The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the long history of right-wing rebranding
For nearly a century, Republicans have been pretending to be the ‘real liberals’
This essay is the fourth in a series called “How This Happened,” examining larger trends in American political history and how they manifest in today’s politics. Please subscribe to receive future installments.
Just over six years ago, the New York Times published a splashy essay by staff editor and writer Bari Weiss hailing an “alliance of heretics” called the “Intellectual Dark Web” whose members supposedly existed apart from the traditional left and right political spectrum.
The article received a fair amount of attention, but few noticed that Weiss’s paean to internet personalities like podcasters Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein was a recapitulation of a profile that the Times’s inhouse magazine had published in 1995 of a “Counter Counterculture,” a new generation of reactionaries who were supposedly different from their predecessors.
The similarities between the two pieces are too numerous to list here, but perhaps the most striking is that the women who were photographed in both were dressed in leopard-print apparel. In the earlier package, future Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham was foregrounded in a group shot wearing a miniskirt bearing the great cat’s distinctive rosettes, while in 2018, author Christina Hoff Sommers donned a jacket that appeared to be made of leopard fur.
It’s unknown whether the Times intended the sartorial parallelism. Likewise, it’s unclear that Weiss and her predecessor, James Atlas, were aware that they were being used in a process that had already repeated itself several times before the late nineties.
Although many journalists style themselves as historians of the present, few seem to have actually read the stuff. Nowhere is this more evident than in the national press’s widespread ignorance of the fact that the ideas and moral philosophy of the American right have remained essentially unchanged since the 1920s: religious fundamentalism, economic policies that encourage businesses to oppress workers and the public, a belief that poverty is the result of immorality, and a deep suspicion of feminism and non-Anglo ethnic groups.
Despite the obvious appeal these failed viewpoints have to wealthy white Christians, they have been unpopular with most Americans. But instead of updating their ideas to ones that are more workable or responsive to public sentiment, reactionaries simply rebrand their policies every few years in a cycle that is as predictable as fashion designers trying to bring back flared pants.
Dennis Prager, the reactionary radio host and founder of video propaganda mill PragerU, described the strategy explicitly during a conversation with Dave Rubin, a podcaster who now identifies as right-wing, but was pretending to be progressive when he was included in Weiss’s article.
“I want you to continue to say you’re a liberal because you’re of great use to good values,” Prager said. “You are valuable in the best sense of the word, because America needs people who are clearly liberal and, to be honest, fall into the category of kosher as gay to say: ‘Hey hello, the conservatives are not hatemongers. Hello, they should be heard.’”