The Cult of “Wrongthink”: How a Generation of Pundits Ruined “Debate”
For the first time in a century, there are no great conservative publications. There are plenty of voices willing to “debate” their ideological foes, among them Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, writers at Quillette, and the ragtag Intellectual Dark Web crew. But rarely in good faith. And to what end?
Last week, Kmele Foster, Matt Welch, and Michael Moynihan interviewed the conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan for their podcast, The Fifth Column. The hosts and their guest spent much of the hourlong interview discussing the bellicose state of political discourse and left-wing activists who refuse to debate their opponents and even their allies, including Sullivan. “The only right that gay people had, for the longest time, was the the First Amendment right,” Sullivan said. He described once visiting a fundamentalist Christian megachurch to debate the pastor about marriage equality. He recalled changing no minds, at least not as far as he could immediately see, but enjoying the conversation regardless. “I love the fact that they were engaging with a gay man in good, civil terms,” Sullivan said. “There’s a great power in surrendering that defensiveness.”
The left, in Sullivan’s estimation, hasn’t just rewritten the terms of engagement. Through a new language of identity politics, they’ve also rewritten the terms of allegiance. At one point in the conversation, Moynihan mentioned how Sullivan had summarized the shift quite nicely in a private exchange. I used to be the gay, HIV-positive, vaguely Toryish British Catholic who loved Oakeshott, Moynihan recalled Sullivan joking, and now I’m just a cis man.
Under President Donald Trump, conservatism dominates the U.S. political landscape. It rules the world, really. Meanwhile, the intellectual aspects of conservatism have disintegrated. There are, for the first time in a century, no great conservative publications. There are plenty of tabloids, a testament to Trump’s influence. There are right-wing microcelebrities who flourish on Twitter, YouTube, and in podcasting, where they don’t advance conservatism so much as a thousand insignificant distinctions between Trumpism and their respective personal brands. There’s Ben Shapiro, a 35-year-old man who wanders the earth challenging random undergraduate students to arguments about transgender pronoun conventions. National Review is fun for anyone who might want to watch Kevin Williamson holler at the proverbial chair known as “wokeness.” There’s Quillette, I guess: a quasilibertarian website launched four years ago as “a space for unusual viewpoints.” Quillette sternly opposes left-wing politics—cancel culture, college activism, black bloc combat—on rationalist grounds, which is to say: Quillette promotes stoicism and classic debate.
It’s easy to read Quillette and detect a classic conservative magazine; it’s more like National Review, or even Taki’s Magazine, than the old libertartian standard-bearer, Reason. Quillette channels the key right-wing anxieties: the fussiness about modernity, the antipathy against civil rights activism and college students, the general hysteria about various “hysterias.” The publication’s writers have the knee-jerk tendency to describe any left-wing articulation about anything as “ahistorical,” with vague but nonetheless vigorous gestures toward Plato and glib but nonetheless fearful reassessments of Marx. And they agonize about all the same watchwords: “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” “wokeness,” “wrongthink,” etc. In fact, the distinctions among so many figures and forums—Quillette and Reason, National Review and Breitbart, 4chan and 8chan, the Intellectual Dark Web and Gamergate, Shapiro and Milo Yiannopolous, Jordan Peterson and Alex Jones—have spent the Trump years delivering one long, unpunctuated screed in defense of “wrongthink.”
The diversity of “wrongthink” among conservative figures and right-wing platforms is largely a matter of style. Fox News, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and Trump are “wrongthink” written in Comic Sans and punctuated with a U.S. flag emoji. In contrast, Quillette, National Review, and The Daily Wire form a “classical” axis that struggles to reconcile the right’s contempt for science with its nonetheless dominant urge to masturbate to the Enlightenment. Quillette’s founder, Claire Lehmann, takes great pride in her website’s provocations. She, too, agonizes about “wrongthink” and “political correctness” as the single-most terrifying perils of her lifetime. The term “political correctness” unites conservatives, libertarians, and vintage liberals in defense of various comedians, rappers, and columnists; and now “wrongthink” unites conservatives and libertarians in defense of George Zimmerman and Alex Jones. “Wrongthinkers” aren’t frustrated with liberals who have somehow failed to discover them, their biases, their anxieties, and their ideas; “wrongthinkers” are frustrated with liberals who have declined to take their ideas and their style seriously in the first place.
Quillette is “wrongthink” fashioned into a tote bag. The Intellectual Dark Web is “wrongthink” incorporated as a corporate speaking tour. The celebrity mascot for the Intellectual Dark Web is Joe Rogan, a mixed martial arts commentator, stand-up comedian, and former TV game show host who will occasionally shoot the shit with conservatives, including alt-right activists, on his podcast. Rogan interviews Milo Yiannopoulos, but then he also interviews Mike Tyson. Who’s to say what Rogan’s political mission is, or whether he even has one? He isn’t the leader of modern conservatism; there are many conservative intellectuals who do not regard him as a crucial figure and do not seem to care about him in the slightest. Likewise, Rogan does not seem to be invested in conservative politics so much as he is invested in counterculture, which is precisely what post-Trump conservatism has come to represent.
If you look directly at Rogan, you will not see a conservative. Individually, he is fine—one of the more sensible goofballs in the general post-Trump racket. The right-wing project takes shape around him and almost despite him. Rogan’s compatriots are white, nostalgic intellectuals, such as Peterson, Shapiro, and Dave Rubin, who moan about left-wing politics while assuring critics of the clique’s homogeneity that they moan about other things, too. Uri Harris, who covers the IDW frequently for Quillette, has observed as much. “A ‘new’ right has indeed been forming online, especially on YouTube,” Harris wrote, “and it includes many people who don’t think of themselves as being on the right, but who nevertheless find common ground with conservatives in opposition to the ‘new’ left, with its focus on identity and structural oppression.”
