Red Sincerity
Jean Allen
How do we communicate our politics in the irony-poisoned world of the closing digital commons?
Freedom of Speech, Norman Rockwell 1943
If you’re reading this and below the age of 50, odds are you spend more than four hours a day on your phone. Taking out sleep, that’s a full quarter of your day, every day. Its also not unlikely that you’ve sunk more of your life into social media—the gamified network of interactions, not just a collection of images and text, but a patchwork of social relationships mediated by images and text—than you have most any other part of your life. And that time spent feels increasingly less meaningful, as the constant pressure for speed up increases the costs of production while also pressuring the creation of lowest-common-denominator content aimed directly, algorithmically, at the viewer.
That pressure has gradually squeezed out what little space for egalitarian participation there was on the internet. Where we used to interact with each other as equals on a forum, or parsed through each other’s social media posts with some degree of intentionality, we now mostly interact by passively watching a stream of content, or commenting under those streams. Posting, once an egalitarian form of self expression, is now a mechanized form of value generation which is getting more and more capital intensive all the time.
We can see this constant need for new content, meaning anything, in the boom of General AI models on social media. Many critics view AI as soulless, but it’s worse than that: the boom of AI suggests that the ‘soul’ of posting has long since left. AI lacks intent, lacks the ability to make artistic decisions, but that does not matter when so much of what we see and produce on a daily basis already has no artistic purpose other than garnering engagement. Zoom out to a whole family tree of ‘second screen viewing’—films, essays, and arguments meant primarily to be a voice in the room while you don’t pay attention. Plagiarism is rife within influencer circles because pretty much every incentive about being an influencer pushes you to plagiarize. We are all already AI.
What does it mean to spend a good portion of your waking hours looking at content like this? In between sexy dancing, a new breakfast hack, misinformation about your mental health, and foreign cityscapes, what political messages are transmitted and encouraged?
Regardless of the reinforcement loop decided by the algorithm, today’s internet politics emerge from negation. Maybe you’ll see a hysterical feminist, yelling at a man presenting a ‘logical’ position. Maybe you’ll see a stupid conservative get caught in their own argument. Don’t be racist, or woke, or a feminist, or a homophobe. Don’t be these things, and instead be what?
The question cannot be answered because social media does not teach you to understand what your own ideas even are. Under the pressure to not be any number of negative things, people view their own beliefs as the ‘common sense’ justification of immediate intuition. This reduces politics into an assertion of the eternal correctness of ego. Ego and, fortunately for social media companies, viewing and consumption choices.
Ego politics
Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech depicts a 1942 town hall meeting in Arlington, Vermont, after a flood which destroyed the local school. The protagonist—the sole man brave enough to speak up about the costs of the new school, rises to speak. This image of almost rapturous glee at standing against the rest of one’s community is an image people use to assert opinions, as if they were bravely standing up to demand their own school not be built.
“Hot takes”, “controversial opinions”, and all other sorts of half-joke opinions abound, which are able to exist as a sincere belief if need be, but can also always be retracted. Phrases like “Hiding Your Power Level” or “Don’t scare the hoes”, are often intoned as a politically neutral argument for us to act ‘normal’ and hide the edges of our politics. But examined more deeply, this whole idea came from white supremacists on 4chan, who used ironic jokes to bring people into their brand of nihilistic Nazism.
This communication style cannot be used for liberatory ends because left-wing and working class movements are dependent on people-power. A billionaire can use his money to lubricate any interaction, a fascist group can use jokes to goad people down a path towards mass shootings. The Left only has people, and the quality of our shared plans for action. You can’t joke together a march route, you can’t ironically go on strike, can’t fight oppression if you’re unwilling to challenge the ‘common-sense’ of the status quo. You can’t build up and encourage faith in others if you do not, yourself, know what you believe. Ego-politics is non transferable. Mass politics has to be bigger than any of our selves, and so requires sincerity.
If that is the case, why is irony so thoroughly taken up by our generation, across the political spectrum? Part of it is a worsening version of the same problem David Foster Wallace noted in his 1993 essay E Unibus Pluram, that the ironic gesture is a way to feel above this four-hour-a-day compulsion, the systematized viewing of content made specifically to reaffirm us. Part of it is that there is nothing really to respect about US society at this moment. From media to geopolitics it seems like the American empire is running on fumes. The promise of a world made entirely for you is appealing for a reason. But reality has its own sense of irony. Olivia Katbi and her husband looked up the same question about feeding their child on Google AI, and got two different answers. If the baby had been given well water and it wasn’t okay, the baby would actually get sick. Despite the bravado and twisted humor of Musk and Trump, people are actually suffering under their rule.
When I brought this topic up to my dear friend AR Goetze, I quickly realized that ‘irony’ is a bad term for what I’m talking about. Irony as a political posture has been predominant in the United States effectively since Watergate, but it’s generally been used as a sign of detachment. Our contemporary ironist is very much attached to their irony, and uses it for immediate purposes. If the attitude of the ‘90s ironist which so disturbed Wallace was “aren’t you a fool for thinking I mean what I’m saying”, the ‘20s version would add the clause, “and you should be deported”. The immediacy of this current mode of rhetoric speaks to how poorly the attitude has prevented the realization that we’re in a dying empire. A more accurate description for this phenomenon is insincerity.
