Postmodern Agon
Andy Warhol would have voted for Donald Trump
Trump is a postmodern exam which liberals failed to pass three times in a row.
They infamously failed it in 2016, when they could make neither heads nor tails of the strange orange phenomenon that had arisen to challenge their regime, and so were caught off guard by a newly foreign playing field foisted by this unfamiliar kind of political force.
It looked as though they had passed the exam the second time, in 2020, but, as is now obvious from Tuesday’s spectacular failure, what had looked like a win was actually just a technicality: a global emergency upended the classroom and, in the resulting confusion, they managed to eke out a narrow, though fragile, victory.
But there is no longer a global emergency, at least not of the sort from four years ago, and the stunning return to power of this Yeti of conservative politics demonstrates the incapacity—and the unwillingness—of the system which liberals represent to learn the rules which this Trumpian exam is designed to test.
Again, they did not study.
Again, they did not do their homework.
And, boy, it shows.
And, now, Trump is the first postmodern president.
As such he establishes what many theorists have often claimed, that postmodernism is a conservative and reactionary formulation. With his performance art and magic, Trump continually reframes and distances: in true McLuhanite manner, the form rises above the content.
The Democrats have been stuck in modernism, the antecedent to postmodernism’s great discursive rebellion, and have therefore not been able to reckon with this inversion of political discourse.
Theorists like the recently late Fredric Jameson refer to postmodernism’s emphasis on the now and the here, what he calls “spatialization,” a contrary to modernism’s Utopian and temporal and chronological world.
It is true that “Make America Great Again” references time, but only apparently so. The seeming modernism of this slogan belies its wholly postmodern cast.
The conjuration of halcyon days in this potent slogan is actually a dodge: instead, what it really is is not a eulogy but an artistic statement every bit as ingenious as the offloading of the image of a Campbell’s soup can onto a canvas. MAGA is not the cudgel which all of its believers think they are holding in their hands, which they believe they are wielding against the status quo. It is much more of a political innovation, a marriage with the aesthetic, than any mere discursive weapon could ever be. MAGA is a distancing effect, the framing of old signifiers within a postmodern world, the abstract “American Dream” concretized into a discursive shape.
And this MAGA shape is as impervious to modernist approaches as any of Warhol’s prints are impervious to old school critique. You can not, to foist a crude example, attempt to render Warhol’s scans and prints as mere regressions to representational aesthetics, for this would obviously miss the discursive trick which he innovated.
The Democrats continually committed this error in the face of Trump’s similarly postmodern challenge.
It was always proof positive they would lose on Tuesday whenever they ran with a “can you believe he said that.” From the “grab ‘em by the pussy” of 2016, all the way to eight years later with the “Puerto Rico is a garbage dump,” Democrats never understood how transparently they flaunted their miseducation, how they demonstrated unequivocally their occupancy of a world that was long gone.
They were using modernist means—the belief in the primacy of content, their myopic literalism—to attack a singularly postmodern threat—with its emphasis on form and shape and distance.
It was a wholly inadequate response.
There should be no mistaking the horror of what this signifies. But it is not the horror of encroaching fascism, which the modernist liberals continue to mistakenly cry about. It is the horror of the postmodern, the productive dynamics of late capitalism which modern society has become utterly inured to, only now mounted onto the backs of political horses. The horror of a world of spectacle, of the unfettered production of pixels, where even money becomes digital and private, is the greatest postmodern achievement (if we may call it an achievement and not an apocalypse) that has ever occurred, a sealing off of the historical and Utopian dynamics of modernism, with their push towards radical enlightenment and collective action.
We should not be feeling a shudder of headless horsemen galloping down from a distant hill, supposedly coming to take away some freedom we actually never had in the first place.
We should be feeling a shudder that the conditions of postmodern stasis, which have been with us for so long, are now finally the law of the land, that the horizon for new worlds, for collective action, for an escape out of the postmodern frame, has been foreclosed. This is the real “end of history” moment. Apparently, Fukuyama was off by 35 years.
I came to this realization when I saw Hulk Hogan’s speech at the RNC.
I grew up with Wrestlemania in the 80s, when the WWE was still the WWF and when pro wrestling was in its popular infancy. I watched the Wrestlemania cartoon every Saturday morning and I collected the Wrestlemania action figures. I had Andre the Giant, the Iron Sheik, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and, of course, Hulk Hogan.
Wrestlemania coded liberal and Democrat back then. The society of the spectacle which this “sport” inaugurated was sensual and libertine, the world of the countercultural Democratic Party. The Republican Party was the party of the rich, WASP-y, country club, evangelical old timers who could not understand what the hoopla about pro wrestling was all about.
In actuality, however, Wrestlemania was doing for sports what Trump, a conservative Republican, is now doing for politics, creating a sport within a postmodern frame. It is obvious now, though it wasn’t back then, that the commodified offloading of Hellenic ideals of masculine athleticism onto the mass production of plastic totems was always a conservative, not a liberal, process, something that Hogan’s florid theatrics on the RNC stage concretized and sealed.
There’s a great clip floating around the online ether showing “Mean Gene” Okerlund, pro wrestling’s long-tenured, nebbishy querist, noticing Andy Warhol coming out of the backstage area, where various sweaty and cartoonish men are congregating after a match. There is something so utterly fluid about the sight of Warhol speaking into the outstretched microphone and sheepishly attesting on camera to his love of professional wrestling.
That fluidity, and its ultimate connection decades later to the rise of conservatism as a politically hegemonic force, speaks volumes about the true politics of postmodernism.
The libertine consumption which played such a huge role in postmodernism’s distancing effects, and which comprised a critical ingredient in the ongoing foreclosure of the collective action of the modernist era, has, at the end of the day, the same conservative dynamics visible in the rise of Trump and MAGA, the final nail in the coffin on collective action.
On Tuesday, with the election of the first postmodern president, the unreality of late stage capital has now finally acquired the cast of holy writ.
Recent Related Matter
“What kind of world do we live in in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect traditional values from the triumph of total permissiveness? Or as Alenka Zupančič put it, Trump isn’t a relic of the old moral-majority conservativism—rather, he is the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms, contradictions, and inner limitations.”
“The lesson of 2024 isn’t that this managerial effort failed to protect swing voters from fake news. It’s that it succeeded in a more perverse purpose: It protected liberals from reality, from seeing all the ways that their own choices were leading downward to a predictable defeat.”
How the Democrats Made it Easy for Trump