Why Michael Brooks & Other Progressives Should Take the IDW Seriously | TaraElla Report S6 E13

Welcome back to TaraElla Report Season 6. Today, I'm going to talk about socialist commentator Michael Brooks's take on the Intellectual Dark Web, which he has both detailed in his book titled 'Against The Web' and also elaborated on at length in his own show. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, his basic argument is that he sees the IDW as repackaging stale right-wing arguments in a new and intelligent sounding form, in order to preserve the status quo and prevent change, which has always been the right's primary aim anyway.

I think this is actually a biased take on the IDW. Surely, some prominent members of the IDW like Ben Shapiro are conservatives, and they do want to preserve the status quo. But the IDW is actually quite diverse, and I don't think Bret Weinstein is that interested in preserving the status quo, for example (Note: I generally disagree with him on his many controversial ideas.). However, the even more important thing is that, in his rush to label the IDW as a conservative outfit, Brooks is actually missing out on opportunities for having important and fruitful conversations about ideas, some of which may actually end up benefitting the promotion of the social democratic policies he champions. The other thing is, many people of our generation, the people who grew up after the end of the cold war, don't have that much attachment to the left-right ideological divide. We are much more flexible in appreciating great ideas from all sides. Which means that ideologically syncretic ideas are often very appealing for us. After all, there must be a good reason why other progressives like Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, and to some extent Bernie Sanders have been much more eager to reach out and do interviews with people associated with the IDW, and they often get loads of new supporters in that process too.

Let's start with Brooks's view that Jordan Peterson is too uncritical of free market capitalism. It's a point that Peterson critics on the Left often bring up. This is a point I actually agree with. While I'm not a socialist, I do agree that unregulated capitalism is a disruptive force that can be detrimental to strong families and the social fabric. No matter how economically sound the free market is, there can be no excuse to allow it to simply take its course and exact its toll of broken families and a fractured social landscape on human society. Capitalism as it exists has contributed greatly to a society where 40% of marriages end in divorce, where birth rates are plummeting to all time lows, and where fake news and misinformation has meant that people don't even live in a shared reality anymore. A society where it's often too expensive to start a family is a society that is fundamentally broken and inhumane. Market fundamentalists like Hayek may have had no problem with that, but the rest of us certainly do. For those of us born after 1980, we weren't even given a choice of whether this is the world we want to live in; we were simply born into this world. This dystopia is, in fact, the only world we have ever known. No wonder many of us want to change things.

Where the Left fails is that it doesn't appear to be serious enough about tackling these issues, nor does it appear to have the solutions to do that. A fact that often goes unacknowledged is that, the current iteration of the Left is in fact the baby boomers' left, a Left they built back when they were students, back in the 1960s and early 70s. They were a generation that were way too obsessed with critiquing and dismantling traditional cultural norms, to even consider that the breakdown of these norms would only leave room for the more ruthless side of capitalism to come in and make society more inhumane in the pursuit of profits. In this kind of worldview, there's simply no room to talk about the importance of strong and stable families, because that's the stuff that 60s radical students found 'oppressive' by definition. It's a fact that some of those students even destroyed books by sociologist Talcott Parsons, because he praised the nuclear family. The fact that many of our generation are simply finding it too expensive to live the white picket fence life makes their attitude look all the more out of touch to many of us. I think this out of touch attitude straight from the 60s, still so prevalent in many parts of the Left today, is why so many young people don't bother to turn up to support the Left, even as they offer things like Medicare For All. We simply can't have faith in people that don't have enough faith in rebuilding a society of strong families and a healthy social fabric.

Michael Brooks appears to recognize people's need for things like continuity in life and he has called for the Left to take this more seriously. He also said the Left should deal with the problem of the so-called Vampire Castle, that toxic mixture of cancel culture, outrage over things like 'cultural appropriation', and so on. What he doesn't recognize is that the IDW actually has the solution to deal with all that, even if it's not in a very polished form as yet. Somewhere in the IDW, there lies the very ideas that could bring the Left back onto the correct track. You see, the baby boomer Left is one that is fundamentally based on critical theory, and later influenced by its offspring postmodernism. These academic theories are all about deconstructing, dismantling, seeing everything as oppressive, and so on. That's why they were so attractive to the youth of 1968. However, we don't need any more deconstructing and dismantling nowadays. Things are already too fluid, too uncertain, and have too little continuity to the past. What we need is the opposite, in most cases. Which is why the Left would be much more successful if it made a decisive break with all that critical theory and postmodernism, and instead embraced the ideal of supporting and nurturing everyday working families. The IDW has all the arguments needed to end the reign of critical theory on the Left. The remaining question is just whether the Left would take it up.

What many people want most nowadays is stability and continuity, rather than even more dismantling and deconstruction. If the Left can convince people that this is what they deliver, through countering the worst of capitalism's tendencies, I'm sure they will get much more support. However, if they can't, then people would naturally turn to the Right. Which is why, seeing statues of Christopher Colombus, Winston Churchill and Thomas Jefferson being targeted everywhere on the evening news, at the hands of people who identify as left-wing, can only benefit the Right. I wonder if conservative politicians around the world secretly enjoy seeing all this drama play out, and their electoral implications.