Fredrik deBoer on "Here's a Thing That Used to Happen";a tangential riff from Ellul on how the right of the present (1970s) repurposes myths originated in the left

Since he has a custom of often self-destructing posts I sometimes consider posts that stick with me for posterity.  The whole process of preserving content posted to the internet for the sake of posterity was a habit I picked up on a ... very different author/speaker and set of topics a few years ago but, anyway ...
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/09/10/heres-a-thing-that-used-to-happen/

September 10, 2020

So when I started blogging in 2008, a thing that would happen would be that a conservative writer would publish something on a conservative website, and then liberals at liberal publications would read those conservative websites, write up their own liberal responses and publish them on their liberal websites, and conservatives would write responses to responses, and so a decent number of people got to be employed. 

And what I can’t scientifically say but which seems screamingly obvious to me is that this is almost unthinkable today. It just doesn’t happen. Liberals don’t even bother to read conservative publications, and they certainly don’t respond to them. I can’t say what conservatives do because, unlike in 2008, I barely read conservative publications anymore. It was a thing I felt honor-bound to do and now I just… don’t do it. 

When was the last time that Screaming Social Justice Twitter got really mad about something published in the National Review? When did they react at all to something in the Weekly Standard? Those publications contain things, every day, that should positively enrage Twitter, but nobody even reacts. Practically the only time any conservative ideas get critiqued by progressives in media these days is when they appear in the New York Times, and there the anger is less about the ideas and more about the fact that the mouthpiece of the Professional Managerial Class has published something not preapproved by the Professional Managerial Class. (Bari Weiss is a hypocrite and clown, but when she says that the ultimate editor of the Times is Twitter, she is correct.) And then there’s the fact that the conservatives the Times publishes tend to be of the pensive, generally-unthreatening variety like Ross Douthat. 

Meanwhile Twitter is able to maintain literally constant outrage even without going to the source of the most (to them) outrageous ideas. It doesn’t take any insider knowledge to recognize that leftists and progressives don’t get outraged by conservatives but rather by other leftists or progressives who wander out of the barn a little too far. The Harper’s letter controversy was not a debate about free speech and open dialogue; it did not even feature an ancillary debate about free speech and open dialogue. Rather it was a statement (fully understood by all signers except perhaps Noam Chomsky who’s too busy and cool to think of such things) of difference, a way to say to those who enforce the utter ideological hegemony of Twitter, “we are not like you.” And then the commisars of contemporary progressive conformity said “we’re not like you either.” And kind of floating around was the idea of free speech, which I think of in my imagination as a slightly-deflated balloon and picture sighing to itself as the fight goes on all around it, “why won’t anybody debate me?”

All of this, I think, was best described by Scott Alexander of SlateStarCodex (pbuh) in his post about the outgroup, which points out as I have that what really gets you mad is the people who you can imagine being. A 29-year old woman who writes about who’s currently serving lewks for The Cut can’t imagine being conservative Christian Michael Brendan Dougherty, but she went to the same college and did the same internship as some of the signers of the Harper’s letter. Them, she can hate. 

This isn’t a lament, by the way. I lived through the blogosphere, or the tail end years of it anyway, and I’m not sure anybody actually did anything besides make it socially palatable for a liberal to support the Iraq war for awhile. It’s just very, very different from how things were a decade ago. I can’t figure out if anything’s been lost, but it seems like the sort of thing people would notice and talk about. As far as I can tell, almost no on does.

Apropos of possibly nothing, a point I find myself trying to make to fellow conservatives is that there are very real, substantial differences between liberals, progressives, and leftists that we have to take seriously if we want to engage with or disagree with their ideas.  There are progressive ideas I agree with and admire and there are progressive ideas I don't agree with.  deBoer is someone on the left whose ideas I may not always agree with but I like to read him and I'm working on Cult of Smart among many other books.

I might suggest that leftists and progressives most certainly can get outraged by conservatives but perhaps not in the same way as they can be outraged by intra "left" disagreements.

Nathan Robinson can make a long-form case that the problem with William F Buckley was that he made the bigoted ideas of conservatives just respectable enough to cover for them.  Like so ...

