The Surreal State of Political Radicalism
“Parties: what is, what is not in the party line. But what if my own line, that admittedly twists and turns, passes through Heraclitus, Abelard, Eckhardt, Retz, Rousseau, Swift, Sade, Lewis, Arnim, Lautreamont, Engels, Jarry, and a few others? From them I have constructed a system of coordinates for my own use, a system that stands up to the test of my own personal experience and therefore appears to me to include some of tomorrow’s chances.” – Andre Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not
On May 6, 2023, Mauricio Martinez Garcia drove to a strip mall in Allen, TX, and opened fire on shoppers outside the building. He shot indiscriminately into the crowd, killing 8 and injuring 7, before being killed by an off-duty police officer. Following an initial flurry of speculation about the shooter’s background and motivation (was he another white incel shooter? or maybe a Latino gang member?), an identification was made that introduced mainstream news viewers to a very curious political archetype: the Mexican-American neo-Nazi.
For those unfamiliar with the niche ideologies that are regularly discussed and debated online, the news of the shooter’s identity was almost more shocking than the act itself. We see shootings every day — but we rarely see a Latino white supremacist. What was worse, the more the media dug, the more it seemed as though Garcia built his ideology solely with the intent of maximizing his right-wing bona fides, blending language of Christian nationalism and red-pill misogyny with white supremacy while ignoring the fact that he was, himself, not white. And to fight back against what he perceived as the Islamification of America, he of course murdered a Korean family, an Indian engineer, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, and a white security guard. The whole thing just didn’t make sense.
On July 13, 2019, Willem van Spronsen attempted to set the for-profit Tacoma Northwest Detention Center (T.N.D.C.) ablaze. The T.N.D.C. was contracted by I.C.E. to hold detained immigrants awaiting trial, with conditions on the inside allegedly ranging from poor to outright illegal. Spronsen arrived at the scene, began throwing firebombs at the facility, and attempted to detonate an improvised explosive before being shot by responding police. At the end of his attack, the casualties consisted of 69-year-old Spronsen and a detention-center-owned vehicle he had successfully ignited.
In the manifesto released shortly before his attack, Spronsen — a self-described “black and white thinker” — cited as inspirations the Alcoholics Anonymous leader Donn Pritts, Calvinist anti-slavery martyr John Brown, socialist pop-historian Howard Zinn, and the Women’s Defense Units of the Rojavan democratic confederalist movement. While disparate, his political influences came together to clarify for him the tools he ought to use to confront fascism in the Pacific Northwest: an AR-15 with 6 magazines, a propane tank, and a 3-page letter. Despite the cries from officials that “hundreds” could have died, operations at the T.N.D.C. were not seriously impacted.
On May 31, 2009, George Tiller was shot in the head while serving as a church usher. Tiller was one of the only doctors in the country providing late-term abortions at the time, and he was killed by anti-abortion extremist Scott Philip Roeder. Roeder had seemingly been radicalized through affiliations with constitutionalists and sovereign citizen groups before somehow stumbling into religious fanaticism and going all-in on Army of God-style “leaderless resistance.” Before his crime in 2009, Roeder had written for Prayer & Action News, an independent political journal that promoted the random murder of abortion providers and printed the instructions to manufacture bombs for this purpose. He expressed no remorse following his arrest and conviction, and the pro-life movement ran as quickly as possible to tell the world that he definitely was not affiliated with any of them.
These men’s actions saw condemnation and cries for decency from across the political spectrum, and a major driver of this reaction was the apparent lack of meaning behind the crimes committed. Even when we got statements of purpose from the perpetrators themselves, they felt totally unmoored — unaffiliated, untied to any larger strategy, uninterested in long-term wins. But despite this seeming emptiness, if you look closely, you can find threaded throughout a violent surrealism that has become the political mode du jour for self-styled American radicals. And what is most worrying about this new shade of violence is not its function or frequency, but rather its form. There is now a purposelessness — a lack of clarity — to the most egregious of acts. A pseudo-sincerity born of thoughtlessness. A laziness.
“All present systems can reasonably be considered to be nothing but tools on the carpenter’s workbench. This carpenter is you.” – Andre Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not
When looking at the political landscape in the United States, it is not that these extremists are simply self-radicalizing toward surreal action in the face of a real political struggle. The same purposeless and lack of will have spread into more “legitimate” wings of the radical left and right.
Despite allegedly seeing capitalism as a world-ending force, the Democratic Socialists of America can’t discipline their own elected members in any functional way, so they spend their time writing critiques of Brazilian right-wingers instead. Fearing an ethnic replacement worthy of a pseudo-dictatorial response, Peter Thiel pumps money into Moldbug lectures and anti-woke film festivals in New York, swaying approximately 0 people. The concerted fight against a lithium mine in Nevada was derailed due not to repression or lack of manpower, but disagreements around gender identity between Deep Green Resistance and the indigenous groups they were representing in court.
Just as it was for the surrealists of the early 20th century, serious political work has been subsumed by the instinctual and libidinal. Results do not matter, affect does. It is in being “radical” that one is political, and instead of a spectrum of efficacy, actions are assessed on a spectrum of identifiable radicality. You aren’t a good socialist if you reduce economic inequality– you are a good socialist if you make the edgiest posters. You aren’t fighting the left if you reduce immigration or smash unions — you are attacking if everyone sees your people in the papers. You aren’t doing ecological defense if you stop a strip mine — you are defending the Earth if you collect the correct political bedfellows. And of course, there is nothing more “radical” than a random act of violence. In a time of ever-escalating stakes and ever-narrowing routes to legitimate action, is it surprising that self-satisfaction has become the reward sought by the most politically extreme?
Making yourself feel radical may take your life, but it doesn’t take much effort. Shooting up a Walmart for “racial purity” is evil, but it is also lazy. Shooting sitting congresspeople in support of Bernie Sanders is unhinged, but again, lazy. Even the most serious extreme-right group in the West, Atomwaffen Division, has resorted to random shootings and stabbings to somehow spark a nuclear race war. They claim an eschatological goal, but they, too, are lazy.
The masturbatory nature of these acts and aims is, in many ways, scarier than historical forms of political terrorism: at least back then you could understand why someone bombed a cafe or assassinated a governor. Many of the most horrifying acts of violence from the late 20th century were those that smelled of politicalism but which seemed to be totally random, from the Barbant killings to the visible arm of Operation Gladio. By feeding into a cycle of rhetorical escalation and tactical regression, American political actors have laid the groundwork for a popular stochastic violence that Pino Rauti could have only dreamed of.
This lazy, anarchic approach to radical politics has failed to do much more than make random activists feel good about themselves. “Decentralization,” Cold War era cries against “democratic centralism,” and praise for senseless “diversity of tactics” have given each of us the right to decide for ourselves what is best for our side, and in doing so, have dissolved the foundation of the very idea of a mass political project. The Party and the Program have been completely abandoned, and the individual “radical” has taken their place at the workbench. The task of building tomorrow has been ceded to the most feckless or unhinged elements of our movements, and they are more than happy to fail at it.
We can’t ignore this violence if we want to bring radical politics back to the real. For whatever issue we find most pressing, there is a Garcia or a Spronsen who is willing to act because we’ve given them nothing else. These are the types of people who do “radical” politics now, and having internalized the aesthetic nature of political action, we can offer them no legitimate rebuke. We can’t build a future together if we are all acting alone, and we can’t work towards something if we are busy playing with ourselves. A return to something more substantive is critical. And real politics, unfortunately, will take some effort.
Jitter 