Reflections of a Semi-Political Man

On finding your people and touching grass in the era of hyperpolitics.

On n’arrête pas une guerre avec des mots; mais la parole ne prétend pas forcément changer l’histoire: c’est aussi une certaine manière de la vivre.¹

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

I filed my last political essay on March 11, 2020—a week after Super Tuesday, and the day before the university where I taught would suspend in-person classes due to the pandemic.

It was a takedown of Joe Biden’s political career that I had been rushing to finish before that crucial turn in the Democratic primary, combing over primary sources day and night as if America’s political future depended on it. Of course I doubted that my writing had any impact on politics, but the frenzy of activity I’d undertaken the previous four years had made some part of me to believe this essay was necessary, that the world was waiting for it. But I fell behind as the research sprawled, and the essay’s intent was rendered moot by the sudden consolidation of the Democratic primary field before Super Tuesday. My friends praised it mournfully; part of me knew even then that it was an elegy for something. Lockdown began the next day, and my personal life fell apart not long after.

In the years since, I’ve puzzled over what happened to my relationship with politics, for so long so intense and consuming that it invaded my every thought, energized my work, and expanded my knowledge. Politics coursed through my aching body by day and my sleepless anxiety by night. But in a few years of personal and global upheaval, it seemed for a while to have vaporized, leaving only a curious absence. During that time I sometimes said—a bit gleefully, a bit ruefully—that I was a enjoying being a low-information voter.

To ever write about politics again, maybe to write again at all, I felt I would have to go back to the beginning, to discover how politics became so inextricable from my vocation as a writer and identity as a person. That is surely in part an accident of personal history, which is why the majority of this essay takes the form of intellectual-political autobiography. But I hope to use that story to reflect on two contrasting stances toward politics. I call them political romanticism, which approaches politics through the lens of aesthetics, values, and identity; and political rationalism, which approaches it through research, reasoning, and analysis. (Or to make it simpler, prophecy and science.) And my own political biography is just as surely a product of its time: the crumbling of the apparent post-political consensus of the 1990s and the apparent upsurge of populist energy in the 2010s. So I also try to sketch my own story against the rise of “hyperpolitics,” the systemic background of all of our engagement with and discourse about politics.

In search of a political theology

I was drawn to intellectual life as a result of working through the contradictions of the evangelical mind: an attitude of seeking and self-examination that is supposed to arrive at a predetermined outcome, but, in the right head and under the right conditions, quickly obliterates that outcome’s crudity and prejudice. For the children of American evangelicalism, the loss of our cosmology is inextricable from a reckoning with the far-right political project that is its practical raison d’être. I came to ideas seeking a new story about what I was doing on this planet, which which also meant—in a visceral, unquestioned way—a new politics. In those first years, philosophy automatically went with politics: it was Nietzsche and Obama, Heidegger and Occupy Wall Street.² My initial conversion to the left around the time I began to study modern philosophy was prophetic: romantic and moralistic, a transposition of my evangelical zeal for truth and justice. From the recently-expired corpse of “French theory,” I detected the scent of a secret knowledge that cloaked its initiates in a stance of countercultural resistance and minoritarian righteousness, a stance that felt familiar to a homeschooled, recent Christian-nationalist apostate. I barely understood the term then, but what I was after was a political theology.

It might be too easy to reduce that conversion to mere biography. It may also have been a constitutional romanticism: an aesthetic personality, a sensitivity to narrative drama. “Derrida and radical politics” was a vibe, an aesthetic, the possible source for a total unification of knowledge and self-expression. Its appeal to my unformed mind was the heady sense that it revealed a hidden world, that it overturned all common knowledge and prosaic ways of thinking about politics, that it was an über-politics. What most people called politics—parties, policy, interests, procedural conflict—bored me to tears. Journalists, pundits, and political-rationalist intellectuals saw politics as a problem and a puzzle; I saw it as a dramatic clash of values and morality.

