Against Political Nihilism

I write this dispatch from the mystical realm of the transsexual bourgeoisie. I have discovered, thanks to a recent Nation editorial by CUNY’s Charlie Markbreiter that, as a penurious graduate student and lecturer I belong to a trans bourgeoisie because my union-negotiated healthcare plan covers my gender-affirming care. This separates me from the non-bourgeoisie trans people, who are all POC—which is strange, because I’m Latina, so perhaps this is another binary I’m breaking? 

Either way, the point of Markbreiter’s piece is to argue that someone like me with a trans-affirming healthcare plan is, among transgender Americans, the sole beneficiary of a potential Harris/Walz Administration—which otherwise has nothing to offer us. Therefore, trans people should avoid thinking about the very grievous threat to our lives and liberties presented by a second Trump Administration, and focus instead on Palestine and Israel’s brutal assaults on both Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

Others have already dealt with the numerous ways this article misunderstands the policies and laws it cites, the very concept of “bourgeoisie,” or the efforts of the Biden/Harris Administration. I’d rather focus on the futility of this piece, and how it’s but one (dim) star in a broader constellation of widespread nihilism that pervades wired progressivism and leftism.

The demand of Markbreiter’s piece, near as I can discern, is for the reader to mummify themselves in a doomscroll of white guilt and pious inertia. It's a plea for vibes, not for action. It contains nothing that actually helps Palestinians, much less trans people. But it is an argument made to go viral in all its barbed uselessness. To that extent, I suppose I’m part of the problem. Here’s that attention you ordered, Mr. Markbreiter. But I think there’s more to the story here than one mean article. 

Why does this plea for pious inertia keep getting made? Why is it so popular? Well, why wouldn’t it be? It’s virtually the only course of action social media makes available to us. 

Demonstrations of faith

This zero-calorie substitute for political action manifests in a variety of ways, but they all have in common a borderline conspiratorial rejection of institutions of all sorts. Consider the deadly wake of Hurricane Helene; almost before the floodwaters began to recede, a small army of extremely online leftists argued that Americans had been left to fend for themselves amidst a thousand-year flood because we’d sent all our money to Israel as military aid. Not to be deterred, the far-right simply Ctrl-F-Replaced “Israel” with “Ukraine” and made the same argument. 

In every case, it was an evidence-free claim that the government was both unable and unwilling to perform one of its most vital functions—and it caught fire. A variant made it into The Onion, even. But as evidence quickly mounted that FEMA was not, in fact, bankrupt and inert, some online began to declare that this lie was, nevertheless, their emotional support disinfo.   

They needed to believe some variant of it because it felt true; it captured the angst of the moment. Rage at a government that didn’t/couldn’t care. The lie about arming Israel and/or Ukraine while leaving rural North Carolinians to drown—its tableau of budgetary zero-sum-games gone mad—was actually quite dear to some people. Stop the arms trade, save our own people. 

Why get so attached to all this? 

There’s a perverse hope embedded in the lie. The hope that the solution to our problems—as if politics is a solvable equation—is one weird trick. One sees this in the enduring discourse that COVID-19 (and all infectious disease, according to some), could be eradicated forever if we just locked down again for eight, ten, or twelve weeks. It’s so simple. And yet our leaders won’t do it because they’re just so damn evil.

Somehow, it’s the worst of all worlds. A Pollyanna’s hope that leads to the blackest despair. 

After all, lockdowns of that scale are both impossible and won’t work to permanently eradicate respiratory illness, and while it’s abundantly clear that the US should follow its own laws and not fund Israel’s war machine while it stands credibly accused of innumerable human rights violations, that military aid is also orthogonal to how government agencies like FEMA are funded (indeed, where there are logjams they’re caused by ever-bolder Republican politicking, not the foreign aid budget). 

But the despair is the point. You collapse inward like a dying star because the despair provides a sense of control and certainty in a world that makes a mockery of both. If we just did this one simple thing, we could save the world; but we don’t, so I must rage and despair.

That Nation editorial, then, is merely one small part of a wider trend towards a progressive pessimism and nihilism that demands a kind of self-flagellation in lieu of activity. Consider: what was the piece really asking for? For members of one of the US’s most vulnerable minority groups to feel guilty for having hard-won, life-saving healthcare because war crimes are being committed abroad? What does this actually do for us or those victims of war crimes, however? 

Markbreiter’s editorial merely calls for us to abstain from voting, feel bad about ourselves, and “focus” on Palestine; the raised awareness is presumably its own reward, for both the reader and the mute, abject people named in the piece. From trans women of color, to Palestinians living under constant IDF bombing, the awareness, the “focus,” the guilt are all enough.

The larger problem here is suspiciously Calvinism-shaped. Out in the world of social media, which leaves us with few to no tools to change the world, we’re left only with demonstrations of faith. The louder the better. They’re proof that we’re part of the virtuous elect. Such an environment, therefore, rewards chest-baring revelations of spirit: self-flagellating confessions and abasement meant to prove that you’re the right kind of person.

All of which is an effective substitute for action. 

