The politicization process in the last two decades cannot be understated. In the incessant analysis of current paradigms like identity politics and the so-called culture wars, there remains an underlying condition around how contemporary politics have transformed—one that masquerades as cultural, but that is thoroughly political.
A social diagnosis—one that observes the collapse of political and cultural meaning, not in its presentation as an ideological battle, but in the shape of media and authority—can be useful. Here, we can look at the history of individual-political dynamics, messaging, mediums, and postmodern and neoliberal critique—particularly Jean Baudrillard’s observations on hyperreality, and the idea of America itself—to find what is really shaping the present, when the culture wars end, and where that leaves us.
In the 1960s, the personal is political became a prevailing concept through second-wave feminism and student movements, serving a time when political activism became actionable and novel. This marked a crucial turning point in how public political identities began to be defined, perceived, and more importantly, the evolving forces at work between individuals and political institutions.
Throughout the 20th century, as political activism grew, so did the reassertion that systems were compromised by corruption and power concentration by private and corporate interests. This disillusionment solidified into cynicism, as people came to an understanding that their political engagement—focused on cultural battles like civil rights and anti-war movements—felt performative rather than truly transformative. The real engines of change appear to be laid in legislative and economic mechanisms, arenas in which most individuals had little to no literacy, affluence, or patience to engage in. Yet, in this realization, the masses didn’t turn to proficiency—instead, they found themselves trapped in being revolutionary.
Gilles Deleuze informed on these mechanics when reflecting on May ‘68, another landmark in civil protests that deeply re-shaped modern attitudes towards politics, radical culture, labor and activism. When discussing how and why people become revolutionary—or get stuck in the process—he noted that the left’s interest in human rights and justice was merely abstract. The real engagement, he argued, lay in the existence of the law itself, with the true fight centered in jurisprudence.
It’s important to note that not only attempts to work through institutions have exhibited their own failures, they also support arguments that dissent is often tolerated by systems only to be defused through commodification and softening (as famously put by Herbert Marcuse). However, this again highlights a cycle of depoliticization or politicization—one increasingly fixated on ideological positioning rather than the frightening nuance of realities, fostering not ignorance, but arrogance or detachment.
Powerlessness and impunity in the legislative and economic gave way to a new form of apoliticism throughout the 90s and 00s. Simply put, a large segment of the population became disengaged from elections, news cycles, party commitments, and national or global processes. In a way, this distancing was also an expression of incredulity.
However, in the last two decades, political detachment—in an increasingly volatile and highly participatory climate—has come to be seen as a negative trait. Anything resembling apoliticism or even centrism has become synonymous with laziness, irresponsibility, juvenility, or privilege. The mere suggestion of the importance of such alternatives, like the infamous rise of the Reform Party within the bipartisan structure of the U.S. during the 90s, not only emerged from this detachment but also helped solidify it—simultaneously exciting, laughable, and doomed to inevitable implosion—its collapse almost serving as proof of futility.
Now, the present state centered on politicization, has seemed to drag the public back into performative behavior around culture—morality, identity, virtue—and away from the core structures of power: inequality, liability, lobbying. What’s more, while our condition beyond postmodernism supposes a breeding ground for the ultra-niche and atomized, ideas are almost obligated to reduce themselves to dominant cultural narratives in the end.
Still, what needs to be underlined is how and why people were able to become political again. When the public made their distrust in institutions known—the political establishment responded.
Throughout the end of the last century, the masses’ growing cynicism extended far beyond politics. The realization that institutions were deeply compromised was no longer limited to the government. The narratives of scientific truth (expanded on by the delegitimation process of grand-narratives by Jean-Francois Lyotard) now seemed tainted by corporate interests and hidden agendas. The CIA openly engaged in domestic drug experimentation, political destabilization (both abroad and domestically), and cultural influence through perceived radical personalities. These realities, once dismissed as fringe paranoia, were increasingly confirmed—even by the institutions themselves. Music as one of the most accessible art forms, once a counter-cultural and populist tool, was increasingly seen as exploitative, controlling artists and manufacturing trends rather than reflecting genuine artistic movements. Hollywood, long viewed as an aspirational dream factory, was exposed as a machine of systemic abuse. Institution and culture inevitably becoming one in the same.
