A Commitment to Reformism Would Have Saved the Intellectual Dark Web
Why Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Bret Weinstein etc. ultimately failed us
Although most people consider the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) to be over these days, it remains the subject of ongoing analysis and historical evaluation, about what it represented, what its effects were, and what went wrong. One of the reasons for this is its spectacular implosion. Cathy Young’s recent article From Intellectual Dark Web to Crank Central, provides an interesting perspective as to why the IDW might have ended up this way. Basically, the article sets out to answer the question ‘was it a worthy project gone bad, or was it always a fraud based on spurious grievances?’
In the article, Young discusses how several prominent members of the IDW, a project originally about bringing people together to have good-faith rational discussions about things, eventually became die-hard Trumpists, conspiracy theory ‘cranks’ and/or far-right sympathizers of some kind. Her main argument seems to be that the contrarian and outsider identity of the IDW might have predisposed it to develop in this direction. This echos a view she articulated in a 2021 article that ‘there is but a short journey from dissident to knee-jerk contrarian to crank to crackpot’. In the current article, she also hypothesized that certain factors might have prevented some IDW figures from going that way, including how Sam Harris’s mainstream success might have ‘made him less receptive to anti-establishment grievance’, and how ‘habits of critical thinking’ could also be protective.
Let’s take some time to think about these points. Being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. Being consumed by anti-establishment grievance. A lack of critical thinking. I guess even the most loyal fans of the IDW would have to agree that many of the most prominent IDW figures have been guilty of one or more of these things, at least some of the time. In particular, I’m sure the many ex-Jordan Peterson fans who have been deeply disappointed by his post-2022 attitude (myself included) would have noticed these things. But why did the IDW get trapped into this negativity spiral? After some soul searching over the past few years, I came to the conclusion that it was because the IDW (and the broader ‘anti-woke’ movement in general) didn’t have a positive vision for anything, besides a vague commitment to free speech and the marketplace of ideas. From what I see, the IDW was inherently anti-woke from the beginning, and that was well justified, because wokeness was shutting down free speech, and there couldn’t be rational and good-faith discussions if everything is seen through an oppressor vs oppressed lens. However, being anti-woke alone is not a vision, because it doesn’t say what you’re for instead. Without a broader positive vision for social reform and progress, arguments for free speech also ring hollow.
The article also discussed the likely role of ‘audience capture’ causing the IDW to turn out the way it did. As Young puts it, ‘in a polarized political climate, the IDW attracted a base of primarily right-wing fans’ who were often pro-Trump and had strong views on certain issues. This point, I think, goes together with another point she made in her aforementioned 2021 article, where she criticized the people who argued that the anti-woke should ‘band together instead of fighting over differences’, countering that ‘a visible ally who is peddling authoritarianism, demagoguery, and conspiratorial derangement can only discredit the effort’. In short, the point here is that the IDW went the way it did because it primarily attracted a certain kind of right-wing audience, which made it lean further and further right over time. Moreover, the relentless focus on anti-wokeism and refusal to criticize people who might be anti-woke but also problematic in other ways allowed these people and their views to be normalized, which also in turn alienated more reasonable people. All this seems to have resulted in a vicious cycle that eventually destroyed the IDW. Again, I think this is basically a result of the IDW having not articulated a positive vision of what kind of social and political change it wants to see instead. The lack of a positive vision meant that the IDW failed to attract progressive-minded followers, and the negativity made it attractive to reactionaries. In the end, the IDW couldn’t bring together people with diverse viewpoints to rationally discuss things, because it didn’t have an ideologically diverse enough following in the first place.
Young’s article ends by concluding that ‘the IDW’s principal legacy today is a cautionary tale’ against getting caught up in a dissident identity and confusing skepticism for contrarianism. Personally, I would be a bit more generous. While, as the article pointed out, the IDW weren’t the only people calling out cancel culture and campus illiberalism, it stood out as a more serious attempt to study these phenomenon, and place them within a tradition of far-left ideology built around postmodernism and identity-based critical theory. Understanding all this has been important in our attempts to push back against ‘wokeism’. This is why I’m more inclined towards seeing the IDW as a good thing gone wrong. It went wrong because the IDW’s most prominent members seem to have forgotten why we should support free speech and oppose postmodern critical theory in the first place.
From the classical liberal point of view, we should support free speech because it is the only way to improve our understanding of the objective truth, and the only way to develop a consensus of how to improve our society via reform, based on the objective truth. We should oppose postmodern critical theory because it seeks to discredit and damage the very framework that makes free speech and progressive reform in a peaceful society possible. In other words, we support free speech and oppose wokeism because we are reformists, while the woke are revolutionaries who believe in tearing everything down, which we see as deeply misguided and even dangerous. This is the insight that the IDW should have reached for, but for various reasons, it never quite got there.
I believe that if there were ever to be a revival of the IDW’s ideals in some form, and the mistakes of the past are to be actively avoided, then the project would have to be rooted in an explicit commitment to reformism. Only by rediscovering the reformist tradition, would the IDW’s commitments to free speech, rational discussion and objective truth be truly meaningful. And only by being committed to liberal reformism would our opposition to revolutionary wokeism become a positive vision that can attract constructive-minded supporters, rather than reactionaries who would drag the whole project to very dark places.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
