The new right is not what you think. It’s worse.
I said in my interview with the Connect & Disaffected podcast last year that following the collapse of the neoliberal consensus both left and right were casting around for new or previously discarded ideologies to help us make sense of the world. The faultlines of modern politics are being shaped by familiar historical struggles as socialism and fascism modernise themselves in response to the manifest recent failures of liberalism. I wrote recently on the more mainstream right-wing liberalisms and recognised them as a sort of ‘honourable enemy’, noting their respectable philosophical roots and still significant political base.
Today’s blog on the other hand concerns the new right. I am not here referring to the Trumpian ‘new right’ nexus as it’s commonly used as a term in US-facing news media. The constellation of alt-right, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim xenophobes, the traditionalists, neo-reactionaries and paleo-conservatives who have rallied around Trump’s presidency reflect an easy-to-understand conservative impulse — the right rummaging through its graveyard of dead and discredited ideologies.
The real ‘new’ right, the ones who represent a genuinely innovative response to the crisis of liberalism, are the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’ (IDW). Although IDW like to label themselves ‘classical liberals’, it’s not accurate to see them as a simple resurrection of some form of Victorian British liberalism [although there are certainly superficial similarities, which we’ll return to]. Nor is it sufficient to understand the IDW purely in terms of what motivates them — their [white] [male] Gen X grievance and fear of loss of relative status. There are features of the IDW — most notably their hostility to universalist liberalisms, their deep commitment to Santa Barbara-style evolutionary psychology, general support for UBI schemes and flirtations with race realism — which they share in common with the alt-lite and which suggest a different perspective on archetypal liberal universalism. If the IDW are neo-Victorians, then they believe in social Darwinism on steroids.
Michael Brooks is right on this. The IDW are laying the seeds of a new political narrative — a narrative that seeks to supplant the discredited rule of the neoliberals and co-opt the resentment of the alt-right, while outliving them both. The left is building its own counter-narrative, quite successfully so. But we need to know our opponents, and pay attention to what they’re saying, because if the popularity of the Petersons and Harrises of the world is any guide, IDW-like ideas are finding an audience on YouTube and Twitch and spreading into a mass consciousness.
A thesis statement
Which brings us to the motivation for today. The race realist Winegard science bros have a new piece on Quillette “The Twilight of Liberalism?”, laying out the clearest thesis statement for the IDW I’ve yet encountered. To be clear, the Winegards are trash. So is Quillette — which is essentially the house rag of the IDW. The Winegards latest piece hits all their usual tropes — cultural Marxism, the authoritarian left, IQ fetishism and the cult of automation. But buried in the piece are hints of something honest about the IDW.
“[I]t is not the abstract logic of liberalism that is flawed,” they write, “but rather the attempt to apply it to fallible humans. Like communism, liberalism conflicts with immutable human characteristics.” Immediately, we encounter a pessimism that is at odds with the liberalism tradition, which is fundamentally optimistic about human nature and grounds its conception of natural rights on axiomatic suppositions about the universal human experience. The Winegard bros dismiss this outright in terms that are familiar to critics of capitalism on both the right and left: classical liberalism as an ideology was adapted to a social world still rooted in a traditional social order, which provided the social reproduction necessary for the capitalist mode of production to take off. Their critique — shared by many communitarians — is that as it matured, capitalism eroded the social foundations on which it relied and what it offered in exchange (universal equality, unlimited freedom, and ‘hedonism’) was a poor substitute.
The Winegards propose an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ between the ideology of capitalism and features of the human mind — or at least the minds of most people — that is as a severe as the supposed mismatch between utopian socialism and human nature. Determining whether a cultural technology is in fact maladapted is notoriously difficult. And it ignores the fact that biology and culture co-evolve. But as a thesis statement, the idea that [some] people cannot adapt to modern social life unites the misogyny of Jordan Peterson to the racial pontificating of Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris, to the elitism of Steven Pinker, and the cultural conservatism of Ben Shapiro and Christina Hoff Summers. It dichotomises the ‘cognitive elite’ — the genteel folk of the IDW who can calmly philosophise and make a living from Patreon — and the masses who engage in manual labour and require a firmer hand. The ‘cognitively inferior’ include women, of course, but also non-whites, cultural Muslims, trans men and women, the poor, the young, the religious and the irreligious alike. Some people simply aren’t morally equipped to be ‘free’.