Because I worked in media, I also read a good deal about the everyday business of politics. The 2008 financial crisis hit months after I moved to New York, putting me out of a job several times in a year. I read with mounting anger about mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps, bankers and bailouts. Something like a systemic view of American politics, stylized and emotional but not uninformed, began to solidify: the actors changed but the scenery remained the same. Obama bowed to the bankers and the generals, and politics was an endless replay of constitutional stranglehold, congressional stalemate, and, forever and ever without end, the stupid fucking debt ceiling. In the media, we whipped the churn of everyday politics into high drama in pursuit of clicks; I edited take after take by washed-up political hacks about polls and why the Democrats would fail if they didn’t embrace X or Y centrist hobbyhorse.

I never went so far as to conclude the outcomes of everyday politics didn’t matter. But it certainly felt like a charade, a performance that was unable—maybe not intended—to move the actual operations of the American state more than a few millimeters this way or a few millimeters back. I was repulsed by the Tea Party movement, with its reminders of the right-wing world I’d left behind. But at least someone was as angry as it seemed everyone should be. I toured Occupy Wall Street with an open heart and wrote a self-flagellating piece that treated revolution—positively—as a kind of prophetic devotion; I lamented, in a “Lord help my unbelief” sort of way, that I doubted listening to fragmented sentences by Slavoj Žižek repeated through the torturous human mic could bring down the American financial system. But I wanted to believe, and in some sense considered the Occupiers better than me because they could.

The birth of hyperpolitics

The intellectual historian Anton Jäger describes those early 2010s explosions of popular rage as the beginning of “hyperpolitics,” a twist on—but not a supersession of—the post-political, “end of history” period of the 1990s now so hotly debated.³ Hyperpolitics is the current aftermath of the end of democratic mass politics in the late 20th century, when traditional parties structured the demos, creating not just votes but entire communities or “worlds” in which citizens found their identity and significance. First came post-politics, in which politics and the people were separated: alongside the globalization of finance, running the state became the affair of unelected technocrats, while the collective associations of citizens that once powered democracy dissolved into scattered, alienated individual consumers. For a moment after the fall of Communism, the post-political seemed like a new utopia of universal democracy and human rights, but those were fig leaves for an ever rawer and more totalizing capitalist domination; the rise of 1990s rave culture was a symbol of a new global unity only in the sense that everyone, East and West, would now be pushed into a private world of personal hedonism and consumption.

The more celebratory idealizations of the “end of history” now seem like something of a farce; politics seems to have come roaring back. The last decade has seen the largest protests in U.S. and world history, and to have lived it often feels as if politics has clawed its way into one’s very nervous system. But for Jäger, this is not the end of post-politics, but the addition of a new kind of ambient, internet-addled frenzy: ephemeral outpourings of emotion and performance that gather and break over the real infrastructure of politics like weather systems, dispersing as quickly as they appeared. Hyperpolitics may seem to produce organized collective action, but it is actually just flashes of simultaneous effusion; it takes place in “a public sphere mostly seen as an arena for self-expression.” Even when it spills over into meat-space, its ethos is still extremely online: Boomer Facebook memes, millennial Instagram stories, Gen Z TikToks, wokeism and QAnon. It is a situation almost perfectly calibrated for the cycle of mediatized projection and manipulation that now constitutes the relationship between ruler and ruled in Western democracies, the conditions of possibility for “Kamala is brat.” Hyperpolitics is frenetic stasis, the politicization of everything and nothing.

Even if my intellectual-political tendencies tended prophetic, I took small steps toward thinking about politics more scientifically. As a journalist in the early 2010s, I did begin to take an interest in politics as something that could be studied and analyzed. I reported on the religious right, studied the Tea Party as a social formation, and examined data on American religious belief and practice. I also noticed the way my own industry worked: I began to see that, despite journalists’ overwhelming commitment to impartial fact-gathering, political media itself was not only a repository of fact, but could itself be an arena of facile, value-laden assumptions, of manufactured drama with only a loose relationship to data. The media was a business, what it sold was attention, and what it produced was to a significant degree entertainment.

