On Radical Sincerity

Irony as domination, meaning it as defiance

A few days ago, in an update on its war against Iran, the US administration posted this video. It splices footage of missile and bomb strikes with the music and visuals of the family video game Wii Sports. It is part of a series of posts that have framed this very real conflict as if it were a computer game. None of this is a leak or a mistake, but part of the Trump team’s deliberate communication choices and the cultivation of showboating through videos like this, and the broader use of AI slop. The image it projects is deliberately cultivated yet ultimately dismissive: none of this is truly real, none of it matters, and, most of all, you are a fool for caring about it.

It is often said in the context of Russian autocracy that the real victory wasn’t suppressing the truth, but defeating the idea of truth. Flooding the zone became about telling lies not to convince, but in such a multitude that reality got lost. As one writer put it, “Nothing is True, and Everything is Possible”, becomes a mantra of surrealist political repression that makes even asking if something is true make you look like a fool. Much of Trump’s campaign has worked the same angle – but the lack of seriousness adds a deeper wave of cynicism. Nothing is serious, and caring at all is a sign of weakness.

What we’re looking at is a mode, a grammar, a way of operating in which seriousness itself is the thing being refused. The irony isn’t a coating over the politics. It is the politics. The mechanism is powerful and serves the regime’s ends particularly well. When nothing is ever quite meant, nothing can ever quite be held against you. The escape hatch is always already built in — it was a joke, it was trolling, you’re the idiot for taking it literally. Accountability requires sincerity as a precondition: you can only be held to what you meant. Refuse meaning, and you refuse the whole apparatus. This is not a bug. It is the point.

Like much of the MAGA political movement, this genealogy stretches back to the internet of the 00s and 10s. It is rooted in trolling and the culture that developed around it. Here, it is important to understand that trolling is not simply about being obnoxious on the internet. It is about baiting people. The term itself arguably comes from a form of fishing. The victory came not from being horrible per se, but from getting people worked up, making them care. It gave rise to a moral economy with a single, absolute rule: the worst thing you can be is someone who meant it.

The protagonists also used this as a defence mechanism. Irony was the hedge that protected them from social disapproval. It was an in-built defence. Say something monstrous, if it lands, mean it. If it doesn’t, you were only trolling – any complainant shouldn’t take it seriously, be so uptight, &c &c. The ambiguity made consequences harder to determine. You can never hold someone to a position that they never quite occupied. As internet culture came to shape an ever-larger share of the wider world, this dynamic spread and became a useful foil for those wanting to push the boundaries of politics.

We see the same phenomenon in the so-called “manosphere”. Irony is deployed to keep the whole thing deniable. Deplorable views are laundered through detachment. The claim comes that it is not meant to be taken literally, that it is hyperbole, for show or for performance. It resolves to the same point – taking it seriously is a sign you have been had, a sign of weakness. You’re never quite saying what you’re saying. The racist joke is never quite a racist joke. The incitement is never quite an incitement. And the person who objects is always, without exception, the humourless one.

This provides the perfect cover for those who do mean it. They can slip back and forth between this smokescreen of irony. Among friends, these things can be meant and celebrated. When faced with pushback, they can melt away and undermine the opponent’s credibility by branding it a joke. Plausible deniability faces outward. Genuine conviction faces in. It is epistemic guerrilla warfare, impervious to head-on confrontation.

There is nothing new in this. It is the classic bully’s riposte — deny the seriousness of what you’re doing, fire the blame back at the victim. Your cruelty becomes their overreaction. The wrongdoer walks: the complainant looks hysterical. None of this is sophisticated. Underneath the memes and the epistemology, it is the same dominance behaviour that has always characterised male bullying — the difference is that the internet gave it scale. The Trump administration gave it a cabinet.

The result is a government that doesn’t care about the seriousness of what it does or the enormous power it wields. Previous administrations could be myopic or callous. This one rejoices in its own cruelty. It treats caring about things as the enemy, morality as a humiliation, and empathy as a weakness. The evidence is consistent. They celebrate the aggression with pop music montages. Their contempt for Ukraine treats the seriousness of the nation and its people as embarrassing, their sacrifice as an obstacle, and their moral clarity as an affront. The war with Iran was launched without proper planning or care and is rendered as a highlight reel, packaged for engagement, stripped of consequence.

This matters beyond the US. The ironic detachment is a solvent. It dissolves the bonds that support good governance and democratic life. This lack of sincerity undermines the idea that power must justify itself, that accountability is meaningful, and that there is a shared reality against which claims can be tested. Its proponents win not by persuading the rest of us, but by miring us in nihilism and cynicism. They empower themselves and extend their domination by making it cringe to care, or risible to object. Just as authoritarian regimes triumph by dissolving the very concept of truth, they also win by making seriousness embarrassing. And Farage, through his Cameo appearances and responses to allegations of schoolboy racism, is steeped in the same deployment of ambiguity.

This framing must be rejected. The cynical gain power by demanding we join them. They want us to accept their mode of conduct. To agree that caring is for suckers, that they should not be held accountable, that there is no expectation that they wield power burdened by seriousness. If we do so, we concede the world a politics in which nothing is real, and nothing counts, and the only operative principle is the will of whoever holds power. That system has a name. It isn’t new, and it doesn’t end well.

The case for sincerity isn’t merely sentimental. It is structural. Accountability requires that someone meant something. Justice requires that someone take an injury seriously. Democracy requires, at a minimum, a shared agreement that things are real and that they matter. Cynicism and ironic detachment erode the ability to hold power to account and to build an alternative. Trump and those around him have understood and harnessed this.

The response is not to yield. I’ve long admired this defence of the moral scold. Its arguments apply to sincerity, too. The accusation of pearl-clutching, of taking things too seriously, of being the humourless one in the room operates by similar mechanisms. They police not the message but the messenger, and they work by making the cost of speaking plainly feel higher than the cost of staying silent. To mean what you say, in a political culture built on ironic detachment, is to make yourself vulnerable in a way the ironist never is. You can be held to it. You can be hurt by it. The escape hatch is closed.

That vulnerability is what makes it powerful. The ironist cannot stand for anything. Everything is reversible, deniable, and hedged. Sincerity makes a stand; it has honesty. More than that, it operates on a purely personal level. While it flows into politics, it can be borne by a thousand daily actions. It fosters a humanity that endures and cannot be taken away either. In the face of a politics built on the premise that caring is weakness, sincerity is not just a disposition. It is an assertion. It is, in the end, an act of defiance.

(Taking a bit of a break this week, so there will be a bumper selection of recommended articles next week).