Hyperreality & Resistance

During the first Trump presidential term, existing tensions between the online left and liberal movements sharpened almost immediately after Trump's inauguration. The backlash against the 2017 Women's March on Washington provoked countless memes mocking "pussy hats" and "wine moms," seen by many of the fervent left disillusioned by Hillary Clinton's defeat (and alleged "cheating") of Bernie Sanders in the contentious 2016 Democratic primary campaign as insincere, performative activism interested in returning to "brunch" rather than doing (what they saw as) the necessary steps to fight encroaching fascism and capitalist/corporatist control.

On Twitter, this divide did not only reinforce perceived divisions between existing groups, but also led to the creation of a new epithet for the "wine mom" faction - "Resistance libs." Although I do not have access to a precise etymology of this term, the use of the term "the Resistance" for liberal challenges to Trumpism was certainly not unrelated to the use of the term "the Resistance" for the protagonists of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, which was presently underway and which, like the liberal movement of the 2010s, had a female "protagonist" and defined itself in opposition to hegemonically masculine figures of domination (President Trump, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren). For the hard left, the adoption of terminology from a fantasy space opera by the liberals was an easy dunk: make fun of these folks not just for believing in cringe "identity" things like a woman's right to choose or trans rights, but also for their devotion to unsophisticated, Disney-produced corporate culture.

Over the next several years, as the already-hellish nightmare of Trump's first term dragged on, and into President Biden's abortive interim term - where the fruits of Trump's labors were paid off with the end of Roe v. Wade and an increasing siege on feminism and gender equality - the idea that liberals in particular are poisoned by corporate popular culture continued on the online hard left, even as it migrated from Twitter/X to Bluesky in the wake of Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform. Obviously, I do not have access to a comprehensive archive of instances of this sort of rhetoric, but if you've been online in the past decade, and align yourself with anyone left of center, you've definitely seen at least echoes of the "Disney wine mom" versus "based socialist radical" dynamic. There's a good chance that if you're to my left, you probably think that I have a simplistic, childish worldview and that it's influenced by simplistic, corporate liberal ideologies like "girlboss feminism," pushed by companies like Disney.

This dynamic is not, of course, even primarily about what fictional media people consume - which is exactly why it makes for an opportunity to examine the hyperreal in politics, which is to say, the means by which we feel as if we live in a mediated, fictional world, hyperreality - a concept defined by Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation during the 1990s. Baudrillard wrote about simulacra in the context of satellite television, particularly using the example of the rhetoric of President George H.W. Bush in the first Gulf War, where Americans and others watching satellite broadcasts were invited to participate in televised acts of imperial violence in a way that felt first-hand. There were only so many Desert Storm veterans, but for people who were watching at the time - Baudrillard postulated, at least - it felt like they were there. Today, of course, this idea feels even more plausible and visceral, as social media has come to dominate and narrativize every aspect of our lives; even if we don't find ourselves convinced by what Baudrillard said about the power of television, it's hard to feel like he wasn't just a bit early at worst.

Which brings us to what I actually wanted to write about today: the Democratic Senatorial caucus, and their alleged "cave" on budget negotiations this week in the Senate, after a 40-day shutdown of the government. In Trump's nightmarish second term, the full force of the United States federal government has been turned to the brutal, Nazi-esque deportation of long term residents and the active, intentional persecution of people in blue states and marginalized groups across the country. In this context, many people want to see the Democrats, shut out of all branches of government, to do some act of resistance to save us from a federal government that is being weaponized against us like never before.

I found myself personally invested in discourses on Bluesky and other social media where I agree with people to my left, the same folks I've been needling throughout this post about more-or-less misogynist signposting of their contempt for "Resistance wine moms", because those folks called on Democrats to say "this sincerely is fascism, this is a war on our citizens, and we're not going to make any deal." To my, and my sometimes-enemies on the social media hard left, the idea that Democrats would make any deal at all with a party and administration that, from our perspective, is posting actual Nazi memes with Hitler-related Nazi imagery, while running concentration camps and clearly aiming to impoverish and harm all citizens of blue/urban America, seems absurd and like a party that is cruising toward being betrayed, yet again, by Republicans who will never make a deal in good faith. But Democrats did make a deal, and now, predictably, people all over social media are saying that they believe that Democrats are simply not up to the task, not able to recognize the reality of the situation.

