Matt Taibbi, once a populist writer who criticized big banks (Rolling Stone, 4/5/10; NPR, 11/6/10), has aligned himself with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the kind of slimy protector of the ruling economic order Taibbi once despised. Putting his Occupy Wall Street days behind him, Taibbi has fallen into the embrace of the reactionary Young America’s Foundation. He recently shared a bill with other right-wing pundits like Jordan Peterson, Eric Bolling and Lara Logan. Channeling the spirit of Richard Nixon, he frets about “bullying campus Marxism” (Substack, 6/12/20).
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, who helped expose National Security Agency surveillance (Guardian, 6/11/13; New York Times, 10/23/14), has buddied up with extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, notorious for falsely claiming that the parents of murdered children at Sandy Hook Elementary were crisis actors. That’s in addition to Greenwald’s closeness to Tucker Carlson, the ex–Fox News host who has platformed the white nationalist Great Replacement Theory and Holocaust revisionism.
This is just a taste of what has caused many former friends, colleagues and admirers to ask what happened to make these one-time heroes of left media sink into the online cultural crusade against the trans rights movement (Substack, 6/8/22), social media content moderation (C-SPAN, 3/9/23) and legal accountability for Donald Trump (Twitter, 4/5/23).
Perfectly demonstrates how so much of the American “left” is centralism
Who cares why let’s just stop supporting it and replace it with journalism that is not for sale and is grounded in truth not just the facts or fairness.
Because its easier to avoid in the future if we can identity the cause now.
There has always been a subset of political writers who suddenly veer into supporting authoritarian movements, surprising friends and colleagues. It has more to do with authoritarian family, when they were small children, than anything else. Later as adults, otherwise repulsive movements seem correct for such people, like water to a fish. This can happen even with gifted people who offer valid criticism in other areas.
One can find many examples, in other times and places.
I think you have two claims here:
- There are many writers who have suprisingly veered towards authoritarianism.
- This is the result of decisions based on a familiarity with authoritarian family structures.
I would argue the latter is much harder to demonstrate.
I was first introduced to this by the Swiss writer Alice Miller; her rewrite Drama of the Gifted Child was translated into several languages and is still in print. The revised is much more readable than the original
people would have to be paid enough to be willing to not sell out. I see how the existence of the middle class is inconvenient to the rich now.
The millennial experience is watching seemingly left-leaning figures and movements break right in ways that defy comprehension. In the 90’s and early 2000’s people seemed to understand the absurdity and cringeyness of the right-wing “moral guardians” calling Harry Potter and D&D satanic, and there was a reaction of irreverence - but this irreverence came to be turned against legitimate concerns with things like South Park and 4chan. Connected to that was a wave of atheism, questioning the religious right - with the leaders then turning around to embrace the Iraq war, with narratives like, “We’ve already achieved equality in the West, it’s those backwards savages clinging to Islam who need to taught our peaceful ways through force.” Then you have various groups turning hard right over the left’s acceptance of trans people, such as TERFs using the language of progressivism and feminism while allying themselves with literal fascists and the Heritage Foundation.
“The old world is dying, and the new word struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
What we have is a situation where people break with the mainstream status quo because of legitimate problems with it but then are left out adrift with no real alternative to look to, and also with lingering unexamined beliefs from their old way of thinking. For example, there’s a reason people sometimes joke about being a “recovering Catholic,” because fully recognizing and rooting out the brainworms instilled in you is not as simple as consciously deciding to reject it - it will continue to influence your behavior whether you like it or not. Meanwhile, the money is in supporting the status quo. Some people may consciously decide to sell out, but for others, they need to invent some sort of justification for what they’re doing - and so the result is often arriving at some kind of insane and bizarre set of beliefs, like Greenwald’s claim that Tucker Carlson is a socialist.
Part of the problem is that there are lots of things to hate about “the mainstream” or “the establishment,” and so when someone goes against them, they tend to be celebrated - but it’s hard to know exactly which aspects of “the establishment” they actually have a problem with and which aspects they’re actually perfectly fine with and happy to support. And then in cases where someone does put out a positive platform of what should be done (as opposed to a negative platform of what shouldn’t) then they are immediately opening themselves up to critique. Many leftist “personalities” on YouTube and such will focus on attacking the right, because you can get a large base of support agreeing that the right is bad and should be attacked. But then you wind up with people like Destiny, who made his name that way but is also a rabid Zionist shamelessly repeating Israeli talking points. Likewise, Conservatives Christians made an popular target for the New Atheists to attack but then it turned out they were chauvinistic imperialist warmongerers, and the surveillance state was a popular target for Greenwald to attack but then it turned out he was insane.
Idk what the solution to this is or if there even is a solution.