Although the phenomena I’ve described maps across the political spectrum, as a rhetorical style insincerity was most clearly taken up by the fascist right over the course of the 2010s. Part of its success can be attributed to the way insincere communication quickly establishes in and out groups. Insincerity allows the fascist to mean whatever they want, and the target of agitation to be included without being empowered. As a mode of political communication it is fundamentally hierarchical and hyperreal because the realization of meaning flows directly from the speaker’s social position.
Donald Trump, one of the great postmodern orators, has perfected this insincerity. His rhetoric, which avoids proper nouns and consistently makes its point within ellipses, forces the listener to act as amateur literature student, engaged in an ongoing read of his meaning. Take this quote, for example, on U.S. talks with Iran on its nuclear program:
“Everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious,” Trump said, hinting at possible military consequences if diplomacy fails. “The obvious is not something that I want to be involved with, or frankly, that Israel wants to be involved with if they can avoid it,”
What does this even mean, comrades? This rhetoric has been so useful that it’s made Trump probably the most successful politician of our generation, and the one of the most influential orators on Earth. But take a look around. Trump and Musk do not have plans. They have jokes, they have ellisions, they have whims and desires, but nothing about the last three months have come together as a coherent political project. And it means that this administration, dangerous though it is, potentially even successful though it might be, will probably fail of its own accord because it’s high on its own supply.
But its worse: Trump does have plans. Tariffs have been a consistent theme of Trump’s politics since the 1980s. But the Trumpist movement did not share those plans, because it took Trump’s most sincere political belief as a joke. Whether the tariff scheme was ultimately about any broader project or just another pump and dump scheme doesn’t matter. Trump used this rhetoric because it is good at allowing people to hear what they want to hear and is now trapped within it.
Goetze thinks that algorithmic content has made a certain kind of American very bad at inhabiting the same reality as other Americans, and I would suggest that insincerity is a surrender to that failure of cohabitation. But you can’t do politics without cohabiting the world, even as a billionaire.
So what do we do about it?
We live in a world where people’s politics are so thoroughly attached to their egos, they use insincerity to protect their inability to inhabit the same reality as others. In that context, being sincere, holding yourself to your words and others to theirs, earnestly presenting your actual beliefs even if they aren’t commonsensical, is a necessary act of socialist agitation. Speaking to your beliefs actively works to create a shared reality, and treats the person you’re speaking to as an equal rather than an audience. It is desperately needed if we are to respond to this moment with a shared strategy because it can produce a shared strategy, in a way that insincerity, and protecting your ego can’t.
The desire to have your opinions exist in a fuzzy space of being ‘correct’ while never making a positive argument is cowardly and caustic to political movements. If we want the working class to be protagonists of their own lives, the bystander ideology currently being promulgated online is its direct inverse.
I have spoken a lot about the way insincerity pops up on the right, through half-jokes and blurred rhetoric. But there is a similar tendency on the left, which views ‘common sense’ as it’s north star, and which disdains anything not immediately intuitive, or intuitive to the ‘average person’. If the internet makes all of us bystanders, this attitude says that most people are bystanders—so best not to rock the boat.
But no one has ever joined a community because it is exactly like everything else in the world. Just like the negatively polarized ironist above, this focus on whether things will be intuitive to another imagined person is deeply disempowering because it again abdicates an honest understanding of your own beliefs.
Marxist Unity Group has a reputation for being a caucus of nerds or theoryheads, a caucus for people who are more well-read than others or too smart for their own good. But I honestly don’t think that’s true. You cannot be a socialist in the United States without being, to some degree, a weird self taught esoteric, and every DSA caucus is filled with incredibly smart and well-read people. What’s different about us, what allows us to project that reading and intelligence, is our commitment to transparency and the unity we have around our program.
We write so much, talk so much, because we want to be transparent, because we want to take our experience and turn them into general rules, and we know that that process cannot be started without taking an initial stand. Our points of unity, our program, our tasks and perspectives, allow a vast array of attitudes, strategies, analyses to all fit next to each other. MUG members disagree, and disagree often.
That transparency would not be worth anything if it weren’t in service of something, and if you are not willing to stick up for positions that aren’t immediately intuitive then you’re not doing politics in the first place. “Politics doesn’t reflect majorities, it constructs them”. Our points of unity include tremendously controversial elements, including a desire for a militia to replace our standing army and police and a democratic republic to allow for worker’s rule. But they are a clear list of tasks, rather than a vibe or a list of empty signifiers really meaning a clique of people with ‘good politics’. Because of that, MUG has been able to expand to include a wide array of kinds of comrades, bringing in leaders across DSA, and even bringing people into DSA itself through the clarity of our vision.
Taken together, an attitude of clarity and an orientation around a clearly stated set of tasks, is an attitude I call red sincerity. This is a necessary ethic for building a democratic culture. Four years ago I wrote “It is the task of every socialist to build a collective mind, composed of and larger than our individual experiences”. Although I don’t stand by everything in that essay, the ensuing years have only solidified this belief.
We live opposed to the wealthiest people on the planet, who have used their economy-spanning power to make their whims the policies of companies, political parties, and sovereign governments. Against them we only have organization, that is groups of people, and those people need to understand what we’re fighting for and why we fight for it the way we do, if we are to truly act collectively. People can take stands against our arguments, but so long as we keep making them we can expose a great deal of the dishonesty we’ve learned to live with in the socialist left under the guise of irony. My hope is that this sincerity can pull the whole movement forward alongside us, towards a better future. I am not perfect in this regard, no person is. But can we try to take this moment seriously, or at least, take it more seriously than we take ourselves?
Individual essays are not caucus opinion.
