Politics, according to Andrew Breitbart’s famous dictum, is downstream from culture. Whether this is true, or how strong is its effect, is a matter of much debate. Nonetheless, the left clearly recognised this when they formulated the strategy of the Long March through the Institutions. Even as conservative legends like Thatcher and Reagan were conspicuously winning the battles in the ’80s, the far left were stealthily winning the war – by steadily white-anting the cultural institutions: academia and entertainment, especially.
Academia remains an almost-completely left-wing desert. On the surface, so does the entertainment industry. Under the surface, though, a conservative underground has been steadily gaining ground. Like the Long March left, it’s mostly flown under the radar of the Establishment.
Until it erupted into politics in the 2024 presidential race.
Theo Von, Lex Fridman, The Undertaker, The Nelk Boys. Among the many YouTubers, podcasters, streamers and influencers who lined up to laud and promote Donald Trump during his election campaign are several characters who always sound to me as though they should be minor antagonists in a Marvel superhero film.
To them we can add the more conventionally named Adin Ross, Andrew Schulz and Logan Paul. Each has an audience in the millions or tens of millions. All are Trumpist or Trump-curious.
The Democrats, on the other hand, stayed squarely in the mainstream media lane and played their old game of assembling a roster of celebrity elites. And they wonder why no one listened to them.
Since Kamala Harris’s defeat, wiser Democrats have been fretting over their party’s lack of “organic” engagement with the American electorate. Lavish donor billions meant they were able to hose battleground states with as much TV advertising as they liked. But modern liberals have nothing to match the spontaneous influence of the online right.
There’s the difference between the conservative underground and the left Establishment. The Establishment impose their world-view, top-down and feeding voters the pronouncements of the elite as holy writ. The conservative underground, while many of them have grown wealthy, did so by the hard scrabble of building an audience the hard way. Often against steady resistance from the Establishment.
An Establishment who are as shocked to discover they no longer own the hoi polloi now as they were in 1865.
One discovery of the US election is that the left’s much-vaunted cultural hegemony is not as total as many believed. It is true that innumerable actors and singers turned out to endorse Harris. But actors and singers are not the unchallengeably central figures they once were.
You can almost hear the MSM grinding their teeth in fury. Hence such put-downs as this:
You do not have to credit the online right with much in the way of cultural or intellectual achievement but it is hard to deny its vitality. A conservative philosopher, Jordan Peterson, sold out London’s O2 arena. A conservative (or at least conservative-sympathising) comedian, Joe Rogan, is the most popular broadcaster in the English-speaking world.
Never mind that Peterson is a bona fide academic, whose first published work was the erudite and obscure Maps of Meaning. Peterson would likely have had an entirely respectable academic career were it not for his foray into social media (the Reddit post that eventually became 12 Rules for Life) and very public refusal to submit to forced speech over ‘pronouns’.
I can’t think of left-wing equivalents of either of those phenomena. Nor of a figure like Ben Shapiro, whose political commentary has made him an international celebrity. Nor even of the strange rabble of zany cult figures and intellectual eccentrics continually being thrown up by the anti-woke movement. Consider even a character such as Bronze Age Pervert, the anonymous blogger whose pseudo-Nietzschean manifesto Bronze Age Mindset became required reading among young staffers in the last Trump White House. He may not be a serious thinker but he is at least a symptom of what you might call the modern right’s animal spirits.
So what does this mean for the Long March? What Dutschke and Marcuse and their apparatchiks failed to reckon with was the rise of the internet. Suddenly, academia is a paper tiger. Who, after all, reads the endless dreck churned out by grievance studies journals, when they can go to YouTube or Substack and get accessible content directly from genuine, dissidently centrist or conservative academics?
You almost have to feel sorry for the left: they’ve spent over half a century to conquer the citadel, only to find the peasants have all abandoned it.
In 2024, taking over a university humanities department looks a bit like seizing control of a melting iceberg. Progressive academics can put trigger warnings on Shakespeare but they can’t stem the rapid decline of young people studying literature.
Publishers can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on stiflingly virtuous literary fiction but they can’t guarantee readers for those books. Curators can compose museum labels explaining the excruciating logic by which William Hogarth can be said to be implicated in Britain’s imperial atrocities but they can’t stop sliding post-pandemic visitor numbers.
The culture has shifted under the left Establishment’s feet, without them even noticing. A Darwinian struggle for survival has seen battle-hardened conservative and centrist figures rise up, intellectual muscles flexing. The left, meanwhile, simply turned everyone away with their poison.
Many have had a thrilling time enforcing punishing rules on each other about what is permissible to say and think. The consequences were inevitable. If you insist on limiting your political allies to repeating worthy platitudes and pious absurdities, you should not then be surprised that nobody else particularly wants to listen.
Ten years of hostility to free thinking and free speech has seriously damaged the left as a cultural and intellectual force. Almost all artistic endeavours, from the high to the low, surprise and delight by breaking the rules. There is nothing drearier than obedient art. Much “woke” culture is simply not entertaining. No wonder audiences are looking elsewhere for fun.
It’s up to we independent media to provide and for audiences to support it. So subscribe to your favourite blog or YouTuber.