In 2014, the summer before I began my PhD, I wrote a kind of kiss-off to the media industry titled “The State of the Internet is Awful, and Everybody Knows It.” It went mini-viral on Twitter, landing on the front page of a now-defunct New York Times app and crashing my blog. That essay—which I’d long forgotten until I discovered it by accident on an old hard drive—is a revealing transitional document. To its credit, it attempted a materialist argument about digital media grounded in my everyday experience of work and reading about the tech industry. Its critique of the self-defeating capitulation of media companies to Silicon Valley platforms and algorithms at least faintly anticipated recent retrospectives like Ben Smith’s Traffic, and it gestured toward the nefarious consequences of a society consumed by social media.⁴  

I narrowly focused on the news media there, but elsewhere I was making the connection between the structural transformation of the digital public sphere and politics. The novel money-maker of the “traffic” era was the expressive, first-person “hot take,” the Trojan horse in the belly of which online fan culture and identity politics combined and entered the political mainstream. The “anti-woke” coalition was already incipient in response, with people like Jonathan Chait decrying cancel culture and the rise of left-wing “illiberalism” against “Enlightenment values.” In spite of my own expressive political tendencies and long history of writing about myself online, I viscerally despised the moralism and censoriousness of this new political culture. But I thought the story was “bad internet,” not “bad left.” In a riposte to Chait, I wrote:

This is not a story about the endemic illiberalism of the radical left, but about the perfect marriage of contemporary progressive activism with media consumerism. All too often, the demands of the Social Media Left are for simply for more inclusive media and entertainment, which doesn’t do much to put our consumerist culture itself into question. While I recognize the value of certain cultural categories to both academic scholarship and political activism, getting too caught up in the ephemeral cultural discourse of the moment simply reproduces the cycle of capitalist cultural production. The offenses, the backlashes, the backlashes to the backlashes, are all almost pre-programmed ways the contemporary capitalist media produce cultural ​“debates” that really, for the most part, are tied to selling consumer products through advertising.

In retrospect, this was something like a critique of hyperpolitics. An at least rudimentary materialism was taking root, encouraging me to look to structural conditions rather than the froth of ideological drama.

The new socialism between hyperpolitics and solidarity

Another product of my media career had been exposure to unions. As a member of a bargaining unit, I slowly got acquainted with the labor of actual politics: the meetings, the legal intricacies, the spreadsheets, the slow construction of consensus. And the thrill of success: our union raised wages, staved off layoffs, and negotiated severance packages. Early in my PhD, I still knew little about Marxism or the working class, but I now knew from experience that procedural political work could be worth—that it could sometime do good. Graduate study is lonely work, and I had a guilty sense I needed to put my money where my mouth was and “touch grass” politically rather than just post.      

I didn’t know I would help start a union from scratch, but it snowballed: I sat through meetings between classes, I spent my evenings at other universities learning from colleagues, I made spreadsheets, made phone calls, and gave public talks. I didn’t “have time” for it if I really wanted to succeed as an academic, and the work was often a slog. But I made new friends, different friends, united by our growing camaraderie and a vague sense that historical wind was lifting us. We worked with field organizers from the United Auto Workers who lived out of hotels to do difficult, demoralizing jobs regardless of who was president or how long and badly unions had been losing. They were not ideologues but hardened fighters, and I sensed they believed change was possible because they were doing everything they could to bring it about. The idea that I could sit at my desk and mope in political despair when there were thousands of people like them came to seem the height of childishness and self-pity.