Impotent rage

It would be easy for me to blame social media for this—and it does play a significant role. Technology often reforges us in its image rather than the other way around. But social media creates next to nothing. Like a lens, it merely refracts forces that originate elsewhere. 

In this case, the forces are very old indeed. But a critically observed example from the late 18^th Century will help us see them more clearly.

In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt gave her views on why the French Revolution ultimately failed to live up to its loftiest aspirations. In particular, she identified the Jacobins’ lust for exposing hypocrisy to be a critical accelerant for the forthcoming Terror. Such exposure of liars, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries—even amongst the Jacobins themselves—lit a spark of rage. 

Loud declarations and demonstrations of fealty to the revolutionary ideology were increasingly required of all, with perverse effects. After all, no matter how loud you are, you can never prove that you aren’t guilty, that you aren’t secretly a counterrevolutionary. That doesn’t mean you won’t try. Much like our neo-Calvinists loudly striving to demonstrate their membership in the Elect, these revolutionaries sought the demonstration of virtue as an end in itself. Arendt writes:

[T]he search for motives, the demand that everybody display in public his innermost motivation, since it actually demands the impossible, transforms all actors into hypocrites; the moment the display of motives begins, hypocrisy begins to poison all human relations.

That poisoning manifests itself, in the end, as unbridled rage.

The rage, as Arendt put it, “of misfortune pitted against the rage of unmasked corruption” swept away “the work of several centuries” while building nothing in its place. Such rage against miserable poverty combined with rage against ceaselessly unmasked hypocrisy was a powerful force indeed.

But, Arendt stresses: 

rage is not only impotent by definition, it is the mode in which impotence becomes active in its last stage of final despair.

And, notably for our purposes, she goes on to argue:

It is true that the masses of the suffering people had taken to the street unbidden and uninvited by those who then became their organizers and spokesmen. But the suffering they exposed transformed the malheureux into the enragés only when ‘the compassionate zeal’ of the revolutionaries… began to glorify this suffering, hailing the exposed misery as the best and even only guarantee of virtue…

In Arendt’s view, the glorification of suffering mobilizes people not as citizens, but as mere malcontents. As miserable-qua-miserable people, despairing and destroying. So, what’s that got to do with some internet drama about an article, or the purity politics so beloved of Twitter and its myriad clones? Aside, of course, from the dashes of Calvinism inherent in the constant chest-beating about one’s virtue and the hypocrisy of others?

Well, to understand that we have to get a little Foucauldian with it.

Just as Foucault argued that the control and regulation of bodies became more sophisticated—moving from grotesque public executions towards subtle surveillance that induced us all to want to obey—so too has social media refined and distilled our rage into seemingly harmless futility. 

At least the enrages, in Arendt’s telling, actually firebombed a Walmart. 

Now, social media ensures that your rage only destroys institutions slowly and insidiously, not by burning the buildings down, but simply by corroding public faith in them. It sounds lovely to the radical ear, at first, but the effects always leave you with something less than the sum of your rages.

Don’t trust FEMA, don’t trust the CDC, don’t trust your elections, don’t trust your neighbours, don’t trust yourself as a political actor, even. Burn only with impotent rage, preferably where everyone can see you. That leads to despair. And if you despair hard enough, you might just break any and all faith in the institutions we actually need in order to exercise power. What results from this corrosion of institutional trust is not the end of oppressive power, but its concentration in the hands of ever fewer people.

It’s an apotheosis of individualism that both asks nothing of you and yet takes everything from you. You need only do nothing, but you also sacrifice any hope you have of actually getting into the political arena to really change things.

This corrosion of faith and descent into self-flagellating, pious myopia has the same effect as it always has: destruction that merely paves the way for autocrats with a plan (or concepts of a plan) for how to actually rule. T’was ever thus, from the early 19^th Century to the 2010s.

Thankfully, many seem to be awakening to this reality once more. The leftist backlash to Markbreiter’s piece was, after all, swift and certain. Even for the many progressives and leftists who’d drunk too deeply from social media’s well of nihilism, the Nation piece demanded one draught too many. 

It’s not a coincidence that some of the piece’s most trenchant leftist critics were people like labor organizer Cassie Pritchard, whose thread I linked earlier. She helps lead an actual union where she has to talk to and negotiate with real human beings, focusing on narrow but vitally important interests for the benefit of her coworkers. Since she mobilizes the actual working class, she was likely in a position to immediately spot the puritanical preening of declaring trans people with healthcare to be “bourgeoisie.” 

Such attempts at guilting the innocent, at unmasking perceived political hypocrisy and inciting rage, are many things. But they are not politics.

Politics is not the social-media-ready Omnicause, which is so multifarious it can only be addressed through gestures. Real politics is work, with clear goals, narrow channels through which you can achieve them, and diverse coalitions to support those goals. It’s the small-bore labour that leads to, say, winning trans-affirming healthcare for you and your colleagues. In short, you submerge yourself and your petty desires into the collective, contributing your dollop of labour, your volunteer hours, your vote, your protest sign, your tiny voice, to a much larger whole, who can then use their combined weight to press for real change. 

