrow it down, perhaps selfishly, to one? If we must lose at politics, can we at least keep art? Then again, art without politics, politics without art—to the left-wing ironist, it isn’t possible. Even when these projects exist in parallel, she cannot escape the fact that both hold important truths at once.
I used to envy the conviction of my truly Catholic peers, or of anyone in the possession of authentic religious faith. As an adult, I envied Marxists. I envied the moral certainty, community and sense of purpose ratified by the divine, or by historical inevitability. It wasn’t hard to understand why Rorty, by contrast, would seem to “disenchant” the public sphere—to relegate all the magic to the private life; to reduce public exchange to relativist word games. But I don’t think this is correct. What I like about Rortian irony is that it sidesteps an ideological certainty I was never able to adopt, without ever condoning political complacence or banishing the pursuit of beauty or spiritual experience. Focused on the essentially literary task of seeking better and better descriptions of what it is like to be alive, this kind of irony has been profoundly motivating to me both as a novelist and as a citizen. It requires turning a rigorous attention on the world and on others’ experience; expanding our imagination for what it’s like to be alive, both individually and as members of a collective; and applying skepticism to our own subjective biases. It requires, yes, applying that same skepticism to claims to metaphysical truth or historical inevitability. This makes me an impossible revolutionary, a recognizable kind of Catholic, a perennial researcher. It is also what makes it impossible for me to hold the present in contempt.
Art credit: Mihael Milunovic, In Jaws of Life, 2023. Oil on canvas, 250 × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
It was an anxious summer. The American elections loomed, the sitting president had just been unmasked as an egomaniacal member of the walking undead, and here on the continent, across the Atlantic, Europe was about to elect the most right-wing parliament in the history of the European Union. The streets were plastered with campaign posters. In Germany, high over the boulevards, a well-known comedian gripped an enormous toothbrush and flashed her pearly whites. “Wählen ist wie Zähneputzen. Machst du’s nicht, wird’s braun!” read the accompanying text, or, “Voting is like brushing your teeth: don’t do it, and things’ll go brown.” The joke is that the Nazis wore brownshirts. To “go brown” is to go Nazi. In essence, the suggested defense against such a future was “Brush your teeth for democracy.” Or worse: “We are the guardians of oral and political hygiene—be more like us.” You slobs. It wasn’t a message endorsed by the Democratic Party or its handpicked candidate, Kamala Harris, who spent the final weeks of her abbreviated but competent campaign warning against the dangers of fascism. But it could have been.
There are lots of ways to explain today’s rightward shift, both in America and abroad. Incumbents are unpopular—governing is unpopular—and more than 80 percent of sitting parties lost in democratic elections held around the globe last year. Other, more issue-based factors have no easy solutions: tensions over immigration; fiscal threats to the social state posed by aging populations; general rebellion against the painful economic transitions yielded by globalization and required by ambitious climate policies; backlash against feminism and gains in LGBTQ+ rights; male disaffection as young men fall behind young women in education and on other measures; social media and the fragmentation of news; and the tendency, in unstable and inflationary times, to use elections as a chance to register protest votes—including against a perceived institutionalized elite. To add to this chaos, only the dreamiest of utopian dreamers would deny that entrenched sexism or racism could have affected Harris’s electoral performance. Months of expert effort have been dedicated to determining which of these factors most deserves the blame. It is likely a perfect storm of all of the above.
Still, it seems self-flattering—if not outright defeatist—to conclude, as many were tempted to do last fall, that the majority of Americans are simply too backwards, resentful or ill-informed to be legitimate objects of persuasion, especially when many are already persuaded by Democratic policies, if not by the people who are pushing them. Going into November, in blind surveys, four of the top five most winning policies were Harris’s—if and only if these policies were not ascribed to Democrats. Many could even be called progressive and/or populist, including a ban on price gouging and extending the child tax credit for low- and middle-income families. Yet Trump still won the popular vote. While some have seen this as a worrying sign that people are voting for style over content, the reality may be even worse: they are voting against leftist style. This would mean that, in addition to the myriad factors cited above, left setbacks throughout the West are also due in part to its rhetorical posture—to its insistence on clinging to a vocabulary of moral superiority that implies contempt for the very people it is trying to persuade. This is no mere aesthetic critique. The way we address each other is no side issue; it is the public sphere.