I am not writing this essay to defend the Democratic caucus here; I think we must continue to support Democrats, but as indicated by how I phrased the above, I agree with those who think that our Senators see their colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, and President Trump and his administration, as possessing kinds of honor, dignity, and the ability/willingness to stick true to their word that simply are not present. But I want to explain why I think this is rational, and why the online left flank (which I am placing myself as a member of) perceives reality so differently, and arguing for a certain amount of both compassion for Democratic electeds in this situation and, at the very least, practical understanding of why it's hard for them to see reality as we do.

In 2004, reports of a never-quite-substantiated quotation from inside the Bush II administration surfaced about the "reality-based community" , with Bush officials allegedly saying

that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

This alleged neoconservative worldview is clearly how the online "groyper" right sees the world, and they're in the White House and on the staff of all of the Republican electeds. They see themselves as existing in a Baudrillardian hyperreality where they are the authors, and they are attempting to write liberalism and freedom themselves out of existence in America. This is an existential threat, and the Democratic Senate caucus, if it realizes this (which I do not think it fully does), at the very least failed to signal this. I contend that this is because the groypers, the power center of the right wing and the Republican establishment (such as it is), are extremely online, and the world of online, even more than the world of satellite television in Baudrillard's day, is hyperreal.

But Democratic senators are not online. Chuck Schumer does not spend his days on social media. I'm not saying he should, either - but I'm genuinely not sure what the solution is to the not-onlineness of many Democrats. I sincerely think that the fact that Democratic electeds exist in physical reality and clearly see physical reality as primary, rather than dwelling in the worlds created by social media and occasionally stepping into the physical world like a lot of us do, is a disadvantage - which is literally insane! It's absolutely insane that we're in a situation where, to realize the stakes of the problem, living in the physical world is a problem - but that's where we're are.

So, again, I'm not writing this to either bury or praise the Democrats. I believe that in a very real, material way, there probably were no deals to be had - I don't think ACA tax credits were getting restored, no matter what anybody did. But I think that for those of us who are Too Online but anywhere left of the fascists destroying our nation, we can see things that they just can't - because Dick Durbin lives in material reality, he is a guy who goes to the office to do his job, and he doesn't really believe that his counterparts on the Republican side are black hat villains seeking to impose an infinite dark reich upon the world.

But that is what they are. This is the ultimate irony, to me, of the hard left polarizing so hard against liberals for being fantasy-brained - because our reality at this point is one where there is an evil emperor, with a cast of freakish tech wizards seeking immortality and building artificial intelligence, wanting to persecute minorities. And this isn't new, either - the OG Nazis were a freakish, ultra-theatrical cult that pursued occult artifacts and tried to build impractical but impressive technologies. In many ways, I would argue those who said things like "Hollywood is fascist propaganda" were right but had the causality wrong. Hollywood depicts a reality that resembles the one fascists have wishcasted into reality, and it's quite clear that stubbornly clinging to the idea that we live in a sensible, material world simply isn't giving our leaders the resolve they need to understand what the stakes are.

You can't be a supervillain offline. But the people running our country are supervillains online, and online is what's real to them. And we're getting supervillain policies. Right now, though, the actual supervillainy, the moment where the simulacra inflicts physical pain on reality, is being inflicted on immigrants and other extremely vulnerable populations. Our (liberal/Democratic) leaders do care about this - but they're unable to recognize that the domination and oppression of the most vulnerable in our society is an encroachment of a literary reality, where tropes that exist in fiction and normally can't in physical reality, punch their way through the veil between the mediated and the physical. Because they still think that people like Stephen Miller and his compatriots live in a world where you cannot be a scheming mad genius with a genocidal plan, and those people live in a world where they already are.

I don't have answers, but I do know that social media in particular embeds us in a narrative world where tropes, narrative dynamics and affordances, and so on, are in a very meaningful sense real. AI bots can now fool us for extended periods into believing even more unreal things, and social media itself is founded on the idea that we are all protagonists of our own little world. All of this is true and it sucks, but we also have to live with it. I don't know how this works for our political leaders, though. I've been Too Online for my entire life, but I don't think we can just get Chuck Schumer online and get him to become the white-hat cowboy who sees the danger of fascism. And yet that may be what we need.