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  • Arturo Desimone
  • Oct 30
  • 13 min read

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The Spectacle of Orphanhood and the Self-Identifying Left[1]

Arturo Desimone

October 30th, 2025


The behaviors of the present-day left can best be understood through a prism of orphanhood. The left’s repeating performances of self-defeat have their origin in the awkwardness of an existential condition of orphanhood.


We inhabit a society where most free association and public space is virtual, therefore disembodied, frantic, and unstable: the content of platforms can be effortlessly edited away or "unpublished" as if written on water. The blue-collar print journalism, books, graffiti and propaganda posters of the 20th century demanded much cruder forms of repression, closer to physical force, on behalf of those censors who wished to eliminate authentic countercultural spaces and manifestations of dissent.


Contemporary censorship, by contrast, relies on automated processes, as well as on the methods of "soft power". A contemporary manifestation of the "old school" of censorship can be found in the Venezuelan military state, presided over by the figurehead of Maduro: this style of censorship is crude and masculine, top-down, a living stereotype of the South American man with a mustache telling his critic he better shut up if he knows what's good for him. But Venezuela is a self-enclosed land of anachronisms and of archaisms. Much of the collective West—including its left-leaning politicians and activists—has long since distanced itself from this model of coercion, in exchange for the public relations of "soft power," which resemble a more maternalistic exertion of psychological (or "moral") pressure: akin to how mothers will use encouragement, games, rewards, and seductive persuasion to correct the often obscene and miscreant speech of their small children. 


This sophisticated, "feminized" form of censorship—necessary in the rearing of children—confirms what advocates of "soft power" like Joseph Nye—who coined the terms “soft power” and “smart power”, both central to the Clinton and Obama administrations’ foreign policy ideology, next to his having co-founded the self-titled neo-liberal school of international relations theory—said all along: it is by far more effective to manipulate people without a brutish, masculine oppressor who frontally invites confrontation. Even the soft power enthusiast Nye, however, cautioned against the misuses of soft power, saying “it is not necessarily better to twist minds than to twist arms.”


So effective is the postmodern, "soft power" version of speech-policing exercised through social media and its vast moderator bureaucracies and in the human resources industries, that even the word for "censorship" falls away to be replaced by the euphemistic "canceled"—censorship is, after all, a harsh accusation, likening well-intended people in the West to totalitarian and inquisitorial regimes simply because they exercise their right to take offence and to leverage bad publicity online into a nonlethal (therefore, soft-powered) weapon. The next step in this process of diplomatic language is that "Cancel Culture", once it becomes a stigmatized term used in right wing media, is displaced by "deplatformed": a neologism which means the opposite of the newly minted verb "platform". Those of us who are studious of etymology or acquainted with Germanic languages might shrink back at the use of "platformed" as a verb indicating anything positive: it implies a flattening—"plat" the Germanic word for "flat", attached to "formed", means "made flat". Would one not rather be "deplatformed" if that would imply coming-to-life, becoming three-dimensional or un-flattened after a 2-d existence encased by screens? 


"Smart power is neither hard nor soft. It is both." – Joseph Nye


For Nye, an astute and at times Machiavellian strategist of great geo-political games, "smart power" was a balancing act between leveraging the violent (male, phallic) and seductive, feminine manifestations of power on the world stage. This arguably ensued in the Clinton and Obama era’s proliferation of politically correct cinema and art, the bolstering of humanitarian NGO industries through the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID, Samantha Power’s changing of the wording "illegal (Israeli) settlements" to "unhelpful settlements", the use of charisma and good looks by both of these presidents, the instrumentalization of feminism to justify the Afghanistan and Syria occupations, and a more intelligent diplomacy towards Cuba and Iran.


The "soft power", casual-style censorship seemed the best way of enforcing neoliberalism in the West, exemplified in how Nina Jancowicz, author of "How to be a Woman Online" and former Biden nominee for the Department of Homeland Security’s ministry of censorship, claimed that anti-disinformation policies are a way of protecting women and LGTBQA+ minorities.


