When I began writing about privilege call-outs and purity-politics sanctimony, in the early 2000s/2010s, I had a vague sense that these things were bad for the causes they ostensibly promoted.
The idea that no-one in America voted for Obama, witnessed the rise of the illiberal left, and wound up voting for Trump is definitely false. I know three people off the top of my head who did exactly that. I admit it’s confusing, but that’s one reason the whole “heterodox” sphere came into existence - to grapple with the strange times we were in.
For what it's worth, as one of the people who joked about the Oberlin bahn mi thing yesterday, I neither insist that you should've instead spent any time sounding the alarm about INCIPIENT FASCISM nor care about your signing the Harper's Letter or whatever connection you may or may not have to Bari Weiss or any other people who have made heterodoxism a key part of their personal brand as professional 'comentators on culture.'
that wrestles with this same question of what role Online Wokescoldery played in the rise of Trump. I think you and her both describe a pattern of behavior that clearly did manifest and clearly did make unpleasant the lives of some number of people.
What I continue to find unconvincing is the leap from 'some really annoying online lefties decided to brigade people for funsies in the name of doing a social justice' to 'this resulted in a non-negligible number of people who were otherwise neutral or even negative toward Trump to embrace him instead.'
Look, I'm a huge believer in negative polarization, it is absolutely one of the most salient drivers of politics and culture today. But by far the most voluminous and vicious of this type of behavior happened on... Tumblr, where everyone involved was, ah, not a regular person. As ever, the vast majority of people victimized by anti-social leftists are... themselves leftists, or at least not-conservative enough to be in similar spaces and care about that sort of dogpiling. It's much more difficult - and usually judged not worth the effort - for the Too Online to cyberbully someone who isn't online in some significant way, and conservatives don't care about what the commies think about them anyway.
I see parallels to the Russian attempts at social engineering with respect to the 2016 election. Sure, it actually happened, they did throw a bunch of stuff against the wall. But I just don't see any real evidence that this moved any significant number of people toward Trump, as opposed to just providing ammo for those already anti-woke.
"What I continue to find unconvincing is the leap from 'some really annoying online lefties decided to brigade people for funsies in the name of doing a social justice' to 'this resulted in a non-negligible number of people who were otherwise neutral or even negative toward Trump to embrace him instead.'"
Here I will repeat myself (https://phoebemaltzbovy.substack.com/p/the-mechanism) but: it's not just about swing voters or political trajectories rightward. It's also about the left-broadly-defined having the wrong priorities, doing battle against imagined internal enemies rather than, you know, the other side. It's about progressives voluntarily ceding the mantle of being the side in favor of free expression. It's about a vacuum created by weaknesses on the left, not just about actual individual paths from left to right.
Well, I know I've made this point before too, but it's also not like voters just _happened_ to notice these weaknesses - there was a massive right-wing media ecosystem amplifying, distorting, and probably inventing controversies on a daily basis. I'm not going to condone your Bluesky treatment cus a) I don't use Bluesky and b) I totally believe you were treated unfairly, but if people are pissed at you, it's probably not on account of your good-faith engagement w/ the topic, but the perception that you were a pawn for the right.
What was the "massive right-wing media ecosystem" pointing me to comments to liberal and feminist blogs I was already by my own choice reading in the early 2010s? Or the "massive right-wing media ecosystem" informing me what journalists and academics in my own social media feeds (not plucked via Libs of TikTok or whichever else) were posting? Two things were happening in overlapping years: the media ecosystem you describe, and the entirely organic discovery *by people in such spaces because these were normal spaces for them to be in* that there was censoriousness and sanctimony going on.
The Bluesky pile-on about this was crazy to watch. The weird part is, if you word it another way and say "Democrats are out of touch elites and that's why working class people voted for Trump" you would get every like from the self-described leftists on there. Non-college-educated whites (and increasingly other groups) see the Democrats as elites and not representing their interests, and the illiberal "woke" stuff has to be at least a part of it.
(And just in case, here's my disclaimer where I say that as an over-educated white I feel like much of "woke" was and is a very necessary thing after years of systemic racism.)