That work almost immediately influenced my research. In the library, I read the dustiest, dullest books imaginable about the layout of industrial factories, theories of management, and the painstaking efforts of early sociologists to study workers’ attitudes about their jobs and politics. I started seeing an entire other side of the story of postwar French ideas behind the literary-philosophical celebrities like Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, et al. That was the story of the skyrocketing of sociology into the international public sphere as a new style of political knowledge. And even though my French sociologists rejected the textual classicism of humanities academia that I loved most, they often were still mandarins: they knew Greek and Latin and read philosophy, they wanted to know everything, to see the whole. And they were public intellectuals and political actors, too, part of the many little islands of the French left, tortured about the direction of history and the future of the working class. They wanted to be both prophets and scientists, romantics doing rational work: I saw my own internal conflict in their history, and took them as my model.

It turned out I was only one of many. It seemed like everyone I met was doing the same thing, writing fascinating dissertations that all overlapped and spoke directly to what was in front of us: the sudden explosion of socialism, how capitalism works, why workers do what they do, what to do with parties and unions, reform or revolution, what knowledge and research were for, what we were for. We overlapped in the grad student union movement, in the DSA, in the Bernie Sanders campaign, and in the press; I’m still astonished to this day how some of those people did so much organizing, researched and taught, and did brilliant public intellectual work that was so voluminous it felt like it couldn’t all fit in my brain. Surrounded by that kind of model—supportive friends and comrades—I worked harder than I’d ever worked in my life and seemed on the cusp of what I had been working toward: the unity of self and history, of reason and reality, of prophecy and science.

The new socialist activist-intelligentsia seemed to vindicate my hope that intellectual refinement was the secret to a politics that could bend history rather than merely submit to it. And they knew their shit. They knew the history of the working class, they knew the history of every political party, they knew every branch of Marxism past and present; they also knew how billionaires thought, how CEOs ran companies, how technocrats made policy and ran agencies, how military power was conceived an exercised. I sincerely believed that some of those people could run the state, and, unlike the largely romantic and voluntaristic left of the recent past, they wanted to, were preparing for it. The best of them shared a critique of both the post-political era that defined Western politics and the mirage of hyperpolitics. For myself, I felt the glow of actual solidarity for the first time in my adult life, but also glimmers of a new role: not lonely romantic or tenured radical, but expert midwife of political transformation, warrior scientist for the wretched of the earth.⁵

That was, in some way, the culmination of a long conversion to the political rationalism at which I had once scoffed. Empirical research was exhilarating, and the erudition of my milieu was such that it seemed that even the idea of a mass socialist movement in the United States, of all places, could not be a romantic fantasy. We plotted the path and ridiculed the well-intentioned but juvenile self-styled anarchists and Antifa LARPers. While liberals collapsed into hysterics and conspiracy theories over Trump, we were cold realists, the adults to the establishment’s crying children. But even that incitement to the rational mastery of politics unquestionably made me a better writer, its motive force, for me, was still the desire for a prophetic mission, to be the mouthpiece of history. As I wrote, I strained against the limits of what knowledge could tell us, pushed myself toward belief. The age-old question of “what is to be done?” hung over almost every piece, and I pressed myself to give prophetic answers: this, exactly what we’re doing right now. History could not have ended because that would be too bleak a plot. I cursed Francis Fukuyama and Endnotes and awoke every day eager to get to work burying them alive.

One of the big things we were doing was tweeting: as much as we read, we were all extremely online. I was glued to Twitter all hours of the day and night and did a crazed-madman amount of posting even as I denounced the futility of performative politics. My socialist intelligentsia was part of a much larger virtual ecosystem of Twitter personalities, podcasters, and other influencers that was about seen and being seen, building a brand, and belonging to an army that was overwhelmingly online.⁶ I never took a walk, rode the subway, or did laundry without a socialist podcast in my ears, sped up so I could get through them all. Along with everyone else, I hated the liberal pop intellectuals who called the American people totalitarian racists more than I hated Donald Trump. I dunked on the internet celebrities popping up overnight to lead the libs in orgies of panic and cancellation.⁷ I fought bitterly with people I agreed with on almost everything. I approached incandescence when other writers suggested that everyone was too consumed with politics, that maybe we should still read novels and think about truth and beauty sometimes, too.⁸

