Jason Bourne and the Failure of the Twitter Politics
How Leftist Twitter missed the point about Ted Cruz’s Jason Bourne Tweet
On May 3rd, Senator Ted Cruz retweeted Aisha Ahmad’s, a PhD candidate at Oxford according to her Twitter bio, critique of the CIA’s latest rebranding attempt. Ahmad’s original tweet criticized a recently released CIA video that depicted the intelligence agency as “woke” and progressive. While Ahmad’s critique of the video is correct, as I will argue, Ted Cruz waded into the fray with his patterned faux outrage at “wokeness” run amok. Cruz’s retweet stated, “we’ve come a long way since Jason Bourne.” There are many infuriating things about this tweet, one of which being that the CIA was the antagonist in the Bourne franchise. Ignoring this obvious point, such rhetoric seems like it would be perfect for the defunct Facebook group Conservatives Approaching the Point illustrating the ways in which the language of identity politics is easily co-opted by existing power structures. However, the liberal Twitter-gentsia (leftist Twitter “intellectuals” and celebrities) harped on the incredibly unimportant factor that Jason Bourne was a fictional character. Presented with an excellent opportunity to illustrate the limitations of identity politics as an ideology, as well as, the connection between the entertainment industry and the U.S. military, the online Left seemed only capable of making the same impotent quips lampooning Cruz for thinking a fictional character was real. This put the online Left in the awkward position of both defending the C.I.A. and again ignoring the deep ties between the entertainment industry (video games, sports: specifically the NFL, and movies).[1]
It is important to note that Ted Cruz’s tweet was idiotic and not trying to make any larger point about the military-entertainment-industrial complex. It is also important to note that “wokeness” by itself is not a bad thing. “Wokeness” as the call for anti-racist policies and acknowledgement of the role of white supremacy in contemporary U.S. society is a position everyone on the Left should embrace, but often the discourse around “wokeness” leaves for a feeble position easily co-opted by powerful institutions. This co-opting lies at the heart of critical theorist Nancy Fraser’s conception of Progressive Neoliberalism. Fraser defined progressive neoliberalism as:
alliance of new social movements (including feminism), on the one side, and the high-end ‘symbolic’ and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alignment, what passes for the forces of emancipation are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, and especially financialization…. Progressive ideals (diversity, women’s and LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism) gloss over policies that devastate manufacturing and the populations who once forged stable middle-class lives from engagement in it.[2]
Fraser’s criticism illustrated the way in which progressive attitudes of “wokeness” can easily be incorporated into the dominant neoliberal order. The clearest example of this is in defense companies. The defense industry is dominated by women. All of the five major defense companies are headed by women. While celebrated for their diversity and held up as a triumph for women, the female led defense industry did little to slow down U.S. imperialism or the U.S.’ role in foreign wars. The example of the melding of progressive lip service with conservative economic and military aims has only accelerated after the explosion of Black Lives Matters and the murder of George Floyd. The examples are too numerous to document here, but some of the most obvious examples include the NBA allowing players to have pre approved social justice messages on their jerseys despite a significant number of owners support for the G.O.P. and Donald Trump, Coke telling employees to be less white while supporting the Georgia’s G.O.P.’s voting rights’ restrictions, or Apple’s Tim Cook receiving an award for LGBT advocacy while relying on inhuman labor conditions overseas. These are a few examples, but if one looks closely enough at any corporate claim at social responsibility the underlying reality will become apparent enough. The CIA’s latest attempt at rebranding as woke, ignoring its brutal repression of leftist or overthrowing of leftist governments around the world, again illustrates the feebleness of identity politics. Again, this does not mean that many of the arguments put forward by supporters of identity politics are wrong, but merely that they do not go far enough in challenging the dominant power structures. Representation alone is not enough, and representation can easily be folded into dominant power structures of oppression as the defense industry example clearly indicates.
What was also lost in all of the Ted Cruz uproar was that Ahmad’s original criticisms of the video were correct. The CIA is not a woke organization and greater representation within the CIA is not a cause for celebration. There is certainly a deep level of subtext to CIA’s video using a Latina spokesperson given the atrocities the agency committed in Latin America. Furthermore, Ahmad was correct in her assessment that this video represents the failure of American Left to provide any real alternative to the situation America finds itself in. The American Left’s failure to offer an alternative economic platform combined with the legacy of white supremacy gave rise to the Tea Party, then Donald Trump, and finally the current G.O.P. of Cruz and his ilk. This video is a damning critique of the state of Leftist politics in America, and rather than echoing Ahmad’s point the Twitter-gentsia pounced on the easy target of Cruz. The critique of Cruz’s comment buried Ahmad’s original analysis of the grotesque way the CIA marketed itself as a progressive institution while upholding and promoting the U.S. imperialism. In this respect, the Left’s Twitter-gentsia is able to uphold the dominant power structures without threatening the platforms that give them their clout and reach. These online figures can continue to appear as rebels or progressives, while protecting and promoting corporate power and defense agencies like the CIA.
Finally, there is Ted Cruz’s invocation of Jason Bourne to harken back to a time where America was supposedly tougher, manlier, and a global hegemonic superpower. Such critiques are not new and are made routinely whether it is current conservative “intellectuals” like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, or Tucker Carlson, Robert Bly in the 1990s, Billy Graham’s Muscular Christianity of the 1950s, or really any discussion of masculinity since the rise of white-collar work after World War II. On this point, Cruz is merely reciting a hackneyed discourse prevalent in America for over seventy years. What was insightful about Cruz’s tweet was his explicit connection between the entertainment industry and the U.S. defense department. Instead of seizing the opportunity to illustrate the way in which U.S. propaganda operates and permeates within the entertainment industry, the Left mustered up some variation of the same joke about Bourne being a fictional character. This leaves those actually on the left with depressing questions of which is worse: the vapid state of American political discourse on the right or that the left can only offer irony and snark as a response?
[1] The entertainment industry had a similar impact on the way the public perceives the police and forensic evidence A.K.A the CSI Effect
[2] Nancy Fraser, “Progressive Neoliberalism versus Reactionary Populism: A Choice the Feminists Should Refuse,” NORA- Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research. Pgs 281–282
