Am I 'right wing' now?
Surely not, but The Left is pretty embarrassing sometimes
I’ve always thought of myself as generally left-leaning, in that I think the state has a responsibility to its citizens, and public services like education, policing, firefighting and healthcare should be part of that responsibility. A state is just so much better equipped to handle these things efficiently than small private enterprises working in competition with each other, but of course that doesn’t mean that a state necessarily will do a good job. But beyond that, the terms Left and Right have been co-opted to encompass a whole host of other opinions that really have nothing to do with left or right wing politics, and which serve to do little more than pit people against each other over dumb ‘culture war’ nonsense.
Are gay rights a left wing issue? What about women’s rights? What about trans rights? Why should any of them be? What do they have to do with class, or seizing the means of production? Absolutely nothing. They are definitely ‘liberal’ issues, and ‘left’ has become somewhat synonymous with ‘liberal’ in the West, but there’s no reason why ‘left’ should be synonymous with ‘liberal’. I remember chuckling reading a George Orwell essay in which he disgustedly referred to ‘homosexual vegetarians’ - and that’s coming from someone who fought in the Spanish Civil War against actual fascists! Andrei Martyanov mentioned in a video or blog post a while back that the USSR was very culturally conservative, much as that might make modern ‘leftists’ uncomfortable.
I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I subscribed to Chapo Trap House podcast for a couple of years, from late 2019 to early 2022, because I thought it was funny and did a good job of lampooning the more ridiculous right-wing public intellectuals like Ben Shapiro. Chapo observed the giant hypocrisy of the coverage of the Jan 6 ‘Capitol riots’ and noted that the policeman who was originally reported as killed by rioters actually suffered a stroke, but they still made fun of the rioters along with the rest of the Trump-deranged crowd.
It was with the start of Russia’s SMO in Ukraine that the penny dropped and I realised that Chapo were actually just another facet of shallow culture war commentary, unwilling to be truly critical of media when it counted. They commented on the Snake Island story and others, acknowledging that the western media was uncritically repeating Ukrainian propaganda stories that were shown almost immediately to be false, but didn’t then take the next logical step of dismissing all the news media that had pushed the story. That’s a big step to take, and they would no doubt have lost a lot of their listeners - although who knows how many other people had the same epiphany over Ukraine as I did, and unsubscribed. Now and then I try listening to their free episodes, but I seldom make it through a whole episode any more; the hosts just seem so grating and self-satisfied. Note: in 2019, Chapo Trap House were the most successful entity on Patreon.
The Grayzone is still an excellent alternative news source, unashamedly on The Left, and its principal contributors Max Blumenthal, Kit Klarenberg and Aaron Maté have all been targeted as a result of their work. They have been unwavering in their criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians for a long time, and since Blumenthal and Maté are both Jewish, this must come at considerable personal cost. Nonetheless, listening to their podcast I find it frustrating how readily they dismiss everything that nominally right-wing personalities like Christopher Rufo and Matt Walsh have to say, because of their support for Israel.
Rufo has done a lot of work exposing the corruption of higher education institutions in the name of DEI (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) hiring, notably the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal, and Matt Walsh made the explosive What is a Woman? documentary, which went hard after the predatory ‘trans healthcare’ industry. To hear Blumenthal dismiss Walsh as ‘going after trans people’ is disappointing, if nothing else. Walsh is part of the growing movement that is critical of pseudoscientific ‘transgender medicine’ and there’s no reason to denigrate that, simply because you disagree with him - no matter how strongly - on another issue. Rufo has even written about how he went from being on the Left to being on the Right, because he became disillusioned with how supposedly left-wing politics is actually about supporting elites.
‘The New Right’ definitely has the funnier writers on Substack, even if I do yawn when they ridicule the ‘queers for Hamas’ protesters for the hundredth time. Yuri Bezmenov, bad cattitude and The New Right Poast are the first that spring to mind, but there are lots of them.
I’ve always found the term ‘cultural Marxism’ to be pretty cringeworthy (because isn’t Marxism already cultural?), but watching those who identify as being on The Left denounce supposed right-wingers in farcical echo-chamber struggle sessions for being on The Right does lend the term credence. This isn’t limited to media but can even apply to interpersonal relations, as I found out to my cost a few months ago. It seems now that those on The Right are generally more open to listening to the other side’s arguments than those on The Left, who tend to see people as Good (i.e. Left) or Bad (i.e. Right), rather than opinions as such.
A lot of opinions espoused by The Left are purely ideological (think Trans Rights and Orange Man Bad) and don’t stand up to criticism, which is why they resort to name-calling and denunciation1 in lieu of discussion. Again, this is something I came across in my personal life over things I said and media I shared related to Ukraine, a topic which has no Right or Left component; or if it does, you’d think at least neo-Nazis would count as being on The Right, but The Left is very ready to dismiss them as Russian propaganda for some reason.
I don’t want to be forced onto The Right, but I’m increasingly embarrassed to identify as being on The Left, and being a ‘centrist’ just feels like a way of giving up and embracing the anaesthetised oblivion of NPC-dom. It would be nice if we could get over these labels, but unfortunately labelling is an essential human trait. Maybe if Western countries actually had proper democracies with more than two viable parties that get the labels Left and Right almost by default, the discourse could be a bit more nuanced, too.
Father Ted nailed it ages ago:
Chapo Trap House’s Virgil Texas was himself a victim of online denunciation. He left the podcast in 2021 amidst some very vague allegations made on Twitter by a now-deleted user who called herself Jennifer Seberg, that he had “fucked with her head at a young age”, after she contacted him. None of the other Chapo hosts stood up for him or publicly addressed the accusations.
This definition of left and right is done deliberately. The media finds things in a population where the working classes will be in disagreement (eg the various culture war things, treatment of migrants, abotion rights or brexit) and focus all the discourse over this to funnel voters into polictical parties that actually agree on anything of signifcance (eg who should own the means of production in an economy, whether we should have such inequality, foreign policy, workers rights etc)
It's a pretty clever manipulation to ensure the working class is always fighting each other and never organised to achieve their common interests and ultimately the oligarchy that controls both polictical parties (along with all the media) wins every time.
It's amazing to think that in 2015 how dissapointed i was when labour lost the election. 9 years on I probably won't even bother to stay up to watch their impending landslide!
You know those hardcore communists who have always said that all American (and by extension, European puppet) politicians and political parties are right-wing, just that some are a little more right-wing and some are a little less right-wing? Over the last two-three years I started to realize they were right.
Or should I say... left.
:p