Loser Politics

On the Rise of the Parasocial Left and "MAGA Communism"

This article is originally published in the new magazine Muftah Issue 2: “Misfits”

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The market is based on a zero-sum game logic, according to which the world is split between winners and losers. The crudeness of this logic shapes our political culture. According to the discourse of the right, the liberal left is made up of people who cannot face up to the reality that there are losers in the world. This is part of the reason why the popular rhetoric on the right chastises soft “snowflakes” on the left who are too weak to accept the market’s logic. This also helps explain another canard of the right, that everyone to the left of them is somehow communist because they want a world of acceptance and affirmation of all people. But this image of the liberal left is a total fantasy. We live in a time when the establishment left of the Democratic Party has no problem affirming the very same worldview of political winners and losers. This was evident in the 2024 election cycle, when Joe Biden referred to Trump’s followers as “trash people”—a phrase as tone-deaf as when Hillary Clinton called Trump’s movement a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. To many liberals, the political coalition of misfits and losers that Trump has assembled are thought to possess an intractable resentment over the loss of their cultural hegemony. But the resentments of Trump’s base are rarely discussed from the lens of economic deprivation.¹ Without an analysis of the economic and class inequalities that drive the resentments of Trump’s base, liberalism only exacerbates the myth of the political loser. This can only lead to more and more communities continuing to sprout up that organize according to this unacknowledged logic.

The politics of the loser points to a deeper contradiction of liberalism on both the right and the left. Namely, the winner-loser dichotomy creates immense subjective alienation, which in turn creates the need for political resistance and defiance to liberalism. The liberal tendency to deny the importance of class, poverty, and economic inequality in the consideration of politics is inversely related to the intensification of the myth of the winner-loser society. This contradiction was on full display in the high-profile debate between right-wing philosopher Jordan Peterson and erstwhile leftist provocateur Slavoj Žižek in 2019. Peterson’s widely popular brand of bootstrap libertarian self-help and individual initiative appeals quite naturally to the “basement dweller,” the “incel,” and other cliché manifestations of the loser. Although he is a highly contradictory champion of Marxism, Žižek championed a left that would be capable of organizing this same alienated contingent of young men; he acknowledges that the left has struggled to integrate the political loser and that his objective was to turn Peterson’s fans to the left. After all, the Marxist insight into class conflict can help challenge the winner-loser vision, revealing it as a total fantasy. This fantasy is revealed precisely in the notion that, for Marx, class is a relation, not a fetish, and thus class power does not function as a personification of the elite or the oligarchs. The ruling class is not a personification of some aristocratic cabal; they are a personification of the whims of capital.² Marx’s insight into class tempers the liberal tendency to individualize social conflict. This individualizing tendency leads to political communities that are constantly caught up in seeking a resolution to the alienation that liberal systems of class exclusion have brought about in the first place. The vicious circle of capitalist politics cannot escape the winner-loser myth.

This cycle gives way to a politics of resentment that marks a blemish on liberal politics, and there is no more important—if not provocative—thinker of resentment than Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche places the problem of ressentiment at the center of his wider theory of the crisis of political values ushered in by modernity. Modernity, he argues, is shaped by movements of leveling, from socialism to egalitarian Christianity, to the revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution. These social forces and values of massification—such as demands for equality, rights, justice, and so on—are thought to be driven by feelings of revenge amongst the lower classes. Nietzsche argues that these forces agitate to remove the very split in society that defines the contemporary liberal idea of the winner-loser split—an idea that Nietzsche wishes to defend. He argues that while political resentments must be overcome, this must be achieved by forging a political community that can affirm that social life is constituted by a winner-loser dynamic. The problem of modern egalitarian movements, in his view, is that they obscure this natural set of differences, and a political operation must be enacted so that a truer “ascending” and “descending” line within humanity can be located and affirmed.³

