Four Ways to Enjoy the Culture War

Never has the algorithm so disappointed me. Usually Big Brother recognizes what I want: news about friends, highlights from the American League playoff race, and the follies of my envied academic rivals. But one afternoon it went haywire. I saw video after video of the assassination of a clean-cut young man. There was a spraying carotid artery in the style of Quentin Tarantino. Then it showed me a torrent of commentary about the video: It is fake; it was not fake; political violence is always wrong; they caught the guy; they did not catch the guy; it had to be a trans woman; it had to be the Mossad; I didn’t agree with anything he said but . . . ; I don’t care who you are . . . ; political violence is always wrong; he had it coming; he had a wife and two kids; he’s going to make it; he did not make it; political violence is always wrong. These comments about political violence, which read like personal press releases, seemed especially odd.

Why do people post like this on the Internet? To millions of spectators, the cursor beckoned irresistibly. What’s happening? Thousands of identical rumors, identical opinions, and identical private public service announcements flooded social media. What is happening, indeed?

The next day was the anniversary of the attacks of September 11. I remember watching them on television. I remember that everyone was silent. We are different political animals now. Onlookers jeered when Christ hung on the Cross. But the Gospels do not record any punditry.

I wonder what has changed in us during the last twenty-four years. Imagine, if you will, watching a hypothetical assassination of Rush Limbaugh in the early 2000s broadcast on an airport television. You could read different reactions on the faces around you. Expressions would reveal who knew the conservative media celebrity and who didn’t. Raised eyebrows and the trace of a knowing smirk—“Well . . .”—would betray the man who despised Rush as a loudmouth bigot. Those who loved him for his humor and common sense would be crestfallen. What I cannot imagine is the airport lounge erupting into chatter, wild speculations, and carefully calibrated reaction statements. Maybe someone would say, “Oh God.”

Walking around the campus of my university in the days that followed the assassination, I heard students repeating word for word the same clichés that had been reflexively posted on X in its immediate aftermath. “I don’t agree with everything he said, but . . . ,” then usually, “political violence is always wrong.” I puzzled over what that might mean. I taught my class that Machiavelli thought the terrifying riots during the early republican period made Rome free and powerful. Portraits of heroes of the American Revolutionary War hang on the walls of the classroom. I reviewed page proofs of my forthcoming article on how Saint Thomas Aquinas, Juan de Mariana, and Francisco Suárez defend tyrannicide. I kept thinking about how many distinctions about political violence were being ignored in all the online chatter. I remembered Hannah Arendt’s famous observation that Adolf Eichmann read only newspapers, spoke only in clichés, and thought for himself never.

The assassination itself was evil in the classic sense: brutal, violent, and shocking. The videos are attention-grabbing. But like Leontius in the story from Plato’s Republic, I angrily reproached my eyes for feasting on death. The seductive glamor of violence surrounds the boring reality of evil; this is a recurrent theme of the Christian Platonism of Simone Weil. Most commentary on the assassination, on the other hand, reflects what Arendt calls the banality of evil: clichéd, reflexive, and unthinking. When the speech that makes us political animals is on autopilot, Arendt argues, totalitarianism eclipses politics. The reflexive chatter was the common ancestor and prototype of many things that I heard and read about the assassination in the days that followed it.

What ought to have gone without saying—it is evil to murder a private person speaking on a college campus—went said a thousand times. For a few days, it went missaid. A highly contestable opinion (“Political violence is always wrong”) was solemnized by the occasion, widely parroted, and so at least briefly placed beyond debate. Ezra Klein published the op-ed closest to the initial online knee-jerk reaction the next morning in the New York Times. His tone was moralizing; he eulogized the right way of doing politics, an approach he claimed to practice with the martyr (i.e., speech), as opposed to the wrong way of doing politics (i.e., murder). His wincingly obvious point encapsulated the online reactions of the previous day, down to the tone of the personal public service announcement.

More than one hundred seventy-five years ago, Søren Kierkegaard said that the newspaper turned people into spectators of political events, not in the form of a deliberative public sphere, but rather like a formless sea of negative emotion. (“It had to be a transgender person.” “It had to be the Israelis.”) When “a man essentially puts his whole personality into communication,” Kierkegaard warns in Two Ages, “eventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction—there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, an abstract noise that will render human speech superfluous, just as machines make workers superfluous.” Even lovers will speak to each other like chatbots, Kierkegaard already worried in 1846. This past summer, Elon Musk designed an anime stripper “companion” “named” Ani to make users’ experience of X “sexier” and “more fun.” More recently, he rephrased Kierkegaard more succinctly, telling X users, “You are the media now.”

