Ideology and Authenticity

Critics of “wokeism” and “cancel culture” often reproduce the very same nihilism and despair that fuel wokeism itself. The woke/anti-woke pipeline functions as something of an echo chamber that feeds into “anti-politics,” understood as the success of establishment politics (or what Marxists used to call “bourgeois politics”) in effectively pacifying movements that aim to upend and revolutionize the class and material bases of political life. The concept of anti-politics is useful here because it helps explain the tendency for political ideology to collapse into an aesthetic or symbolic form that gestures toward power but relies instead on slogans, generalized outrage, and protest. This is the objective of bourgeois politics within the Democratic Party in the United States: to absorb and neutralize outlier protest and agitational movements—from Black Lives Matter, to Bernie Sanders, to more recently Zohran Mamdani. The Democratic Party is perhaps the single most efficient force by which truly agitational political energy in American life becomes overwhelmed by inertia and subordinated to the establishment’s own political machinery.

A good example of how the inertia and pacifying machine of the Democratic Party operates is observable in two recent protests movements: the No Kings protests and anti-ICE uprisings in Los Angeles. Because these movements are qualitatively different in terms of strategy, optics, and messaging, the appropriate way to analyze them is to locate the class basis from which they both emerge. The anti-ICE protests emerged from some of the poorest working class neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and the tactics they deployed against the police (like burning, looting, and effacing property) recall the Rodney King riots of 1992, which Mike Davis referred to as the “first postmodern bread riot.”1 The No Kings protests, on the other hand, are a largely middle class movement sponsored by over 200 civil society nonprofits from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to MoveOn.org, all of which are deeply ensconced in the Democratic Party. These two movements should not be seen as separate; they are interrelated but also antagonistic to one another. The best way to clarify the distinction between them is to invoke what the late poet and communist thinker Joshua Clover once called the “split” that occurs in any riot—between a “practical” side that aims for maximal agitation (and thus a true overcoming of ICE as a repressive