The Left Has a Post-Problem, or How We Keep Losing in a Post-Ironic World

• In Event: 51.023 - Rethinking the Intellectual for the 21st Century

Abstract

It has become increasingly difficult to argue against false claims of truth in contemporary political discourse in the United States. Just as the right has coopted civil rights language and rhetoric for federal policies since at least the mid 1980s (e.g., Right to Work, No Child Left Behind), more recently, the right has coopted the political conceptualization of the academic left. Consider, for example, rhetoric around questions of “fake news”, a claim that is impossible without a foundation in the notion of a multiplicity of truths. This move away from universal, sequential, and static Truth is in many ways is the backbone not only of postmodernisms and postructuralisms but also of more contemporary post-next theorizing, from post-humanisms to discussions of post-truth for example.

Yet we have always already been post-truth. For, the purpose of our ongoing theorizing, including such understandings as those found in African American intellectual traditions and the multiplicity of Indigenous conceptualizations of the world, is often to address the nuanced complexities of understandings in increasingly (or ongoing and sustained) complex ways.
We have sought to counter oppressions and violences of singular perspectives through a plurality of our understandings (e.g., Benjamin, 2008; DuBois, 1903; Sharpe, 2016; Simpson, 2015).

As Amy Suskind’s (2018) ongoing list of not-normal actions under the Trump administration and Nancy MacLean’s (2017) Democracy in Chains, present, there are indeed deep forces at work to divorce American publics from governance and both from an increasingly fortified wealthy elite. However, what remains under-recognized is that we are still using enlightenment era tools of truth-telling and evidence in a post-ironic world. For, without irony, the ridiculous can become sublime and overwhelming evidence can become obsolete. Just last week, the President of the United States claimed in a public address that Germany is a tool of the Russian state—a claim only possible without irony.

Where its theoretical cousin bullshit (Frankfurt, 2009) requires an intentional artistry of disregard and bluster in the face of evidence, irony requires a juxtaposition of irreconcilable understandings where one renders the other implausible. A lack of irony strongly helps solidify bullshit as plausible while helping grease the skids for rhetoric of bullshit to substitute for presentation of evidence. Rephrased slightly, an absence of irony creates a context where rhetoric can function as content. As such, contemporary political rhetoric can be understood as part of an ongoing tradition of the social efficiency group in public education (or educating publics) where focus on practice trumps discussions of ideas and ideals (Kliebard, 1976, 2004)—build a wall, lock her up, it’s going to be the best, believe me.

This paper therefore has two central purposes. First, it argues that we operate in a post-ironic political climate that strongly informs contemporary governmental policy and rhetoric under the Trump administration, an argument that also requires attention to previous, recent administrations. Second, this paper provides some potential pathways for articulating modes of solidarity, addressing core concerns, and the respectful rejection of ridiculousness, in a post-ironic polity.

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University