Ross Douthat and the Times: Thoughts

I have previously remarked how many a young man early on in his intellectual journey finds himself attracted to the far right, and something of why this seems to me to happen so often. Certainly it seems relevant that, to those looking beyond conventionalities for the sake of understanding the world, the ideas of the far right are so much more easily available than those of the left, within an essentially conservative mainstream enjoying the sponsorship, visibility, tolerance, respect unavailable to those desirous of a more egalitarian order even in the absence of a regime of formal censorship. (So it went with Martin Eden's discovery of Herbert Spencer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and so goes it today with the young person finding their way to the manosphere, on those perhaps rarer-than-the-hype-has-it occasions when they do so.) It also seemed possible that many of the ideas of the right have a particular attraction for those in that phase of life. After all, if questioning the world around them it is safe to say they may be more individualistic than most--and the ultra-right can be very flattering of the individualist. Facing, often while feeling very much alone, a forbidding adult world they have no choice but to enter, or which they have already entered and been brutalized by, they want to see as themselves as tough enough to take it on, tougher than the others around them, and certainly the far right makes much of toughness--indeed, has been accused of making a pornography out of toughness--all as the young man believing the things it tells him may get the illusion that doing so they are also tough. (They know how the world works, unlike the namby-pamby optimists surrounding them who just don't get it. Or so they tell themselves.)

However, there is also the fact that the far right can say things before the mainstream that the mainstream's preferred thinkers generally will not, including things the left would say to a mainstream audience were it ever allowed a platform. This is even the case in regard to what the guardians of respectable opinion in American society hold most sacred, capitalism--enabling the right to appeal to any misgivings they have about that (as so very many of them do), with Ross Douthat an excellent example of the tendency. The coiner of the term "woke capital" in the very pages of the thoroughly Establishment New York Times, he acknowledged that the public does have discontents with capitalism, and that Big Business' exploitation of identity politics for public relations purposes was apt to make "anti-wokeness" an outlet for social frustrations that the bounds of discourse in America do not permit to be expressed in a franker way.

Douthat's analysis will probably not impress a well-read leftist, indeed likely strike them as unoriginal and shallow in its manner of raising the point. They have long been well aware of the reality, and seen others treat it in a far more sophisticated fashion likely better aligned with their thinking. Indeed, even those who are not leftists but merely liberals may remember Thomas Frank and his concept of "market populism" from the turn of the century. Still, the leftist or even liberal critic of wokeness has rather less access to the pages of anything like the Times (consider, for example, how little attention the mainstream media was paying a Frank by the time of Listen, Liberal), precisely because its tolerance for criticism of neoliberalism in the era of Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton, and the Squad vs. Nancy Pelosi, fallen to zero, and so it was that Douthat and his fellow travelers monopolized mainstream awareness of woke capitalism with all its dodges, and perils for the things that those who genuinely do support wokeness stand for, all very much to the right's advantage, such that "woke capitalism," which one could be forgiven for thinking a leftist epithet, actually became a right-wing one. Indeed, the resulting situation seems to me to be well summed up in a remark I once saw in one of the fora at a site devoted to pop cultural news with an avowedly right-wing editorial line. The user thought it ironic that "leftists have programmed young people to blindly accept that major corporations are selfless and good" when really "they are machines to make money and all that virtue signaling is a smokescreen." To the leftist, who is unlikely to go to such sites or otherwise come into contact with such thinking, this remark may be shocking in just how much it gets the reality of the situation completely backwards. It is not the right but the left which warns the public against credulousness in corporations, and about the dangers of an economic system sacrificing all to the interests of business. Yet the remark is entirely consistent with the conventional wisdom of a milieu in which people confuse what is left with what is woke, all of which has been so much to the advantage of the right in the political battles of our time.