In the last days of the Cold War, trauma studies—a then upcoming strand of literary studies and literary theory—and its approach to historical and personal suffering worked hand in glove with popular trauma culture as promoted by Oprah Winfrey to remake the bourgeois subject as an ideal ethical actor and a political force for good. Societies in denial of traumas past and present were deemed authoritarian and needed to be reformed or taken over and remade in the image of the liberal democracies. Trauma studies took on an aesthetic quality that was very attractive to liberals who had lost confidence in a narrative of social progress, but who saw themselves as purveyors of individual virtues. In fact, the self-effacing, trauma-identified scholar could remake herself as the best witness to history.

A trauma culture/trauma studies approach to war and recovery has had direct consequences for the reconfiguration of the Syrian polity after the fall of the Assad regime. According to sociologists Zeina Al Azmeh and Patrick Baert, the failure of nerve displayed by leftist Syrian intellectuals exiled in Western Europe could be described as a consequence of their adoption of “trauma work” as a paradigm through which to understand what the Syrian people were going through under the Assad regime. Paralyzed by guilt at having failed to stand up to the forces of Islamic fundamentalism that dominated anti-Assadism in Syria, these “intellectuals quickly diverted their efforts toward trauma narration as a means for expressing solidarity and alleviating guilt … This role of trauma narration, sometimes funded by European academic institutions or NGOs, called for identification with the suffering masses.”⁠¹

In adopting trauma culture and trauma narration, they tried to win Western support for the struggle against Assad. Al Azmeh and Baert argue that “the extreme form of solidarity from below and associated epistemic hyper-egalitarianism were aligned with intellectuals’ new role as trauma narrators and their related quest to establish a Syrian cause on the global political arena.” But what trauma culture produced at home was a “discursive vacuum” rather than “a persuasive emancipatory discourse congruent with the people’s lived reality.” Syrian intellectuals were unable to articulate a coherent case against religious extremism and foreign intervention. According to Al Azmeh and Baert, by engaging in trauma work’s anti-intellectual liberal project, intellectuals neutralized themselves as leaders and as leftists who could lead Syria to socialism. While what happened to the Syrian left unfolded under the shadow of forced exile and state violence on a horrific level, the abdication of responsibility to reason, to an objectively shared material reality and history, happened on the academic left in the Anglo-American world in much less violent circumstances.

Academic populism and postmodernism were as politically impotent as trauma-identified intellectuals. In response to the rise of the right, academics and professors shunned their role as intellectuals, preferring to identify with popular consumption habits as a form of solidarity with the “people.” Left-liberal hostility to history and “high” culture rendered academics unable to defend scholarship that was resistant to the demands of the market and corporate-driven ideas about efficiency. Too busy condemning the Western canon and treating scholarship as activism, they made hyperbolic claims for humanities scholarship that are impossible to realize.

When trauma studies elevated trauma testimony to a sacred realm that defied analysis or history, its scholars embraced anti-intellectualism as a form of crypto-religious overidentification with trauma testimony. In the realm of psychotherapy, overidentification with the trauma narrative is as dangerous as it is ineffective. Despite electoral and empirical failures, trauma culture and its ideal liberal subject continue to give shape to political programs that promote the most superficial forms of recognition politics as social justice. Trauma culture participates in the destruction of the past and the annihilation of the future. Elite members of the professional class have promoted the management and instrumentalization of suffering in order to enshrine irrationality and mystify affective life on social media and political platforms.

False Companions

Whether it is centering one’s lived experience or acknowledging one’s privilege, professional-class liberals love to do things with language and intersubjective relations that have no material effects on the distribution of wealth in the social whole. Capitalism loves trauma culture. Today’s trauma professionals offer cures for trauma and its long-term deleterious effects as modes of self-optimization. Counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists embrace more expedient cures for complex PTSD, including the use of drugs (legal and illegal, such as ketamine, MDMA, or LSD) and behavioral modification through hypnosis or EMDR to speed up the recovery time.

