About a year ago, my son asked about post-modernism. “It’s just a type of art,” he insisted, dismissing the idea that it exists in any other form. That conversation turned into a long one as post-modernism really did begin in art, but did not stay there. It moved from art into literature, from literature into philosophy, and from philosophy into activism.
Once upon a time, my son would have been right that post-modernism really was just a school of art. It emerged in the late twentieth century as a reaction against modernism, rejecting the belief in artistic purity, universal progress, or a single authoritative meaning. Instead, it embraced pluralism, irony, appropriation, fragmentation, and the blending of high culture with the popular, the commercial, and even the profane.
I’m not an artist, but I dabble in poetry, and I approach it as if I’m taking photographs of emotions. When I write a poem, I want the reader to feel what I felt in the moment that moved me to write. I assume that I can convey my emotions to others.
Post-modernist poetry rejects that assumption. It does not treat authorial intent as important, and it rejects the notion that meaning can be fixed. Language, in this view, is layered with cultural and historical baggage, with all meaning produced in the interaction between text and reader.
A poem becomes less a photograph and more a collage. Post-modern poetry consists of fragments, references, irony, and competing interpretations. Where I seek clarity, post-modernism seeks ambiguity. Where I seek to convey meaning, post-modernism questions whether meaning can ever stand independently of the structures embedded in language and embodied in the cultural bias of the reader.
From there, the idea expanded. Words can have multiple meanings. Sentences multiply interpretive possibilities. Paragraphs expand them further. By the time you reach a book, the possible interpretations are almost limitless.
Up to that point, the observation is fair. Words do carry nuance, and texts invite discussion. But post-modernism takes an additional step, treating the existence of multiple interpretations as proof that there is no objective way to judge among them.
That leap works inside an art studio or a poetry reading, but it breaks when applied to the world around us.
Moby Dick is not a book about elephants. It is about Captain Ahab’s hunt for a particular whale, told through the eyes of Ishmael. We can debate symbolism, theology, obsession, or industry, but there are boundaries that reason and evidence establish.
The same is true of the world beyond literature. Our senses may be imperfect, but they are not useless. There may be multiple interpretations of events, but only some align with observable facts. Interpretations that do not fit the facts can and should be discarded.
Where I seek clarity, post-modernism seeks ambiguity.
The original post-modern philosophers did not deny that interpretations are constrained by context and structure. Post-modernism, however, escaped from philosophy just as easily as it escaped from art, eroding confidence in shared standards of rational judgment.
In its activist form, post-modernism does not just entertain multiple interpretations; it downgrades facts into personal opinion—you have your truths, I have mine. Whose facts count depends on who says them within a framework in which perceived oppression grants political power.
Post-modernist activism also blends well with other forms of identity politics.
The mainstream media tends to lean left, treating post-modernist activism with kid gloves even when it breaks down into violence and rioting. The resulting anti-American political propaganda is so effective that our adversaries now help guide our propaganda rather than making their own, begging the question of how we got where we are, as well as that of how to find our way back to reason.
Post-modernism did not begin with René Descartes, but the philosophical conditions against which it reacts did.
In the seventeenth century, Descartes confronted radical doubt. Perhaps our senses deceive us. Perhaps a “malicious demon” feeds us illusions. Descartes introduced skepticism not to dissolve truth, but to secure it to a point that nobody could argue, what we now call “common ground.” From this undeniable starting point, Cogito ergo sum, he attempted to rebuild knowledge, reason, and his belief in God, on stable foundations.
The Enlightenment embraced Descartes’ reason. Truth was assumed to be discoverable, objective, and universal.
In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche questioned whether what we call “truth” might instead reflect perspective and power. In the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger emphasized that human beings are never detached observers, but are situated within language, history, culture, and bias. Later thinkers such as Jacques Derrida examined how texts resist fixed meaning, while Michel Foucault analyzed how institutions produce knowledge in ways intertwined with hierarchy and power.
Post-modern philosophy did not claim that reality is imaginary. Rather, it questioned whether claims to universal, objective truth can ever stand outside the frameworks that produce them.