While the collective sublation of human individuals into “the media” is no doubt good news for the bottom line of X Corp., not everyone wishes to be transformed into the organs of public intercourse. Those of us who cherish silence and the decision to speak deliberately in our own voice in our own time do not have to be. With a smidgeon of self-control, it is possible to remain a private person with any number of impolitic and even inarticulable thoughts. Yet remaining silent is becoming increasingly difficult for the younger generation, for whom chatting online is second nature. Many young people do not realize how recently we invented this new narrative genre, the individualized press release. Nor do they realize what a bizarre decision it would be to employ this sort of locution were it not a reflex utterance that people are compelled to make.

Overproduction of thoughtless chatter has accelerated since newspapers terrified Kierkegaard. It threatens individual personality. You can barely distinguish the bots from the presumably human users of social media. The algorithm shows us the most lurid images and the most grotesque responses to them. It seems like the least we can do is declare ourselves for the obvious. No wonder each individual user sounds increasingly like the output of the large language models that run the bots.

Thanks to X, the right-wing version of the George Floyd moment gathered momentum in minutes instead of hours. Pundits, speculators, and amateur ballistics experts crawled out of the network immediately. The many caveat-laden posts (“I didn’t agree with everything he said, but . . .”) presumably came from the same accounts that blacked out their Instagram profile pictures five years ago in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. This is politics at the accelerating speed of internet communication.

Social media has obviously changed the nature of speech in the last twenty-five years. If one were watching the event on television in a public place, as in my hypothetical Limbaugh assassination, one would have to blush to say aloud many of the things posted online. On social media, however, our responses as well as our stimuli are mediated. This double mediation is important. Communication can be shameless. We express ourselves without the liability of blushing at the banality or the abhorrence of our words.

Spectators can respond immediately, but why do they? One of the many brilliant insights in Antón Barba-Kay’s Web of Our Own Making is that culture war is the greatest form of entertainment. It has been great fun since the 1990s, when James Davison retrieved the term Kulturkampf just in time to describe the millions of Americans glued to the O. J. Simpson trial on twenty-four-hour cable news. But now, via social media, culture war is interactive. We do not passively consume the Entertainment like the characters in Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace’s response to the 1990s seems quainter and more old-timey, somehow, than Kierkegaard’s total freak-out about the newspaper-reading public. We can respond to the videos, and our responses are constantly co-creating the Entertainment. The culture war is morphing into a M.M.O.R.P.G.: a massive multiplayer online role-playing game.

The culture war offers four kinds of enjoyment.

First, as in all role-playing, the culture war is most fun when you lose yourself in its world. This is a “jouissance,” Jacques Lacan would recognize, that exceeds the pleasure principle. The earnest escapists are seeking deep fulfillment; they are not enjoying themselves on any superficial level. Maximum jouissance occurs when they are convinced it is just like Selma in 1964, Munich in 1938, Boston in 1773, or “the Republic of Gilead” in The Handmaid’s Tale. They are convinced that they face the same life-or-death struggle of their ego ideals. Man’s desire is the desire of the Other, Lacan writes; these people can only be pleased when they imagine their role models and heroes are pleased with them. (“This is the end of free speech in America if we don’t stand up now.”) Culture war is rarely fun for these people, paradoxically, because their joy is so deeply part of it. (“Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”) These are the people who seek fulfillment in politics.

A second amusement is trolling the earnest role-players. What sport to strand their imaginary depths on the shallows of ironic know-nothingism. The participants wear the masks of bigotry, though Slavoj Žižek suspects these betrays the repressed bigots that they truly are. “Groypers,” the online followers of Nick Fuentes, have trolled Turning Point USA events from the racist right for years. Shocking the bourgeoisie is an old delight of the avant-garde left as well. (“Your guy got shot in the neck ha ha.”) The trolls feed on the earnest role-players, and the earnest role-players feed off the trolls.