Trauma culture promotes the belief that embracing its ideas about distress and healing is an implicitly enlightened and progressive act. Trauma culture rewrote the American soul in order to rebuild the public sphere: it constructed social spheres as different halls of mirrors where different identities could be reflected and “seen.” Trauma and the path to recovery from it sell books—lots of books. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery—two of the most influential books on trauma and healing in the US, published in 2014 and 1992 respectively—continue to rake in big profits for the authors and their publishers. Mary L. Trump has by now published three memoirs about her infamous and traumatizing uncle.⁠¹

Trauma culture has given rise to a mass-produced, media-friendly script that has been fully monetized by entrepreneurs, influencers, drug companies, universities, publishing houses, and not-for-profit organizations that use it to market cures to people suffering from the chronic stress of living in a ruthlessly competitive, exploitative, dishonest, corrupt, and punishing world. In doing so, trauma culture helped move liberal politics away from defending or fighting for the material interests of ordinary, working-class people. It synthesized 1960s cultural discontent with 1980s economic entrepreneurialism and opportunism, only to serve it to today’s social-media-driven craze for self-optimization and personal development.

The 2020 Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a 500-page encapsulation of trauma culture’s ideological priorities and trauma studies’ lack of historical rigor. Based primarily on the work of Cathy Caruth, the volume recognized almost every kind of suffering other than the slow violence of economic deprivation and wage work. The editors state that the anthology will deal with “the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such current and historical phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides … 9/11 and other catastrophes, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism.”

The listicle itself is incoherent and additive. It offers literary trauma studies as an adequate palliative to the destructive legacy of colonialism, the violence of 9/11, and the deleterious effects of climate change. The volume fails to mention a catastrophe that has touched almost everyone’s lives: the 2008 global economic crisis that pitched hundreds of millions of people into poverty and hundreds of thousands into homelessness.

Trauma studies is anti-socialist and anti-Marxist and pro-American imperialism; its exclusion of class and economic analysis is pure ideology. Trauma culture has nothing to say about the injuries of class society and the fear produced by labor precarity and work discipline. “Raising awareness,” “making space,” “demanding to be seen,” and “witnessing” are deeply anti-social: these activities replicate the ideology of political enemies who would rather the working class and ordinary people remain trapped in affects, irrationality, and infantilization.

And thus, in the middle of an otherwise unforgiving political climate, trauma has become a liberal fetish, blocking the road to decisive political action from the left. The skills we need to escape from the social, historical, and cultural isolation of identity-based politics will not be provided by a class of corrupted professionals. Trauma culture produces needy consumers, angry citizens, and deluded revolutionaries. It kills democracy not by accident, but by design. It does not give us the courage to fight for historical knowledge or a world where the social, political, and cultural achievements and struggles of the past are valued as the precious heritage of all human beings. Most perniciously, it distracts us from the deprivations and struggles of working-class people today.

Let Us Be Brave

In 2025, the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity released a study showing that for sixty percent of Americans “minimum quality of life is out of reach.” From 2003 to 2023, working- and lower-middle-class Americans saw their incomes fall by four percent while housing, education, and health care costs soared. The Ludwig Institute’s Minimum Quality of Life Index offers a detailed analysis of the economic and time constraints that the majority of Americans experience in terms of providing for basic needs for themselves and their families. The study provides proof that leisure activities, basic health care, education, housing, and transportation are increasingly beyond the reach of the majority of Americans.

Our society is economically organized for the immiseration of the many and the prosperity of the few. Renouncing trauma culture would liberate us from a cultish devotion to survivors, prophets, stupid ideas, and dishonest idols. We need to respect the social value of intellectual life, critical theory, craft skill, aesthetic experience, reasoned argument, empathetic skepticism, physical courage, scientific experiment, seriousness, and sensuous immediacy.

Our world, in all its glory and all its pain, was built by the working class; to redeem their sacrifices, it is our duty to renounce the reactionary class politics of trauma-culture liberalism. Let us be brave, let us be true. Let us accept nothing less than solidarity with reason and objectivity in our most subjective, private experiences as in our work, culture, and politics. Only by working through the seriousness of psychological damage and accepting the impossibility of finding convenient diagnoses or totalizing cures can we find our way forward as a society. Let us honor the world in its beauty and its pain. Let us never back away from a relentless critique of the broken present. Let us hope for justice, but let us never forget the ways in which our elites have manipulated and molested the political and economic realities of our shared world. Let us be true to suffering as a bond that connects us to others, both living and dead.