Thread by @JeffreyASachs

The Anti-Politics Machine: or, a unified field theory of the Intellectual Dark Web

What is the IDW, et. al.? A huge amount of journalistic effort has been spent trying to nail down precisely what the IDW believes, the values it promotes, the future it is working toward.

nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opi…

vox.com/the-big-idea/2…

lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-in…

"They're just a bunch of conservatives!" (except some are pretty liberal). "Enlightenment fetishists," (but Jordan Peterson is a total mystic). "The pseudo-intellectual face of the alt-Right," (you're thinking of the Claremont Institute).

No, what unites the members of IDW isn't their politics. It's their *deferral* of politics. It's the idea that politics is something that happens later, after the ground has been cleared and the foundation stones laid. In other words, what unites the IDW is its utopianism.

This is the point made by @ambientGillian in a recent, perceptive piece on Dave Rubin. But what she says about Rubin is true of the movement as a whole.

currentaffairs.org/2018/10/dave-r…

It's why so much of the movement's energy is devoted toward burying social practice underneath an avalanche of scientism, such that to question gender roles, racial inequality, family structure, or market relations is to question human nature itself.

It's why the grundnorm of the movement is "free speech", since speech has no performative function, only a persuasive one. Disagree? That is the doctrine of the politically correct. Think that speech can itself be political? That would mean speech can be violence. Anathema.

In this sense, the closest cognate to the IDW isn't the alt-Right or JS Mill, but rather the bloodless liberalism of pre-Trump Ezra Klein, a kind of techno-optimism that reduces political conflict to a mix of misunderstanding, bad faith, and the improper use of Excel.

The IDW goes to absurd lengths to disguise this deferral of politics, but every once in a while the mask slips, as happened during Rubin's recent interview with Ben Shapiro. People were shocked. That kind of honesty has no place on the Rubin Report.

Or the atheism showdown last month between Sam Harris and Peterson. Granted, pretty middling stuff as far as intellectual discourse goes, but this is what the IDW looks like when people stop being polite and start getting real. Sparks kinda fly.

https://twitter.com/gspellchecker/status/1036339590968356864?s=12

Usually, though, it's not an ill-timed admission or debate that gums up the works, but the force of a good argument: "Hey, IDW'ers, you know all these things you like? Some of them were achieved via identity politics and political correctness! Where's your God now, Pinker?"

Here the IDW'er plays his or her trump card: the careful drawing of a meaningless distinction. *Some* identity politics is good, but other kinds are bad. Political correctness *can* be okay, but only when condition X is present.

observer.com/2016/09/anti-p…
nationalreview.com/2018/08/identi…

These distinctions never amount to much, and one gets the sense that their hearts aren't really in it.

None of this is to say that they don't ever disagree with one another, but their rhetorical mode is always theory, never praxis. Thou shalts, never We shall dos. So of course they're always civil with one another; there's never anything real at stake.

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1048326933891764224

What's the best you can say about the IDW? They're nostalgics, and therefore fundamentally harmless. What's the worst you can say about the IDW? They're naifs, and therefore easily coopted. Which is where the alt-Right comes in, as well as the regular Right.

If I was a crueler person, I would take some joy in the knowledge that if their vision were ever realized, they would be the first ones ground under foot. But since the Left would surely be the second, they must be resisted at all costs.

And that's where the pressing urgency of "and then what?" comes in. Because there's nothing that the IDW fears more than the future. There's nothing utopians understand less than the morning after.

They've achieved some success and built a pretty large audience, I'll give them that. But only by passing over in silence every actual question. Ask them what comes next and they fall to pieces. And since questions, sooner or later, always arise, they're living on borrowed time.