The Reasonable Middle Has Always Been an Elitist Mirage

The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack.

In the mid-2000s, a minor current of right-leaning writers and intellectuals briefly had their bright but fleeting moment in the sun. Members of this group tended to be liberal-ish in both style and affect, but their views on certain issues heaved closer to neoconservatism. This, it turned out, was for a time a very profitable grift. The War on Terror and its accompanying manias had yet to fully recede, and shallow books about the sinister Islamic menace could still peddle in rank bigotry and find acceptance in some corners of respectable liberal opinion — especially when they invoked science or came packaged in a foil of freethinking objectivity. For a precious few years, this schtick was very handy for selling books and securing media appearances. But, on a substantive level, it was at once too niche and too blandly orthodox to cohere into anything more lasting that held broad appeal.

Back in 2018, Bari Weiss sought to give it new life in her astroturfed profile of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web.” But, tellingly, the label never stuck and was usually a punchline among those who remembered it. The supposedly iconoclastic denizens of the IDW included Sam Harris, a veteran of the New Atheist movement who somehow found the courage to endorse a civilizational war against Islam in the aftermath of 9/11. Also there was Jordan Peterson (who if nothing else did manage to cry in public a bit less in those days) and dumb-as-paint former Young Turk Dave Rubin, whose inclusion on the list remains an insult to both intellectuals and webs of any shade or color.

What most of these people had in common was a set of fairly bog standard right-wing opinions, and a few of them (like Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro) were just card-carrying conservatives already. But the whole phenomenon nonetheless sought to brand itself as a non-aligned movement of freethinking heretics willing to transgress against the puritanical orthodoxies of the 21st century elite.

Foremost among them was Weiss herself, whose already distinguished tenure as “editor in chief” of CBS News has seen her combine the same tack with a posture of contemptible servility toward the Trump White House. As Katherine Krueger documents in an excellent piece for The Intercept, CBS’ flagship “Evening News” show has quickly morphed into an infantilizing breed of de facto state TV — too weird and discordant to land with either the network’s existing viewers or any significant number of the hooting MAGA chuds Weiss is presumably hoping to capture.

It most definitely isn’t working. As Krueger writes:

[Host Tony] Dokoupil’s viewership numbers have been in the tank, with the number of eyeballs down 23 percent in his first five days on air, compared to a year ago with anchor Norah O’Donnell. Viewership was not much improved in Dokoupil’s second week; “CBS Evening News” remained a distant third behind ABC and NBC’s evening news shows. … Dokoupil’s first official broadcast was marred by gaffes, and his January 6 show featured a fawning package on Secretary of State Marco Rubio that featured the utterly surreal lines: “Marco Rubio, we salute you. You’re the ultimate Florida Man.” (The White House rapid response team approvingly shared the clip.)

This week, for good measure, Weiss announced a new roster of independently minded contributors that, among some less well-known others, includes the right-wing historian Niall Ferguson and crank doctor Mark Hyman (a close friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s). Again, these are hardly brave, independent voices and nothing about this project is remotely heterodox or new. What is notable is Weiss’ repeated insistence that the end goal is majoritarian and populist: that there is actually some great swath of moderates pining to hear from “charismatic figures” like Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch so that the extremes at both ends — represented by leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and neo-Nazi beta male Nick Fuentes — can at last be reconsigned to the political fringes.

With this achieved, Weiss claimed in November, the reasonable middle would be free to reassert itself:

This is an opportunity to speak for the 75 percent, for the people on the center-left and the center-right that still believe in equality of opportunity, that still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in: liberty and freedom and individual responsibility and, on a basic level, the right to know what is exactly going on in the world. Not the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be, but what’s actually going on in the world.”

This is not just absurd, it’s delusional. But Weiss’ delusion is perfectly of a piece with the self-conception of reactionary liberals as we’ve known it for the past two decades. These are people who, for whatever reason, hold right-wing views but prefer the discursive affectations of the political center and find it either unpalatable or professionally disadvantageous to just be out-and-out Republicans. If they’re convinced there’s a silent majority who share the same weird mashup of rank prejudices, centrist airs, and liberally coded tastes, it’s down to a pitiable sense of having been jilted by the cultural elites from whom they have always, finally, sought validation, and the accompanying need to seek it out instead from a phantom constituency of ordinary folk that exists solely in the ether.

In Weiss’ case, it is honestly difficult to figure out where this victimhood comes from. Liberal newspapers like The New York Times are, well, pretty damned liberal when it comes to publishing conservative and right-leaning columnists (Weiss herself worked there until she voluntarily self-canceled in July 2020, and you’ll still find more writers with the politics of David Brooks and Bret Stephens in the op-ed pages than you’ll see people to their left.) In theory, you’d think this ethos of pluralism would satisfy a would-be freethinker. But pluralism, like free speech, is sometimes the rallying cry of those who really crave intellectual uniformity — at least when it comes to their own views. Not incidentally, Weiss has been an incessant launderer of moral panics about the suppression of free speech on college campuses, having waged innumerable campaigns to get pro-Palestinian scholars fired during her own undergrad years at Columbia.

Indeed, if you want to find the source of a reactionary liberal’s martyrdom complex, perceived slights suffered at prestigious universities and legacy media outlets will always be the place to start. This makes the schtick doubly ironic because it underscores the extent to which all of this is really just the expression of an intra-elite quarrel. A news network that actually reflected today’s broad middle would probably be quite critical of Israel, platform proponents of defunding ICE, go hard on plutocratic corruption, and be anchored in a politics much closer to those of Bernie Sanders than those of Alan Dershowitz or Niall Ferguson. It would be more adversarial in its relationship to institutional power than any of America’s major networks, and if it featured independent minds with outsider opinions they would be genuine eccentrics rather than right-leaning misanthropes educated at Harvard, Columbia and Yale.

If nothing else, Weiss’ laughably incoherent project is testament to the fact that the reactionary right’s cultural coups in the Trump era, even when they successfully conquer once liberal institutions like CBS, are mostly destined to be Pyrrhic victories. There is, again, simply no real audience for what Weiss and David Ellison are selling. But, moreover, there is also no world in which the cultural liberals who have rejected someone like Weiss suddenly embrace her because she has the ear of the White House and has become the boss of CBS News. If the right somehow seized control of NPR and refashioned it along conservative lines, its listeners would simply go elsewhere and its cachet would plummet so fast that there would no longer be anything gained by controlling it. Weiss’ brief and incompetent stint at CBS is living proof.

It’s also proof that the faux heretical posture adopted by reactionary liberals for the past quarter century has always been a mirage. A heretic, by definition, rejects or dissents from orthodoxy and, in doing so, inevitably collides with entrenched authority and power. Weiss, and the rest of her ilk, are fundamentally driven by a deep reverence for both.