The new socialists made a genuine effort to avoid the trap of hyperpolitics: to build in-person solidarity, to revive the old institutional pillars of left-wing mass politics, the union and the party. Bernie Sanders was revered because he had chugged along through the post-political era without giving it an inch; the socialist moment transformed him into a stick figure digitally accessorized with birds and mittens. His movement may have done the best it was possible to do, might have been as rational as it was possible to be. But if hyperpolitics is a thing, it is a historical condition that, to us today, may have no outside. As Derrida wrote in his 1968 lecture “The Ends of Man”: “The ‘logic’ of every relation to the outside is very complex and surprising. It is precisely the force and efficiency of the system that regularly transform transgressions into ‘false exits.’” The very fact that I had come so far as a political rationalist made it possible to hide from myself how much I needed the victory of socialism as a prophetic mission, my validation as a writer and a person. And the frenzy of American hyperpolitics made it possible to feel that a constant stream of self-expression was politics and politics was life itself.

On March 2, 2020, I sunk back immediately into the despair all that frenetic activity had strained hold at bay. I could hardly bear to finish my stupid Joe Biden essay, which felt like it was written for another world. A little over a week later, the solidarity of the previous few years disappeared with orders to shelter in place. In January 2021, the Demon of History communed with his mob, and then the empty suit we’d fought so hard against, the personification of sclerotic impossibility, was inaugurated in front of a bare, frozen Mall, surrounded by a militarized police force, with the people nowhere to be seen.

Thrown into the world

My prophetic need to believe in socialism wasn’t the only thing I was hiding from myself. My identity as a writer-activist, or scientist-prophet, surely drew some of its intense romantic charge from all the unexamined, unexpressed parts of my soul it had to carry. I never got to reconfigure my relationship with politics after the socialist moment collapsed, because everything I else I had been running from caught up with me—and the rest of me collapsed, too.

Coming out in my 30s threw me into the world in an entirely different way. I had to get to know my family and close friends again as my real self. My social world changed almost overnight; where previously I had associated mainly with other writers and academics, now it was gay men of different ages, classes, professions, ethnicities, and political views. No one cared what books I had read, how many Twitter followers I had, what I’d written. To my relief and gratitude, I found a new kind of belonging in their beautiful, crazy world. I spent way less time alone. I danced and did drugs. I read novels. Without so much politics, I could revel in my romantic tendencies—my love of beauty, narrative, drama—without sublimating them into a mission or a cause. I couldn’t help but be humbled and awed by how good it was to be alive. That I had for so long been able to see the world—and locate myself within it—only in relation to its injustice and tragedy seemed a deformation born of experiencing it so little.

It was getting closer to being a whole person, I think, that finally made it possible to stop needing more from politics than it than it can give. My long education in political rationalism now forces me to confront realities that were difficult to face before, that maybe are difficult for all of us when we sense our true powerlessness in the face of one “existential” election after another. Even when you’ve done all the reading and have the best theory and the best data, you may still have no idea what is to be done. History is impossible to predict and difficult to change. Science and prophecy are different enterprises; knowledge and action don’t always fit together.

Political rationalism, for me, is concerned engagement that resists romantic tendencies to overidentify politics with self-expression, personal identity, and existential meaning. I would never say that emotions like passion and belief have no place in politics; it’s difficult to imagine any other fuel for work that is so excruciatingly complex, slow, and thankless. But politics in a merely expressive sense—the hallmark of hyperpolitics—will not save you or anyone else; it is a terrible place to channel your loneliness, your anxiety, your idealism, the emptiness of your soul and your longing for more.

