A Race to the Top

I’ve been following the work of Colin Wright, one of the contrarians of the Intellectual Dark Web, who has made a crusade of opposing the “woke” left’s obscurantism, particularly their denial of the biology of sexual dimorphism.

He is perhaps most famous for a diagram that expresses his bewilderment at finding himself in a de facto alliance with conservatives because “the left” moved so far out to its most fanatical and illiberal fringes.

Recently, he has found himself bewildered again, because he hasn’t realized that the right, too, has been moving toward its most fanatical and illiberal fringes. He seems shocked to discover that Tucker Carlson has been leading the way and specifically objects to Carlson’s broadside against atheists.

Carlson’s statement that his “tolerance for atheism has really dwindled to nothing at this point” is a divisive blunder at a time when the right can’t electorally afford it. There are many atheists—myself included—who have been alienated from the left by the religious dogmatism of woke ideology, who have serious reservations about the right, and yet are still poised to vote Republican for the first time ever in the next election. Making this group feel even more alienated and politically homeless than they currently do is a major misstep….

Now that the Left is becoming mired in ideological purity tests, thereby betraying their longstanding principles of diversity and inclusivity, the right has a golden opportunity to give these godless political wanderers a home. But godless doesn’t mean morally depleted—a view that many on the right appear to take joy in perpetuating. No, these are good people with a robust commitment to the Enlightenment values of individual liberty and bold truth seeking. The right would be prudent to welcome them.

I feel like Colin Wright is on something of the same path I went on—but five to ten years behind me. I, too, was a reluctant draftee in the culture wars. I, too, pursued the idea of a pro-freedom ideological coalition that could accommodate both religious conservatives and atheists.

But I came to realize that for many conservatives, toleration of unbelievers was only an alliance of convenience, a concession to political weakness that they were eager to abandon. As for “Enlightenment values of individual liberty and bold truth seeking,” many of them have explicitly turned against all of those things. Offered the temptation of political power to impose their own dogmas—first by President Trump, now by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—they sprinted off toward the right-wing illiberalism of Christian nationalism.

That’s why I offered a corrected version of Wright’s diagram.

The larger story, though, is what this shows about the inadequacy of speaking in terms of “left” or “right” in the first place, which leads us to assume that if “the left” has turned against us, then our only choice is to seek allies on “the right”—only to find out they aren’t real allies at all. As I pointed out, “The real alternatives are up to liberalism and down to illiberalism—so the current political trend captured here” is not one side racing to the left and the other racing to the right. It is “actually a race to the bottom.”

Maybe Wright is following my path and will eventually figure this out. Then again, as I was preparing to write this, he published an article about how maybe eugenics is not that bad. This makes me wonder whether he is already following the much more well-trodden path from “contrarian” to “crackpot.”

But the wider lesson for those of us who are seeking to find allies in defense of liberalism is that we will have to join together in a race to the top.

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