The contemporary Western left (comprised of the Democratic Socialists of America, Xtinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, alongside more veteran organizations like Code Pink, media platforms like DemocracyNow! and their viewer-constituency, the leftovers of the fragmented Occupy and Sanders movements, the Green Party USA and the followings of Cornel West, Jeremy Corbyn, and  Judith Butler) provides neither the patriarchal regulatory order, nor the "mothering" and nurturing spaces such as those over which Rosa Luxembourg presided, and where the oppressed workers could be educated and organized while finding warmth and physical and intellectual nourishment. Jeremy Corbyn would not muster the backbone to tell his accusers within Labour to shut up so as to project an outward image of order and discipline presiding over his party that could inspire or convince voters. Corbyn’s constant mollifying and accepting of a pronoun-juggling cancel culture came back to haunt him: his young followers who had justified the idea that vulnerable groups such as the trans, radical feminists and Black Britishers are allowed to silence and defame their opponents as bigots without providing evidence, were suddenly ambushed by self-appointed spokespersons of another vulnerable minority, British pro-Israel Jews, who confronted Labour with evidence-free accusations of Lefists’ "cognitive bias" against Jews and testimonies about hurt feelings. The result plunged Corbyn’s youthful followers into a "catch 22," "Damned-if-you-damned-if-you-don’t" state of confoundment because the Corbyn youths’ ideology and historical consciousness were too thin, and their only political language was precisely the cancel culture now being leveraged against them.


The contemporary left can offer neither a patriarchal nor a maternal consolation because, like orphans, the recent generations comprising the online left have no models for leftist institutional organization in recent memory, which is why their mass protests often seem to be masking the absences or the lack of a movement and are in any case unable to garner the most piecemeal reforms they set out to achieve.


When the rubber met the road, Bernie Sanders was not able to put an end to the loquacious, and often baseless, smear-campaigns and accusations of misogyny and racism which were constantly being disseminated from within and without: like Corbyn, he was unable to invoke the paternal, top-down regulatory force when necessary. When pressed to explain the fall of Sanders, journalist Glenn Greenwald points to how Bernard’s wife Jane O’Meara Sanders, who then chaired the Sanders Institute, sought to correct the speech of youths who wanted to do necessary oppo-work by going after Biden with (for example) accusations of past misdeeds against Tara Reade. At a pivotal moment, activists were instructed to tone down their adversity and to hem in their (completely healthy) eagerness to expose Biden’s history of corruption, pathological lying, and support for reactionary neoliberal and neoconservative policies. The result of this castration of the libido of the Sanders movement by the geriatric Bernie and his younger wife Jane O’Meara at a crucial hour led to the dark lacuna in history where we are today, having turned the Sanders movement into yet another farcical performance of what Franco Bifo Berardi mournfully calls "the de-sexualized society" of the late-capitalist West. The current generation of left is not, as Lacan famously said of the students of 1968, in search of new masters, or they would have already found them. It is the young conservative movement that finds masters in clownish or comedic figures like Andrew Tate, Milei, Peterson, Musk, and Trump. The left, like all orphans, either turns to a world of phantasmagoria, corpses, and ghosts; or it seeks grandparents and gerontocrats to submit unto (Biden, Sanders, Corbyn); or immerses itself into an infinite self-reliance and self-exploration of the body (the trans adventure, feminism, "sex-work is work", the politics of skin color). This is our "spectacle of orphanhood."


The current left fulfills neither the patriarchal nor the maternal role, neither the hard nor the soft power convincingly, and instead flails hysterically between the polar opposites—the Stalinist and Maoist impulses are manifest the screaming-matches that accompany the spectacle the on-campus and online cancellations—and the soft-power modes of attraction and coercion, in which the left resorts constantly to increasingly hollow-sounding words like "empathy" and to the seductive power of the influencer, as well as the online moderators who resemble mothers duly correcting and polishing the speech of potty-mouthed children.

The grotesque blend of these worst traits of both systems becomes a kind of parentless hybrid: neither a commanding patriarch, nor a nurturing mother is present, and the absence of both is felt more intensely. Neither Fidel, nor Rosa.


What got us to this point? The privatized university was the maternal matrix into which many activists disappeared during the 1990s after a form of death of the "father" figures represented by the USSR and NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) with its strong masculine figures like Khruschev, Tito, and Guevara. Reliance on the uni and on digital communications platforms exclude the rule-breaking and rule-making rowdiness and virility of male power, but also cannot substitute the mammalian warmth of the gathering spaces for the organization and education of groups of people who want their grievances to be heard and engaged with by a strong "mother" who consoles, but who also gives guidance, as opposed to commands. We have neither. How did the left become fatherless, motherless, shorn of past or future?