Baudrillard’s observations on American society paints this picture by positioning it as a zero degree for modernity, commenting on the world’s conflicted and constant reference to it—a nation that mystifies and often is treated as a real-time window into current affairs. In discussing American criticism, he highlights this self-admission of deeply failed systems, stating: “When they ask with such seriousness why other peoples detest them, we would be wrong to smile, for it is this same self-examination which makes possible both the various ‘Watergates’ and the unrelenting exposure of corruption and their own society’s faults in the cinema and the media, a freedom we might envy them, we who are the truly hypocritical societies, keeping our individual and public affairs concealed beneath the bourgeois affectations of secrecy and respectability.”
The essence of this vulgarity and its allure shows how shamelessness came to be accepted—and, furthermore, offers a way to conceal it. When this generalized distrust became so widespread that political institutions, which had historically relied on covert influence tactics, faced a dilemma: how to keep shaping perception when traditional methods of propaganda and manipulation had become obvious, outdated, or ineffective. All the while, the public became sufficiently “educated” in recognizing traditional manipulations, fostering an illusion of immunity, while in the open a new form of propaganda was emerging.
By the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, millennials introduced their own cultural declaration—a supposed morality-based liberation that, in the same breath, condemned taboo, celebrated vulnerability, and experienced their own indulgence shamefully. This declaration not only centered ethics at its core but also directly tied it to individuals political personalities.
Baudrillard captures this dynamic, stating: “Politics frees itself in the spectacle, in the all-out advertising effect; sexuality frees itself in all its anomalies and perversions (including the refusal of sexuality, the latest fad, which is itself only a supercooling effect of sexual liberation); mores, customs, the body, and language free themselves in the ever quickening round of fashion. The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls. This is practical liberation whether we like it or not, whether or not we deplore its wastefulness and its obscenity.”
By the mid 2010s and the beginning of the 2020s, the natural degradation of ideologies like ‘woke’ (now a co-opted umbrella term used by the right to label all left-leaning politics) and identity politics in the public eye—having almost suddenly become part of the status quo—not through a revolutionary dismantling of institutions, or accountability of it’s perpetrators, but rather through capitalist commodification (major corporations incorporating LGBT+ flags into cleaning products, endless discussion of the incorporation and representation of peoples in Disney franchisement)—almost demanded a new political character from the opposition. Some would argue that this cultural thesis and antithesis playing out was not only inevitable but actively facilitated by propaganda.
The rise of the alt-right was not merely conservative in a retrograde sense but became politically engaged precisely due to its perceived awareness of contemporary political manipulations—primarily through internet-based narratives. (As Baudrillard argues that the United States represented a space where modernity materialized, we could say that the internet is the space of postmodernity.) However, as this cycle completed itself, the right too came to see itself as immune to propaganda in its rejection of “legacy media”, failing to recognize that propaganda had simply shifted to a different medium. The distributors were no longer political parties, politicians, or mainstream media—but individuals themselves. The finger was pointed not at systemic failure or commodification, but at culture itself.
Some speculate on the links between the failure of Occupy Wall Street—perhaps one of the last mainstream collective demonstrations based on economics—and the rise of identity politics, though (of course) conspiracy theories abound. However, what can be said is this again highlights the shortcomings of the left, where the ability to manifest within culture comes easy, but declines within the economical. Wendy Brown’s work magnifies this bleeding between ideology and commodity by linking neoliberalism to the way politics and social movements are treated as marketplaces for market-ready individuals. Identity politics as self-marketing, corporate sponsorship of social causes, and ethical consumption instead of structural change. Furthermore, she argues, disillusionment with politics helps breed conspiracy theories and reactionary populism.
While there is much conversation today around media literacy and alternative media, there is little focus—once again, in McLuhanesque terms—on the medium itself. Perhaps the most brash example of propaganda today is the meme. This format—built on repetition and degradation—was introduced to the web almost as a vox populi, a vehicle for irreverence, absurdism, and the public’s unfiltered views.
The most notable case of meme weaponization is the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The Russian organization engaged in government-backed propaganda through the use of fake accounts across social media, manipulating meme pages to spread inflammatory political content—exploiting identity politics, religion, race—with the goal of increasing societal divisions and influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Not only is this event seemingly disregarded, it is also treated as a one-off occurrence. An incident that demanded nothing but a week’s outrage. Meanwhile, social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which rely on short-form videos, have been shown to adjust their algorithms to inevitably push political content under the guise of personalization, with no reference to actual user behaviour—much like Facebook’s 2018 shift to consciously prioritize emotionally charged content, particularly political posts, to maximize engagement and ad revenue.