The style that produces slogans like “Brush your teeth for democracy” could, of course, hardly stand in greater contrast to the regnant style of right-wing politics, at least in America—the edgy, offensive and borderline-nonsensical oratory that revels in making its audience wonder whether to take its statements literally, as performance art, or somewhere in between. This is the sensibility that, although liberals were slow to recognize its power, has now controlled the cultural avant-garde for nearly a decade through online personalities like Bronze Age Pervert, kingpins of the once-fringe channels of the digital far right.
Yet if this far-right irony has always defined itself against legacy media and establishment (i.e. liberal) institutions, its revolutionary credentials are bound to fade now that Trump has been elected triumphantly, popularly and for the second time. His cabinet nominations have already ushered the fringe into the center of power, while every policy statement he makes registers as an unstable half-joke (I’m looking at you, Panama). Ideas floated by onetime pariahs of the New Right like Curtis Yarvin—another far-right blogger who has argued for the return of (racialized, patriarchal) forms of autocracy—are arguably part of the mainstream. Right-wing irony has officially peaked. It’s even begun to feel predictable, cliché.
This will eventually present an opportunity for liberals and leftists, but only if they know how to seize it. Doing so will require recognizing, and then transforming, an uncomfortable state of affairs. Because one of the challenges of rebounding from crushing economic and political defeat—by its nature easily overlooked—is that a reflexive contempt for one’s opponents, no matter how justified, can threaten to overwhelm the imagination for strategic political action. When it does, engagement in politics becomes an academic exercise, as action is subordinated to rote and sneering critique.
●
Back in 1931, when the West really was on the brink of being overrun by card-carrying fascists, the German-Jewish essayist Walter Benjamin found himself exasperated with exactly this kind of knee-jerk negative posture. The left of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin felt, was winning the moral high ground but losing the rhetorical (and therefore political) war. In a widely read review titled “Left-Wing Melancholy,” he took aim at the New Objectivity, an artistic movement that satirized the vacuousness of modern life. These artists and writers, he wrote, had abandoned the “gift” of disgust with present material conditions in favor of rote, routine and self-flattering criticism. Preferring to pose as a “spiritual elite” rather than actively engage with the labor movement, they were guilty of a “grotesque underestimation of the opponent” (in this case, capitalism). Where their ideals used to be, Benjamin lamented, there lay only “the empty spaces where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the feelings—nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity—once rested. Now the hollow forms are absentmindedly caressed” with a “know-all irony” that “turns the yawning emptiness into a celebration.”
For many progressives, Benjamin’s gift of disgust with material conditions has likewise been displaced, shifting instead to a disgust with the people who vote for Trump. Since 2016, it has become common across the left-liberal spectrum to argue that these voters are low-information, cast ballots against their own interests, are primarily motivated by misogyny and racism, and on top of this are just plain stupid. While a pedigreed “spiritual elite” has tried to educate these voters out of their incorrect economic assessments and backwards cultural beliefs, it has in the meantime allowed a “yawning emptiness”—a silence—to engulf issues that its ostensible base, working-class voters, say really matter to them. In an interview for New York magazine, Karines Reyes, State Assemblymember for the 87th District in the Bronx, regretted that while her community spent plenty of time before the election debating “important issues” like abortion, “sometimes we feel like if we have those conversations about the immigration process being fair and equitable, that we are somehow sounding anti-immigrant. But people want us to address those things. They feel it is fundamentally unfair.” Pressed on whether she herself avoided these issues, she replied: “Absolutely. I didn’t want to talk about it.” The Bronx, which is 85 percent black and Latino, went 27 percent for Trump, tripling its support since 2016; in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s overlapping congressional district, a third of constituents voted red, 50 percent more than in 2020.
