Matt Taibbi: Congratulations, Elitists: Liberals and Conservatives Do Have Common Interests Now

The go-to response to any criticism of mainstream politics for years has been to accuse people of being in league with the right-wing – well, congratulations, you’ve made those alliances real. https://t.co/euFoVj19NJ

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 3, 2021

The Catch-22 of modern press: reporters are told they can’t make an impact if their only outlet is Fox or The Federalist, but “reputable” outlets won’t touch news (and sometimes will even call for its suppression) if it counters establishment narratives: https://t.co/euFoVj19NJ

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 3, 2021

The consistent pattern with the Trump-era press… is that information that is true but doesn’t cut the right way politically is routinely either non-reported or actively misreported. https://t.co/MB3SEdjRST

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 3, 2021

The people @ggreenwald is shitting on are not “the left.” They’re aristocrats and authoritarians whose idea of heaven is a Dick Cheney spy state with unlimited censorship and a press corps of obedient snitches. https://t.co/CZgkGoWo2J

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 3, 2021

The new political mainstream is Dick Cheney meets Robin DiAngelo, and it’s no surprise lots of different kinds of people loathe it: https://t.co/euFoVj19NJ

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 3, 2021

The article is about how political elites denounce everyone who disagrees with them, inc. progressives, as being in league with the right, and shouldn’t be surprised when those groups end up agreeing with right critiques of them. This Bors cartoon is basically “MAGAs are Nazis.” https://t.co/FMsc4ndl33

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 3, 2021

What is the Left?

Is it going to be woke progressivism or what is called the “successor ideology”? If so, can it continue to coexist with traditional liberalism? Is it devouring liberal institutions?

Matt Taibbi:

“The hilarious headline in the Daily Beast yesterday read like a cross of Clickhole and Izvestia circa 1937: “Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media? FROM HIS MOUTH TO FOX’S EARS!” …

For years now, this has been the go-to conversation-ender for prestige media pundits and Twitter trolls alike, directed at any progressive critic of the political mainstream: you’re a Republican! A MAGA-sympathizer! Or (lately), an “insurrectionist”! The Beast in its Greenwald piece used the most common of the Twitter epithets: “Trump-defender.” Treachery and secret devotion to right-wing politics are also the default explanation for the growing list of progressives making their way onto Fox of late, from Greenwald to Kyle Kulinski to Aaron Mate to Jimmy Dore to Cornel West.

The truth is, Trump conservatives and ACLU-raised liberals like myself, Greenwald, and millions of others do have real common cause, against an epistemic revolution taking hold in America’s political and media elite. The traditional liberal approach to the search for truth, which stresses skepticism and free-flowing debate, is giving way to a reactionary movement that Plato himself would have loved, one that believes knowledge is too dangerous for the rabble and must be tightly regulated by a priesthood of “experts.” It’s anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political spectrum.”

The answer is no.

As people like Andrew Sullivan are correctly pointing out, this new governing ideology of the Democratic Party is leftwing, but it is not rooted in liberalism. It is rooted in critical theory and postmodernism and parts ways with liberalism at the level of epistemology and ethics.