Although contemporary liberals seldom think of their wider political vision in such terms, they share much in common with some of the most reactionary elements of Nietzsche’s political thought. Nietzsche is one of the most important intellectual allies to the liberal order because his political thought supports the “winner-loser” mythology. At the heart of Nietzsche’s political thought is a community-building objective in which the liberal mythology of the winner-loser society is affirmed by an Übermensch that actively shapes a world in which the descending and ascending lines of humanity are affirmed. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has argued that there is a danger implicit to the Nietzschean call to affirm oneself above the herd in that it has been the source for reactionary and fascist community-building. Sloterdijk does not blame Nietzsche directly for the rise of early 20^th century fascism, he rather claims that fascism is a movement of losers who effectively abuse Nietzsche’s insights for the purposes of ascending to the top. For Sloterdijk, fascism is a movement of losers who usher in an upside-down world, and thus Nietzsche’s elitist community poses a fatal risk to the liberal order because it can easily be co-opted.⁴

In our age of extreme class stratification and inequality, the winner-loser myth is a near-inescapable commonsense on both the political right and left. Political communities sprout that openly embrace the winner-loser myth to confront the resentment and alienation of capitalist society. To internalize the winner-loser myth is to affirm as natural a society governed by aggression and resentment. This is why, as the psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion points out in his studies on groups, political communities form to allow members to flee this sense of persecution. In his Experiences in Groups, Bion describes a similar logic of group belonging, in what he calls the “fight–flight group.” Here, group members identify with a leader by forming a dependency structure that is violent and exclusive.⁵ The emergent fight–flight group affirms the zero-sum logic of the capitalist market interior to the group, but it does so on terms that are perceived as fairer and more satisfying than mainstream groups, such as the school, the church, or the army.

In the fight–flight group, the leader plays the role of forming an artificial environment in which the competition of the wider society is reenacted within the group, but on terms that are more transparent. Like the Nietzschean community which affirms the winner-loser myth by active separation and division from those deemed weak or inferior, the fight–flight group does the same thing, but they rely on a leader to enact this separation from the wider society. The fight–flight group thus sustains the winner-loser mythology by rejecting the dominant liberal version and fortifying the community as a perfect alternative to it. Problems inevitably arise within the fight–flight group because the leader, as a savior figure takes it upon himself to perform victoriously against a hostile world. The fight of the group thus becomes the reserve of the leader alone and they leave little to no room for group members to enact their power. This results in the inability of the fight-flight group to satisfy the independence of each member, and they become what Bion refers to as a “dependent group.” A dependent group is formed around a leader whose authority is taken to be benevolent but who remains the only actor within the group that can confront the hostile outside world.

Backlash to Liberalism: Gen Z and the Rise of the Parasocial Left

The alienation brought on by today’s rapacious, austerity-driven capitalism has given rise to all sorts of strange political ideologies, especially among young people. The fallout from Bernie Sanders’ second presidential campaign in 2020, combined with the zombie-like blunders of the centrist Democratic Party, has contributed to a highly confused series of political ideologies across the online left. Social alienation is not homogenous, but it is shaped by generational and class experience. While the Millennial Generation exhibits the most support for socialism among any generation since World War II, this trend can only be understood by recognizing the way that system-wide crises—from 9/11, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the 2008 economic crash—have uniquely disenchanted Millennials with status quo liberalism and capitalism. But what of the current youth generation—the Zoomers? Theirs is an experience of life fully immersed online; they do not know a life before institutional austerity and cutthroat competition.

Not only have the Zoomers come of age amid rapacious post-2008 economic conditions marked by austerity and a rising cost of living, the two major political events that shaped their lives were the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both events bore witness to the liquidation of the left, and it was the fallout of the Bernie Sanders movement that proved to be particularly damaging given that he was a figure that many Zoomers passionately supported. On the older end, the Zoomers are now reaching their late 20s and early 30s in an economy that has blocked their capacity to reproduce the family or to purchase a home, let alone get by without massive debt from college. For those who remain politically active, Zoomers tend to forge their political engagement online, and, as Amber Frost documents, their political ideologies are highly odd and contradictory. For the more politically active Zoomer, it is common to hear them label their politics as “Third Positionism” or “antidemocratic transhumanism.” This incoherence signals a restless radicalism that is driven primarily by institutional alienation and the long-term fallout from the sabotage of the Sanders movement. Young people today are rightly rebelling against the existing left and liberal institutions, from the NGO network of civil society groups and nonprofits to the various Democratic Party subsidiaries such as the Democratic Socialists of America. There is a profound trust barrier and legitimacy crisis that these organizations have rightly developed, and many young people feel that the frameworks the left offers for social change have been proven inadequate. Added to this legitimacy crisis, the leading left and liberal institutions reflect an exclusive upper middle-class culture that seems to care nothing for the struggles of the everyday worker.