Sponsored propaganda is woven into the most routine, mundane, and subconscious aspects of our daily lives. This content is not only created by organizations like the IRA (and now institutions following in their footsteps) but is now amplified by a vast network of influencers serving as often-unaware economically and politically motivated replicators, making it appear as though these shifts in public opinion and behavior—from the rise of red-pill ideology to gambling culture— are purely organic, popular expression.
Not only has this completely eroded the possibility of contemporary media literacy, but the casual passivity of hyper-postmodernism often enables a constant fluidity between moral restriction, repression, narcissism, cruelty, anti-intellectualism, humor, detachment, liberation, and irreproachability. Adding to this, our alarming proximity to Dead Internet Theory—the belief that the web is rapidly becoming dominated by AI-generated content and bots while human activity diminishes—creates the perfect conditions for unprecedented propaganda vehicles.
In this desolation of culture itself, some would argue that the right has often identified culture as a means to distribute propaganda—turning it against itself. However, while that may be true, the constant degradation of the cultural commons, its expressions, and its true impact on individuals is also sustained by the left’s own self-assurance and permissiveness, often wrongly interpreted as radical acceptance or anti-elitism.
Worth mentioning in the context of this accelerated process of mediums is Yanis Varoufakis’s concept of techno-feudalism—the end of capitalism and the introduction of a feudal order ruled by the tech industry. Instead of competing or producing, digital landlords extract rent from users, businesses, and workers, while the users themselves become the primary producers of data and content. “Cloud capital,” as he calls it, not only establishes a new economic structure that concentrates power in the producers of often unregulated technology, but also ensures that individuals maintain farcical jobs and that the environments of communication continuously degrade themselves.
Today, it’s not difficult to find examples of this. One of the most fascinating grifts hides behind the guise of standard influencer content: women sharing aspirational life experiences, personal struggles, and self-improvement journeys. The video, audio and editing are AI-generated, engineered to drive affiliate sales. Some would argue that AI is still recognizable, but the issue is not only that it’s becoming catastrophically difficult to distinguish (As Google’s Veo 3 has shown)—questions of regulation and proper use are barely asked by those developing the technology, while product updates arrive daily. It all bleeds into physical reality in a fast-paced social media carousel.
Most importantly, this kind of content isn’t being produced by some covert organization, some shadowy “them.” Instead, it’s individuals working within this Americanized model—an economy obsessed with efficiency, self-help grifts, money worship, gambling, humiliation, and lifestyle indoctrination.
These are concepts that resonate with Byung-Chul Han’s observations on Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society, which has been extinguished by an achievement society—where individuals exploit themselves under the pretense of self-development, “liberated” to do anything yet self-imposing repression. An idea that also fits the contemporary gig-economy labor market, whose premise sells complete ownership of one’s job, tools, and time, yet often results in an even more restrictive form of subjugation.
And where does cultural opinion get exploited in this space now saturated with propaganda and marketing, where commerce and politics have become indistinguishable from lifestyle and society? It’s shaped by the new faces of PR and public persona.
You’ll stumble upon a fast-paced, heavily edited video claiming Taylor Swift is a pedophile. It opens with unflattering images, followed by a montage of images of her with a series of men, each highlighting their age gap. If—and only if—you have enough lucidity in a single second of hesitation, you might pause instead of affirming and reproducing, catching the next series of pulsing lights and sounds. You’ll notice blatant gaps in the information presented and question its accuracy.
Maybe you already hate this person. Maybe you already love them. You don’t know enough about them, but when you discuss culture, you must have an opinion. Is this a cultural reaction? Is it founded or unfounded? Who made this? A content creator, an influencer, a meme page, a bot? In many cases, it’s deliberately designed to smear—just another piece of algorithm-driven content, appearing “randomly” in the endless scroll.
The PR industry managed the likability of entertainment stars—their job was to perform damage control. It was about public personas and reputation engineering. Now, post-MeToo at the height of an inverted idea of “cancel culture”, PR has adopted a similar but deeply corrupted enterprise.
