Trump, Gen Z, & Foucault

Political Interlude

1.

Three weeks into Trump’s second term, I’d like to post a reminder that this didn’t have to happen.

Biden could have been the “bridge” president he said he’d be and chose not to run for reelection—like a hell of a lot of the people who voted for him in 2020 had expected him to do. After the incumbent bombed a televised debate where he actually made Trump seem lucid and made the Democrats look like a pack of liars (remember them swearing up and down that the octogenarian Biden wasn’t slipping, not even a little bit?), the party could have held a mini-primary during or before their convention instead of defaulting to a candidate so patently flawed that she was one of the first to drop out in 2020.

“How’s that working out now?” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank recently asked pro-Palestinian voters who either didn’t vote for Harris or did vote for Trump.

First off: You don’t get to speak about the sacrosanctity of democracy from one side of your mouth while saying “the voters failed us” out of the other. I’m sorry, but that’s not how it works—not even when the voters pull the lever for an authoritarian dumbass. (If we want to reassess the advisability of giving any & every uninformed yahoo with free time on a Tuesday a say in selecting the person who commands the United States’ military and manages its foreign policy, that’s a separate conversation.)

Secondly: if Harris and her team actually thought they needed to win Dearborn, Michigan, they would have made some effort to get her recognized as being more interested in stopping the bloodshed in Gaza than Donald fucking Trump. That’s on them.

If the average voter doesn’t think the Democrats’ concerns are in alignment with their own interests, I’m sorry—but that’s on the Democrats. I don’t like the popularity contest spectacle of American politics any more than you do, but the Democrats knew what game they were playing, and they played it terribly.

My wife, who voted for Harris, continues to espouse the truism that every four years, the United States gets exactly the president it deserves. And that’s the beauty of democracy, isn’t it?

2.

I recently observed a message board conversation about the Democrats’ electoral failure, and the thread turned to generational attitudes towards neoliberal economics. A Gen Xer commented that by and large, the Boomer generation believed in what the likes of Reagan and Thatcher were selling, while his own his cohort smelled bullshit. They could shout about it until they were blue in the face, but it didn’t make a difference. By the time they were all old enough to vote, he said, it was a given that they’d always be outnumbered by their elders as a bloc. On election day, their parents and grandparents invariably presented them with a field of possible candidates representing either Blue Reaganism or Red Reaganism at any given level of government, and the result was the political apathy and irony for which Gen X gained a reputation.

“It never seemed relevant if we believed in anything,” he said—so a lot of them gave up on believing in shit.

I’ve been teaching an English Composition 101 class to college freshman these last several months, and even though I’m working with a very limited sample, I’m getting the impression that Gen Z feels the same way.

The morning after Trump was elected, the university’s English department was firing off emails at itself. Heartbroken this, can’t believe that, lost all hope for the country, etc. America despises strong women of color, resist, self-care, stay strong, and so on.¹ The department head endorsed the idea of letting instructors take some time to open the floor for discussion about the election so that our hurt, confused, and scared students could have forum to process and express their feelings about the disaster. It seemed like a good way to eat up half an hour.

My overture to the class ran along the lines of: “So—the election happened, and I’m guessing a lot of people are shocked by the outcome. I’m not sure where you’re at this morning, so if you want, we can take some time to talk about it. I’ll open the floor to discussion, and we can all have a chance to say what’s on our minds.”

I put a QR code up on the projector, and students were taken to an online poll when they scanned it. “Do we want to talk about the election?” it asked. (I didn’t want to take a vote by a show of hands, since students tend to decide to put their hands up or down on the basis of what the majority seems to be doing.) The possible responses were: Yes, No, and Don’t Care.

67 percent of the class voted for Don’t Care. 23 percent voted Yes, 10 percent voted No.

When I told my mother about it later on, she was appalled. My supervisor was a little startled when I mentioned it to her.

I can’t say I was too surprised.

I know this is completely anecdotal: we’re talking about a single sample of twenty-six eighteen-year-olds taking a required course at a very large, middish-tier university. Still—I suspect that if I asked group of eighteen-year-old Millennial college students if they had anything they wanted to get off their chests the day after Bush won reelection in 2004, substantially more of them would have said yes. But that was a different time, and the Millennials were—well, what can we say about my cohort?