This collapse in the legitimacy of left and liberal institutions is also occurring in a context in which the Internet increasingly mediates every aspect of collective social life. This has given rise to an online left populated by micro-communities formed around podcasters, online streamers, and scholars without proper place in the academic system. These micro-communities are not marginal or ineffectual; it is more likely that an online community will contribute to shaping the political ideology of Gen Z than the immediate experience of college professors. Not only have the institutions of the left collapsed, but the university system has also grown more exclusive and austere, particularly in the academic humanities. In 2024, there were fewer than five tenure track jobs offered in comparative literature, for example, and growing numbers of younger academics face a job market that has completely dried up.

In the absence of civil society and political associations, micro-communities form online around public figures, and this takes on a “parasocial” quality. Parasocial communities are in many ways more intense than purely social communities because they are forged in the liminal comfort of online spaces. While relationships formed online are typically noncommittal and passive, political micro-communities on the left—precisely because the left tends to be composed of people who have themselves been radicalized and who experience alienation from this system—tend to forge more passionate connections. The power of these parasocial communities should not be underestimated; it is more likely that a young person will change their minds about political theory, power and social reality from exposure to a podcaster and their micro-community than through experiences at college with professors. Micro-communities are more than mere education hubs—the leaders can take on the role of a spiritual coach as much as an intellectual. They provide sense-making, allowing for the development of an ideological lens by which to make coherent the politics of our world.

Meme Warfare and the Alpha Parasocial Movement: MAGA Communism

On the online parasocial left, the “MAGA Communist” movement typifies the political irrationalism of a Gen Z alienated from the existing left. It is not clear whether MAGA Communism is a fringe Internet movement, as reported by CNN, the New York Times, and reflected in an investigative report on this movement conducted by The Guardian. MAGA Communism began as “Infrared,” a parasocial community started by Haz al-Din, a Lebanese American law student who dropped out of law school in 2019 to “preach” Marxism full-time on the Internet. Haz is not an ordinary influencer in the age of the parasocial left. His message draws support from the same vulnerable demographic Jordan Peterson attracts, namely the dejected young man, or the figure liberals mockingly call the “basement dweller.” Haz peaches a message that has many of the same qualities of Peterson’s bootstrap self-help rhetoric, but he situates his thought squarely in the Marxist tradition.

In the early period of Infrared, Haz built a loyal following based on a cage match approach to the wider online parasocial left. His strategy was to approach each day online as a battlefield amidst a wider war to defeat what he names “leftism,” which he and his followers define as the collective ideological tendency of the existing American left. In a founding manifesto of MAGA Communism, Haz and Infrared argue that a new “metaphysical” alternative to leftism needs to emerge to usher in a new multipolar imperial arrangement of power in which American hegemony is “dis-aligned.” Haz’s followers are known as “The Guerillas,”⁶ an homage to the task of making guerilla warfare on existing leftism and an admission that their community is centered around the silverback alpha of Haz himself. Infrared argues that the primary schism of politics is not between left and right. Rather, it is between a nascent “partisanship” ideology, which draws people into a general antagonism with the status quo, and “leftism,” which represents all expressions of the existing left, and which is in total embrace of the status quo. In the manifesto, they write:

The distinction between left and right is displaced by the distinction between Leftism (which increasingly takes, in political reality, the form of an ‘apolitical Center’) and Partisanship, the latter including all manner of eclectic, wild, fringe ideologies which appear ‘all over the political spectrum.’ It appears as such, not because of any mystical ‘Nazbol vortex’ or profound metaphysical significance of fascism – but because it represents, in the final analysis, a denial of modern political form itself. In contrast to ‘third position syncretism,’ partisan political ideologies are properly chaotic, being defined only by their unpredictability from the standpoint of modern political consciousness.⁷

The strategy of MAGA Communism is thus to promote a radical “hyperstitional” disruption from within the MAGA base of followers, whom they see as the antagonistic agents capable of disrupting contemporary leftism. But this idea that inside the onion of the Trump MAGA movement is the beating heart of the American proletariat leads Infrared to positions that effectively tail the Republican Party. This is precisely because so much of the content of their political controversies revolves around the embrace of the very same culture war positions the mainstream Republican Party champions. Most detrimentally, this culture war pandering to the right leads Infrared to adopt a narrow empirical definition of what constitutes the working class, leading them to deny, for example, that baristas or service workers are part of the proletariat.