What might save you, what saved me, is other people. My experiences of solidarity, both in and outside of politics, have convinced me that closeness with and obligation to others, entanglement in their messiness, is the only thing worth living for. I see it in my little gay world and my different clusters of friends, I saw it my socialist world, I saw it in my unions, I see it in the churches of my family and friends. It’s not exactly political in itself; in fact, I think our interpersonal relations should be massively depoliticized in the sense that they should resist the toxic encroachment of hyperpolitics. But closeness with other people is not apolitical, either. It might even be a certain kind of political stance simply to hold oneself open to people in all their weirdness, to love them even if they’re problematic or sometimes assholes, to learn to sit with awkwardness and discomfort. We can’t know if that will stop the temperature from rising or tech companies from turning politics into a expressive consumerism. But we can have absolutely no doubt that we’re no good alone.

And romanticism might do us a lot of good, too. I’ve treated it, as an argumentative device, like rationalism’s political opposite, but I’m not sure that’s the really the case. Romantic sensibilities like our love of narrative and drama, our desire to express ourselves and belong, may be uniquely susceptible the illusions of hyperpolitics, which offer only simulacra of those things. Those impulses are indeed perhaps best expressed in art, in love and friendship and community, in the lives all of us should be leading even “when the world is burning.” But romanticism doesn’t have to limit us to pessimisic resignation, identitarian insularity, or apolitical aestheticism. It can open us to the depths of life, the many sides of things, the fine shadings of reality. To the wonderful strangeness of other people, to what they see that we do not. It can inspire us to imagine a world with more of what nourishes our souls in this one.

I can’t really tell anyone else what to do with their lives or exactly how to relate to politics; I don’t think there’s only one answer. I don’t know if there’s any way to write about politics that can avoid being swallowed up by hyperpolitics. But I want to live in this world, the one we have now, and write about all of it, whether it adds up to a grand story or not, whether it ever changes or not. Maybe writing can change history—one can always hope—but it’s the best way I know of living it.

1. “One does not stop a war with words; but speech doesn’t really claim to change history. It is also a certain way of living it.” Beauvoir, Les Mandarins (Gallimard, 1954).

2. I felt uncomfortably skewered by the old YouTube video where a grad student goes, “Oh for fuck’s sake. My thesis is on Derrida. I am working on Derrida. All of my reading schedule is already devoted to Derrida for the next three years. I don’t have time to read Sein und Zeit as an introduction to everything Heidegger ever fucking wrote. I’m already taking a fucking class in the fucking language department to help me read fucking French. I don’t have time to read fucking German. I want to think about radical politics.”

3. Jäger has a brand-new essay in the New Left Review, “Hyperpolitics in America,” which I decided not to read until after I posted this essay, which was already mostly written and I didn’t want to be tempted to turn into a more sprawling response. I’m looking forward to reading it!

4. “Even in a breaking news event, the instantaneous ‘coverage’ now provided by the internet media generally proves to be substantially worthless. The much-analyzed night the Boston marathon bombers were arrested is an instructive example: every detail was followed for hours on Twitter, while countless false reports were amplified by major media outlets, innocent people were blamed for things they didn’t do, etc. Absolutely nothing worthwhile—nothing social, political, moral, personally enriching—was achieved by the way that night was covered online. If breaking news coverage is supposed to be hours-long, anxiety-inducing interactive entertainment, then it was great. If you simply wanted a truthful account of what happened, a reported, verified, and synthesized account in a newspaper a couple of days later was a much better option.”

5. I know! I know.

6. It’s to the credit of people like Matt Christman that they constantly hammered home the limits of the very online politics that built their brand.

7. As much as I mocked their mania, I was every bit as obsessed with and agonized by the spectacle of the Trump administration.

8. It’s hard not to read this post from 2018, a response to an essay by Jon Baskin that now seems unobjectionable, as a howl of hyperpolitical fury. I even made some good points! But it was still a performative confirmation of the very thing Baskin was talking about.