We were such a damnably earnest and optimistic bunch, weren’t we?

In another totally unscientific way, I’d like to try to account for why our outlook was so much rosier than either Gen X’s or Gen Z’s:

I. As I’ve said before, Millennials born before 1990 were sensible of the End of History ambiance of the 1990s and perhaps of the Big Boom Mood of the 1980s. Even if we didn’t have anything else to compare it to, and even though we were occasionally inundated with anxious narratives about social decay, exposed to cynical and ironic media products attuned to Gen Xers, and catching whiffs of the 1999 = 666 the antichrist is coming the new world order is about to come crashing down!! noise from right-wing lunatics (this stuff oozed into the mainstream more than you’d think), the overall vibe to which we were acclimated during our formative years was, on the whole, quite positive.

II. We lived through 9/11, the last time in living memory when Americans experienced a palpable sense of unity. 9/12 was a great big national hugbox. “Gen X Irony, Cynicism, May Be Permanently Obsolete,” The Onion declared in a not-really satirical headline. Yes, we were all scared, and we don’t need to get into how quickly and effectively the war hawks and functionaries of the national security apparatus took advantage of everyone’s jangled nerves—but Millennials got to live through a moment where everyone was hugging and saying “we’re in this together” in spite of their differences, and I do think that an atmosphere where earnestness wasn’t so reflexively mocked made an impression on the cohort’s collective psyche.

III. I don’t want to overstate the Millennial bracket’s support for Barack Obama in the 2008 election—but nearly twice as many of us voted for him over McCain. Those of us who’d cast our votes for him believed we were instrumental in the candidate’s historic victory. In the moment, we felt heard. We felt we’d decisively repudiated the intolerant, warmongering, greedy, bible-humping Old White Men milieu of George W. Bush’s GOP and set the nation back on the right track by electing a young, visionary president who clearly wasn’t a foundation-hatched, smooth-talking Harvard lawyer with vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics.

IV. We were the first internet generation. This is the big one.

As far as I’m concerned, I qualify as an older member of Gen Y instead of a younger member of Gen X by dint of being born late enough to go online as a pre-teen. By the time I was fourteen, I could talk to my crush via instant message, look up video game tips on GameFAQs, and participate in message board conversations. Most of my extended peer group was on LiveJournal during my junior and senior years of high school, as were their younger siblings.

The early internet was to the Millennial psyche what the frontier was to the early United States. I don’t want to tax this metaphor too strenuously, but going online and participating in a new form of culture within virtual spaces we often had a direct role in creating, building up, and connecting tended to imbue young netizens with what frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner called the “buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”² The diffuse, decentralized, open-source internet was a place where it seemed easy to get involved, be seen, and make things happen—to be a Big Fish in a Small Pond. Just by being an active member of a message board dedicated to a niche pop-cultural phenomenon, nestled in its own corner of cyberspace, one could luxuriate in a sense of both communal warmth and personal efficacy.³

Possibility and novelty defined the early internet. Being involved in web culture was to be seen making an impact in a completely new way, one that dazzled and impressed the social organism. Simply by using the new media, we were told, we were revolutionaries. The olds seemed like they were at a loss every time the internet acted as the vector for an unusual “viral” trend, or drank the milkshake of some slow-footed and complacent twentieth-century institution. Even if all we were doing was posting sketches of Rozen Maiden characters on DeviantArt, agonizing over who to select to be among our Top 8 friends on MySpace, or punching out catty screeds in the comments section of Gawker, it was difficult not to feel like we were contributing to a collective, historically progressive happening.

This is the sort of thing that leaves a deep impression upon one’s habits and perspectives.

Occupy Wall Street was the tragedy of a generation that had internalized the internet’s rules for How To Make A Difference and imagined they’d work when put into practice out in meatspace. Occupy did politics precisely how the virtual arena of its Millennial protagonists’ political and social awakening had taught them, with predictable consequences.⁴ Not to repeat myself, but we see the abject failure of Generation Y as a political cohort encapsulated in the meteoric rise and whimpering fall of the Occupy movement. Not that we wouldn’t ever get our hopes up again after that—but our window of opportunity had shut. The moment was over. The spring of 2020 demonstrated how deeply the elite had internalized the lessons of Occupy—and how little any of us had learned.

