Democracy is, at its core, anchored by communication and language. As people are not fixed bundles of preferences, sharing power means both speaking and being shaped by others’ speech. This makes the reliability of communication a central democratic problem: Can claims be trusted? Are they true, or merely strategic attempts to win power? Do unequal power relations encourage dishonesty or manipulation? These tensions are not new—they were already evident in accounts from ancient Greek democracy. In 5th and 4th century Athens, the power of speech was considered a divine force—peitho—and the Athenian relationship with language was a matter of civic pride. Freedom of speech—isegoria—was a cornerstone of democratic life; in order for people to have a share in power, they must have the right to speak in front of their fellows, to be given the opportunity to persuade them. At the same time, a variety of factors contributed to widespread anxiety in Athens about the possibility of deception and the use of rhetoric. If everyone can speak, how can the best ideas get a hearing? If the majority has power, why wouldn’t demagogues just tell them what they want to hear—just as sycophantic advisors might have done with kings or oligarchs before democratic governance? And what of outright deceit in the service of power? In many of the ancient sources, the good Athenian was one who had no need for deception—that was something for inferior people to use or a tool to deal with tyrants in the archaic period. In the democratic era, Athenians strived to eliminate the possibility that citizens would use words to deceive or manipulate. Over time, they developed a set of formal, legal mechanisms in an attempt to ensure the truthfulness of speakers. For example, male prostitutes were not allowed to speak before the Assembly because it was thought that anyone who had sold his body would be more likely to betray the polis for his own gain. A speaker could face serious charges for accepting a bribe, a reflection of the value attached to public speech and its transparency. The Athenians also developed normative prescriptions to ensure truth-telling, namely, the ideal of parrhesia, often translated as “frankness.” If the concern was that citizens of a government founded on isegoria would be vulnerable to gratifying rhetoric or pandering, democracy needed an ideal that emphasized not just the right to speak, but also the duty to speak the truth. Parrhesia described the speech of a person who gave a full disclosure of his beliefs, disdained distracting rhetorical ornaments, and had a moral obligation to relate the critical truth he had found to others. This person was an independent thinker, willing to risk grave danger in order to fulfill their duty to the polis. Parrhesia was thus a key feature of the ancient Greek democratic identity. Rather than just a right to speak, which had roots in the oligarchies that preceded Athenian democracy, parrhesia implied responsibility to speak the truth, even when risky. Someone who spoke to the Athenian Assembly with parrhesia was someone you could trust, someone who rejected the potential gains of pandering rhetoric and instead spoke the truth at any cost.
However, by the 4th century, claims to parrhesia become a rhetorical device—a trope of Assembly debate. Of course, that is distinctly at odds with its intended meaning, which implied original, critical thought (much like the contemporary cliche: “thinking outside the box.”). Once something is named and valued, its invocation can become a rote signifier, a label to be used because of its power, regardless of whether the content itself holds the quality in question. Parrhesia could be invoked by all sorts of speakers, frank or deceiving, to affirm their authority over others, perhaps concealing their true intentions. The trope becomes its own rhetorical style; in democratic Athens, we see the rise of a “rhetoric of anti-rhetoric” (Cleon in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is a great example of this).Footnote 1 Speakers would claim parrhesia, accusing their opponents of using rhetoric, which they, of course, would never do. But which of course they are doing by invoking that rhetorical trope. The sort of shamelessness of this move is reflected in the complexity of the term itself; as Arlene Saxonhouse has shown, parrhesiastic democracy was always a mixed bag given the fine line between someone bravely speaking without shame and a problematically shameless person who recognized no limits at all.Footnote 2
Frankness’s move from democratic ideal to weaponized cliche remains with us. For example, in Jürgen Habermas’s deliberative theory, democracy is legitimate because it is based on reason. The public sphere offers everyone the opportunity to deliberate about the best course of political action, ideally coming to a consensus about what to do. In turn, deliberations are guided by universal norms of communication or discourse ethics, which guide discussion by offering a way to critique another’s claims. They are claims to truth (the sun is shining), normative rightness (sunshine is good), and truthfulness (or sincerity) (I actually prefer the rain—truly). In this view, democratic politics works because we can rely on deliberation to carry the best ideas forward in ways that persuade others and thereby gain democratic legitimacy. But as in Athens, it is never so neat and clean. In our contemporary case, the analog to parrhesia is that last ethic, that of sincerity. Like parrhesia, it can morph into an antirhetorical rhetoric, or “hyper-sincerity.”Footnote 3 Hyper-sincerity privileges a rhetorical style that claims to be style-free, natural, and shuts down other speakers. It prizes plain, blunt language, short words, and simple grammar; mispronunciations and malapropisms are signs of being real, rather than uninformed. There is also often an explicit invocation of one’s sincerity and a stated rejection of rhetoric, made especially in contrast to one’s opponents. You can trust me , but not her, with her fancy words and confusing explanations (the elitism! The wokeness!). And when you have a truthful speaker who can see reality clearly, and will not try to manipulate you with their fancy words, why not sit back and trust this person? While this mode has long existed (I wrote about in the early 2000s, in reference to speakers like George W. Bush and Bill O’Reilly), it has perhaps found its apotheosis with Donald Trump.
