The insurgent Right and the politics of envy
The culture war as status contest
It’s very easy to laugh at those who earnestly demand to be taken seriously. This is especially true if they are deficient in the mitigating balms of humour and irony.
The Canadian professor Jordan Peterson evokes mirth for this very reason. The populist Right doesn’t like being laughed at and it likes even less to be sneered at by latte-swilling cultural ‘elites’. This was apparent in a piece I read this week about Peterson in The Critic which accused The Times of having a ‘strange fixation’ with the Canadian professor and of treating him with ‘condescension’. The article concluded that
‘Behind all of this lurks fear of the old media’s loss of status.’
I don’t think this observation is without merit. Traditional media gatekeepers (overwhelmingly privately educated) are gradually losing their ability to direct the public conversation as the cost of producing content goes down (as an example I don’t need to pitch this article to a legacy media gatekeeper in order for it to be published). It’s probably also true that some newspaper columnists do look down their noses with haughty contempt on the hoi polloi over at YouTube and here on Substack.
But the writer at The Critic confuses popularity with merit:
‘a freely available four-minute discussion online could barely muster a tenth of the views that Peterson’s three-hour paid lecture did.’
Moreover if Peterson is so popular, why worry what a failing legacy media is saying about him?
To state the obvious, just because something is popular it shouldn’t be beyond criticism. Much of Peterson’s output is silly, from his paranoid ramblings about ‘cultural Marxism’ to his ranting about the ‘tyranny’ of a paper towel dispenser to his claim that Britain is about to go communist under mild-mannered son of a tool maker Keir Starmer. Moreover, the man is utterly devoid of any sense of irony and regularly gets weepy during interviews (I dare somebody to watch this and conclude that he isn’t doing it at least some of the time for dramatic effect). Perhaps I’d find these tearful episodes more poignant if Peterson hadn’t sternly instructed readers of his bestselling book 12 Rules for Life to ‘Toughen Up, You Weasel’.
The thing to understand about Peterson and the wider populist Right is that they aren’t anti-elitists. They simply have their own pretensions to elite status and resent the fact that they aren’t treated with the prestige and reverence they believe they are entitled to. In the familiar populist tradition, they are the humiliated little men and women left behind by history. They are angry at not being invited to dinner at the big table and they just won’t take it anymore.
The French economist Thomas Piketty has written in the past about the ‘Brahmin Left’ and the ‘Merchant Right’ as a way of understanding political competition in contemporary society. Piketty makes four main arguments: 1. There has been a decline in class voting. 2. A wealthy ‘merchant class’ votes for Right-wing parties. 3. Educational voting has inverted, with educated voters increasingly voting for the Left. 4. All of this is feeding into a new division of globalists versus nativists*.
This argument has became more salient since Piketty first made it, at least as it pertains to social media. Something I find interesting about the so-called Merchant class is the way in which some of its members, despite being materially wealthy, strive for recognition from the same Brahmin cultural elites they publicly disdain. When that recognition isn’t forthcoming they seethe with resentment. People on the Left are frequently accused nowadays of adopting ‘luxury beliefs’ and ‘high status opinions’. I think this definitely happens; but it also smacks of projection because I don’t think any political faction is more obsessed with status than the insurgent online Right.
Elon Musk is a fitting example of this: a thin-skinned businessman who, despite being the richest man in the world, chafes bitterly at the fact that educated people scoff at his puerile frat-boy humour and culturally conservative politics. Again, here is somebody who possesses otherworldly riches yet his chief gripe is that this success isn’t reflected back at him by cultural elites, who regard him as a gauche figure of fun.
Notably one of the first things Musk did upon acquiring Twitter (apart from changing the name to X) was to get rid of legacy blue ticks, a status symbol of the online cultural elite. He was cheered to the rafters for doing this by the online Right, who immediately went out and purchased their own blue tick for $8 once Musk had made it possible to do so. Because it was never about being anti-elitist. It was a bunch of people whose pretensions to elite status were being thwarted by the old system.
Of course a blue tick is now cringe precisely because anybody can purchase it for pocket change and thus there is nothing ‘exclusive’ about it. Instead it demonstrates that you are probably trying a little too hard to look important, like the people who post photos on their Instagram grids of themselves standing next to Lamborghinis they’ve rented. Trying to look high status is low status.
Sartre once said that antisemites like to view themselves as part of an alternative intellectual elite. Conspiracy theorists - antisemitism is the ultimate conspiracy theory - are much the same, and alt-Right spaces nowadays are awash with a supercilious sense of unacknowledged intellectual superiority. They have ‘red pill awareness’ and wear t-shirts which say ‘they lied and you complied’ and have ‘pure blood’ because they didn’t get vaccinated.
Again, it’s usually the Left that is accused of being motivated by a ‘politics of envy’ - of wanting to cut down the tree because the apples are too high for them to reach. Yet today it is the Right that seeks to smash things up because late capitalism hasn’t turned out as they imagined it would. Everywhere you look today the ‘little guy’ is furiously railing against the system he has repeatedly voted for.
The row over companies pulling their ads from X/Twitter is an illuminating example of this latter point. People who have spent their adult lives arguing that capitalism is good and benevolent and that corporations can do as they please are aghast because big companies don’t want their ads appearing next to tweets by neo-Nazis. Musk and co know very well that it wasn’t ‘Left-wing censorship’ that resulted in people like Alex Jones (who was this week reinstated) being banned from Twitter. It was corporations not wanting their brands to be associated with extremists because it’s bad for business.
Something similar happened with YouTube during the so-called ‘Adpocalypse’ of 2017 when 250 brands pulled their advertising from the platform because it was appearing next to videos of hate preachers and fascists. The Adpocalypse resulted in a slew of policy changes at YouTube which made it easier for advertisers to select categories of videos they didn’t want their ads to appear alongside. A bunch of far-Right and manosphere channels subsequently found themselves demonetised. Predictably, the Right blamed political correctness and the Left for the adpocalypse, when again it was an example of corporations trying to protect their bottom line.
As I’ve pointed out previously, the contemporary Right has no coherent critique of consumer capitalism so instead it has to pretend that big corporations are secretly controlled by a cabal of ‘woke’ Marxists.
*Jan Rovny gives a good account of these changes over at the LSE page here.
I’ll be a panellist at this event in January. It’s free and you can get your ticket here. I can’t promise I’ll be wearing a cheerier expression on the day but I’ll definitely try.