But despite these basic contradictions in its understanding of the working class and MAGA, Infrared’s core problem is that it only measures its success by the performance of their leader. In his bios, Haz curiously describes himself as a “comedian” and the “undefeated Tankie Warlord.” Haz hosts nightly streams for a loyal following of between 600 to 1,000 “Guerillas” consisting of lighthearted comedy to armchair theory, to the occasional cage match debate with a leftist. Haz sees himself as a Marxist theoretician and at the core of his idiosyncratic blend of Marxist-Leninist thought is the reactionary thought of Russian philosopher Aleksander Dugin. Dugin is the master thinker who most importantly provides the strategy for thinking civilizational “multipolarity,” or the emergence of a post-unipolar, post-American-dominated world scene. Dugin argues that war and violence are necessary to initiate a break from leftism and liberalism. Dugin thus gives Infrared a global perspective on the wider aim to destroy leftism and, as a result, they frequently celebrate and embrace repressive and authoritarian regimes such as North Korea, and they understand Putin’s Russia to be in line with a wider socialist and communist vision.

In the last two years, Haz has teamed up with Jackson Hinkle, a shady social media provocateur who mysteriously grew his follower count on X following the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, to over two million. Haz and Hinkle have such outlandish squabbles with leftists that they become parodies of themselves. They openly celebrate Stalin, they advocate a return to patriarchal authority, and they refer to LGBTQ as a “social fascist” movement. In the “The Rise of MAGA Communism,” they make it clear that, “today’s LGBT pride parades, or the 2020 BLM protests thus have more in common with the ‘mass politics’ of Fascism than today’s MAGA movement.” All these provocative and chaotic politics have, unsurprisingly, led the left to view Hinkle, Haz, and MAGA Communism as at best a “patriotic socialist” movement destined to only tail the Republican Party. But at worst, they are viewed as a fascist rightwing movement.

Engaging Irrationalist Marxism

Unless you have chosen to go full “grill pilled” and gone offline, the parasocial left is inescapable. And if you are on the online left, the MAGA Communist movement will inevitably enter your picture at some point. My engagement with the MAGA Communists started when I quote tweeted Dugin’s appearance with Haz and Hinkle in Russia. I pointed out a series of contradictions in the Marxism espoused by MAGA Communists. Although my criticism was relatively mild, the Guerillas swarmed on me with passionate defenses of Haz. One thing led to another, and they taunted me to debate him, going so far as to suggest that if I backed down from the debate, I would only confirm that I am a “soy leftist professor.”

What I pointed out to the MAGA Communists is that they resemble a dependent group, as Bion theorizes it. We recall that the fundamental weakness of the dependent group is found in the members’ reliance on the alpha leader. Bion helps us to locate the fatal flaw of the dependent group in the way that aggression persists amongst its members due to their reliance on the leader. This reliance is ambivalent, while the leader is celebrated as the only one who can enact an alternative to the winner-loser reality of liberal society. The fact that the leader is taken to be the only one who can perform and be the winner ends up stunting the independence of each member.

So, I decided to engage the MAGA Communists and to appear on Haz’s show. The event was livestreamed on Haz’s Kick channel (an alternative to YouTube for dissidents on the right and the left). Death threats were exchanged between Infrared Guerillas as well as pro-trans and LGBTQ leftists. Just one day before the debate, a close friend of mine alerted me to a meme that Infrared had promoted during Pride Month that openly advocated the extermination of gay people. As a result of this tension, going into the debate, I felt obliged to address the importance for Marxists to embrace LGBTQ people in the name of common dignity and in the name of de-intensifying the culture war aggression.