You better believe it… I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.
For many US voters, Donald Trump’s remarks in a 2015 Republican candidate debate signaled the arrival of a long-awaited truth-teller. Here was the one person on stage willing to admit that US politics was broken, a game for wealthy elites with no real concern for the well-being of regular people. Yet this moment of candor came from a candidate who even then struggled with “brutal elementary data” in Hannah Arendt’s terms, who repeatedly made untrue claims, both about trivial and serious matters. Now well into a second Presidential term, the scale and sheer number of Trump’s untruths is like some sort of hyper-object—difficult to even comprehend or catalog, let alone address (this itself has been identified as a rhetorical tactic—“flooding the zone”). Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters continue to see him as the real deal, the only authentic person in a town full of phonies.
Scholars are slowly coming to terms with this new political animal, for although Trump could only exist in the contemporary media environment (and is therefore new), he is not alone among populist leaders, both in the United States (Marjorie Taylor Green, Ron DeSantis) and throughout the world (Javier Milei, Victor Orbán, Vladimir Putin). We see with Trump and those like him “the authentic appeal of the lying demagogue” and how flagrantly violating norms of truth-telling can perversely signal a leader’s authenticity.Footnote 4 Scholar Ryan Skinnell terms it the “‘honest’ mendacity of fascist rhetoric,” which rests on a performance of sincerity that rejects the “Enlightenment values of empiricism, skepticism, and rationality” and instead relies on transhistorical myths as referent and standard.Footnote 5 Capturing one essential truth about inequality and elite access to democratic institutions in the United States signaled his trustworthiness to supporters. This is then coupled with myths of white (male) supremacy, with blame for perceived loss of status placed on progressive policies and liberal democratic norms. These dynamics have firmly pushed contemporary US politics into a fascistic “post-truth” era, where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” as Lee McIntyre describes it. It is not that truth does not matter or holds no appeal, but that feelings are more important than facts and that conventional modes of uncovering the truth (such as academia, journalism, the courts) cannot be trusted. Meanwhile, the historian Timothy Snyder argues “post-truth is pre-fascism.”Footnote 6 This realization is not novel; Hannah Arendt warned that we cannot have meaningful political life without a commitment to the factual truth:
It is only by respecting its own borders that this realm, where we are free to act and to change, can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.Footnote 7
That is, this move to post-truth threatens to annihilate politics as we know it; it does that with a move away from reasoned discourse and to demagogic propaganda—that is, rhetoric that attempts by bypass reason, delivered by someone that claims to be the people’s voice and protector, a powerful savior who can simplify political complexity into a clear plan of action.Footnote 8 My core argument is that the move to post-truth was facilitated by the perversion of the longstanding democratic ethic of sincerity into hyper-sincerity. Trump has taken this hijacking even further into demagogic propaganda with a fascist bent, a rhetorical style that poses a threat to the very possibility of democratic politics. The next sections will explore how exactly this has worked. In the final sections of the essay, I consider whether or not irony—which I have argued elsewhere was the democratic way to undermine hypersincerity—has a role to play. Is irony really up for the challenge posed by the hypersincere fascist demagogue? Or is irony already a part of the contemporary fascist toolbox? That is, has another democratic tool been hijacked?