There are precedents for these beliefs, of course. The Winegards are barely disguising their re-purposing of the Bell Curve, and Murray has long argued that his argument in that book is all about meritocracy and its totally not his fault at all that cognitive differences happen to be racialised. Sure buddy. But this worldview is also implicit in much of behavioural economics and the ‘authoritarian libertarianism’ of Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein’s ‘nudge’ approach to public policy. Neoliberals, drawing on mid-twentieth century views of the Mont Pelerin society, have long believed that society needs to be governed with a firm hand to deliver outcomes that are optimised for the greater good. The wrinkle that the IDW add is that some [Westernised men] can govern themselves free from the state, but that others [largely women and non-Westerners] are categorically incapable of doing so.
The IDW are therefore critics of liberalism, but critics who think we cannot possibly improve upon it. The theory is not wrong, it just has the wrong subject. Classical liberalism is therefore an ideology by and for the ruling elite — and not for everyone else. Liberty for me but not for thee. The various members of the IDW have different emotional reactions to the burdens of rule — the Weinsteins and more centrist-leaning adherents look upon the ‘cognitive inferiority’ of humanity with regret, but treat benevolent rule as the white man’s burden [recall Brett Weinstein’s incredibly patronising response to the Evergreen controversy]. Those of a more conservative inclination, including Shapiro, Peterson and the Winegard bros, believe strongly in the need for order and discipline of the masses, lest they ‘slump into an empty and unsatisfying hedonism that is ruinous to communities and to society more broadly.’
It is for this reason that the IDW are properly categorised as a right-wing movement. Their reverence for order and hierarchy puts them in good company amongst conservatives. The alt-right, neoliberals and libertarians all serve the interests of power and hierarchy in different ways. Fascists do so consciously, libertarians by neglect and neoliberals behind a veneer of technocratic governance. The IDW are the apologists of domestic empire. If fascism can be thought of as the application of the tools of colonial rule to the metropolitan population, then the IDW narrative is the justification of imperialism and the ‘tutelage’ of ‘inferior’ peoples brought home to justify dominion over the majority of the population.
Unlike their neoliberal colleagues like Pinker, who tend to believe that with the right combination of education and public policy, the masses can [eventually] mature to enjoy the full right and privileges of liberal citizenship, the IDW are pessimists who are prepared to write off the vast bulk of humanity as a burden upon the white man’s pursuit of a glorious future. As best, the masses are to be pensioned off with a UBI so they no longer disturb the peace — at worst, as Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House fears, they are rhetorically preparing for a future in which their ‘cognitive inferiors’ are either permanently enslaved or fenced off and left to die on the doorsteps on the enclaves of the elite as climate change burns the world down around them.
It is for this reason, also, that the IDW serve as such a gateway to the actual alt-right. It’s not fair to call a fan of the IDW a fascist. But they are certainly travelling on the same road, because their diagnosis of the crisis of liberalism is the same [including their complete and utter aversion to any consideration of a socialist solution]. An IDW-rationalist looks at the cognitive divide and thinks they’re going to come out on top; a supporter of fascism probably recognises they aren’t going to. At the leadership level, the two movements probably share 99 per cent of their beliefs, but unlike the Richard Spencers of the word, the writers at Quillette are unwilling to lower themselves to engage with the MAGA cultural wasteland. It remains to be seen which is the more effective political strategy.
What is to be done?
I’ve said many times that the first step of any socialist movement is to defend and uphold liberal democracy. Without upholding the basic principle that every citizen is entitled to equal dignity and equal say over the decisions that affect their interests, we cannot argue that a materially unequal society is one that does not uphold the social contract. Mere rejection of the IDW is not enough however. The IDW are very, very good at propaganda and are learning how to package misogyny, racism and transphobia under a veneer of scientific and philosophical legitimacy that is superficially persuasive to many people.
The left is getting better at countering these narratives — but there’s a disconnect between the very online progressive movements who are the ground troops of this war of stories and the movement activists who are seeking and contesting power. It doesn’t help that many of the [white, male] writers and academics who naturally support this movement enjoy socially privileged positions and access to expert knowledge. For many serious politicians, the IDW may be beneath their notice. But its cultural influence should concern us. We won’t be able to enact our agendas if the narrative ground has been disappeared beneath us.