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/09/how-to-be-a-respectable-public-intellectual

This is admittedly a bit of a tangent, but one of the things that progressive and left authors have pointed out is that the new alt-right presents itself as defending old traditional liberalism.  This is something that liberals will likely affirm and that progressives may not and leftists likely will not.  The tangent (or not) is by way of Jacques Ellul on how myths develop in relation to political movements and classes and in relationship to revolutionary ascents and conservative consolidations:

The New Demons
Jacques Ellul
The Seabury Press
8 15 Second Avenue
New York, New York 10017
Original edition: Les Nouveaux Posskdks
@ Librairie Arthbme Fayard,
The Seabury Press
English Translation by Seabury Press 1975
ISBN 0-8164-0266-3 

page 119
... of myth. We must not deceive ourselves. Myth is not result of fabrication on the part of the intellectuals or the elite. always an expression of the most active force in a society, the force creative of the future. We have seen, however, in accord with majority of authors, that myth is very often conservative, a means of justifying the status quo. At this point we have to make distinction between the time of the creation of the myth and time of its utilization. It is always the social force on the rise which invents the motivating collective images which can be believed and accepted by the mass of the members of a society, because that always the force which formulates a project. [emphasis added] Without a project there is neither a return to an origin nor an explanation of the past.  The two factors inevitably go together. 

Thus the myths which we easily characterize today as bourgeois date from the era of the bourgeoisie, a revolutionary group trying to seize power and, at the same time, bearing within itself the hope of the oppressed poor. At that time it constituted the entire left. when it became an established class, when it had set up privileges and had taken up a defensive position, it used these myths as a means of justification. [emphasis added] 

pages 119-120
Like it or not, there has always been an inability to explain fact that it is the dominant class which creates the dominant ideology and which imposes it on the dominated classes. How this imposition accomplished? How could it become an object faith? Why are the alienated incapable of producing their own ideology? In reality, one has either to think them too stupid or to rely on simplistic formulas (the dominant class is the one which is productive of dominant ideas, etc.) which explain nothing. 

And yet, propaganda has its limits! It has to be noted that, historically, the myths of the bourgeoisie were born during period of its rise and its conquest of power. We have to realize that the proletariat, the left, created substantial myths during its period of oppression and alienation. It seems to me that Marx's formula should be exactly reversed. It is the dominated class,  but in its period of conflict and seizing power, the group which bears society's future, that creates myth. That is the time when belief in myth is possible. It is not the dominant class which can believe ideologies, and have faith in its own histories, when there is longer a battle to be fought. 

Hence we are forced to conclude that the class on the rise brings with it its myths which are revolutionary. But when it has become dominant, its myths likewise become dominant. At that point tends to retain its power, so that the myths become conservative and instruments of defense. What is more, those myths had held out a future for the society, but the people who made the promise are now on top. From that point on, by retaining the same myths, they present themselves as the guarantors, the bearers, the fulfillers of the collective hope. Myth becomes the justifier.  

However, there is another point to consider. It is also possible for the dominant class to seize upon a myth created by the rising class, in order to give it a new direction and to use it for its own justification (thus leisure is a creation of the left, but it has been transformed into an ideology of the right, with vacations, the Club Mediterranee, etc.; there are many other examples). 

But it is never the dominant class as such which fabricates, circulates, and believes in myths. Thus it is that, just because it the bearer of the hopes of the masses and of the future of the society, the left is the great purveyor of myths and of the accompanying political religions. That is not a vice. This is not an accusation. The left is the great religious force of this age. Marxism is the great producer of myths. Still, we have to be aware of the fact and not shift the responsibility when it happens, or say that it through some mistake or deviation. To the contrary, it is through force of circumstance.
That also means, to be sure, that if the sacred, myth, and religion are what prevent man from coming of age, then it is the left and Marxism which bear that responsibility today.  ...

Connecting Ellul's observations to deBoer on capitalism and its culture industry (at the risk of trusting you know his work even if he deletes posts); there is a difference between the myth that will be fit to sell by the culture industry to the masses and the myth that the culture industry itself embraces.  Hollywood may be selling the Joseph Campbell formulaic monomyth to the masses but deBoer's writing suggests that it's the Silicon Valley ideologies that are in a position to bankroll selling the old myth.  To put it in starkly axiomatic terms, the myth "they" sell you is not the myth "they" live by.

This would be easily observed in clashes between old left and new left or between post-Marxist and New Left thinkers and authors if conservatives, for instance, were paying attention.  Such clashes within the liberal/progressive/left spectrum are what, as best I can tell deBoer has been observing throughout social media.  If Ellul's observations were correct that it has been from within the left and the left alone that the myths of political religion have been formulated in the last two centuries and that the reactionaries and right-wing and dominant castes simply found the left-originated myths they could redefine and redeploy, then it might make sense that deBoer sees intra-left/liberal/progressive battles over what stories are supposed to define them and what they aspire to whereas conservatives can fall back on "tradition" and have that tradition be any number of myths that were, as Ellul outlined above, bourgeois revolutionary myths that simply became the status quo once the bourgeois were established.  

All of which is to piggyback on deBoer's observation about "a thing that used to happen", Ellul was able to propose the transmigration and mutation of political myths from the nascent bourgeois left to the established bourgeois right because he read widely enough and broadly enough to formulate such a proposal.  Whether or not the proposal is right can, of course, be debated.