“Postmodernism on Steroids” first appeared at Blog of Public Secrets, on 13 June 2024. It is reproduced on Communis after being revised by the author and with his permission.
“Just as twentieth-century fascism had its ideological sources in leftist syndicalism – more so than colonialism – Trumpism has roots in the postmodern movement. In both cases, the emphasis on class is replaced with culture and identitarianism, dismantling the universalism without which particularism does not even exist.”
— Marc James Léger
To understand Trump, the post-left should also look at itself
Discussing René Magritte’s 1929 The Treachery of Images, a painting of a pipe with the words “ceci n’est pas une pipe” (this is not a pipe) beneath it, the French philosopher, and prophet of an epochal paradigm shift in episteme, or way of thinking, Michel Foucault famously described the work as a broken calligram, a representational situation where image and text do not so much contradict one another as make impossible a perspective that would allow us to say that the assertion is true, false or contradictory.[1] If none of these, then what? A calligram that was first constructed and then occulted; a mark that hides the traces of its own production. What might the above Magritte meme from 2016 say to us today, now that Donald Trump has more dramatically shifted into Führer mode? According to Foucault, a calligram is more tautological than rhetorical. It is not concerned with meaning, which points to something else, but with itself. In the terms of Jacques Derrida, the calligram is “phallogocentric,” proliferating the same non-sense in different guises, not unlike a rebus, which seeks to erase the difference between showing and naming, words and things, and one might think, between art and life. Unlike the dramatist Antonin Artaud, the smiling, Ubuesque Trump is in no way bothered by the dilemma. The Trump pipe-president defeats the descriptive function of words by defying and destroying meaning. Words are not strong enough to take the attention away from the bloviator who enjoys, as he does, his command of the levers of state power. An “immobile, ambiguous, nameless presence” captures the citizenry in a perfect trap through the complicity of writing (Trump) with the play of space (politics), floating in an evasive “natural silence.” The caption denies reality, repeating twice what simply cannot be admitted. Yet the smiling pipe says: “Take me for what I manifestly am.”
What is currently unfolding in Trump’s America is the result of the political belief among most North Americans and Europeans that capitalism is ultimately better than socialism, a view that Mark Fisher defined as “capitalist realism” – the belief that there is no alternative to global capitalism, conceived as the least bad of political systems. This view ratifies the petty-bourgeois politics of the postwar counterculture that opted for consumer-based lifestyle change and the therapeutic balm of critical awareness, seemingly anti-bourgeois, as opposed to broadly organized mass movements of the communist left, whose mission was to take control of the levers of state power and transform society away from social relations based on private property regimes.
The basic contours of this argument were first proposed by the Russian artist Alexander Melamid in the 2017 Time magazine article “Blame Donald Trump’s Rise on the Avant-Garde Movement.”[2] According to him, Trump is an avatar of the culture “we created,” giving as examples Dada infantilism, Pablo Picasso’s adage that “great artists steal” (most recently deployed in The Studio television series) or the hippie idealism that gave vent to new principles of immorality, as epitomized for instance by Andy Warhol’s theory that making money is a form of art. Reiterating Andrew Breitbart’s argument that “politics is downstream from culture,” Melamid concludes:
Whatever the intelligentsia nurtures and celebrates in our galleries and academic journals is bound to flow eventually into the nation’s cinemas, through its ballot boxes and toward the swamp of Washington, D.C. (…) [Trump] is its progeny, and we on the left – the artists, the people of culture – have done our part in creating the conditions for him to thrive.