In late 2023 and early 2024, I was impressed by the discipline on display in certain contingents of the Gen Z college students protesting Israel’s atrocious war in Gaza. But as the war dragged on, it must have become clear to them that Biden and Blinken would never be convinced to stop enabling Israel’s murderous land grab. The presidential contest between Harris and Trump presented them with the choice between one candidate who almost definitely wouldn’t change America’s policies vis-à-vis letting Israel kill, torture, and dispossess whichever of its neighbors it wanted, whenever it wanted, and another candidate who would most likely take them in an even worse direction (but whose puerile vanity might compel him to spite Netanyahu).

Their protests were ineffectual. The political apparatus waved them off.

And I think this sums up the lesson that my eighteen-year-old students have been passively absorbing from the public sphere since coming into adolescence and becoming aware of events in the world. They are not going to be listened to. Not seriously—except for where purposes of advertising are concerned.

And unlike the Generation Y bracket—who were born during the last of the United States’ best decades, hugged it out after 9/11, witnessed the election of Barack Obama when his messianic charisma was at its peak, and experienced of the digital revolution at a point when its emancipatory promises seemed credible—I don’t think Generation Z has much experience with any long-term moods of justifiable optimism.

Assuming the students who took my poll were all born in 2006, what have they known?

By the time they could coherently speak, they were living in a post-financial collapse world; they’ve had no experience of any American economy but one defined by enshittification and rot. They were ten years old the first time Trump was elected president. They stayed at home and “learned” in Zoom classrooms during the second half of their year in the eighth grade, and for some or most of their first year of high school. They witnessed the Capitol riots of January 2021. For most of their sentient lives, geriatric presidents suffering from senility and/or outright derangement have occupied the top position in the United States’ political hierarchy, and the legislature has been stubbornly dominated by lawmakers old enough to be their grandparents. For the last two decades they’ve absorbed the same dismal climate change reports as us, and unlike older Millennials, they’ve never seen the grown-ups make a somewhat believable pretense of acting like they’re doing something or even planning to do something about it.

Moreover, they were never able to experience the “frontier” iteration of the internet. This is pure speculation, but I suspect it’s significant that for them, cyberspace and social media have been as much a banal fixture of life as television was to my generation. Unlike us, they’ve probably never seen much cause to ascribe to any of it the possibility of fostering public enlightenment, more egalitarian power structures, and understanding between groups by way of a good-faith exchange of perspectives. By the time they arrived, the whole space was already built up, corporatized, professionalized, hierarchized, and mean—not to mention inescapable.⁵ It was just another space where, although it invited participation, it was exceedingly difficult for most people to make a difference in any appreciable way.

Given all of this, I can easily imagine myself being an eighteen-year-old in 2024 who regarded Trump’s victory with little more than a shrug. It’d probably just be par for the only course I’d ever known.

3.

I didn’t get to plan the curriculum for the class I’m teaching. (That’s definitely for the best.) But it mostly consists of articles on what we could call “social justice” topics published in the last fifteen years—and a single chapter from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

It’s always struck me as strange that the progressive liberals who nest in university humanities departments should have such a predilection for Foucault. One Elliot Swain spells out how Foucault’s thought is not only fundamentally conservative (even reactionary), but profoundly defeatist:

Going back to the defeatism point, in one of his most famous declarations, in the History of Sexuality, he says that since oppression…and resistance are both part of the same back-and-forth discourse of ideas, well, resistance is functionally resigned to oppression and vice versa: they cancel one another out. We are hopelessly caught in a web of ideas over which no agent or group of agents has any control. Resistance is futile. Give up and resign yourself to an unbroken history of misery that’s the fault of nobody and everybody all at once, because we’re all wrapped in the same ideas-web…

Foucault offers us raw material to work with. Lots of it. But his philosophy, even though every post-structuralist from here to Sciences Po will screech upon hearing this, is nothing more than pure, depressive, malignant nihilism…

Now is it any clearer why the actual powers of capital and its major institutional channels much prefer the soothing lullaby of Foucault’s nothingness to being told, by Marx or whomever else, that they’re doing something wrong?