1. The slide from sincerity to fascism
Sincerity begins as a norm meant to ensure the legitimacy of democratic discourse, but slides into a form of hyper-sincere rhetoric, perverting democratic discourse. Due to its stated plainness and rejection of rhetoric, hyper-sincere speech generally purports to help rid the world of artifice and manipulation. It is a claim to authenticity that is possible only when one stops with self-consciousness and just acts naturally. And in fact, the more outrageous the claim, the truthier and the more alluring—it’s so shameless that it must be true! The speaker has no filter, they cannot hide their true feelings—and therefore can be trusted. This is how we get the “authentic appeal of the lying demagogue.” There is also an affective and interpersonal piece here—there is a real pleasure to be had from aligning with the plain-speaking, authentic personality. That is, this appeal is at least in part so strong because it is incredibly flattering to the listener (and therefore a source of pleasure in the form of intensified feelings): aren’t you pretty smart for also seeing through the elite lies and having the courage to stick with the frank speaker? Especially when what he says shocks everyone else so much?
But what makes it so dangerous in the contemporary US context? This hijacking of sincerity happens in democratic discourse all the time, going back to ancient Athens; democracy has spun out flatterers and demagogues before without descending into flirtations with fascism. How does sincerity slide even further into fascist propaganda? With contemporary fascists like Trump, hypersincerity is coupled with a “flawed ideology,” rooted in a nostalgia for a mythic past and committed to a politics of hierarchy. To draw out this relationship, I turn to philosopher Jason Stanley’s pair of books How Fascism Works and How Propaganda Works. Stanley argues that fascism is a “politics of hierarchy, us vs. them, that seeks to naturalize group difference.”Footnote 9 Its characteristics include authoritarianism and a preoccupation with hierarchy, purity, and struggle. Adherents feel justified by reference to a mythic and glorious past; their discourse is marked by a sense of victimhood and grievance over the loss of that past. Fascists expound on the need for law and order. They exhibit a rising sexual anxiety and a belief in the patriarchal family as the solution. These elements of fascist propaganda can be seen throughout the Executive Orders of the second Trump administration—and very clearly across Trump’s incredibly prolific Truth Social postings. But most important is the fascist demagogue’s reliance on propaganda to create a state of unreality—a post-truth world. This is echoed in Timothy Snyder’s characterization of fascism as a “cult of will” and a “triumph of will over reason.”Footnote 10
Propaganda has traditionally been viewed as a form of lying, a cynical deployment of what speakers know to be false, in order to convince and inflame the public, which remains ignorant of the falsehood. But Stanley helps us see what an impoverished understanding that is. For him, propaganda is “the employment of a political ideal against itself.”Footnote 11 He also defines it as a form of “rhetoric” and argues there is a good kind—civic rhetoric—and a bad kind—demagogic propaganda.Footnote 12 The key characteristic of propaganda is not that it is insincere or a lie, but that it is rhetoric cut off rational thought. Propaganda uses flawed ideologies to overwhelm rational processes and relies on “emotions detached from their ideas” to persuade (to be clear, emotions are not necessarily nonrational; the issue is when emotion obliviates reason).Footnote 13 This makes it different from lying—lying attempts to convince through evidence and engage that rational process. Propaganda, meanwhile, bypasses it completely.
