Pomo Problems

There were multiple avenues a generation ago for getting out the truths that lately seem to be available only through right-wing conspiracy theories. Remember all your options?

In particular, there were left-wing conspiracy theories (make George W. Bush the bad guy and you could say almost anything back in the mid-00s, and major bookstores would even give you a lot of display-table space), hip-hop (you could swear, issue warnings about the Illuminati, or even mention crime statistics and no one batted an eye as long as you were the proper hue or had friends who were), the academy (there was a time when if you made your historical analysis detailed enough you didn’t necessarily have to draw conclusions that got Democrats or European socialists reelected, whereas college professors are now nearly 100 percent non-Republican but more eager than ever to lecture you about “diversity”), and postmodernism (if your aesthetic/political philosophy is built around noticing strange contradictions, you were bound to deviate at least occasionally from what the establishment considered the proper narrative).

That recently, you could’ve publicly taken note of a prominent rapper like Sean Combs (a.k.a. Puff Daddy a.k.a. P Diddy) being arrested—not for having a song on the soundtrack of the most-hated of all Godzilla movies but for orgies that may have involved sex trafficking and drug use by minors, maybe even a then-teenage Justin Bieber—and could even have noted the arrest being near-simultaneous with the feds raiding the homes of officials associated with the black-but-also-law-and-order mayor of Combs’ home city of New York, maybe even mention the simultaneous scrubbing of the social media accounts of Usher and Pink (the latter of whom memorably groped a visibly uncomfortable Bieber onstage once), and instead of telling you that you should be silenced for spreading “misinformation” (and possible racism), back then people would’ve chuckled approvingly and suggested you turn it all into a first draft for your Boondocks script (that animated comedy, in retrospect plainly one of the most prescient TV shows of all time, returned repeatedly to the theme of rich, secretly-gay rappers trying to collect child apprentices at their mansions).

I genuinely think it’s only a coincidence, though, that a couple of people I know who were considering being extras in that terrible 1997 Godzilla movie for which Combs contributed a soundtrack song were a professional sex-advice lecturer and a black former Libertarian mayoral candidate.

Everything good and truthful eventually gets condemned by establishment left-liberals as right-wing, and I do mean everything. So, it’s no surprise that postmodernism—social and philosophical observations like those of the Marxist literary theory professor and author Fredric Jameson, who passed away this week, about the disjointed, jarring, and artificial nature of the contemporary world—has been looked upon suspiciously by many academic leftists as a covertly conservative philosophy, even with writers like Jameson strenuously signaling their hatred of markets and bourgeois society through subtitles containing phrases such as “late capitalism” (the decay never gets blamed on “late leftism”).

Postmodernism, whether in the form of a mostly-coherent essay or an annoying video installation in an art museum, tends to leave things messy, and no dedicated party hack or P.R. professional wants to leave room for unpredictability or mixed messages. Gotta get those votes, TV ratings, or rally attendees in on time. Sarcasm or irony might be an indication that you’re not fully onboard with whatever the current crusade is, and we can’t have that. (No jokes at this crucial juncture, please, about sociopathic Kamala Harris leaving an innocent man in jail when she was California attorney general because he didn’t file his paperwork on time! There’s a campaign to finish, and like every presidential campaign, this one’s the most important in history!)

But the real world keeps offering up evidence of its insanity and decadence not merely “on both sides” but in ways that make it obvious you’d go insane just by trying tidily to tote up which political faction should be most embarrassed by each new revelation.

Surely, something like the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina declaring himself a “black Nazi” and pro-trans sex fetishist online, sincerely or not, sends a message more suited to comedic collage than to a confident, straightforward, party-line “Republicans are fascists—even the black ones!” bumper sticker. One state to the south, that black academic and anti-racist author condemning conservative Rep. Nancy Mace as a racist in public while sending her flirty messages in private should raise at least as many confusing questions in the mind of a standard political partisan as do the texts between reporter Olivia Nuzzi and RFK.

By all means, abandon neat political meta-narratives if you’re an academic or a highbrow leftist, and abandon harmonious traditional melodies if you’re a rapper, but don’t follow up by hypocritically telling me you still know how everyone should vote. Your overconfidence, not just the right’s, helped create this mess.

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey