Losing the Plot: The “Leftists” Who Turn Right
From In These Times: inthesetimes.com
How to name the rude currents eroding the Left, those which have claimed the hearts, minds and Substacks of so many former friends and fellow travelers? There are the journalist-provocateurs and the readers who have followed them rightward, the Trumpers-come-lately marching on to Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble or vanishing into Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone. There are those not quite yet there, such as Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks, currently mourning the leftism she now believes “gaslit” her about a “crime wave” it refuses to admit. “I’m going through something very real and very sincere,” she told a “disaffected Democrats” podcast in July, “and it’s uncomfortable.” It is, indeed.
Consider the dislocation that flickers across the face of journalist Matt Taibbi in a TV interview this summer for the conspiracist, right-wing Epoch Times. Acclaimed by the Left during Occupy Wall Street as a scourge of corporate power, Taibbi is best known for his years at Rolling Stone. When the day eventually comes, the “vampire squid relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”— Taibbi’s unforgettable embodiment of Goldman Sachs in a 2010 article—will haunt his obituary.
While Taibbi insists his politics haven’t changed — an oddly conservative way to insist one hasn’t become conservative — his surroundings certainly have. Wearing a velvety brown jacket, jeans and his default smirk, he sat for his Epoch Times interview amid the libertarian FreedomFest conference. This year, in addition to Taibbi, it featured as speakers presidential candidates RFK Jr. (an Independent) and Vivek Ramaswamy (a Republican), along with former candidate Tulsi Gabbard (now a former Democrat, too), united in their contempt for “wokeness.” Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek anointed Taibbi an “American Thought Leader” for Taibbi’s critique of a timid, consensus-driven press that, he says, is reminiscent of the Soviet Union.
As Taibbi charges that the media is unwilling “to raise questions about things that have been ‘decided,’” Jekielek’s eyes light up. It reminds him of his own experience bucking consensus, he says, when, as a university student, he realized the core tenet of evolutionary science “simply was untrue.” Gulp. In the midst of nodding along, Taibbi’s normally expressive, still-boyish face seems to freeze, his fingers to tense on his knee. It’s a moment recognizable from countless movies. Imagine the record scratch, the freeze frame, the familiar Hollywood voiceover: “You’re probably wondering how I got here.”
Taibbi’s far from the first. Consider the case of David Horowitz, once a founding sponsor of this magazine, more recently author of Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win. Or, after him, Christopher Hitchens, whose knowledge of Iraqi Ba’athism led him, after 9/11, to align first with U.S. neoconservatives and ultimately with the very kind of religious nationalists he’d so long derided. We might mark 9/11 as a moment when many who believed they were for peace gave in to the notion that it can only be won through war. Post-October 7 may prove another such moment.
But the present left-to-right acceleration began in earnest with the onset of the Trump years, in 2017.
There are the intellectuals-in-exile, the scholars whose once contained complaints about free speech or diversity initiatives metastasized into a broad contrarianism that found new patrons. There are the not-so-funny-anymore, the comedians once known for their left politics — Chappelle and Roseanne and Russell Brand — pulled rightward by “jokes” about trans people, pandemic panics and pedophiles. There’s the “new New Right’s” very own Kennedy — Robert F., Jr., of the bulging biceps. RFK Jr. may seem, with his campaign pushups, little more than a joke to young leftists, but his history as a champion of intersectional environmentalism is long: as a leader of activist organizations, a lawyer for poor communities of color and a host for the defunct progressive radio network Air America. But in recent years, he’s been having second thoughts: We all know about Bobby and the vaxx, but did you know he’s recently “learned” we must seal the Southern border to protect our food supply from a “tsunami” of “defecating” migrants, shitting on our greens?
These left-to-right sliders (or at least left-ish-to-right) — themselves migrants across the political divide — find themselves in strange constellation with those they might once have disdained. Pop feminist icon Naomi Wolf now conferences with hard-right student organizer Charlie Kirk over the prospect of “capital punishment” for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. YouTuber Jimmy Dore, another once-left comedian who lost hold of the joke, now marvels over his meeting of the minds with Tucker Carlson: “We should do a show together!” Call it The Horseshoe Hour.
Except “horseshoe theory,” which imagines a political spectrum bending to meet at its extremes, doesn’t describe this drift. It goes in one direction.
It’s easy to dismiss many of these high-profile defectors as crackpots or spotlight-seekers, as never truly serious in their political principles or as plain grifters. Because of course there is money to be made by saying, “Once I was blind, but now I see.” It permits the Steve Bannons of the world to affirm their political faith not as an argument, but just the truth. But, in some ways, the peculiarities of the celebrity drifters are beside the point.
The point is who they bring along.