Strategic silence, though, is not the only problem. Or rather, it is only a symptom. The real problem is a blanket disregard for how voters might describe their own aspirations and material experience. Throughout the election cycle, both presidential campaigns made repeated claims that Americans could easily disconfirm with their eyes, ears and bank accounts, ratifying that the dominant style in American politics, on both sides of the aisle, is contempt.
Importantly, though, this contempt revealed itself in the different parties in very different ways. One made easily falsified statements in earnest, or else hoped they would be seen as white lies told in the name of the greater good. The other made these statements precisely because they were norm-bustingly false. Peddling falsehoods, however, turns out to be a bigger problem for the party that places value on verification, and that has (rightly, if smugly) pegged the other side as the roost of conspiracies and lies. From the chicanery surrounding Biden’s health to silence on the migrant crisis, Democrats neglected to describe accurately—or else even outright denied—the real-world conditions people were experiencing, observing and describing themselves.
It’s worth taking a closer look at some of the most incredible statements made by both campaigns, as they reveal how a politics of contempt unfolds across the Western political mainstream—including via the strain of right-wing irony whose aim, as Steve Bannon famously stated, is to “flood the zone with shit.” Let’s start with the Democrats. Beyond the gross denial surrounding Biden’s fitness and disastrously delayed abdication (“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know,” Obama tweeted after the unmitigated disaster of the first televised debate), the most egregious claim on the mainstream center-left was to dismiss consumer dissatisfaction as a “vibecession.” The reasoning went something like this: Consumer sentiment (bad) had become spuriously uncoupled from the underlying macroeconomic data (good) and could therefore be dismissed as “bad vibes.” All Biden—and Harris after him, forced to clean up the campaign disaster he left in his wake—had to do was show us enough data to make us believe inflation was under control. Never mind that other year-over-year data for 2022-23 showed trends like worsening inequality, a deepening affordability crisis (especially pronounced in blue states, which have failed to build housing), an uptick in credit-card defaults and a 12 percent increase in the national homelessness rate. The standard political vocabulary—GDP is rocking!—failed to capture the underlying reality, which is that it rocked unequally. The Democrats used this language anyway. The idea of a “vibecession,” meanwhile, smuggled in the contemptuous suggestion that the problem lay with the voters themselves, who simply refused to admit how wonderfully they were doing.
In retrospect, this turns out to be an especially bad look for the party whose voters were, for the third election cycle in a row, on average both wealthier and better educated than the competition. In 2024, in a country with a median household income of $80,000, Democrats won the majority of voters earning less than $30,000 or over $100,000 per year, while Republicans won a majority of those with an annual household income between $30,000 and $100,000 (including the $30,000-$50,000 echelon); within these brackets, the single best predictor of voting Democrat is holding a college degree. Dismissing the economic experiences and self-perception of low- and middle-income voters is also a bad idea for a party that is still seen as having presided over the biggest bailout for banks in global history. The appeal to “vibecession,” itself a gross misdescription of how “real people” experience the “real economy,” in fact recalls the underlying causes of the 2008 financial crisis: back then, financiers chose to dress up the economic outlook in fancy math and intentionally obfuscating language that directly contradicted the underlying—and structurally rotten—material conditions.
Those to the left of party stalwarts were less likely to use such invalidating language about the economy, but they were not immune to discounting working- and middle-class Americans’ descriptions of what is important to them, most notably with respect to cultural issues. Attempting to find common ground on the sidelines of the culture wars, the democratic-socialist wing has long—and helpfully—campaigned to rechart the national conversation along the axes of economic populism and class. One weakness of this approach, however, is that it can seem to voters to minimize serious concerns—whether about crime in their communities, or the curriculum at their children’s schools. But even for those who favor an approach that prioritizes material concerns, the fact remains that, especially in America, cultural issues are not easily separable from economic ones. If wealthy people don’t like what their children are learning in school or what they see on the street, they can move districts or enroll the kids at private institutions. If there’s a spike in petty crime or drug use during a pandemic, the professional class can retreat to the country; if they lose jobs to foreign competition or new arrivals, they have the connections, degrees and geographic mobility required to find new ones. They do not see their own housing-voucher applications as competing with finding housing for migrants, shipped en masse from Texas to sanctuary coastal cities. An unintended, but subliminal, class-based message to “setting culture aside” is that working- and middle-class voters on either side of the aisle should deprioritize deeply fraught issues that in the immediate term require difficult compromise, while wealthier, more progressive Americans continue to exercise their preferences in parallel, with all the freedom and influence higher incomes afford.
