The full text of a comment by “Ex Nihilo” on an UnHerd post, “How the BLM riots broke America” by Sohrab Ahmari:
Unfortunately, the overwhelming hegemony of the Western Left, across all of the significant social and cultural institutions, does not allow for a fair contest between its orthodoxy and contrary opinions. The Right played fair for decades as the Left evicted them from academia, media, the bureaucratic state, the judiciary, and more recently business and science. Thoughtful conservatives are de-platformed and ignored to death. The Left deliberately empowers rightwing nut jobs because they are such easy straw men to knock down. The Democratic Party has cynically influenced Republican primary elections by donating money to the vilest of the nutcase Republicans in primaries so that their Democratic candidates would not have to face reasonable and thoughtful Republicans.
The notion that there are two opposite but equally influential epistemic silos is false. Conservatives are absolutely marinated in the dogma of the Left. It permeates all entertainment and advertising, it indoctrinates their children in the schools they attend, it has preached to them relentlessly from media pulpits. They cannot escape exposure to progressive ideology. Only the Left is siloed in ivory towers protected from contact with heterodoxy by their degrees, their zip codes, and their isolation from the unwashed masses. The Left remains clueless as to what conservatism even means because it has reduced it to its most absurd extremes so as to avoid having to actually formulate intelligent responses to it.
Counterintuitively, liberals have become the new anti-intellectuals who reflexively respond with knee jerk ad hominum instead of reason. “Deplorables”, “knuckle draggers”, “MAGAs”, etc. are the words substituted for cogent rebuttal. The greatest unrecognized cultural upheaval of our age derives from a phenomenon greater than the absurdities exposed by Covid and BLM. It is the transformation of liberalism from the cradle of open-mindedness into a reactionary defender of orthodoxy that will not tolerate dissent.
We seem to forget that Louis XVI and his court also considered themselves vastly enlightened elites in tune with every intellectual fashion of their time and contemptuous of the rude peasants that grew their food. It didn’t end well.
As another UnHerd commenter points out, the above comment is more insightful than Ahmari’s original post. The post and discussion are worth reading.
(Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Louis XVI and his court also considered themselves vastly enlightened elites in tune with every intellectual fashion of their time and contemptuous of the rude peasants that grew their food.”
True, but it didn’t end at the hands of rude peasants. It ended at the hands of provincial lawyers, spoiled priests, and the like, exploiting the urban mob of Paris.
In the Vendée the revolutionaries massacred rude peasants by the thousand: some 190,000 according to the estimate on Wokeypedia.
Ahmari has been a disappointment. He seems to be a on a Tucker-like vision quest. Ever since he left the NY Post to found Compact he seems to be taking the position that the route to wisdom is to condemn both sides and occupy the middle … as opposed to say being the man in the arena.
To Ex Nihlo’s point, Armani seems to scoop various points that are convenient, often strawmen and try to construct a narrative favorable to him. What a surprise, there are some nasty and gullible people on the Right. However looking back over the past 10 years, and especially the key years he mentions – 2020, 2021 – who were responsible for the most heinous things? Russia Collusion, BLM, DEI, censorship, and so on vs. what? Tucker Carlson and online payment systems?
You cannot understand the reaction to 2020-2021 without understanding twp points; the first is that we were in the midst of a soft coup by the Left for the previous six years and the second is that with their election of Trump many on the Right already had a framework in which to process the events of those 2 years. However Ahmari cannot acknowledge that because for him to do so would be to recognize Trump, a man he has renounced, was right from the start.
Ex Nihilo does a great job on those themes and Ahmari’s false equivalence
I found it strange that Ahmari starts his piece describing the terror of having his neighborhood turned into a war zone and the lesson that he learns from it is essentially it’s on par with Trump being chummy with tech bros. He used to be much more militant.
As an aside I found Ahmari’s reaction, or I should lack of one, to the riot illuminative. If he wanted to understand the Right and its distrust of institutions, he would have taken matters into his own hands by either moving his family out of New York, a city that refused to protect his family that night, and/or bought a gun.
Great comment, Mike.
yes the CBPB, Warren’s Gosplan was going to be the vehicle for such skullduggery, the semiotic cul de sacs that Ahmari drives himself into, the Oligarchs all adopted the catechism of the so called BLM and Antifa, Zuckerberg Dorsey, Bezos, as with the liturgy of the Vaccine and the Our Democracy chant, like the Mutants worshiping the Bomb,
even someone like Mark Helprin, who I used to respect, went off on a rant againsr Elon, as if there is another alternative to government reform, one might call this state of nature, the Cold Civil War, as William Gibson noted in Pattern Recogniton, then Orange Man bad Syndrome claimed him as demonstrated in the Peripheral
yes that notion has to be put to bed as well, take Tom Tillis, please, thats the reasonable one that tried to deep six Hegseth, with the whispering campaign and forced Ed Martin to be cycled upwards from his post iin DC, where he was cleaning up the Augean stables,
it has been 15 years since Rove and company, had their conniption over Christine O’donnell and yet they haven’t been able to find a candidate who performed better against Chris Coons, the bearded marxists, that took Biden’s seat,