The ambiguity that Harris attributes to the IDW might apply to post-Trump conservative politics in general. Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor who now identifies as a thinking man’s conservative, has spent the past couple weeks bickering with publications that, in reviewing his new book, The Right Side of History, characterize him as an alt-right figurehead. Of course, liberals characterize the alt-right more expansively than conservatives do; and, among themselves, liberals disagree about the term’s scope. The alt-right is most strictly understood to be a self-identified white nationalist faction flourishing within a broader conservative movement while nonetheless at odds with the movement’s mainstream leaders. But the alt-right is also a culture war construct, too evasive and disingenuous to be defined by self-identification—more readily defined by style and by language. Shapiro and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie do not speak the same language. Shapiro and Yiannopolous do.
“Woke” reads as an epitaph for the conservative mind.
Unlike “wrongthink,” “woke” is a broadly common term with peculiar, dynamic significance in current political discourse. I am old enough to remember when “woke” was black slang employed, at turns, to celebrate and ridicule whimsical thinking about spirituality, life sciences, human history, political conspiracies, etc. Throughout the 2010s, however, gossip blogs, music critics, political pundits, and white people in general appropriated the term to describe a broader range of sensibilities in mainstream discourse. So “woke” came to mean “aware” in a more sincere, self-righteous sense. Stephen King tweeted about the death of Freddie Gray, and thus Stephen King became woke. So, too, did J.K. Rowling once she turned Dumbledore gay and Hermione black. Inevitably, conservatives and other “wrongthinkers” appropriated the term to mock all they perceived to be the most left-wing identity politics. Now, Williamson will write entire columns in which he simply rants about “woke” people and “wokeness” in some form or another. So here we have a self-consciously ridiculous term that might have placed conservative intellectuals in conversation with black skeptics—a term that contains so many hints that progressive black thought, for instance, is more complicated than Kanye West suggests with all his talk about plantations. But instead this term persists as the inexhaustible cliché that propels conservative columnists inexorably toward the minimum word count. “Woke” is thus wasted in an echo chamber designed by people who, supposedly, hate echo chambers.
The post-Trump conservatives aren’t the only “wrongthinkers,” and “wrongthinkers” aren’t all necessarily opposed to left-wing concerns and left-wing projects. The journalist Jesse Singal provides a less conventional example. Singal isn’t a conservative, nor does he agonize about “wrongthink” and “political correctness” in so many words. He has, however, spent the past few years arguing with LGBTQ activists about gender transition science, which he has covered for The Atlantic.
On Twitter, Singal spent the past weekend challenging a perceived resistance among marginalized people to argue with conservatives. Arguing against such reluctance, Singal cited Frederick Douglass as a counterexample. He expressed one conception of Douglass—as a black genius who debated his people to freedom—and then several black journalists, disagreeing quite strongly with Singal’s characterization, expressed alternative conceptions of Douglass, abolitionism, and activism in general. Vann R. Newkirk II, an Atlantic staff writer who has, unlike Singal, actually written about Douglass and other black liberation figures, stressed the general aversion among abolitionists to debating slaveholders and other “unpersuadables.”
Singal, a proud rationalist, had an interesting debate on his hands. He might have directly engaged with black journalists at The Atlantic and The New York Times who might have had some worthwhile thoughts about Frederick Douglass, but instead he retreated from the debate, which he himself had launched in a live forum, only to reconfigure himself in the comfort of his own newsletter. It was all very meta and pathetic, and so poignantly counterproductive in demonstrating the power of rationalist confidence. “Be braver,” Singal had tweeted at one point. It was a fun debate while it lasted.
No one is scared to debate Singal, Shapiro, or Sullivan; they are, in most cases, simply annoyed. No journalist, no activist, no person of any persuasion wants to argue with a bad listener; no one wants to match against yet another rationalist champion only to find him retreating immediately to backchannels, whining about how many people are retweeting his opponents when they could be celebrating him. Routinely, the rationalists and the “wrongthinkers” disgrace the distinctions between provocation and trolling, between playing the devil’s advocate and presuming oneself to be the Twitter messiah, between begging for nuance and clamoring for attention. If this is “debate,” if this is discourse as ideally envisioned by the web rationalists, then there’s no wonder why a generation of journalists and activists might turn to other modes of opposition.
Through the watchwords and dysfunction, so many arguments about “wrongthink” and “bad faith” reveal themselves to be arguments about personal valor. These quarrels inform only the right’s language of grievance, persecution, and self-pity. Some alternative to Twitter liberals, huh? It is easy to celebrate the Schoolhouse Rock! version of Frederick Douglass; and even then one must reckon with John Brown. It is easy to gesture vaguely at the footage of William F. Buckley debating Jesse Jackson; it’s much harder to explain what, exactly, was so valuable, apart from entertainment value, about the exchange. It’s now harder than ever. It is hard to confront these abstract ideas—liberalism, conservatism, Trumpism, antifascism, the world—as an adult who carries as many convictions as questions. It is still more difficult to confront the discourse when speaking the language of so many shitposters and too-precious rationalists. They suffer the ratio for our sins.
An earlier version of this story misstated that Matt Welch had recalled an earlier conversation with Andrew Sullivan during an episode of The Fifth Column; it was Michael Moynihan who had the recollection.
