The Online Triumph of the Right

In his book The Theory of Business Enterprise Thorstein Veblen, when discussing the clash between an essentially productive "industrial" mentality and a predatory "business" one that he saw as having a deranging effect on the economy, spared some remarks for what the larger development of society implied for the clash between the two outlooks. In covering that subject he had something to say of the media of his day that many have never ceased to deny--namely that the media is on the whole to the right of the general public. The factors which Veblen stressed as making for this situation were the media business, being a business, catering to a comparatively privileged--and unsurprisingly, also comparatively conservative--social layer, while as if this were not enough finding it safer to err in standing to their right rather than to their left. Today critics of the media are prone to stress other factors--indeed, the tradition of media criticism in which works like Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check and Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent loom large has been far less attentive to the media's pandering to a privileged and conservative demographic--but the reality that the media's being a business, and its consequent subjection to bottom-line concerns within a marketplace where "money talks," has been prominent throughout that intellectual history, with the agreement typically that it has this rightward effect.

If one worked forward from this understanding of the media they would not be surprised to find that, just as was the case with the print media of Sinclair's day, and the broadcast media dominant in Chomsky and Herman's day, the Internet is a place where the autocompletes finish phrases like "Sick of hearing about" with the bugbears of the right. That the Internet is a place where any query about economics invariably leads us to page after page of search results linking us to think tanks, foundations, institutes pushing the right's line in the matter and none other. That, indeed, the Internet is the Drudge Report and Breitbart and the Daily Caller, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bognino and Matt Walsh, Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate and Elon Musk, the "Dark Enlightenment" and the alt-right and the "manosphere," 4chan and X and Gab, "free speech absolutism" and "crypto bros" and gleefully hippie-punching trolls, while much of what may be disputable as of the right is at least plausibly "right-adjacent," as in the Internet also being Joe Rogan. By contrast leftishness online lives insecurely, furtively, in obscure interstices of the web the Search Engine Overlords and their ilk ever strive to cut off from the rest of the web and eliminate, their commitment to "free speech" never having extended to such in even a nominal way, and no one with any platform in a position to seriously challenge them for doing it. Indeed, they unapologetically point to their doing so in their own defense when facing critics from the right whose dominance online, ironically, has enabled them to make it the conventional wisdom that if there is a victim of Big Tech's censorship, it is they and not the leftists who go unseen.