I opened with this message because it is essential for Marxists to stand for the rights of LGBTQ people and to do so does not mean that one has somehow been co-opted by liberalism, bourgeois culture-war politics or leftism. But more importantly, I wanted to argue that because the MAGA Communists treat the online space as a battlefield with immense political stakes, they treat online politics are more real than offline politics. However, when death threats are made, and violence is encouraged, this theory suddenly is abandoned, and they end up backing away from the open embrace of violence and destruction. Would Haz and the Guerillas want to be responsible for actual chaos and violence, or are they ultimately LARPing? The good news is that Haz ended up encouraging the Guerillas to refrain from violent provocations with LGBTQ leftists, which could be taken as a minor success and sufficient reason justifying the debate.

My rationale for taking part in this debate was influenced by the Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukács, who argued that fascism is an irrationalist epistemology that thrives on incoherent ideas. The Marxist sociologist John Bellamy Foster has argued that today’s left is witnessing the return of irrationalist theories and, like Lukács before him, Foster locates this return of irrationalism in the rise of imperialist wars and monopoly capitalism. Although I do not think the MAGA Communists are fascist in any clear sense of the term, I do believe that their movement poses a danger to the development of Marxism in our time. A Marxism that trades in openly chauvinistic, violent frameworks, and that theorizes Marxism as a warlike practice in the service of a new age of inter-imperialist warfare, is irrationalist. If it is successful, it will only further divide the wider left away from Marxism at a time when the practices of Marx and Engels are desperately needed for re-forging and organizing the working class. If irrationalist ideas are not openly debated and critiqued, they will only fester.

Since my debate with Haz, the MAGA Communist movement has fused with the Midwestern Marx Institute to create the American Community Party (ACP) . The formation of the ACP has led the Guerillas to professionalize and, like Jordan Peterson, Haz frequently admonishes the Guerillas to take an active role in their community. But despite their professionalization, the ACP continues its daily, all-out assault on leftism which seems only to reinforce the culture-war inertia of bourgeois politics.

The myth of the political loser is one of the great stumbling blocks obstructing the advancement of socialist politics in America. From the perspective of bourgeois politics, the myth must be internalized as reality. But when it is internalized, workers tend to see their condition as the immediate result of their performance on the market—as a success or a failure. This sparks a cycle of resentment in which alpha fight–flight communities inevitably sprout up to organize this collective disaffection. The left must never affirm this coding of people according to success and failure. To do so is to affirm a violent and competitive account of social reality which ultimately conceals the reality of class struggle. If the left does not address the psychic alienation that comes with automatically coding people as losers, they will have only frozen the class struggle, not advanced it. Because they have created a highly irrationalist account of Marxism, the first step to challenging a movement like MAGA Communism is to take them seriously at the level of their ideas. And the best antidote to addressing movements like MAGA Communism is not to dismiss them as losers, for to affirm the myth of the loser goes only to strengthen it and thus to foment even more reaction.

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Notes

1. Most notably, Jonathan M. Metzl’s book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland (New York: Basic Books, 2023), formulated an argument which sought to obscure economic precarity in the motivations of the American right wing. Moreover, following Trump’s landslide victory in November 2024, liberals have continued to insist that class and economic precarity do not explain the widespread support for Trump. See Nikole Hannah-Jones on Trump’s second victory.

2. As the Marxist scholar Anthony Giddens notes, “classes are constituted by the relationship of groupings of individuals to the ownership of private property in the means of production. This yields a model of class relations which is basically dichotomous [since some own and others do not, some work and others live off the fruits of those who labour]: all class societies are built around a primary line of division between two antagonistic classes, one dominant and the other subordinate,” Anthony Giddens and David Held, Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 37.

3. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes, “All individuals can be viewed in terms of whether they represent the ascending or the descending line of life.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 97.

4. Peter Sloterdijk, Nietzsche, Apostle, Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 16 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 77.

5. W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004), 63–67.

6. The “Guerillas” are a reference to the “Guerilla Warfare” that MAGA Communism sees as necessary to transform civil society, but the guerilla also refers to “being overlooked.” It is thus an implicit call to sublimate one’s dejected loser status to rise to a higher fight. See “The Rise of MAGA Communism,” Infrared Substack, September 18, 2022,

THE RISE OF MAGA COMMUNISM

7. “The Rise of MAGA Communism,” Infrared Substack, September 18, 2022,

THE RISE OF MAGA COMMUNISM