The patriarchal, macho expressions of Stalinism were a pivotal internal cause for the self-defeat of the left and for the liquidation and vulgarization of Marxism throughout the 20th century, in particular when it came to the Stalinist betrayal of the Spanish Revolution. But today's Western left is plagued by altogether different and new forms of Stalinism—one without the fatherly Stalin-figure, but with the feminized emotive performativity of the "two minutes hate" ritual which George Orwell coined in his fiction "1984" as a faithful depiction of ceremonial outpourings in the totalitarian societies he was satirizing.


The example of Argentina may have convinced Davos of the efficacy of "soft power": in 1970s Argentina, imperial and local elites supported a dictatorship that sought to impose neoliberalism by the traditional means of top-down, brutal, masculine oppression and coups d'etat—but the dictatorship of the "gentlemen of the coup" did not last a decade, and the country has been a nightmare to the global financial elites ever since, a "basket case" as The Economist calls it. Introducing neoliberalism through soft power and a language of "free choice," "agency," and emancipation has proven much more effective. Honest dictatorships, to security, longevity, and unwaning loyalty over the longer term, need to provide a social welfare state model, rather than only performing acts of terror, as the Baathists and European Fascists did. It is noteworthy that such a state of provision and nurturing is not what Nye, a self-described neoliberal, refers to as "soft power"—he is strictly talking about indirect forms of persuasion which, like the rules of an effective romantic date, seem "non-pressuring" and consensual.


Only through the authoritarian, welfare-state model can the leader be seen as a provider-figure, as "Big Brother," loved by his or her children or lesser siblings, as Perón, Chavez, and Saddam Hussein were beloved.


To transcend the current spate of terrible choices, the internet must cease to be the primary zone of interaction. Cyberspace can no longer substitute public spaces as the early impresarios of virtual reality (most of them self-described "neoliberals") once imagined. The internet, the surrogate parent of the recent generations of left-identifying people, must regain its original, de-fetishized form as a mere tool to be mastered and used by movements and individuals. Just as the orphan lives in phantasmagoria—praying or trying to see the ghosts of a deceased father, mother or dead relatives in the hope that these accompany them—the internet, which is phantasmal and seemingly immaterial, has become in loco parentis the specter that haunts the orphaned left, who communes with a dead world.


Outside of the online core of MAGA, the people and families who identify with the right—even when the business-driven right does not authentically represent their electors' interests—are, by contrast, not orphans. Frequently, conservatives boast of their families and of their many social roles in communities. Conservative popular icons Candace Owens, for example, shows an intro to all her shows featuring private photographs of her wedding and pregnancy, as if these lend any relevance or credibility to her political content.


Many conservatives believe that their institutions—family, property, church—form a bedrock with which they can happily survive the epoch of increasingly predatory capitalism, nihilism and "precarity." 


The contemporary left, or those who agglomerate under that misnomer today, are men and women and entranced trans who flounder in the shifting reality of liquid modernity, amid the erasure of all past certainties such as stable employment and community, which give way to the state of fear that Zygmunt Bauman defined as being at the core of "precarity." The "precarious" individual lives in angst, conscious that his world is unraveling under the pressures of financialization and a volatile labor market. As churchgoers, conservatives are in a better position to feel refuge from this social collapse and dissolution into the precarious liquid modernity. They condemn the fragmentation of the social fabric from safe distances, while supporting the politicians who ushered in the neoliberal policies of fragmentation. Conservatives are more able to dismiss anxieties about the volatility and accelerationist destructiveness of contemporary capitalism: where they stand, the social fabric seems more intact. They can revert to religious platitudes such as the Evangelical exhortation to "build one's house upon the rock, and not upon the sand." In this case, the "rock of Christ" is the privatized and highly exclusive social safety nets provided by church, family, and the corporate employer who also takes responsibility for the employee’s health insurance.  


What Bauman did not explore was whether such precarity has led to a survival impulse, fueled by anxiety and the fight-or-flight response, to reach for one’s own body. In the fluid world made liquid by neoliberalism, overwhelmed and panicking individuals reach for the breast, for the uterine, (i.e. feminism), for the skin (i.e. the politics of ‘color’, POC). To customize and adapt the body is a way of reaffirming its existence against the sense of disembodiment that accompanies the atomized, virtual way of life in the deregulated labor market.