Returning to the viral wonders from the Trump campaign, there are simply too many to count. On health care: “I have concepts of a plan.” On whether he conceded to losing the previous election: “We want a landslide that is too big to rig. That’s what we need because they’re going to be cheating.” On whether or not he’d be a dictator: “No, no, no, other than day one. … After that, I’m not a dictator.” These are all examples of the strain of irony long championed by the far right. It is extremely difficult to try to engage it in a rational debate, especially if you’re trying not to sound like a scold. The entire idea is to mean it without meaning it. To speak to every possible voter at once: to mere contrarians, to center-right voters who argue that Trump “doesn’t really mean” what the media says he means and finally to committed extremists, who can commend themselves for “seeing through” the apparent joke to the deadly serious intentions behind it. It is the equivalent of adding “lol” to the end of every sentence to maintain plausible deniability in a dicey group chat where everyone is holding their cards.
It’s a strategy that works best when practiced at rapid-fire. The ultimate aim of “flooding the zone with shit” is to ensure that no one, above all the media, is certain whether those at the highest levels of government are serious or not. As we now know, plenty of people voted for Trump precisely because they believed he won’t really do what he says he will. And if you do not believe that Trump will implement Project 2025, or carry out mass deportations, or start a trade war, or embolden white supremacy, or become a dictator for one day or more, or transform the Southern border into a spectacle of cruelty, and that he will, at worst, be just as bad as the Democrats have been on foreign policy in Gaza and Ukraine, then this is all just vaudeville entertainment, and you might as well have a great time.
●
How should the left counter right-wing irony, if not by adopting the same destructive rhetorical strategies as Trump, or else slipping back into its own contemptuous habits? I have no wish to transform leftist rhetoric into a Trojan horse for chaos and conspiracy. But there are, happily, other options. In particular, other types of irony. A more productive left-wing irony might be rooted not in the ideological certainty of the smug critic—the “know-all” irony of Benjamin’s “spiritual elite”—but in ideological humility. The irony, that is, of holding two thoughts in mind at once: my experience, and yours.
The late socialist pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, widely lauded as having “predicted” Trump’s victory in 2016, imagined just such a form of irony. An admirer of Wittgenstein, Rorty placed a premium on empiricism and verifiability, a style of thinking that rejects confidence in a priori ideals. There is no truth “out there” waiting to be discovered, Rorty believed. Nor is there a truth that, having been discovered, can be appealed to in order to dismiss others’ views out of hand, before the debate has even begun and our experiences compared: in short, one cannot begin an argument with the assumption that history, or reality, is on one’s side. There is only the world, and our descriptions of it.
Rorty captured this political identity in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity under the umbrella of the “liberal ironist.” “I use ‘ironist,’” he writes, “to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires,” who has “abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance.” The term “liberal,” meanwhile, denotes a political commitment to reducing human cruelty through the expansion of public solidarity. Put together, the task for “liberal ironists”—whether activists, intellectuals or elected officials—is to come up with the most compelling, because most accurate, description of how we are living. The one that, without betraying core convictions, is most convincing to the largest group of people. When successful, this kind of description expands the public imagination for who is included under the sign of “we.”
While right-wing irony operates in the distance between what is said and what is meant, Rorty’s liberal irony maintains its fundamental conviction in reducing human suffering and promoting equality, while recognizing that multiple meanings and conflicting experiences can be true at the same time. Those who do not assume their vision is self-evidently superior and their opponents’ self-evidently base and corrupt are left to contend with how people might actually think or feel, and to imagine how they might be persuaded to adopt one or the other view. This is irony as reconnaissance mission: it requires paying attention to a wide range of experiences in order to accurately describe how people are living today and what they desire—especially people whose experiences are different from yours. It provides a blueprint for the contemporary left-wing irony American politics so desperately needs.
