Matt Taibbi Is Wrong to Ignore the "Sins (or Threats) from the Right"

A recent tweet by economist April Harding provided a summary of reasons that the journalist Matt Taibbi gave for why he doesn’t “pay much attention to the sins (or threats) from "the right." One of the reasons he gave for not spending a lot of time on Republicans is that “The Republicans have very little institutional power nationally….Even if Donald Trump were a “threat to Democracy” he lacks the institutional pull to do much damage, which can’t be said of Democrats.” (https://twitter.com/april_harding/status/1773730805325389955)

The lack of institutional power is a long-running complaint of the Right. It is not easily dismissed given the cultural hegemony of left-leaning ideology in many of our institutions. As I wrote several years ago (https://goodmenproject.com/politics-2/specter-antonio-gramscis-neo-marxism-haunts-democratic-party-allies-wcz/) on the influence of Gramscian neo-Marxism in the Democratic party, “a visit to college campuses, a scan of the headlines in the mainstream media, or a study of the increasingly vocal “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party makes clear the degree to which ideological preoccupation with class struggle and a presumed “superstructure” of exploitation and victimization has infiltrated our academic, media, and political institutions, transforming social justice dogma into a twenty-first century incarnation of the Marxist creed. Nothing short of a rewiring of the collective consciousness will be tolerated.”

Taibbi will encounter no resistance from me on efforts to roll back the tide of militant “woke” activism over the last decade. I have written extensively on the flaws of the Critical Social Justice paradigm and “woke” activism, as can be seen in my writings linked on my website (https://www.jonathandavidchurch.com/publications). These include essays on how the specter of Marx haunts the social justice movement, the many flaws of Robin DiAngelo’s white fragility theory (look up my book), the flaws of Ibram Kendi’s antiracism paradigm, and shortcomings in the ways that scholars and activists have redefined our understanding of racism.

It is for this reason that I heaped lofty praise on the 2020 book Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, in a review for Quillette in July 2020 (https://quillette.com/2020/07/20/the-truth-according-to-social-justice-a-review-of-cynical-theories/). It is for this reason that I welcomed the efforts of many writers and activists to expose and criticize “woke” left-leaning orthodoxy that was fueling a wave of militant activism in the mid- to late-2010s and which culminated in the summer of 2020. It is for this reason that I saw so-called “cancel culture” as a serious threat to free speech and heterodox critique.

Somewhere along the way, however, things started to go seriously awry with right-wing resistance to Leftist cultural hegemony. This is a broad statement because it deals with a broad topic, and it is not the intent of this essay to dive into the deep, fraught, nuanced history of fragmentation of the Right into reasonable, thoughtful thinkers who exercised a healthy and rigorous skepticism of left-wing orthodoxy and the radical lurch into the world of conspiratorial madness increasingly gaining steam on the Right.

But the conspiratorial lurch does lend insight into the sins, threats, and institutional pull of the Right.

The conspiratorial lurch reached a crescendo during the 2020 election campaign, particularly in the months after Trump lost the election. From November 3, 2020, to January 6, 2021, the former president undertook a campaign to consistently deny the election results. He then oversaw a scheme, orchestrated by former advisors Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, by which former vice president Mike Pence would refuse to count the elector votes (or send them back to the states) during official Congressional proceedings to certify the results of the election. The aim was to decertify the results of the 2020 election and to replace Biden electors with fake electors who would vote for Trump. Trump persisted in this fake elector scheme to overturn the election results despite being told repeatedly by multiple people that he had lost the election, and despite losing 61 of 62 cases brought forth to dispute the election results (and in which 22 judges were Republican appointees, 10 of them by Trump, including 3 Supreme Court justices). As we all know by now, the effort to overturn the election was accompanied by a “Stop the Steal” rhetorical campaign that culminated in the events of January 6.

To this day, Trump continues to deny that he lost the 2020 election. Multiple right-wing figures and institutions, including Tucker Carlson, Michael Shellenberger, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Federalist, and the Epoch Times, have cast sufficient doubt on the events surrounding the leadup to the election, the events following the election, and the events January 6, as to create a counter-narrative that none of what happened actually happened (at least the way “we’ve been told” it happened). The campaign has been so successful that figures like Ramaswamy and Shellenberger peddle the conspiracy theory that January 6 was an “inside job” in which FBI agents were planted in the January crowd to entrap the rioters.

The point is that Taibbi is quite mistaken that “The Republicans have very little institutional power nationally” and that “[e]ven if Donald Trump were a “threat to Democracy” he lacks the institutional pull to do much damage, which can’t be said of Democrats.” The successful campaign to create a counter-narrative about the 2020 election and January 6 that is grossly wrong on the facts, and serves to set a precedent for attempts to overturn an election and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, reveals serious institutional pull by right-wing figures and institutions in their ability to generate political results by appealing to a right-wing constituency increasingly and dangerously hungry for conspiratorial accounts of the prevailing institutions that make up the “Establishment,” or as the off-the-reservation “philosopher” Curtis Yarvin calls it, the “Cathedral.”

