11 September 2024

There is an intellectual sickness on the American right

When free speech is treated as the highest good, it gives rise to shock-jock politics.

Photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“Shut up, Jew.” “Your Jew lies don’t work anymore.” “Yeah, Jew, the truth can be a bitch, huh?” “Jews lie, steal, and murder – it’s their religious duty.” “Less kikes is always good.”

In recent days I’ve been inundated with these and hundreds of similar messages on the X app. The onslaught followed a recent column in which I took issue with Tucker Carlson’s granting of an uncritical platform to a crank historian. Darryl Cooper, an amateur-history podcaster using the pseudonym “Martyr Made”, claims that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War”. There is no point equivocating: the Carlson interview, and the way it has energised swarms of online bigots, are symptomatic of a profound sickness afflicting the American right – particularly the young, online right. The aetiology of the disease is complex, but it would be a mistake to try to locate the causes outside the right, as many of my conservative confrères will be tempted to do.

Cooper presents himself as a cool-headed, just-asking-questions kind of guy – the pose struck by suave revisionists such as the Holocaust denier David Irving. But Cooper’s animus could be glimpsed in unguarded moments, including an X post in which he suggested that Hitler is in heaven, and another in which he declared that the Nazi conquest of France was “infinitely preferable” to the raunchy spectacle of this year’s Paris Olympics. In his chat with Carlson, Cooper deplored the horrors of the German invasion of eastern Europe. But he blamed insufficient planning, rather than deliberate policy. The sheer early success of the Wehrmacht meant “they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners… [They] went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps.” (Oh, whoops!)

Meanwhile, Cooper assailed Churchill as a “psychopath” whose lust for war spread a conflict that could have been limited to Poland (never mind that the Nazis had already invaded Denmark, Norway, France and the Low Countries as Churchill came to power). Even so, Carlson lauded Cooper as America’s “most honest popular historian”. The interview garnered tens of millions of views, promoted (in a post later deleted) by X’s owner, Elon Musk.

Carlson is one of America’s top podcasters and Musk is the world’s richest man. We are not dealing with a few basement-dwelling trolls; the volume of interest and invective indicates that this is a real social phenomenon. Americans spend, on average, eight hours per day with digital media; the centrality of online political life is widely underestimated.

So what’s going on?

I have no doubt this is partly a reaction to the historical revisionism that has emanated from mainstream quarters. The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, for example, falsely framed the defence of slavery as the prime motivation for the American Revolution until the magazine clarified the story under pressure from historians and its own journalists. This is one episode in a wider story of Anglo-American progressives’ centring of identity and grievance politics that was bound to trigger a backlash like the one unfolding today.

At some point, however, blaming the left for the ideological grotesqueries of the right begins to feel like the sort of “root causes” blame-shifting that we conservatives reject when it comes to, say, Islamist ferment in certain American and European suburbs. The sickness of the right can’t begin to heal until we admit that it has causes that are immanent to the right.

Foremost among these is the fetish for free speech as the sole end of political life. Loath to actually govern, lest it encroach on donor-class prerogatives, the institutional right has long substituted procedural claims – why can’t I ask questions! – for substantive ones about the good life. Free speech and inquiry are valuable. But treated as the highest good, these ideals give rise to a pure shock-jock politics.

Second, and there is no delicate way to put this, the right suffers from a talent shortage. For all the rhetoric about free inquiry, the same donor class severely disciplines the mainstream right’s media and academic operators. To go beyond certain hawkish, free-market lines is verboten.

This leaves conservative institutions dominated by doctrinaire hacks who can churn predictable opinion pieces, but can’t report or write at anywhere close to the level expected of left-of-centre counterparts. There are many applicants to be the next Fox or Newsmax loudmouth, but few young rightists aspire to the excellence and enterprise daily showcased by the New York Times or the New York Review (for all their shortcomings). Being a successful loudmouth is much easier: all you need is to bellow about how “they” want us to eat bugs and take poison vaccines.

The third and final cause is what might be called the young right’s epistemic snap. Thoroughly alienated from the American mainstream, they feel compelled to believe that everything they’ve been taught is a big lie – even the relative decency of the Allied effort against the Nazis.

The nation and the world face much bigger problems than online hatred. One mustn’t miss the forest for the trees, as a conservative editor I respect often tells me. True enough, but lately I’ve been wondering if what I’m seeing on the right is the forest: darkened woods, populated by monsters.