The third and most obscure pleasure is felt by those who feel obliged to post what seems appropriate. They generate all of the strange commonplaces that you see. (“Political violence is always wrong.”) The telling clue is in the tone of the personal press release. This is a person who appoints himself to be his own spokesman. Celebrities feel compelled to use their platforms to say something when everyone else is saying something. But The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han explains why everyone is becoming “entrepreneurs of themselves.” There is an initial thrill of self-creation in the freedom to control one’s own image, brand, and project. Eventually, however, this comes to feel compulsory and exhausting. The regime exploits the feeling of freedom itself, Han would say.

All of these brand ambassadors for themselves generate the same P.S.A.s, meanwhile, because of what Adam Smith calls the pleasure of mutual sympathy. It is always pleasing to find that someone shares your moral sentiments. As the trolls know, there is shock and pain in the discovery that others do not remotely share our feelings, for example, when someone does not find a murder disturbing.

Fourth and finally, there is the happiness that I find in the culture war: competitive punditry. I never miss an opportunity to try to show how clever I am. But this is a team sport and not a totally solipsistic exercise. I am competing to prove that our political perspective is better than theirs, that we understand how events will play out better than they do. It must bring glory to the team that formed my character: our Church, our people, our generational cohort, our friends. Watch me show how their form of life warps their sense of reality. (As if good breeding did not make this obvious and moreover rude to mention in public.)

I refuse to tell myself the lie, This is how one becomes an informed and engaged citizen. The best citizen is not the one who enjoys politics the most. Sometimes I tell my wife that, however, when she complains that I have been on my phone too much.

Role-players, trolls, personal brand ambassadors, and pundits: There are four ways to enjoy the culture war. We are both competitors and spectators online in a colosseum without walls. We seek the approval of a hundred million thumbs in a never-ending ludus. Like those antique gladiatorial contests, our game generates financial losses and blood loss. People get fired and fired upon. Then we role-play in solidarity, troll the role-players, state the obvious, and predict the consequences. Our preferred diversions are four different sorts of feedback loop. The whole jumble of them interacting together is the architecture of the massive, chaotic, mostly online multiplayer game.

That is my best guess about why we are behaving like different political animals now. It is a little overtheorized, of course, but I am pleased to consider it the superior kind of punditry that should be liked and shared online. Unfortunately, how this new broad virtual front of the culture war is affecting the reality of politics, much less the Church, is far from clear to me.

Unlike other M.M.O.R.P.G.s and their fan communities, the culture war does not take place in a separate game world. All its fictional elements depend on verisimilitude to whatever remains of shared reality for us. And it intersects the real world in various ways, depending upon whether “it’s gametime” where you live or for the sort of person you are. The stakes are always higher for some unfortunate few. Detachment from the culture war is a privilege of wealth, locale (but not education), and mostly age. Even so, most people most of the time are playing for fun. A nation of more than three hundred million individuals with deeply personal problems of their own can only play along on almost any given political issue.

We are far from "gametime” like it’s 1773, 1938, or 1964 again. Until the uniformed militias start arming and drilling in public, the real conditions of civil war and fascism, the endless reactions to lone gunmen online will continue. Professor Jason Stanley claims otherwise about the United States, now from the safety of Toronto, because he has found meaning for his life in his role-play, within the world of the culture-war game. Whether you are for or against him, it would be more fun to play along. But grow up, please. The kids get it. As Gen Z has learned to say about internet aesthetics in its peculiar way, it is only “giving” fascism. The vibes are only “giving” civil war.

All the fun dissipates when the anger turns to sadness. Anger and envy are more enjoyable than pity and sadness, Aristotle reasons, because these painful emotions nonetheless look forward to the pleasure of revenge. Resentment has always energized passionate arguments about justice with our equals, which the Philosopher regards as the core of politics. Online noise, however, is not the speech of equals. Condescension is appropriate here. Pity the dummy online whom the chatter ventriloquizes.

In my case, one tweet (a screenshot of a Facebook post) turned the pleasures of indignation to pity. In Christmas 2013, the assassin’s mother appears to have written to her ten-year-old son: “Almost forgot Tyler! He can totally avoid us now that he got all of the computer accessories he’s been wanting.” A generation of parents failed to imagine what horrors are now encompassed by “playing video games online with friends.” That’s tragic. I wish I hadn’t read the tweet. It made me sad for many reasons.

