PicoBlog

Writing for the Bulwark the other day Cathy Young asked a brilliant question: what on earth happened to the Intellectual Dark Web and its critique of the left?  

Go back to the 2010s, and all kinds of people, myself included, were wondering why leftists allied with the most fascistic versions of Islam, and why there was such screaming intolerance in liberal institutions.  All of a sudden we were told to accept that white people were inherently racist and that men could become women –  just by saying they were.

If you moved in​ leftish circles and refused to clap your hands and cheer the new orthodoxy, your career was over.

In theory the response ought to have been a liberal defence of democratic freedoms. And from many it was. 

But the “Intellectual Dark Web” - the melodramatic name came from a New York Times  piece from 2018 – was something else. It consisted of online celebrities opposed to progressive orthodoxy, who revelled in the joy of shocking the liberal bourgeoisie. 

The full list of its members ran: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Greenwald, Sam Harris, Heather Heying, Claire Lehmann, Bill Maher, Douglas Murray, Maajid Nawaz, Camille Paglia, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Michael Shermer, Christina Hoff Sommers, Bret Weinstein, and Eric Weinstein.

As you can see, it was a journalistic concoction, which did not hang together well. Genuine liberals, such as  Steven Pinker and Sam Harris were yanked together with reactionaries like Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.  

Meanwhile the self-aggrandising willingness of many of them to announce that they were  “heretics” and “dissidents” was ridiculous. No one is a true heretic, unless they are persecuted. And dissident is an honourable title you cannot in good conscience bestow on yourself – not that that ever stopped anyone.

But once the caveats had been made, you could say that these were people who were willing to attack progressive orthodoxies as they turned oppressive, and in 2018 had a kind of radical glamour.

All gone. Utterly gone. Many of those acclaimed in 2018 have become what they despised – or purported to despise. They are on the side of the enemies of liberty now. They threaten basic democratic freedoms. The alt right has turned out to be the far right, as perhaps it was always going to.

If you are looking for an immediate cause it is clear that Trump has done for them. When the crunch came far too many supposedly intelligent conservatives bent the knee and tugged the forelock, and engaged in an intellectual justification of dictatorial power.

In the process they showed that there are two ways of dealing with left authoritarianism. You can defend the values of liberal democracy, and ally with the many on the left who agree with you. 

Did the conservative members of the Intellectual Dark Web do that?

Did they hell. 

They produced arguments for tyranny, which the conspiratorial atmosphere of the alt right positively encouraged. In the process, they showed how a critique of the left can end up justifying the authoritarianism of the right.

If you paint the globalist elite as all powerful. If you maintain that progressives have the means to indoctrinate the young  through their control of the universities, schools and the mainstream media. If you further posit that they are guaranteeing their power by importing immigrants they know will vote for their centre-left parties, then a dictatorship is a justifiable response to such supernaturally powerful enemies.

Indeed, such is their supposed power​ of the "woke mind virus,​" overturning free elections is the only plausible response to a rigged system. 

If everything from immigration policy to the schools is a con played by progressive elites to ensure their control of society,  there is no other option available to the right. The 20th far right century used the justification that they were saving their countries from the communist menace. The woke menace serves the same purpose today.

I remember being interviewed by one member of the New York Times list, a media entrepreneur called Dave Rubin.

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