Moreover, in a liberal democracy, propaganda is generally “masked” according to Stanley. It purports to uphold liberal democratic ideals, like freedom or equality, but the statements ultimately undermine those values, strengthening unworthy political ideals—like racial hierarchy or patriarchy. While it bypasses reason, that fact too may be masked, with supporters lauded for their ability to see the truth. It is critical to remember that it’s not merely rhetorical. The rhetoric itself is deeply rooted in structural elements for Stanley—here, massive economic interests:
When societies are unjust, for example, in the distribution of wealth, we can expect the emergence of flawed ideologies. The flawed ideologies allow for effective propaganda. In a society that is unjust, due to unjust distinction between persons, ways of rationalizing undeserved privilege become ossified into rigid and unchangeable belief. These beliefs are the barriers to rational thought and empathy that propaganda exploits.Footnote 14
Flawed ideologies help maintain unjust social and economic relationships by creating and maintaining prejudice and bias; inequality poses an epistemic harm with cognitive consequences, which in turn help to shore up unjust social and economic arrangements. Therefore, to fully understand this inequality, it is critical that we go beyond relations between people to examine the structures that produce these relations. Those structures are what political theorist Sheldon Wolin termed “inverted totalitarianism”—the illiberal, managed democracy where corporate and state power work together to shore up elite economic control (which is another way to make Trump’s 2015 debate claim).Footnote 15 Inverted totalitarianism is the political analog to neoliberal economics—state and economic power linked for its own benefit, meant to manage the demos’s potential unruliness and render them powerless. This form of politics all the while continues to trumpet “popular sovereignty” as the source of its legitimacy but limits the popular input to periodic and outrageously expensive elections, at least in the United States. So that masking effect of propaganda is in full force here as well.
This inverted totalitarianism leads to a “devitalized agency,” a bewildering loss of freedom in an era animated by a passion for freedom.Footnote 16 The will to freedom can find no collective, solidaristic expression and so focuses on freedom as freedom from interference. The logical pinnacle of this is freedom-as-sovereignty (control)—to ensure no interference, one has to be the ultimate authority, controlling the world one inhabits. Yet this is so obviously thwarted by the massive forces of inverted totalitarianism. In this way, the structures of inverted totalitarianism couple with the rhetoric around and aspiration to sovereign freedom to serve as an accelerant for contemporary fascist movements. To those feeling the effects of this contemporary condition, Donald Trump’s debate statement—exposing the machinations of the 1 percent, where politics is really just a fight over elite control of economic resources—felt right and true. He was willing to say what scared the rest of the elites on stage to admit, revealing that the game is rigged. He was shameless in the face of the overwhelming structures that have frustrated so many nonelites, left and right—he appeared to be willing to stand up to elites, when no one else will. And his shamelessness in all areas—personal finances, sexual and personal histories, medical advice—is a shining beacon of freedom for supporters. Seemingly, Trump can do whatever he wants; laws and norms are not limits—only he himself sets the terms. Trump himself noted this when asked if there were limits on his power: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”Footnote 17 He alone creates the world in which he acts. Beyond a political representative or even champion, Trump becomes an aspirational figure for supporters, who idealize and identify with him as a charismatic authority figure, as “Daddy Trump.” The focus on the leader’s sovereign freedom—evidenced by his shamelessness—is a key part of the allure of contemporary fascist politics.
One thing that makes this so potent is that the idea of truth itself is not meaningless; it still holds power. Otherwise, why name your social media platform “Truth Social?” Why spend so much time taking down “Fake News”? It is rather that the traditional sources of truth—academia, oversight agencies, media, legal systems—have been so deeply undermined. And facts that do not feel right, that might call into question fascist stories of a glorious past lost to invading inferiors (whether foreigners into the United States or women into board rooms) are dismissed. With this rhetorical style, there is no need for outside verification—his power is his ability to see the truth that has been concealed by elites.
To summarize, political subjects living in liberal democracies, states that claim their legitimacy through popular sovereignty, are increasingly frustrated by the practical experience of their unfreedom. Having no obvious recourse—that is, these global forces are too massive, they are hyper-objects with complex origins—many political subjects come to see figures like Trump as their fantasy self. He has sovereign freedom—he can command and control the world, and the truths circulating in it. And sovereign freedom for Trump means demonstrating how little sources of factual truth outside of his own mind matter to him. This is what renders fact-checking and counter-arguments by opponents so deeply ineffectual. What kind of power is more sovereign, more unbounded than being able to do whatever one wants, without repercussions, without being bound by the claims of factual reality? The sovereign is absolute, he has no rule above him. In this version, not even facts—at least as conventionally understood—provide that rule or higher authority. It’s all Trump and whatever his appetites desire.