At roughly the same time, Marxism faced a crisis. Classical Marxism had predicted the internal collapse of capitalist societies and the rise of proletarian revolution in industrialized nations, with what would be World War I, the first war that killed at an industrial scale, as the main trigger. Unexpectedly, that revolution did not occur in the West, with the very “workers” on whom the theorists had depended for their “world revolution” voluntarily rushing to the trenches for king and country in 1914, and then settling back into their civilian jobs once the war ended. “Scientific socialism” was disproved: instead, when revolution did come, it came to Russia, the most politically primitive and least “capitalist” of European states, and the last one Marx would have expected.
Twentieth-century communist regimes that did take power in the Soviet Union under Lenin and then in China under Mao revealed severe economic dysfunction and massive human suffering. This was repeated in Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, and various other places, all of which failed to deliver anything resembling Marx’s vision.
That leap works inside an art studio or a poetry reading, but it breaks when applied to the world around us.
By the late twentieth century, Marxism as an economic system appeared empirically dead.
Into that intellectual environment, some communist theorists shifted emphasis. Rather than grounding critique in deterministic economic collapse, attention moved toward culture, language, ideology, and institutional power. This shift was influenced by the broader tradition of critical theory, which had already begun expanding Marxist analysis beyond economics.
Critical theory operates by identifying structural divisions within society and subjecting them to sustained critique. Over time, that method migrated from class analysis to analyses centered on race, gender, and identity. When institutionalized, this form of critique can intensify social fragmentation rather than analyze it, making everyone, as a member of some identity group, feel oppressed by the whole.
Here is where post-modern thought proved useful.
If knowledge is socially constructed, and if truth claims are shaped by power structures, then failures of communist regimes need not invalidate the broader critique of capitalism or hierarchy. One could argue that the perceived “truth” about those failures was produced within dominant Western narratives, reflecting a “Eurocentric” world view. This shifts the debate away from empirical prediction, and toward a framing around perceived oppression in which the Western nations are inherently guilty. Economic systems are suddenly viewed based on perceived morality, independently of the outcomes they may produce.
Post-modern skepticism did not invent Marxist politics, nor were all post-modern thinkers Marxists, but the tools developed by post-modern philosophy—such as suspicion of universal truth, a focus on communication as a tool of power, emphasis on power in knowledge production, etc.—integrated perfectly with critical theory.
The struggle then shifted.
Instead of focusing on economic class, newer academic movements began emphasizing race, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity. In fields such as feminist theory, post-colonial studies, and later critical race theory, standpoint and lived experience were treated as just as important as, if not more important than, actual proof.
We hear this in common language. Whenever people say, “I feel that,” followed by something that sounds like a fact, they are putting feelings ahead of facts.
By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, elements of these academic frameworks migrated beyond universities into broader social movements. In this popularized form, certain themes became dominant:
- Knowledge is shaped by social position.
- Power structures influence what counts as truth.
- “Truth” is personal and subjective.
- Lived experience carries epistemic authority.
- Claims to neutrality conceal structural advantage.
- Systems such as capitalism are framed as inherently exploitative or colonial in character.
- Language is treated as an instrument of power rather than a neutral tool of communication.
- Social identity becomes the primary lens for moral and political evaluation.
In activist contexts, these ideas take on explicit political force. Disagreement may be interpreted through the lens of power and harm rather than through empirical debate. Objectivity may be treated not as a neutral aspiration, but as a contested concept embedded in historical dominance.
Where Descartes used doubt to rescue certainty, post-modernist activism uses doubt to challenge it. For political movements disillusioned with failed economic predictions, skepticism about universal truth offers a way to relocate the struggle from material collapse to cultural and discursive transformation.
This does not mean post-modernism was designed to save communism, but it does mean that, in the aftermath of Marxism’s visible failures, post-modern critiques of truth, objectivity, and power provided intellectual resources for reshaping communist theory, and that was exactly what Marxism needed.
From a philosophical or artistic perspective, Marxism and post-modernism are separate, but, from an activist lens, the two movements are the same.
This raises another question: if post-modernism destabilizes confidence in truth, how do we regain reason?