Because of its focus on describing the present, Rortian irony is constantly being replenished with new, more resonant vocabulary for conditions both material and spiritual. It is by definition responsive to new evidence. Ever suspicious that she may have missed something, the Rortian ironist is afraid of getting stuck in the “know-all irony” of reflexive critique. As a matter of strategy, adopting this lexicon would preclude silly mistakes like “vibecessions can be defeated with charts” and “brush your teeth for democracy”—phrases that attempt to impose priorities onto voters rather than allowing a vision to emerge from their own descriptions of their experience. Rortian irony requires us to listen and, ultimately, present resonant alternatives. This is so much harder to do than simply pointing out—even though it seems so obvious, so right!—that the other side is “going brown.”
That ideological humility and a focus on description could help left-of-center parties win more elections, in America and elsewhere, is a matter of no small importance. But the ethical imperative to practice this kind of irony, for liberals and for leftists, extends beyond electoral strategy. For those who claim to have a politics grounded in democratic pluralism and evidence-based reasoning, it is a matter of both logical and moral consistency to take others’ good-faith descriptions of the world into account. It’s part of modeling what liberal values actually look like in the public sphere. Even more importantly, it’s about expanding our individual and collective imagination for what it’s like to be alive, and using that imagination as a basis for the creation of public solidarity. This imperative for the moral imagination means just as much to me.
●
Some of this may sound discordant to those who are familiar with the most common criticisms of Rorty’s liberal irony, leveled since he began talking about it in 1989. In response to his claim that there could never be any final or indisputable goods in politics, critics on both the left and right accused the post-metaphysical Rorty of evacuating public life of seriousness and meaning. Often, he was grouped with Francis Fukuyama as an avatar of a relativistic, technocratic liberalism that neglected to concern itself with either spiritual or secular values. From the perspective of Rorty’s critics, the end of history would arrive only when we had moved beyond ironic detachment and learned to embrace politics as, once again, an arena of ultimate ideological struggle.
Indeed, recent reconnaissance suggests that many young people throughout the West, most of them men, are today moving to the right in search not of ironic fun but its opposite. They are looking for frameworks that satisfy aesthetic or spiritual appetites. In an essay written before the election for the New York Review of Books, the liberal-centrist political philosopher Mark Lilla noted that among his highly educated students, the brightest are increasingly turning to right-wing, “postliberal” Catholic thinkers to address the alienation of modern life: “They feel the hollowness of contemporary culture,” he wrote, a state that is “heightened by the ephemeral yet fraught online relationships they have with others.” These new right-wing supporters are post-irony, pro-Spirit, possibly post-internet. They are seeking not to drain public discourse of sense, but to re-enchant their lives with higher meaning.
The left, understandably reeling from growing political threats, has not seemed, at least not to these students, to make space for the vocabularies of spiritual, alienation-reducing pursuits, vocabularies that have traditionally drawn from religion and the arts. Again, that leftism and liberalism quash these very appetites for the romantic, religious or sublime is a long-standing right-wing criticism, firmly rooted in the nineteenth century. I’m not sure if we’ve realized, however, that the ball will soon be in our court. How many of these serious students are going to be satisfied by the culture that is likely to be created by Trump and his flood-the-zone compatriots? How much edgy, irony-poisoned humor can the next generation take before it looks out onto a culture drained of any stable meaning and desiccated by contempt with something like despair?
The question is whether the left will, by that time, be capable of presenting an alternative that addresses this despair, both substantively and stylistically. Before the election, I found myself at a dinner party where a young Marxist influencer (in her own words: she commanded a significant online following) proclaimed her hatred first for every living novelist we could collectively name and then for all the dead ones, on grounds of their not being Marxist enough. “I just don’t like novels!” she finally exclaimed, only half-joking. “I was indoctrinated too early!” It’s an extreme example that nevertheless points to a persistent suspicion of nonpolitical forms of meaning-making on the left. Luckily, neither leftist convictions nor the kind of irony I am recommending here are so incompatible with spiritual or aesthetic experience as the influencer’s sentiment suggests. I know because I myself first discovered left-wing irony—however ironically—through church.