There are many reasons to question this thesis, least of all the fact that Pop art was already reflecting the culture. Still, the interaction between New Left cultural politics and business culture, as Thomas Frank has convincingly shown, were mutually intertwined. If one thinks of them in terms of form and content, intention and substance, or in historical materialist terms, Trump’s blatant repetitions of postmodern culture war tropes – attacks on biased media, lambasting of trans athletes, language police, foreigners stealing American wealth, neoliberal Marxists, clean coal, the tyranny of paper straws — so many ways that everyday Americans are victimized by liberal elites – are no more surprising than Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin’s courting and “overcoming” of the historical avant gardes.[3] Through a process of emulation and distortion, what is outwardly radical has no intrinsic connection to what is stripped of meaning. While the intelligentsia can perceive this readily enough, the demagogue has other purposes, and these are typically defined in the crude terms of money and power. While none of it is extended to the masses, the people can do the bidding of the masters by mindlessly fighting it out among themselves. Surrealism, after all, was a political art movement and its confabulations were never intended to be exercises in hermeticism.
Trumpian politics indulges in what it claimed to oppose: from cancel culture through the reduction of objective truth to narrative. Is it not symptomatic that Trump himself behaves like a millennial clicktivist?
The discussion around Trump 2.0 has stumped many progressives as to whether the criminal coup plotter is fascist or represents something entirely new. Such undecidability betrays the fact that Trump and Trumpism have much in common with the “cultural Marxism” that the alt-right has manufactured as its bugbear, which conveniently does two things: 1) ignores the important distinctions and overlaps between orthodox Marxism, Western Marxism and postmodernism, 2) ignores the distinctions and overlaps between the latest versions of the New Right, now also known as the alt-right, or cultural Right, and the cultural left. With regard to the latter, the main point of overlap is postmodernism’s philosophical nihilism and political relativism, its anti-Enlightenment anti-humanism that shares points of view with the conservative anti-Enlightenment tradition, altogether rejecting “superstructural” realms such as rights law, aesthetics and macro-politics, denounced as bourgeois ideologies that mask particular interests under the guise of universal principles and ideals, and this, in favour of either identitarian agendas or discourse-theoretical immanentism – both of them crude distortions of dialectical materialism. Many have already caught on to the fact that this politics now indulges in those things it claimed it was against: volkish tribalism, cancel culture, witch hunts, cultural censorship, the reduction of objective truth to narrative, anti-Marxism, etc. Is it not symptomatic that Trump himself behaves like a millennial clicktivist, posting more than 2,262 times on Truth Social in the first 132 days of his administration, and as often as 138 times on one day only.[4]
Given the above, the orthodox left cannot simply bury the Western Marxism that has led us to where we are, on the view that the leading mid-twentieth century thinkers were simply anti-Marxist; secondly, the liberal left can no longer ignore the extent to which postmodern ideas and post-structuralist methods have undermined the emancipatory universalist basis of socialism and inadvertently paved the way for the revival of fascism, at least, on a cultural and intellectual level. Indeed, just as gays and lesbians sought to “reclaim” terms of abuse such as queer, or as McDonald’s India has twisted Clara Zetkin’s pioneering of International Women’s Day to promote fatty foods as a way, its advertising says, to break feminist stereotypes, the political right is now shamelessly “reclaiming” the fascist legacy, presenting everything in meme-ready, upside-down Orwellian terms, as though a slap in the face of all those malcontent naysayers who through their bad attitude prevent America from being great, and this, as opposed to the upward transfer of tens of trillions of dollars to the plutocracy. Of course, even this is not entirely new for a culture weaned on buying, shoving or raging your way to ego satisfactions.