What Aristotle could never have foreseen is how much political passions could be separated from conflicts over profits and honors, the real core of a political regime. Nowadays a few people get killed or canceled. But twenty-first-century Americans are enjoying the culture war’s entertainment products by the hundreds of millions. No people in history can have enjoyed the angry pleasures of politics so extensively and so intensively while wielding so little influence over any policy outcomes.

“Hyperpolitics” is a useful way of thinking about the noise and entertainment that our sort of regime makes over politics. Anton Jäger recently coined the term it in a New Left Review article that describes how politics is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in contemporary America. Politics is present in our emotions but absent in the form of collective action. It is part of everyday conversations, but these have no discernable policy influence or relation to governance. Everywhere we breathe a politicized atmosphere, but any tangible effects seem to melt into air. Hyperpolitics is as exhausting as it is ephemeral. So much of the substance of politics is sublimated into self-expression.

The remarkable fact about this assassination was how seamlessly it became a matter of hyperpolitics. Assassin and martyr alike designed themselves to go viral. The former carved cryptic messages on his bullet casings. His text messages fantasized about “notices bulge uwu” and “Bella ciao” being read on the Fox News Channel. (“He must have been antifa. It is a false flag operation.”) It was a field day for amateur pundits online. There but for the grace of God go I.

The martyr, too, was a master of hyperpolitics. His talent for online outreach to university students made him a multimillionaire. All of the men who have figured out how to profit from hyperpolitics face serious risks. The martyr wore a bulletproof vest. Tesla spends millions on Musk’s security. President Trump was an inch away from what might have been the first hyperpolitical assassination. Had Trump been killed in Butler, Pennsylvania, however, there would have been more solemn concern that our election rituals must make the candidate sacrosanct.

Make America Great Again is a consciously hyperpolitical movement. The red hats, Trump flags, rallies, and internet videos have not disappeared since the 2024 election. Neither the earnest M.A.G.A. role-players nor the trolls have ended their carnival to fast from their political relishes for a few years. It is sometimes difficult to remember that 2025 is an off year in American electoral politics.

Democrats are learning, too. Governor Gavin Newsom has started to ape Trump’s social media register. Even in my county in rural north-central Ohio, where the president won just shy of seventy-five percent of the vote in the last election, his critics cannot resist hyperpolitics. The county fair organizers ejected the Ashland County Democratic Party from their booth for distributing buttons with a red FELON hat and the legend “Is he dead yet?” Lengthy debate has ensued on the community-interest Facebook pages. The sheriff has contacted the U.S. Secret Service just in case. The story made national news. Hyperpolitics is a waste of time.

Trump instinctively understands that his base loves kayfabe and memes that own the libs. Administration policies—deportations, peace deals, tariffs—must come with hyperpolitical supplements. Therefore, we also receive Department of Homeland Security Pokémon-themed videos, candid-camera diplomacy with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, and belittling Canadian aspirations for their homeland to be treated like a real country. It is inevitable that politics will become more circus-like. Winning political platforms need a robust presence in the culture-war role-playing game.

Traditionally, however, the circus distracts and pacifies the citizenry. Conservative journalists have spent all year discussing whether the right-wing “vibe shift” would amount to more tangible policy or not. Politicians are learning about hyperpolitics in real time, too. They may be learning that their supporters will increasingly lap up “owns,” tweets, and videos as readily as policy outcomes.

The political martyrdom of Charlie Kirk reveals surprising new religious dimensions of M.A.G.A. hyperpolitics, even to writers such as Ross Douthat and Spencer Klavan, who have been discussing a resurgence of Christianity among young American men for over a year now. Many of my students, young women as well as men, have spoken to me about the role that Kirk played in shoring up their faith in Christ. Or do they mean emboldened their self-expression of their Christian-branded lifestyle to others?

Those who role-play as Christian disciples online above all must be warier of the culture war and its enjoyments. For example, Bishop Robert Barron called Kirk a martyr of civil dialogue. However, not every culture warrior with a microphone in his hand and a livestream video is engaging in “civil dialogue,” no matter how peaceable he is. Most of them are manipulating anger, envy, fear, and loneliness. Was Kirk very different? I don’t know. I refuse to form an opinion on the matter, much less express one. The algorithm only showed me the one video.