Trump aside, however, let’s have a brief look at how Republicans fare in some of our mainstream institutions.

As for governing institutions, we need no reminder that President Joe Biden is a Democrat who is saddled with low popularity ratings and faces a divided Congress in which the Republicans barely control the House and Democrats barely control the Senate. But at the state level, there are currently 27 Republican governors, compared to 23 Democratic governors. Moreover, Republicans currently control 28 state legislatures, compared to 19 for Democrats. There are a total of 4,022 Republican state legislators, compared to 3,270 Democratic state legislators. Combining governors and state legislatures, Republicans control 23 states, compared to 16 for the Democrats (https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan-composition). Note that the numbers vary slightly according a different source (https://governors.rutgers.edu/fast-facts-about-americas-governors/), but in either case, Republicans exert control in several more states than do Democrats.

As for media, there is no shortage of right-wing talk radio shows that garner thousands, even millions, of viewers (Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt, Dan Bongino, Jesse Kelly, Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, etc.). Rush Limbaugh himself was an institution in himself until he died of cancer a few years ago. On TV, the right-wing bastion Fox News, where Tucker Carlson was the most-watched personality until he was let go, has been the top-rated cable news network for the past eight years (https://deadline.com/2024/02/fox-news-ratings-msnbc-cnn-1235840722/), far surpassing the ratings of MSNBC and CNN. Turning to MSM newspapers, it is true that MSM mainstay New York Times dominates the subscription ratings, but the right-leaning Wall Street Journal comes in second place, topping the other MSM mainstay Washington Post (https://www.statista.com/statistics/785919/worldwide-number-of-digital-newspaper-subscribers/#:~:text=Online%20subscriptions%20to%20news%20websites%20worldwide%202023&text=The%20New%20York%20Times%20had,million%20online%20news%20subscribers%20respectively).

Then there is social media. The purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk has been a boon to right-wing voices. As of December 2022, “[t]housands of previously banned Twitter users, including members of the far-right and users sharing blatant misinformation, [had] begun to have their accounts restored to the platform, according to an independent analysis” (https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/tech/twitter-unbanned-users-returning/index.html). These restored accounts include QAnon followers, 2020 election deniers, and COVID conspiracy theorists.

Yet for all the fanfare about the alleged shadow-banning of right-wing accounts revealed in the Twitter files (https://www.foxnews.com/media/what-elon-musks-twitter-files-uncovered-about-tech-giant), it appears that Twitter had a history of amplifying right-leaning accounts more than left-leaning accounts. According to a 2021 study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119) in which Twitter conducted “a long-running, massive-scale randomized experiment on the Twitter platform”, it turns out that “[i]n six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left.” Its “second set of findings studying the U.S. media landscape revealed that algorithmic amplification favours right-leaning news sources.” It also found no evidence that algorithms amplify far left and far-right political groups more than moderate ones.

Finally, for all the (quite reasonable and well-grounded) complaints about the Left’s “long march through the institutions,” conservative activists like Chris Rufo and many others have been ruthlessly effective at exposing the Left’s cultural hegemony in municipalities, universities, public schools, businesses, and other institutions, as well as spearheading successful campaigns to reign in the ideological overreach of DEI bureaucracies. It is, of course, important to acknowledge that the crusade against left-wing cultural hegemony is itself an ongoing long march given the wide and powerful reach of left-wing orthodoxy in many of our institutions. But for all that, the right has not been without several significant victories. For example, Ron DeSantis has effectively turned Florida into a red state, and Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial race on the backs of suburban resistance to Critical Race Theory in the schools.

In summary, as a long-time critic of “woke” orthodoxy, I welcome efforts to resist the tide of military “woke” activism and engage in rigorous critique of their ideas. But despite these reasonable concerns about the cultural hegemony of left-wing orthodoxy, there is little doubt that the Right exerts a great deal of power in governing institutions, media institutions, think tanks, and other outlets that have engaged in successful campaigns of activism that has won many victories. Many of these victories are to be celebrated by those of us who believe there are flaws in the ideas of “woke” orthodoxy and who believe that militant left-wing activism has stoked the abuses of cancel culture.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that the Right has in many instances taken a serious and radical lurch into the world of conspiratorial lunacy that finds its most dangerous and outrageous expression in the rhetorical excesses of the cult of Trump and MAGA, especially surrounding the attempts to deny the integrity of the 2020 election results and distort the narrative around Trump’s attempt to overturn those results.

Given the perilous risk of setting a precedent that a strong-arm demagogue can attempt to overturn an election, disrupt with peaceful transfer of power, and get away with it, we must not ignore the “sins of the Right”.