Diagonalism

This is an entertaining article about various people formerly identified with the left (albeit dubiously in some cases) becoming full-out reactionary cranks:

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.”

To make an unoriginal observation, in some cases the full-out turn to the right is driven more by personal slights:

Matt Taibbi’s own slide began in 2017, after the release of his book about the police killing of Eric Garner, I Can’t Breathe, was derailed by the resurrection of his misogynistic exploits as a young expat reporter in post-Soviet Moscow. Taibbi’s apologies didn’t quell the criticism. Then he started talking about ​“cancel culture”; then liberal media bias; then, late in 2022, he made himself the mouthpiece for Elon Musk’s Twitter Files project. In March, he found himself in a congressional hearing, nodding along as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) described Democrats as a McCarthyite mob. In November, Taibbi and two other Twitter Files reporters received a $100,000 award from a program of the Young America’s Foundation, long a bridge between establishment conservatives and each generation’s shoutiest right-wing youth.

In similar fashion, Naomi Wolf ​’s path from a liberal third-wave feminist writer of ​“big ideas” books to a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room and Fox News began— or perhaps sped up — with a career humiliation. As Naomi Klein recounts in her recent book Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, the premise of Wolf’s 2019 book Outrages collapsed on live air over a misunderstanding of an archaic legal term. By 2021, Wolf had emerged as a key purveyor of Covid-19 conspiracy theories, warning that ​“vaccine passports equal slavery forever.”

“The party left me. I used to be a lefty, but when mean libs brought up my misogyny diary or pointed out that I based an entire book around a legal term I didn’t understand, I had no choice but to become an anti-vaxx crank who worships alt-right billionaires.”

I agree that “horseshoe theory” doesn’t really capture what’s going on here. Naomi Klein’s alternative is interesting:

“It’s not the Left going to an extreme,” says Lowndes. ​“It’s choosing one element of left politics and abandoning all of its other historic principles.”

The publication of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger has popularized an alternative interpretation: diagonalism, a theory developed by historian Quinn Slobodian and political theorist William Callison to describe 2020 Germany, where a coalition of primarily small business owners and apolitical ​“lifestyle leftists” joined to protest pandemic restrictions.

Diagonalism, argue Slobodian and Callison, functions like a post-Covid version of ​“digitally mediated” movements such as Brexit. It rejects conventional labels of left and right, even as it borrows elements from both, sharing ​“a conviction that all power is conspiracy.” It’s often marked by ​“a dedication to disruptive decentralization, a desire for distributed knowledge and thus distributed power, and a susceptibility to right-wing radicalization.”

The people who comprise diagonalist movements come in various forms: movement hustlers gamifying politics; left-to-right ideologues who claim they didn’t leave the Left, the Left left them; and far-right esoterics. It has drawn wellness enthusiasts as well as neo-Nazis, and has praised QAnon. Unlike a horseshoe, the diagonalist path draws from not just the Left but also the center and the greater hinterlands, where everyday people hadn’t previously thought much about politics at all.

I would add that the crucial characteristic of this particular paranoid style is always to put superficially anti-Establishment form to work in defense of the most powerful forces in society. You can act like a victim while being generously compensated by Peter Thiel — win-win!