The answer cannot be to deny human bias. We are limited creatures with imperfect senses. Our institutions can be (and have been) corrupted. Power does influence which voices are amplified and which are ignored. Post-modernism is not wrong to observe these things.
Where it goes wrong is in moving from humility to surrender.
Human imperfection does not imply that there is no truth, and nor does the fact that interpretations vary mean all interpretations are equal. The existence of bias does not eliminate the possibility of correction, and, in fact, it makes correction much more necessary.
Descartes started with Cogito ergo sum. We need some kind of shared truth that is just as unassailable.
We now have that.
Zohran Mamdani announced recently that New York City has a $12 billion deficit. This is not new information. Former Mayor Eric Adams announced that deficit, and told us the reason—that it is the cost of taking care of migrants in a city that has been asking for more migrants to come.
Similar cost overruns are occurring in other sanctuary cities and states around the country. We also have rampant welfare fraud in Minnesota, California, Michigan, Maine, and likely many other locations around the country, much of it related to migrants and covered up by politicians currying the favor of those groups.
Those locations are beginning to tax their residents to pay for those costs, and the residents don’t like it. Reality is pushing back.
Bad ideas do not bring good outcomes, but those with bad ideas never seem to be held accountable for the outcomes they produce. When public officials conceal fraud, when institutions protect criminal behavior for political reasons, when leaders evade accountability under partisan protection, those people need to be prosecuted. If proven guilty, they need to go to jail.
If truth is merely a construct of dominance, then there is no neutral ground from which to challenge it. There is only counter-power. The argument shifts from “Is this true?” to “Who benefits?”, and when politics is dominated by identity, the answer is never “we all do.” It is always that some are asked to pay so that others can benefit, but there is no limit to the amount the government can spend, and eventually the bills come due and reason is forced to emerge.
The pain bad policy causes is universal.
Reason is not the enemy of the marginalized. Properly understood, reason pushes back against oppression.
Shared standards of evidence prevent authority from defining reality unilaterally. If truth depends solely on social position, then those with greater leverage will always determine what counts. This will always lead to more oppression (not less), and people don’t like being oppressed, so eventually reality pushes back.
The Enlightenment was not perfect. It overestimated human rationality and underestimated the persistence of bias, but it recognized that there exists a reality independent of our interpretation, and that careful inquiry can approximate that reality over time. Post-modernism, when healthy, tells us to question that reality, but with an eye toward making it more complete and more correct. Post-modernism, as a philosophy, does not make reality go away. Only its activist arm does that.
Descartes started with Cogito ergo sum. We need some kind of shared truth that is just as unassailable.
Descartes doubted radically, but he did so in order to rebuild. He stripped away what could not be defended so that something could stand. Post-modernist activism kept the doubt but abandoned the rebuilding. To regain reason, we must recover that second step.
The path back to reason is not dramatic, but disciplined. It requires institutions that value evidence over narrative, media that distinguish reporting from activism, universities that prioritize inquiry over ideology, and citizens willing to question their own assumptions before questioning their neighbors.
An angry public now faced with paying the bills will demand those changes.
We will never eliminate bias. We will never interpret the world perfectly. But that is not the standard.
The standard is whether we believe correction is possible. And it is.
We do not regain reason by denying the insights of post-modernism. We regain it by placing those insights within healthy limits. Yes, perspective matters. Yes, language influences thought. Yes, power can distort discourse.
But inverting the power structure does not change any of those things. It only changes who gets to oppress. The answer is not to change overlords, but to end all oppression through universal standards of liberty, and through equality under the law.
Facts remain stubborn. Gravity does not change with identity, economic policy produces measurable consequences, and historical events happened in particular ways regardless of how we frame them.
My daughter is a high school English teacher and a progressive, but she’s become much more practical since she bought a house and started paying her own bills.
My son is still in college and is becoming more of a post-modernist every day. My message to my son is the lesson my daughter learned, and it is the same message I have for those reading this article: reality pushes back, and it will keep pushing harder and harder until we get along side of it.
Reality will eventually push post-modernism all the way back into the arts, and once it does I can visit it with my son, in a museum, where it belongs.