The idea that no-one in America voted for Obama, witnessed the rise of the illiberal left, and wound up voting for Trump is definitely false. I know three people off the top of my head who did exactly that. I admit it’s confusing, but that’s one reason the whole “heterodox” sphere came into existence - to grapple with the strange times we were in.
For what it's worth, as one of the people who joked about the Oberlin bahn mi thing yesterday, I neither insist that you should've instead spent any time sounding the alarm about INCIPIENT FASCISM nor care about your signing the Harper's Letter or whatever connection you may or may not have to Bari Weiss or any other people who have made heterodoxism a key part of their personal brand as professional 'comentators on culture.'
Marie Le Conte wrote a piece a year ago
(https://youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/the-one-where-we-realise-we-dont)
that wrestles with this same question of what role Online Wokescoldery played in the rise of Trump. I think you and her both describe a pattern of behavior that clearly did manifest and clearly did make unpleasant the lives of some number of people.
What I continue to find unconvincing is the leap from 'some really annoying online lefties decided to brigade people for funsies in the name of doing a social justice' to 'this resulted in a non-negligible number of people who were otherwise neutral or even negative toward Trump to embrace him instead.'
Look, I'm a huge believer in negative polarization, it is absolutely one of the most salient drivers of politics and culture today. But by far the most voluminous and vicious of this type of behavior happened on... Tumblr, where everyone involved was, ah, not a regular person. As ever, the vast majority of people victimized by anti-social leftists are... themselves leftists, or at least not-conservative enough to be in similar spaces and care about that sort of dogpiling. It's much more difficult - and usually judged not worth the effort - for the Too Online to cyberbully someone who isn't online in some significant way, and conservatives don't care about what the commies think about them anyway.
I see parallels to the Russian attempts at social engineering with respect to the 2016 election. Sure, it actually happened, they did throw a bunch of stuff against the wall. But I just don't see any real evidence that this moved any significant number of people toward Trump, as opposed to just providing ammo for those already anti-woke.
"What I continue to find unconvincing is the leap from 'some really annoying online lefties decided to brigade people for funsies in the name of doing a social justice' to 'this resulted in a non-negligible number of people who were otherwise neutral or even negative toward Trump to embrace him instead.'"
Here I will repeat myself (https://phoebemaltzbovy.substack.com/p/the-mechanism) but: it's not just about swing voters or political trajectories rightward. It's also about the left-broadly-defined having the wrong priorities, doing battle against imagined internal enemies rather than, you know, the other side. It's about progressives voluntarily ceding the mantle of being the side in favor of free expression. It's about a vacuum created by weaknesses on the left, not just about actual individual paths from left to right.
Well, I know I've made this point before too, but it's also not like voters just _happened_ to notice these weaknesses - there was a massive right-wing media ecosystem amplifying, distorting, and probably inventing controversies on a daily basis. I'm not going to condone your Bluesky treatment cus a) I don't use Bluesky and b) I totally believe you were treated unfairly, but if people are pissed at you, it's probably not on account of your good-faith engagement w/ the topic, but the perception that you were a pawn for the right.
What was the "massive right-wing media ecosystem" pointing me to comments to liberal and feminist blogs I was already by my own choice reading in the early 2010s? Or the "massive right-wing media ecosystem" informing me what journalists and academics in my own social media feeds (not plucked via Libs of TikTok or whichever else) were posting? Two things were happening in overlapping years: the media ecosystem you describe, and the entirely organic discovery *by people in such spaces because these were normal spaces for them to be in* that there was censoriousness and sanctimony going on.
The Bluesky pile-on about this was crazy to watch. The weird part is, if you word it another way and say "Democrats are out of touch elites and that's why working class people voted for Trump" you would get every like from the self-described leftists on there. Non-college-educated whites (and increasingly other groups) see the Democrats as elites and not representing their interests, and the illiberal "woke" stuff has to be at least a part of it.
(And just in case, here's my disclaimer where I say that as an over-educated white I feel like much of "woke" was and is a very necessary thing after years of systemic racism.)