In December 2024, the New York Times published an article, “We Can Bury Anyone: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” revealing how the director and lead actor of It Ends With Us, Justin Baldoni hired a PR firm to preemptively discredit actress Blake Lively in case she made allegations of repeated physical and sexually inappropriate behavior. This was the same firm that represented Johnny Depp during his media spectacle of a trial against Amber Heard. Their objective was to “bury” Lively through an orchestrated smear campaign. By crafting a narrative across online platforms, they successfully amplified pro-Justin, anti-Lively sentiment before the accusations were made public. The cynical tone within their internal emails and messages presents, once again, how shameless and absurd modern propaganda has become. More importantly, it highlights how the shifting political climate has co-opted right-wing media tactics to manufacture the perfect victims, as the story of a woman alleging abuse is dismissed as aesthetically overplayed, “woke”, a money grab.
Today, this isn’t just about liking or disliking a celebrity, or even forming an opinion on a public figure. It’s about the constant flood of strategically designed messaging—meant to distract, confuse, and create overwhelming chaos (a tactic explicitly used by the Trump campaign)—and how this shapes perception.
The infiltration is subtle but complete; people exist in a miasma of online content, where media efficiency and moral instincts are forced to keep pace, while ideology is offered as a mantra. Not even to be thought of, but repeated, as conscious reflection is wasteful and a restriction to one’s own identity and mental fortitude. It’s repression. As any number of internet-based celebrities would preach, the game is about a unquestionability, zero admission of defeat, perfectly catered aesthetics, the perpetual plundering of an audience.
The results of this sophisticated system of propaganda—where worldviews are packaged as life optimization—are, of course, simply new forms of conditioning.
The right’s narrative of escaping the ‘Matrix’, the left’s addiction to moral and intellectual superiority, the pseudo-intellectual threads on X, the political commentators on TikTok and YouTube—all revolve around a grotesque version of Guy Debord’s spectacle: a world of mediated representations, casual outrage, and endless dissertation. Politics itself becomes nothing more than an ideological commodity—one that offers some the feeling of morality, others the feeling of cultural belonging, others the feeling of adulthood, others the feeling of revolution, others the feeling of intellectualism, and others the promise of power.
In this eternal return to America, its political culture has spread across the world. Countries like France, Germany, Mexico, and Argentina reflect this dynamic—some of their political inclinations align, while others are perfectly inverted yet seamlessly fitted. They refract.
Political ambitions and policies discussed by the public are mantriatic and callous. Otherwise uninterested, unassuming people become exhorting militants, their energy directed not at institutions but at their own families, friends, and co-workers. The world is always on the brink of collapse. Democracy is perpetually dying, and the next political movement is the one that will save us.
Today, the most appalling realities are met with trivial reactions. Trump casually threatens foreign invasion and annexation, painting the invaded nations as aggressors. Christian theocracy is embraced by those who claim to focus on facts. Populist America, outraged by the idea of an elite pushing “liberal” propaganda instead of addressing inequality, endorses billionaires. Elon Musk cosplays as a Nazi, while building his own dogmatization machine under the guise of free speech.
The “moral” right appropriates traditional leftist hallmarks, like the drive to push what is considered taboo and the pursuit of a popular revolution (as seen, for example, in the events of January 6th). This is a phenomenon Slavoj Žižek attributes to the final consequences of the tragedy of liberation from May ’68, highlighting Jacques Lacan’s lesson to the 1968 students: that there is nothing subversive about losing the sense of shame.
The “free thinkers” of alternative media like Joe Rogan seemingly only needed the push from a global pandemic and a bit of public scrutiny to switch from “curious” and “open” to deeply entrenched in their own misguided self-protection and reproduction through slightly re-calibrated archetypes of his conspiratorial fears. The masters of manipulation, immorality and obfuscation are Bill Gates and Joe Biden, not honest brokers like his guests Peter Thiel and the newly re-branded and politically re-oriented Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates wants to implant surveillance chips, Elon Musk’s Neuralink is cool and exciting. La propagande incarnée. The public acts against its own interests as routine.
Baudrillard writes, “Americans believe in facts, but not in facticity. They do not know that facts are factitious, as their name suggests. It is in this belief in facts, in the total credibility of what is done or seen, […] Americans are a true Utopian society, in their religion of the fait accompli, in the naivety of their deductions, in their ignorance of the evil genius of things.”
Perhaps most interesting here is the story of Peter Thiel’s direct family ties to Nazism, South African apartheid exploitation, the so-called PayPal Mafia, and his extensive history of U.S. government-funded contracts. A recent example company, Palantir, using AI to develop warfare systems, currently used to aid Israel’s attacks against Palestine, leveraging mass surveillance—obtained through the NSA—for intelligence. Accompanying, continued financing of politicians like JD Vance and Donald Trump.