I am aware that some people associate the label “postmodernism” with something like academized insanity and analysis unto absurdity, but it ought to be borne in mind that the milieu of postmodern thinkers (with whom Foucault is often lumped, perhaps undeservedly) would neither have arrived at the conclusions they did nor influenced culture beyond the academy were it not for the material conditions of post-WW2 life in the West.

What I mean is that you could send Jean Baudrillard to the year 1500 to explain his ideas to the leading scholars of Paris, and there’d be a hundred percent chance of him being anathematized and/or declared insane. Nothing like the hyperreality he’s known for theorizing about existed yet. For that matter, he and all the other French theorists would have just been talking to themselves if the circumstances of the late twentieth century hadn’t made them worth listening to. They didn’t create the “postmodern” condition; they described it. Of course by speaking to it, they reified it—but the condition was already there to begin with.

And, like Swain, I think that this gives us some insight as to why Foucault has enjoyed such staying power in academic and pop-intellectual discourse. Mark Fisher mentions Foucault a couple of times in Capitalist Realism, which isn’t surprising—but it is interesting how the cynicism and “reflexive impotence” he observes as definitive traits of the advanced-capitalism worldview create precisely the kind of social and intellectual environment where Foucault’s ideas can seem like gospel truth. There’s no way out and there’s nothing we can do. We’re the depraved victimizers and the blameless victims all at once, and even if we were capable of dreaming of a better world (and we’re not), there’s no point in making an organized effort to bring it into being because all we can do is fail.

Well, whatever—release the symbolic gestures of resistance! Declare pop music empowering! Queer the spaces! Ratio the fascists! Absolve us for the things we buy! Like & repost & donate to our Patreon if you hate tech oligarchs!

How bleak of me. But if I’m optimistic about anything, it’s that the next four years and beyond will be rife with occasions to rise to.

1. There were certainly American voters who, even if they didn’t or couldn’t admit it, decided they weren’t on board with Kamala just on the basis of her being a WOC. That said, my colleagues who believe her electability problems were only skin-deep are kidding themselves.

2. Okay, let’s stretch and read too much into the metaphor. Turner:

But quite as deeply fixed in the pioneer's mind as the ideal of individualism was the ideal of democracy. He had a passionate hatred for aristocracy, monopoly and special privilege; he believed in simplicity, economy and in the rule of the people. It is true that he honored the successful man, and that he strove in all ways to advance himself. But the West was so free and so vast, the barriers to individual achievement were so remote, that the pioneer was hardly conscious that any danger to equality could come from his competition for natural resources. He thought of democracy as in some way the result of our political institutions, and he failed to see that it was primarily the result of the free lands and immense opportunities which surrounded him.

Okay, switch out “competition for natural resources” with something like “competition for attention and engagement,” and I think we’ve got a reasonably fair description of the cyberspace mindset from the early 1990s to the mid 2000s.

3. It’s important to remember that internet spaces became progressively less human-scaled as time went on, and the character of and incentives for participation changed drastically with the careerization of “internet famous” and the implementation of social validation feedback loops via upvote buttons &c. (The human-scaled spaces still exist, but the odor of irrelevance clinging to them can give them the air of a shopping mall with weeds in the parking lot and a couple of empty department stores anchored to it. The culture of profilicity attunes us to this sort of thing.)

4. This isn’t the first time I’ll link to “The Revolution Will Not Be Trending – Hong Kong, Social Media, and The Failure of Attention Politics,” and it won’t be the last.

5. I would provisionally say the web’s frontier period was completely over by 2014. Among other reasons, I feel like that year coincides with the mass-scale resignation to the fact that the meanness that so often characterizes online discourse and interactions was a feature, not a bug, of the new-and-improved public sphere. (Remember McLuhan’s rebuff to readers and fans who imagined his “global village” would be a warm and cozy place: “when people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other.”)