White BLM activists would say things like "as White Allies, we need to ensure that Black bodies can be safe in traditionally White spaces," thus reducing people with African and other descent to "Black bodies". This reductivism and aphantasia is what much of current neoliberal-left politics seems to thrive on. At least that was all that was on offer before the demonstrations against the Palestine genocide at the end of the Biden administration.


Contemporary racial identity politics is no longer about escaping definition by pigmentation: it is all about skin, it advocates that epidermises that were once stigmatized as counterhegemonic now ought to be made hegemonic, or "centered."


Gender and feminist politics are about the female or feminized body and its morphing genitals, the womb—increasingly dismissed as irrelevant, as abortion is celebrated as the ultimate rallying cause for the Democratic Party, which also fights to install tampon-dispensers in men’s public bathrooms — the nipple; there are passionate discussions on the meanings of botched circumcisions in US hospitals. A man who one day wakes up lactating is no longer encouraged to sue the pharmaceutical corporation for millions of dollars over unwanted side effects (male lactation or gynecomastia /galactorrhea is a potential side-effect of certain medications like Johnson & Johnson’s antipsychotic Risperdal, or Merck’s Propecia). Instead, the victim is enthusiastically "empowered" and encouraged—possibly by activists aligned to foundations that rely on donors in Big Pharma—to celebrate his new magical power to "chest-feed" babies.


A culture that idealizes androgyny, that exalts the hybrid state of being at once female and male, signals a concerted attempt to surpass the "binary," or the dialectical, parental duality of male/female. This implies a wish to escape from the biological circumstances of all mammals having been conceived by the often-traumatic, because penetrative, sex act between a male and a female, a mother and father. The embrace of trans identities as a central rallying cry for the mainstream left therefore embodies (among many things) the partial acknowledgement of this orphaned state in which one can become as the Ouroboros: the creature from Greek mythology whose tail grows into its mouth, who is self-begotten and self-reproducing, therefore parentless. Whereas in Jung, the Ouroboros represents the unification of the psyche, in our context the Ouroboros would symbolize our permanent crisis of self-individuation through individual consumption.


"Parthenogenesis in the sea urchin, the starfish, and the toad has been artificially reproduced."-Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex


One of the aims of the sacralization of the trans issue, is a search for parthenogenesis—or  belief in virgin birth. Despite the origins of this myth in the Church (the institution that often credits itself as having invented patriarchy) feminist thought ever since Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 "The Dialectic of Sex" has continuously reimagined parthenogenesis and conception-sans-penetration as liberating for women. The fantasy of feminist immaculate conception, (today advocated by Firestone’s intellectual heiresses like Haraway and Butler) reframes the left’s current state of orphanhood as an ultimate blessing. But it is more like the curse of the orphan-King Oedipus, who wanders the earth eyeless and in rags.


When all else is precarious, the welter of gender and BLM activists believes that the last refuge is in a regression into very basic elemental physicality: like Helen Keller, who was rendered deaf blind, and mute, the precarious-afflicted individuals try to feel the elements, the senses upon the skin, in order to restore some sense to a too-rapidly changing world. Yet that mere blunt physicality is all that's left in the new absence of true community, of ideology, of that adult extension of home which could have been found within a functioning offline movement. The extended family, unlike the nuclear family, always doubled as an effective political party and social organization. That physical remedy of taking refuge in the hyper-politicized genitalia, womb, and cutis does not suffice, even if it promises an avenue of redemption from the existential disembodiment of the internet and online life.  From this last resort of refuge in a revisionist biology that denies the facts of sexual reproduction, there follows the “Transhumanist” urgency to infinitely expand the possibilities of the body, to rebel against the limitations of sex and death.


"Precarity" or the state of being afloat and alone in volatile economic forces is an abgrund, a lack of grounding, a sense of fallenness in the abyss. It leads to what the psychiatrist RD Laing in "The Divided Self" called ontological insecurity, a feature of the schizoid personality structure. The only way to end the state of constant freefall for a left currently relegated to the schizoid universe of podcasts, facemasks, x.com, and Zoom conference calls is to build warm, physical spaces that offer both social connection and free expression, through free offline education, culture, and militant organizational guidance. Such myriad organic, physical spaces could be federated or interconnected by way of the tool—no longer standing in as a foster parent—of digital and virtual communications tech: one of many torches out of this Oedipal blindness, nursed by night.

Footnotes

Arturo Desimone (1984) was born and raised on the island Aruba. At 22 he moved to the Netherlands and started exhibiting visual art.

 
 

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