'I didn't change, the left did'
The lucrative confidence game of heterodoxy
What got me thinking about this topic was a graph created by the Very Online (and very airbrushed) evolutionary biologist Colin Wright. Elon Musk has shared it (tellingly, Wright was thrilled about this) as have other pundits whose self-image is bound up with implausible claims of being renegades from the left, including the co-host of the Triggernometry podcast Konstantin Kisin, who says it “best describes” his political journey.
I think the dates on the graph are particularly illustrative. As is the fact that Wright, Musk and Kisin are today bumptious supporters of Donald Trump. According to the chart, whereas liberals have rushed to the left and embraced what Musk calls the “woke mind virus”, the political right has remained true to first principles. “The stick figure in the middle depicts me, a centre-left liberal in 2008, and how the ground had shifted under my feet by 2012 and 2021,” Wright claims in an accompanying article.
The leftward shift of these political tectonic plates has supposedly prompted ‘lifelong Democrats’ (people such as Wright, Musk and Kisin) to reluctantly go from supporting America’s first black president in 2008 to backing Donald Trump, the most high profile supporter of the Obama ‘birther’ conspiracy, 16 years later.
I think you’d have to be fairly credulous to accept such a drastic ideological reverse ferret at face value. Not least because Wright created the graph in August 2021, seven months after Trump incited a mob to try and overturn the result of the 2020 election. That’s quite a moment to decide that the forces of reason and moderation and sagacity are to be found in the contemporary Republican Party.
Wright did receive push back in this vein at the time, to which he responded in a characteristically unconvincing manner [emphasis mine]:
“the most common criticism is that it [the meme] portrays the right as remaining stationary since 2008. A similar drawing depicting specific issues such as abortion, climate change or immigration might tell a different story. But with respect to the important cultural values I have in mind - free speech, individual rights and women’s rights - my cartoon is consistent with the lived experience of many liberals and centrists.”
So let’s get this straight. Trump may have tried to overthrow democracy, threatened to have the Department of Justice pursue his enemies - all the while boasting that his supreme court picks were decisive in bringing an end to the federal right to abortion. But according to Wright’s '“lived experience” - which no doubt involves long hours spent marinating in the culture war - the truly existential threat to free speech and individual rights comes from what he and his fellow heterodox thinkers call ‘wokeness’.
I think this is an obvious example of the obsession with leftist excess blinding people (to paraphrase Hannah Arendt) to the numerous small and not so small evils with which the road to hell is paved. A cautionary tale if you will.
The monochrome *LEFT* frequently evoked by these self-styled apostates also doesn’t exist. It never has. This is after all the left we’re talking about: splits, schisms, denunciations, ex-communications, falling outs and selling outs have always been part of the landscape. To claim, as Kisin does, that the left “fought [for free speech] for most of my adult life” before abandoning it as a '“right-wing talking point” is transparently self-serving. Sections of the left have always been depressingly disdainful of free expression. Kisin would know this if he was actually of the left as opposed to being merely parasitic on Google quotations of George Orwell. If you think sections of the left have a flimsy attachment to free speech in 2024, wait until you hear about the past.
Speaking of which, much outstanding political writing during the twentieth century was produced by individuals adjacent to what was sometimes called the left opposition. Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Boris Souvarine, Victor Serge and CLR James (to name a few) all tilted against the leftist orthodoxies of their day. Moreover, rather than flouncing into the arms of the right and portentously declaring that they had ‘left the left’, it was Stalin and his fellow travellers who were perceived to have abandoned leftist first principles.
In other words, competing tendencies on the left have always been duking it out. A 1965 essay by the American democratic socialist Irving Howe, in which he denounces the sixties ‘new’ left for making “style into the very substance of [its] revolt”, might just as easily have been written about some of today’s identitarian progressives. And yet Howe managed to make his case without ever feeling the need to self-importantly announce to the world that he was ‘politically homeless’.
This is not to say that journeys from left to right are an unusual intellectual phenomenon. Daniel Oppenheimer’s 2016 book Exit Right: the People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century, profiles Whittaker Chambers, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan and Christopher Hitchens as examples of writers and intellectuals who ostensibly left the left, even if their respective ‘Kronstadt’ moments differed in tone and substance.
People change their minds and it’s a mistake to allow one’s beliefs to ossify into an inflexible dogma (or to merely replace one dogma with another, as some of the aforementioned names were probably guilty of doing). There is also much to be said for eschewing heresy hunts and hair-splitting ideological inquisitions. I have myself been on the receiving end of these in the past. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it has also made me less sympathetic to those likeYoung Turks host Ana Kasparian who feel able to disavow all of their previous beliefs on the flimsiest of pretexts (in this case because online leftists were mean to her).
Mentioning the likes of Hitchens and Burnham in the same breath as lightweights such as Kisin, Wright and Kasparian is obviously somewhat farcical. But then so is much of today’s media landscape, where only those with extraordinary talent or an extraordinary capacity for self-promotion are able to cut through the cacophony of white noise.
If certain pundits display an uncanny ability to land on their feet in this unforgiving media landscape then it’s partly because of the right’s insatiable appetite for former leftists and liberals with ‘second thoughts’. Melodramatic ‘cancellation’ stories1 add additional novelty to what would otherwise be purveyors of boilerplate reactionary opinions. The Los Angeles Times writer Lorraine Ali has aptly described this grift as “skating on the edge of right-wing rage while pretending to be a nondenominational outsider”.
I’ve heard people claim there is more ‘energy’ on the populist right at present and I can see how this might exert a gravitational pull on red-brown types for whom the main enemy was always liberalism. But energy is perhaps also a euphemism for money. If your only goal is to cash in and keep cashing in then heterodoxy/right-wing populism must represent a tempting career move. The only real impediment to making a name for yourself is a sense of shame, which must seem of trifling importance when set against the vast sums of money various oligarchs are throwing at one side of the culture war. These benefactors include Elon Musk (X), Paul Marshall (UnHerd, the Spectator and GB News), Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale (Bari Weiss’s University of Austin), Peter Thiel (JD Vance), and the Koch Foundation (Spiked, the Battle of Ideas, Reason magazine).
A cursory glance at these outlets gives a good indication of what to expect should you choose to publicly embrace performative heterodoxy. The skill is in railing against powerful ‘elites’ while carefully exempting the richest people on earth who fund your lifestyle. If you can pull this off while adopting the affectations of a disillusioned liberal or leftist then a bright future surely beckons.
Such origin stories are frequently of dubious veracity and are always worth checking. Kisin, Peterson and the Weinsteins immediately come to mind.