The aim of this type of demagogue is not really to convince the citizenry of lies by presenting doctored photographs or deep fake videos—although these are often shared. The goal is to prevent the audience from engaging in rational reflection on whether the claims made by the demagogue support or undermine the political ideals espoused by the community. Pervasive lying demonstrates and expands his sovereign power; it “floods the zone” and makes reasoned discourse impossible; and it ultimately makes a caricature of deliberative democracy. As there is a flawed ideology easily at hand—the hierarchies of white supremacy—the demagogue and followers do not recognize their claims as propaganda—the flawed ideology allows them to believe their claims do support worthy political ideals (such as freedom), even as it undermines them.
Recall that Stanley argued that propaganda need not be in sincere (that is, the speaker could believe their own claims). Yet, we can be even more precise: the most effective demagogue will at least appear sincere, or even better, hypersincere. Again, it does not matter if the demagogue believes it or not; a requirement that the speaker be insincere would miss a lot of propagandistic claims. But if the demagogue can vouch for his claims with his appearance of sincerity, he will go much further. If he can flatter followers into believing that they are the chosen few who, like him, can see through the elite flattery and conspiracies, and tell it like it is, it’s all the more powerful. Again, it is not that “truth” is meaningless but that its referent has been radically transformed—it is the leader’s will.
In summary:
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1. Demagogic propaganda is the mode of political discourse for contemporary fascist movements. It attempts to bypass our rational thought in support of flawed ideologies that undermine the liberal democratic ideals on which Western democracy is supposedly based.
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2. It is most powerful when coupled with a hypersincere stance that flatters followers and preemptively undermines opponents.
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3. It feeds off of and reinforces the post-truth environment, where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
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4. The flawed ideologies spring from our economic, social, and political structures, which Wolin termed “inverted totalitarianism.” This is not a matter of a single political figure who has polluted our public sphere.
2. Irony as democratic intervention
How might committed democrats begin to respond to this? In The Politics of Sincerity, I argued that antirhetorical rhetoric could be best countered by Socratic irony—philosophical ironies, but also sarcasm and ironic flattery. But can it do the same in the face of this potent combination of the structural and discursive factors in a post-truth fascist environment? Irony can be a tool of democratic politics by changing the discursive landscape, and creating a certain kind of attunement to political life, an ability to critically reflect—that is, irony can help to (re-)engage reason. If demagogic propaganda short-circuits deliberation and rational thought, then it also constrains citizens’ abilities to connect the structural to their political choices. Instead, citizens rely on flawed ideologies to explain the world around them. Irony, in contrast, can be a vital component of a democratic civic education and rhetoric because it may jumpstart reason, disrupting the lazy reliance on cliche, bias, and prejudice. This is only effective for long-term change, though, if it also results in a transformation of those underlying structures. It is necessary but not sufficient.
Psychologist Roger Kreuz notes that irony is a cluster of concepts linked by family resemblance to juxtaposition and contradiction.Footnote 18 It includes dramatic ironies; cosmic ironies; situational ironies; historical ironies; verbal irony and sarcasm, as well as a more generalized ironic attitude. I agree that all these different ideas inhabit the term “irony”; one way to think of irony is as “incongruity” (not all incongruities will be ironic, but that particular dynamic between situation and communication is helpful). My earlier work on the Gorgias argued that Socratic irony worked to counter the potential demagoguery of Callicles (and his “knack for flattery”) by engaging the audience’s minds. Socrates did this through both his ironic flattery of other interlocutors, particularly Callicles, and with his philosophical irony about being the only person to practice politics in Athens. Coupled with the critique of both rhetoric and parrhesia (frank speech) in that dialogue, Socrates’ particular practices there pushed his audience to examine the rhetorical commonplaces of daily civic life. In this account, Plato shows what is required of citizens in a democracy—reflection, critical thought, and a skepticism of self-appointed experts. Of course, we are still debating what Plato was really doing in the dialogues and whether Socrates just inspired cynicism and autocracy with his constant questioning and truth claims—perhaps all that irreverence for established authority was ancient Athens’s edgelord subreddit. But I believe that when it works and remains coupled with democratic commitments, the critical exchange—whether between Socrates and his students or Plato and his readers—can provide a way to intervene in the “amygdala-hijacking” upon which demagoguery relies.
