21st Century America: Raging Against the Wrong Machine Modern rebellion has become performance art—rage without risk, protest without purpose, and revolution safely contained within the comforts of conformity. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/25/21st-century-america-raging-against-the-wrong-machine/
One of the most popular and unintentionally hilarious bands in rock’s post-grunge, nu-metal era (the mid-to-late 1990s) was Rage Against the Machine, a Los Angeles-based quartet that was formed in 1991 and became globally famous in 1995 and 1996. The band—fronted by lead singer Zack de la Rocha and renowned guitarist Tom Morello—was popular because it was loud, funky, and nonconformist. It was unintentionally hilarious because it was “nonconformist” in the most conformist ways possible while rebelling against a peaceful and prosperous nation, largely lacking in major conflicts.
The decade of the 1990s, you may recall, was something of a golden era in American history. After a very mild recession in 1992, the economy grew by an average of better than 4% per year over the remainder of the decade. Unemployment fell over the course of those years from 8% to 4%. The stock market boomed, and nearly half of all Americans enjoyed the benefits of that boom, with the expansion of 401(k) plans pushing market participation to record highs. Productivity accelerated rapidly as computers became ubiquitous and the internet blossomed.
Meanwhile, the entire world was at peace. The Soviet Union and its Evil Empire had fallen. The United States stood alone as the world’s hyperpower. Global conflict was so meager that the Clinton administration had to invent conflicts in which to participate, even as the president himself bemoaned the fact that history had denied him the opportunity to be a “great” leader. By the end of the decade, the combination of economic growth and cuts in defense spending enabled the federal government to balance its budget for the first time in three decades.
All seemed right with the world.
But not to Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello. De la Rocha, the son of a celebrated artist/muralist and a PhD in anthropology, was raised in the heart of beautiful and sunny Orange County, California, at the historic height of the Golden State’s own golden era. Morello, in turn, grew up in leafy Libertyville, Illinois, the son of a schoolteacher and the (admittedly, largely absent) Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations. Morello attended and graduated from Harvard before moving to Los Angeles, where he worked, for a time, as an exotic dancer.
These, then, were the faces of 1990s rebellion: comfortable, if not especially privileged, bored kids with nothing in particular to cause them or their contemporaries much angst but who wanted desperately to be relevant. Like their president, they longed to be “great” and were envious of their predecessors. After all, rock’s legends fought “the man” and “changed the world”—at least by their own accounts. So, de la Rocha and Morello screamed and yelled and swore. And they raged against a “machine” that really didn’t exist. The kid from Orange County and the Harvard grad (who eventually became a contributor to The New York Times) played at being rebels. Deprived of the opportunity to be real rebels and, apparently, frustrated by the lack of meaning or purpose in their lives, they refined and perfected the art of LARPing as anti-establishment heroes.
It all worked out pretty well for them, of course. They became deca-millionaires (or perhaps a centi-millionaire, in Morello’s case), and they never really had to do anything particularly rebellious or dangerous. They didn’t get themselves arrested or thrown in prison. Neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump (nor even Bill Clinton) sent them off to re-education camps. The closest they ever came to being “punished” for their “rage” was when the producers of Saturday Night Live cut their planned 2-song appearance in half after they tried, during the first song, to hang a U.S. flag upside down on the stage. (Soooo edgy!)
Unfortunately for the rest of us, however, their style of LARPing as rebels and raging against non-existent machines has caught on and has become the dominant form of political protest in this country over the last two decades. Whenever anyone, anywhere, is unhappy about something the local, state, or federal government did or didn’t do, they take to the streets, carrying signs that prove, beyond a doubt, that they’re fighting for freedom and democracy and all that is good and right with the world.
They insist that certain lives matter, even as society rightly and wholeheartedly agrees and bends over backward to demonstrate as much. They demand “No Kings” and the restoration of “our democracy™” in a country that hasn’t had a king in almost two-and-a-half centuries and holds federal elections every two years. They ram the cars of federal agents doing their jobs and demand the abolition of laws that were passed by Democrat-majority Congresses and signed by Democratic presidents. They declare policies that were mainstream, even on the left, only a few short years ago, “fascist” and “totalitarian.” They insist that selling arms to an allied nation defending itself against multiple aggressors and banning the mutilation of healthy pre-teens are equivalent to “genocide.” They prattle on endlessly and angrily about the destruction of “the people’s house,” without ever acknowledging that at least four previous presidents (including three Democratic icons) undertook major White House renovations. They scream and they yell and they swear, frequently without knowing what they’re screaming, yelling, and swearing about. They rage…but at what?
I won’t pretend that this country has no problems. And I won’t pretend that everything President Trump does is wonderful and great and exhilarating. Indeed, I would argue—and have argued for years—that the American ruling class has largely rigged politics, education, culture, and markets to suit its own ends, to the detriment of the broader populace. The catch is that the stuff that the people are out on the streets protesting about, the things that make them rage, are largely distractions from the real problems that plague our society. Worse still, the solutions they offer to these distractions—on the rare occasion they offer solutions at all—would serve only to empower and entrench the corrupt ruling class. I mean… that’s the gist of the populist left’s case against Trump: “He’s the government, and the government is corrupt. Therefore, give the government more power.” It’s all insane—and the ruling class’s biggest fear is that someday, the rest of us will figure that out.
In the meantime, it stokes outrage and foments violence. Its members imitate the Confederate secessionists in their contempt for the federal government, even as they scheme and plot to retake control of that government. They hope we rage and rage and rage, just as long as we rage at someone else. They like it when we LARP, and they’re grateful to Zack and Tom for showing us how.
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