It’s always gratifying when someone with a much larger audience than I have manages to lurch onto a point I made years ago. In this case in his latest New York Times column Ross Douthat points out that conservatives and progressives have, in a real sense, swapped places:
One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.
These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.
By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.
In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.
His journey’s violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.
And the political right’s response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in “The X-Files,†“Trust no one,†is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.
which I pointed out quite some time ago. Sadly, Mr. Douthat does not go so far as to explain how something happened only that it happened.
I think I know how it happened. They got power. Once they had power they became loth to relinquish it, particularly when their personal business models became corrupt influence peddling. You need only consider the Clintons to see how that is true. They got hundreds of millions of dollars as long as Mrs. Clinton was the heir apparent to the presidency. When that fell through, the donations dried up. The practice is now so widespread and accepted not to mention lucrative among the nomenklatura, not just politicians but generals and civil servants, they don’t even think of it as corrupt any longer.
That’s how you can tell the system is corrupted. When something that’s obviously corrupt is no longer thought of as corrupt, the system itself has been corrupted.
I don’t think it’s necessarily about getting power, it’s because of shifts in the electorate that changed power dynamics. The Democrats, for instance, are increasingly the party of the educated, the professional class, and the elites – IOW, the establishment. Republicans have mostly rejected their conservative intellectual roots in favor of populism. Intellectual conservatives are pretty much homeless at this point. If Douthat didn’t have a gig already, he’d probably be at The Dispatch with the remnants of intellectual conservatism.
Another way I’ve heard this explained is that Democrats are recreating the Eisenhower majority while Republicans are recreating the FDR majority.
Where you (and your base) stand is where you sit.
And this dynamic also explains why people like Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald are now hated by the left and quoted by the right. They’ve stayed the same in their skepticism and opposition to government law enforcement and military authority.
Douthat is really reaching with the claims about hordes or documents and regulating speech but his tenor is correct. I think it is mostly just tribalism. Whatever your tribe supports everyone supports. A lot fo that just means opposing whatever the other tribe supports. It means principles arent that important anymore. I think he also misses that in fact both parties selectively support the same things like censorship. The GOP makes it illegal for a school to say anything that would make parents uncomfortable, fires people and bans books. The Dems ban books, fire people and try to enforce speech rules.
Taibbi and Greenwald are just in a long line of people who figured out you can make money criticizing the tribe you used to be a part of. To be fair I rarely read them before their conversion and still dont so maybe their is some sincerity but they were such attention seekers I am skeptical.
Steve
Dave Schuler: You need only consider the Clintons to see how that is true. They got hundreds of millions of dollars as long as Mrs. Clinton was the heir apparent to the presidency. When that fell through, the donations dried up.
That misunderstands the dynamic of the Clinton Foundation. There is no evidence that the Clintons have garnered a direct financial benefit from the Clinton Foundation, and plenty of evidence that they did not. They gained for the same reason most charitable givers gain, by doing good, by being seen to do good, and by developing connections to the rich and powerful making the donations.
Ross Douthat: The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A.
While there was certainly a delusional and paranoid left in the 1970s, the current left seemed more wedded to fact than the right. So, while it behooves one to be skeptical of government, that doesn’t justify every paranoid delusion or outright lies about it.
Andy: And this dynamic also explains why people like Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald are now hated by the left and quoted by the right.
Glenn Greenwald: The Democratic Party is a party that I view as completely repressive and not just the Democratic Party but the liberal movement that supports it.
IDK why upper caste people feel the need to justify their privileges. On- line.
Aren’t you comfortable with your own fantasy of superiority?
You can pretend but the lower castes, we face reality each day.
And there’s no room for woke dreaming. Bills need to be paid, privileges or whatever, A-Ho’s.
“Glenn Greenwald: The Democratic Party is a party that I view as completely repressive and not just the Democratic Party but the liberal movement that supports it.”
Greenwald has always hated the national security establishment. And since the Bush years, the Democrats have changed from being strong skeptics of that establishment to becoming its primary defenders. Ergo, Greenwald now hates the Democrats.