Yet contemporary fascist rhetoric does something weird with irony, revealing the limits of its democratic potentials. If irony is incongruity, then the post-truth environment is itself deeply ironic, because incongruities abound—a classic move of the hypersincere demagogue is to call opponents demagogues, tyrants, liars. As Timothy Snyder notes:
Fascists calling other people “fascists” is fascism taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. It is a final point where hate speech inverts reality and propaganda is pure insistence. It is the apogee of will over thought. Calling others fascist while being a fascist is the essential Putinist practice. Jason Stanley, an American philosopher, calls it “undermining propaganda.” I have called it “schizofascism.”
As Sophia McClennen puts it, “it’s ironic, but not funny.”Footnote 19 In many ways, post-truth fascist rhetoric defies irony—it tries to undermine the very distinctions between empirical truth and assertion. In doing so, it generates myriad situational ironies—the TV-star President criticizing the medium that launched him; the liar calling everyone else a liar; saving the country by attacking the US Capitol building or sending National Guard troops or ICE agents into major cities. Irony, in contrast, requires this distinction in order to generate its humor—the incongruity must be apparent rather than rendered meaningless. What role can irony play when the situational and dramatic ironies are too much to bear, at least for those who still hold that there is a meaningful distinction between empirical reality and fascist mythologies? The situational ironies abound and, in fact, appear to be a defining element of our time.
Moreover, the irony is not just situational for there is also a fascist rhetorical irony. It is irony as escape valve: “I was just being ironic!” Think here of Trump’s Covid advice to inject bleach as a Covid treatment, which he later claimed was sarcasm directed at reporters. It is not actual irony as we have long known it, but a bullshit claim of irony (that is, Harry Frankfurt’s “bullshit”—intended to persuade without regard for truth).Footnote 20 It is not merely a lie because we do not and cannot really know what Trump meant. Moreover, it does not actually matter given his general attitude toward truth as whatever his own mind deems truth to be. This propagandistic irony is cut off from rational thought and instead meant to persuade via unprocessed pathos and trust in the demagogue. It is irony untethered from objective reality (or long-standing norms around the establishment of objective reality, such as journalism or scientific research). Meanwhile, Socratic rhetorical irony requires some intentional incongruity with reality—not a refusal of shared objective reality.
Extending this stance even further, contemporary fascists also give us a form of attitudinal irony. This should not be surprising, given that irony has been called “the ethos of our age” (even after its supposed death by 9/11).Footnote 21 The internet and social media have proven to be exceptionally fertile ground for this development. In fact, in his book Blank Space, W. David Marx traces a history of the counter-culture wherein right-wing Groypers have become the countercultural forces of today, the successors to self-aware ironist hipsters of a previous generation—via chat rooms and niche podcasts.Footnote 22 Here we find the figure of the “Edgelord”: a person—usually a younger white man—who makes wild statements online with the hopes of shocking everyone. This posture is rooted in both a democratic ethos (unruly shamelessness in the face of existing norms and power structures) and is what Boris Litvin refers to as “memetic irreverence.”Footnote 23 In these cases, the demand for sincerity (or “candor,” in Litvin’s spectatorship approach) has allowed demagogues to signal their repudiation of scripted politics with audacity, mocking language, and a rejection of seriousness. It needs little content—just a chaotic negativity. This “perverse normalization of candor” in fact masks the dangers of demagoguery. And it is imitated by the spectators on internet forums, leading to the misogyny and racism that is claimed as mere “joking” and are meant to signal the trolls’ free-thinking irreverence; it is a staple of the “Manosphere.” Again, situational irony is a defining feature; here, the troll signals his free-thinking by imitating the brash norm-destroying audacity of the fascist leader who is here to restore the troll (and their identity group) to the glorious station once rightfully afforded to them. The norms of truth, sincerity, and ethical rightness are far less important than the belief in the fascist project of restoration. Those who insist on such norms are signaling their “sheeple” status and their fear of shedding the woke culture that threatens that restoration project.