Today, conservative voters not only call back to “traditional” values but almost primitive ones, in a silent admission of future ecological disaster as inescapable and the cultural complexities of issues hyper-postmodernism as incomprehensible. This restoration of the past echoes Baudrillard’s claim of the U.S. as a “realized utopia”. He writes “Octavio Paz is right when he argues that America was created in the hope of escaping from history, of building a Utopia sheltered from history, and that it has in part succeeded in that project, a project it is still pursuing today.”
Left leaning ideologies can’t help but go back to pathos, academic voids and performance, in a veiled concession of their complete incompetency of dealing with the darkest impulses of humanity. Politicians today no longer strategize—they become soundboards for mantriatic reality. They don’t debate; they coach public guerrillas. They no longer work for your vote; you work for them.
Many theorize about the fall of the United States—a place with no past or founding truth—through the lens of its ever-deepening social divisions. Within this reading, Baudrillard’s claim that “America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved” becomes particularly relevant.
The cyclical nature of tragedy and farce populates today’s unattainable progression, an impossible revolution. Deleuze, when explaining his disinterest in joining the French Communist Party, recalls watching “an entire generation of communists” become trapped in endless meetings and signature-gathering—intellectuals locked in a cycle of analyzing the failures of revolution while endlessly revising its tragedies. A prolonged meditation on its failures. A state of confusion that ultimately prevents revolution itself, distracting people with revisionism.
In today’s context, it’s painful to ironically point out just how stuck the left seems to be in a “state of being revolutionary”. It remains excessively focused on the culture, the pointing out of immorality and the dream of liberation. Here we can look at Baudrillard’s assertion that liberation inevitably leads to a state of indefinition: “It always happens the same way: once freed, you are forced to ask yourself who you are.”
Naturally, the current shift in political ideology, emerging as a reaction to the last great mass consensus of thought in the late 2000s and early 2010s, demanded an antithesis. As the far-right consolidates today, a new synthesis is already taking shape—an opposition forming once again. However, despite younger generations becoming increasingly aware of their own radicalization and seeking to deconstruct their experiences online, the real concern lies in the velocity of these ideological shifts, the speed at which the pendulum swings. Not to mention, of course, the tragedy of consciousness and repetition.
It might just be that this current political establishment won’t last—perhaps even shorter than expected, given how quickly the “cultural” devours perception and opinion. But even if we soon find ourselves in another oscillation, what is troubling is that while some might feel more comfortable with that ideological shift, we could just be easing into a new propaganda. Like touching a live wire and forgetting the shock, if politics and culture reorganize toward the left, it may simply serve as an excuse for the opposition to go dormant again.
A perceived change through the very mediums we indulge in, expressed in ready-made and within a language that feels new, novel, even counter-cultural—yet when the aesthetics are lifted, inequality, jurisprudence, and power concentration will remain the same.
The “culture wars” might end, but culture has been changed irreversibly by politicization. Shamelessness not only seems to normalize viciousness, but the absurd hopelessness from those who want to fight it. It seems like the cause of our continuously forecasted end can be reduced to our species inability to recognize the repetition and parody beneath the mediums our narratives are presented in. A delusion of immunity. In the wake of a cultural collapse, what lingers?
In 1981’s My Dinner with André, André Gregory describes a hopeless world—New York as a model for a new kind of concentration camp, where the inmates have built the camp themselves, living in a schizophrenic state, both guards and prisoners at once. And even if escape were possible, where would one go? He argues that we are returning to a savage, lawless, terrifying period, yet almost in the same breath, he brings up the Findhorn people—a group that believes pockets of light are forming in different parts of the world, invisible planets within this planet, places to refuel for whatever it is we are meant to do on Earth itself. These centers, he says, are emerging everywhere—attempts at creating a new kind of monastery, an underground, a reserve, islands of safety, where history can be remembered, where the human being can continue to function, preserving itself through a dark age.
One wonders if our very desire to resolve our inconceivable future is just that—an attempt to preserve a version of the human being that no longer is, or can exist. When what looms closest to us is not a physical extinction, but a cultural one.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Crónicas de América, trans. Joaquín Jordá (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000).
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).
Deleuze, Gilles. L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, dir. Pierre-André Boutang, with Claire Parnet (Paris: Editions Montparnasse, 1996). [Documentary]
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979).
Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (London: Bodley Head, 2023).