Rather than focus on Trump and the MAGA movement, progressives should look at themselves to find the roots of this seemingly unshakable monster. Just as twentieth-century fascism had its ideological sources in leftist syndicalism – more so than colonialism – Trumpism has roots in the postmodern movement. In both cases, the emphasis on class is replaced with culture and identitarianism, dismantling the universalism without which particularism does not even exist. The extent to which the progressive left in the U.S. played down the threat of the January 6 coup attempt, for example, is the measure of its own “don’t look up” predilection, which has its material sources in middle-class educational and professional privileges. Those who by design are licensed to describe and comment on social injustices are in the same class faction as those who invent ever new paradigms of social analysis, such anti- or post-humanism, care studies, animal studies, new materialisms, intersectionality, afro-pessimism, and so on. Whether in academia, the media, business or government, their political tendency is to ward off a socialist programme. At the same time, the problems caused by capitalism and the ruling class is their bread and butter. While it was the New Right that spearheaded the “attack on the professions” in the 1970s and 80s, through deregulation and the demonization of “new class” elites, this attack on welfarism was ratified by neo-liberal elites and later, in the cultural sector, by the postmodern bankrupting of the Marxist left. This sector cannot be rebuilt without the welfarism that was made possible by the threat and actuality of world communism. While the fate of the United States seems to be tied to the fortunes of this professional-managerial class, our political task must be to think and act beyond this fundamental mistake.
Trump’s America now appears as the Leibnizian “best of all possible worlds” of the property system and after the postmodern proponents of neoliberalism and identity politics have finally caught wind of what the end of history was really all about: the suppression of organized labour, generalized precarity, never-ending wars, climate catastrophe, the bankrupting of public services and institutions, unprecedented economic inequality, genocide in broad daylight, the militarization of police and the replacement of constitutional rights with the mafia-style management of billionaire interests.[5]
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1982] 1983).
2. Alex Melamid, “Blame Donald Trump’s Rise on the Avant-Garde Movement,” Time (May 12, 2025), https://time.com/4777118/avant-garde-koons-trump/.
3. See David Sirota, “Democrats Can Avoid Trump’s Culture-War Traps,” Jacobin (May 29, 2025), https://jacobin.com/2025/05/trump-populism-culture-war-democrats. See also Marc James Léger, “Fascism and the Suspension of Belief,” Blog of Public Secrets (November 15, 2024), https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2024/11/fascism-and-the-suspension-of-belief-1.html.
4. Drew Harwell, Clara Ence Morse and Emily Davies, “Tallying Trump’s online posting frenzy: 2,262 ‘truths’ in 132 days,” The Washington Post (June 3, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/03/trump-truth-social-twitter/.
5. For Francis Fukuyama’s anti-socialist retort to articles like this one, see Joshua Citarella, “Francis Fukuyama: History and Democracy,”YouTube(June 18, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc7O7qSBzM8. Citarella’s great admiration for Fukuyama’s work, as stated in the interview, speaks to the kinds of opportunist compromises that are made in the name of liberalism. In June 2023, Fukuyama introduced three neo-Nazis from the Azov Battalion (Arsenyi Fedosiuk, Julia Fedosiuk and Kateryna Prokopenko) at Stanford University, where Fukuyama heads the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. The SS logo of the Azov Battalion was prominently featured on the event poster, which was sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, as well as the Ukrainian Students Association at Stanford. Prokopenko is the spouse of Denys Prokopenko, who is known to wear the Wehrmacht Wolfsangel symbol, and other SS insignia, and is a member of the Boys Club neo-Nazi fan club of the Dynamo Kyiv soccer team. After the event created a backlash, Fukuyama defended the Azov Battalion as heroes he is “proud to support,” falsely claiming that to call these nationalists neo-Nazis was to accept Russian viewpoints. Meanwhile, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation considers Azov a far-right nationalist military and paramilitary movement. It was founded in 2014 by white supremacist Andriy Biletsky against “semitic-led subhumans.” Fukuyama was a Reagan advisor and champion of Obama. See Alec Regimbal, “Author Francis Fukuyama, a Stanford fellow, backs far-right Azov group after school visit,” SFGATE (July 12, 2023), https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/fukuyama-senior-fellow-stanford-far-right-group-18193614.php. For a critique of Fukuyama’s more recent defence of identity politics in Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2014), whose reclamation of the ancient concept of thymos was satirized in Ridley Scott’s 2024 sword and sandal epic, Gladiator II, see Marc James Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide (London: Routledge, 2024).
Featured image: Ceci n’est pas un président. Anonymous Internet meme, 2017, as shown in the original post.