To those actually in politics’ arena, Markbrieter’s piece was a dispatch from another dimension—albeit one all too familiar to people who are entirely too online. It’s a

perspective on complicity that turns the basic fact of living in a society into a crime that can only be avenged through abstention and self-flagellation. A theodicy of suffering that demands a toxic mixture of self-abnegation and omnidirectional vengeance.

But, even leaving aside the fact that these impulses towards hyper-individualistic, fruitless rage, are ancient, there’s one more issue that needs tending: if people are outraged at institutions and feel utterly powerless, there is a reason for that.

 Genuine anguish and powerlessness

The despairing rage that gave birth to the idea that we must chastise the “trans bourgeoisie” and heap our guilt upon a digital altar is not purely the product of a privileged game, as some critics might have it. Sure, it can come from having too much time on one’s hands. But although some of Markbreiter’s critics jeeringly urged him to “read theory,” I assure you, this would only make the problem worse. 

The anguish and sense of powerlessness that leads to this sort of opinionmaking is very real. For many, the pain of watching the suffering in Gaza—and now Lebanon—from afar is unendurable and demands only the most uncompromising of moral responses. Despite the lack of similar anguish expressed for Tigray, Sudan, Xinjiang, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, or Burma from many of these same people, it does not make their anguish less real or any less sincerely felt. One would have to be lacking in basic humanity to not be moved by the images from Gaza that we see on a daily basis.

Combine that with the ongoing grief over the very real attempt by the US’s Republican Party to criminalise the existence of transgender people in public life, with law after law being passed that makes transgender children targets and places intolerable restrictions on trans adults’ ability to access healthcare—interspersed with the stochastic terrorism of bomb threats and death threats directed at anyone who provides healthcare to trans youth, an eerie echo of threats to abortion doctors. 

Someone has to hear our cries of despair. Someone has to come and help. Someone has to hear the alarm we’re ringing with all our might. But if not, at the very least, we can make the guilty feel guilty. Even if it's ourselves. In all our inadequacies and privilege. 

We lose faith in the institutions that are meant to protect us—for instance, so much of the antipathy towards the CDC comes from their failures (real and perceived). And so we need to shout about it, condemning any and all foolish enough to still affect such faith, unmasking their morally offensive hypocrisy in this hour of utmost need. 

Social media is the perfect place to do this, quickly and efficiently, to blast it out with the hope that someone, somewhere will hear. As the old song says, “Somewhere after midnight/ In my wildest fantasy/ Somewhere just beyond my reach/ There’s someone reaching back for me.” Scream, and maybe there’ll be an answer.

I’m reminded of a quest from the videogame Disco Elysium, arguably one of the most important leftist texts of the 21^st Century. In one of its unfortunately named “political vision quests,” the one themed around centrism and neoliberalism, your character strives to build a radio tower atop a decaying equestrian monument to an old king. The goal is to use this tower to finally communicate with the rulers of the totally-not-European-Union organisation known as the Coalition, to finally be heard. Most outcomes of this quest are predictably tragic and futile. The closest you come to success is a series of clipped, pointed conversations with the communications officer of an airborne warship with its guns trained on your city. A threat more eloquent than all language.

And yet you still try to communicate, desperately clinging to the top of that rickety, ad hoc radio tower, only to be dismissed, even if you “succeed” all your skill checks. You’re merely confronted with the implacability of a frightening military force convinced of its rightness and the lack of any alternative. As satire goes, it’s as clear an example of how some leftists feel talking to liberals as any. 

Right or wrong, that feeling characterises so much social media interaction, the desperately addicting feeling of touching the face of power for a few moments all-too-easily wasted. A chance to rip off the mask, a chance to shout your rage, your hopes, your dreams, to that distant airship where the truly powerful reside.

That feeling is the genesis of anti-theory like the idea of a “trans bourgeoisie” complicit in genocide because they have healthcare. Scream from the radio tower, and hope someone will hear; hope the guilt, the unmasking, the rage, will awaken something, someone who will come and fix things. 

This un-solution is, like Disco Elysium’s radio tower, a kludge built unattractively atop an even less attractive monument to white supremacism. It’s all Twitter can ever be. Whatever happens on November 5^th, we’re going to need to march forward and keep trying to make this world a better place. That work demands that we recognise no one with the power to change anything will hear your screaming signal through the void.

It requires participation in civil society; and if you care about trans rights in the most inclusive sense, that includes organisations like The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, to which I devoted several of my own years. Reproductive justice writ large? Try Sister Song. For Gaza, take after the encampment activists who won tangible victories by tailoring their demands to what universities could actually achieve—meaningful divestment and closer academic ties with Palestinian scholars, or scholarships for Palestinian students. 

Find a vital campaign in your area that you can feel good about; the ugliness of geopolitics doesn’t have to impact a city council campaign or a fight against an anti-carbon tax initiative. Join your local union, or start one. Volunteer with your congregation. And, yes, dear reader, vote. Change the channel from screaming about “bourgeoisie” in increasingly incoherent ways and do something.

Because, in the end, all we can do is climb off the radio tower and, finally, get to work down here.  

Featured image is Polling place - 42nd Ward, by Seth Anderson