I grew up in Indiana, in a household of lapsed, leftist Catholics with Vietnam protest records. Outside our home, I was surrounded by conservative evangelicals. My peers and neighbors were obsessed with other people’s souls; I was obsessed with other people’s suffering. This was a recipe for becoming an incredibly serious, spiritually paranoid and morally severe child. Safe to say I had no sense of irony at all. At the age of ten, after hearing on the radio (NPR) one afternoon that the majority of the world’s cocoa passes through supply chains tainted by child slave labor in the Ivory Coast, I boycotted chocolate for the next decade. In high school, I embarked on an embarrassing campaign to live on a dollar a day (or as close as is possible in deep-red suburban Indiana) in apparent solidarity with those living below what was then the global line for extreme poverty. This required elaborate calculations, down to the cost of turning on the lights, and culinary work-arounds like making “juice” for breakfast from hot water and a jumbo jar of grape jelly. Around this time, someone’s pharmacist father went to jail. A friend regularly self-medicated by mixing sleeping pills and alcohol; a psychologist would have been better, but neither she nor her parents had health care. Someone else’s older sister returned from freshman year at NYU. Listening to our anxious discussion about a local politics shaped by demographic shifts, religion and polite Midwestern racism, she corrected us: “It’s Latin-x.”
I went to Catholic schools. My classmates and teachers, greater believers than I, were also in possession of a greater sense of irony. I learned from them. They were Catholic and gay. They did drugs—we all did—and then attended confession. They believed in the mind-warp of the Holy Spirit, but also in salvation through concrete acts. People were against abortion, but for the death penalty. Or they prioritized option-for-the-poor and liberation theologies—over and above the Vatican’s position on abortion. Protestants regularly blew a fuse over the rituals of a Catholic mass, when wine becomes blood and wafers become flesh: If I believed what you believed, I would crawl down the aisle, they said. We puzzled over how literal they were. The bread really is transubstantiated into Christ’s body, the wine really is His blood. Then again, it’s also a metaphor; it’s both at once.
Are the recent political failures of the American left due, as we are so often told, exclusively to the failure to offer an attractive economic and political vision of the future—a public project that appeals to worker solidarity and materially liberates labor from corporate and market oppression? Or might our failure—now or in the immediate future—be equally due to the neglect of vocabularies of the self that appeal to the spiritual pain of alienation—vocabularies that present an alternative to the comforts of ideological certainty, that make irony and skepticism spiritually and intellectually attractive again? Is it stupid to ask this many questions, in particular these questions, in a public forum? Is it symptomatic of hysteria? A sign of despair? Should I narrow it down, perhaps selfishly, to one? If we must lose at politics, can we at least keep art? Then again, art without politics, politics without art—to the left-wing ironist, it isn’t possible. Even when these projects exist in parallel, she cannot escape the fact that both hold important truths at once.
I used to envy the conviction of my truly Catholic peers, or of anyone in the possession of authentic religious faith. As an adult, I envied Marxists. I envied the moral certainty, community and sense of purpose ratified by the divine, or by historical inevitability. It wasn’t hard to understand why Rorty, by contrast, would seem to “disenchant” the public sphere—to relegate all the magic to the private life; to reduce public exchange to relativist word games. But I don’t think this is correct. What I like about Rortian irony is that it sidesteps an ideological certainty I was never able to adopt, without ever condoning political complacence or banishing the pursuit of beauty or spiritual experience. Focused on the essentially literary task of seeking better and better descriptions of what it is like to be alive, this kind of irony has been profoundly motivating to me both as a novelist and as a citizen. It requires turning a rigorous attention on the world and on others’ experience; expanding our imagination for what it’s like to be alive, both individually and as members of a collective; and applying skepticism to our own subjective biases. It requires, yes, applying that same skepticism to claims to metaphysical truth or historical inevitability. This makes me an impossible revolutionary, a recognizable kind of Catholic, a perennial researcher. It is also what makes it impossible for me to hold the present in contempt.
Art credit: Mihael Milunovic, In Jaws of Life, 2023. Oil on canvas, 250 × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.