Given all this, in order for irony to provide any salutary effect, there must be an alternative form of contemporary irony with its own distinctive elements. We may call this civic irony, which is rooted in the commitment to the values of democratic discourse: truth, sincerity, and normative rightness. That is, for irony to be civic irony, it must maintain those underlying commitments. There is an irony in my own claim here, as I have often critiqued a reliance on sincerity and the ways in which it enables problematic hypersincerity. To be clear, I still do not think it is possible to truly determine a speaker’s sincerity and I would caution against attempts to discern motivations that lie within the human heart. In fact, the correspondence to actual factual truth and to being in accord with democratic values can get us most of where we need to be, in that they are perhaps the most reliable outward manifestations of one’s commitments. But the underlying reality does matter. With Socratic irony, he is saying something that is true and false at the same time; it is a puzzle to be worked and this is the play of Plato’s dialogues. But the underlying reality—at least the reality Plato is presenting to readers—is one of a sincere commitment to truth. In fascist irony, it does not matter if it is true or false, or if the speaker believes it to be true or false. What matters is that HE said it—the cult of the will—and that is the reality followers accept because of what it signals to them about the promise of sovereign freedom in an era of devitalized agency. Again, norms of truth and ethical appropriateness are simply not afforded a central place (even if to critique them); the underlying objective and shared reality do not matter, displaced by the transhistorical myths and political hierarchies—the real truth—of the fascist political actor.
In short, the contemporary rhetorical landscape makes it exceptionally difficult for irony to do its work because it has opened irony to be a tool for fascists as well. With Trump and followers, we get fascist irony, which is a form of undermining propaganda. In response, and for democracy, we absolutely need a civic irony, a form of Stanley’s salubrious civic rhetoric, which “can repair flawed ideologies, potentially restoring the possibility of self-knowledge and democratic deliberation.”Footnote 24
What might this look like? Here we might look to something like “camp,” the exaggerated, ironic, playful “lie that tells the truth.” According to Susan Sontag’s foundational essay, camp is “sensibility…that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken.”Footnote 25 The most familiar examples of camp come from drag, where outrageous incongruity abounds. It is rooted in performativity, with “Being-as-Playing-a-Role”; it throws into question the very demand for authenticity. While Sontag maintained that camp was apolitical, holding style and aesthetics “over” content and morality, others have rightfully argued for its political relevance and its critical importance as a tool for survival within gay community. At the same time, Trump’s own appeal has been described in camp terms and many of his claims may be seen by supporters as “lies that tell the truth.”Footnote 26 He is performative, garish and playful, absurd and compelling. In fact, perhaps the rise of Trump’s style reveals camp’s deep political potential—and undermines claims about any inherent content of that politics. Yet Trump’s own campiness should remind us all that there is a basic need for joy, play, and fun in political life—and so perhaps camp should be a key part of the antifascist toolkit, even as a version of it gets taken up by the far right. Take Randy Rainbow’s viral videos, for example. Rainbow is a comedian/singer who makes parodies, reworking Broadway hits attacking Trump (he began doing parody videos earlier in the 2010s, but took off with Trump’s presidential run). With his trademark pink cat eye glasses and extensive drag repertoire (including impersonations of Trump himself), Rainbow pokes fun at Trump’s lies, foreign policy blunders, misogyny, and embrace of white supremacists. In “Spoonful of Clorox” (7.7 million views), Rainbow focuses on Trump’s infamous claim that disinfectant could cure Covid, beginning with an ironic endorsement of Trump’s medical advice and proceeding to highlight Trump’s reliance on distraction and the dangers of his response to the pandemic. In “Desperate Cheeto” (3.9 million views), Rainbow indicts Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, as well as his embrace of North Korea’s dictator and white supremacists in Charlottesville (Virginia); he similarly focuses on Trump’s fascist politics of hierarchy in “All About His Base” (2.5 million views), in which Rainbow appears as a drag version of Trump himself. These videos could often be mean—focusing on Trump’s appearance in ways that many might argue have little relevance for politics or just pander to a different base. Yet they clearly reject the flawed ideology that motivates Trumpian politics and reveal the lack of authenticity among those who most violently claim it. The videos do it via camp, the self-conscious adoption of drag performance to insult a President who ironically and unself-consciously shares so many traits with camp (vulgarity, exaggeration, make-up, beauty pageants) and whose fascist politics relies on a hyper-masculinity that would deny the LGBTQI* community’s very right to exist. Perhaps most importantly, these videos provided a source of community during a period in which many in the United States, especially on the Left, remained quarantined at home, unable to participate in in-person social networks and events. They remain propagandistic—the emotional appeal of these videos overrides a more reasoned discussion—but they uphold such democratic values as commitment to factual truth, equality, and openness.
Another example of civic irony comes from Sarah Cooper’s “How To President” videos, in which Cooper simply lip-synced Trump’s statements. As with Rainbow’s videos, there is an obvious affective element—for those opposed to Trump, the videos are obviously funny. But they also offered an opportunity to re-engage the critical faculties and to counter the propagandistic attempt to cut off rational thought. Sophia McClennen argues that it is not merely anyone making fun of Trump—like it might be with, say, actor Alec Baldwin’s impressions of Trump on the popular US TV show, Saturday Night Live. Footnote 27 Cooper’s were complexly layered, with her facial expressions and movements providing their own commentary on Trump. Like Rainbow, her figure itself provides its own commentary—she is a Jamaican American woman—the embodiment of so many of Trump’s targets. She undermines him by keeping his outrageous words and voice but embodying them in the figure of a then unknown black immigrant woman—his opposite in so many ways. The juxtaposition and incongruity here—the irony—were meant to awaken both the emotions and the rational, to get people to see Trump for the danger he really was. For both Rainbow and Cooper, there is an underlying sincerity, demonstrated by the factual and normative commitments. They are parodists in the service of these other values, not their own power or some transhistorical fascist myth. Their work is part of what the radio host Jesse Thorn called the “new sincerity”: “irony and sincerity combined like Voltron to form a new movement of astonishing power.”Footnote 28 With civic irony, rooted in respect for factual truth and upholding (rather than undermining) democratic ideals, maybe there is a chance to invigorate the capacity for rational, deliberative thought, coupled thoughtfully with the affective element that offers the richness of human experience we all crave (and which makes the fascist ironist so appealing to some).
Of course, Rainbow and Cooper’s satires will not stop fascist propaganda or the policies coming from a Presidential administration that came to power supported by that style of rhetoric. It is too much to ask for our cultural projects to do such work. But contemporary democratic resistance to fascist movements begins building support, calling people in, explicitly advocating norms and values, and demanding an adherence to factual reality as the basis for politics. In this way, campy ironic videos poking fun at fascist propaganda may be a starting point, providing some joy and community to people undertaking the structural change required. Those forging new collectivities out of this crisis may rely on ironists to relay the personal, human realities of the events swirling around us and to expose the absurdity of fascist ironic irony. At that point, democratic activists must re-engage the rational faculties in order to break through the propagandistic attempt to render everything as mere noise and to flood the zone. The project then must move to structural transformation, dismantling the systems and institutions of inverted totalitarianism and opening new avenues for a more expansive notion of freedom; otherwise, the flawed ideologies undergirding the fascist politics of hierarchy will remain unchecked.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to all my colleagues at the AALAC meetings on the Far Right at Amherst College, with particular gratitude to Adi Gordon and Jonathan Obert for first convening us in 2024 and then keeping the lively conversations and debates going through 2025. I also want to thank Mount Holyoke College student Eliza Mohan for her valuable research assistance.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: E.M.
Open access
