American civilisation is speeding back in time. Kant brought philosophy into the modern era by locating reality not objectively in the world outside our heads, but in the way we make sense of the world. Well, in America, where more and more people, beginning with the Lunatic-in-Chief, happen to live inside their heads, the commentating classes regularly declare a new objective reality. The most recent revolutionary perception is that the seeming demise of right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro’s media empire signifies the utter replacement of the center with Maga extremists. Not quite.
Ben Shapiro has long been the wunderkind of the American right. An intellectual and musical prodigy, he supposedly reduced the guests at a fancy Hollywood dinner party to tears as a boy when he accompanied his composer/pianist father on the violin for a rendition of the theme to Schindler’s List. Raised by Orthodox-Jewish, Reagan-Republican parents – his mother was a TV executive in Hollywood – he shone as a pro-Israel, conservative columnist for his college newspaper, going on to become, at 17, the youngest-ever syndicated columnist for a large network of major newspapers. His first book, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth, published when he was 20, became a bestseller.
Curiously, he evolved into a conservative mandarin along a typically liberal elite path, going from Hollywood to Harvard, where he got his law degree. In 2012, he ended up as a columnist at Breitbart News, the forerunner of what would become the paradigm-changing conservative media universe. Three years later, he co-founded, with a Hollywood producer, the Daily Wire, which grew into a sensationally successful, and influential, media conglomerate consisting of podcasts, streaming shows and feature films.
A fixture at Cpac conventions, here and in Hungary (under Orbán), a defender of Ice, stalwart supporter of Trumpism, warrior against gay marriage and trans people – where his Orthodox Judaism converged neatly with the Christian right – Shapiro has, at the same time, tried to preserve his parents’ commitment to Reaganite small-business, libertarian politics amid these whirling new extremes. Though fundamentally sympathetic to Maga, he seems as repelled by Trump’s character as any member of the liberal elite. He told PBS’s Frontline in 2017 that Trump was, basically, a chaotic mess of feelings and moods, hardly a statesman. While liberal pundits were swooning over “populism”, he saw through the populist trend, rightly describing it as a “strategy” and “not an ideology”.
And as liberal bien pensants were signalling their sophistication and sense of fair play by swooning over Maga-incubus Steve Bannon as some sort of cross between Metternich and de Maistre, Shapiro rightly summed him up, ex-banker that Bannon was, as “more balls than brains”. Shapiro is too smart to be purely Maga, but he is too fanatical to be classified, as he often is, as some remnant of the “establishment” or neo-conservative right. He is a mutating insider, mainstream conservative one day, fringe provocateur the next.
Most consequently, the yarmulke-wearing Shapiro is Jewish. Even more, he is a right-wing Zionist, an unapologetic defender of Israel’s actions in Gaza and Iran. This has put him at loggerheads with figures like Candace Owens, who got her start at the Daily Wire but was cut off by Shapiro after she employed anti-Semitic tropes about Jews running Washington and Hollywood. In response, she has called Shapiro a “worm” and a “parasite”. There is no love lost between Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, either. Shapiro has described Carlson as a “virulent” “nut” who courts dictators and Jew-haters, with Carlson simply saying that Shapiro’s insults make him “laugh”. If you didn’t know any better, you would think you were trapped in some never-ending nightmare of middle school.
About two and a half weeks ago, the Washington Post ran an article reporting that Shapiro’s Daily Wire media empire was on the verge of collapse. It created a frisson through the frissson-addicted media, but it was a peculiarly incoherent story. On the one hand, it used the fact that the company had laid off 13 per cent of its workforce as proof of its calamitous decline. On the other, it dutifully observed that the Daily Wire is still more popular than the tremendously popular Paramount. This didn’t prevent the reporter who wrote the story, Drew Harwell, from attributing the Daily Wire’s “decline” to “the company’s brand of traditional conservatism, exemplified by Shapiro’s intense support of Israel [which has] has clashed with right-wing creators promising a more radical brand of anti-incumbent, antiestablishment rage”. Harwell goes on to quote Owens on the irrelevance of Shapiro and his company, despite the fact that Owens, having been cashiered and vilified by Shapiro, is hardly a neutral observer. To make matters even more confusing, Harwell details one bad business decision after another as an even more fundamental cause of Shapiro’s decline. The article ends up being as chaotic as the new reality it attempts to describe.
This didn’t stop the liberal media from, as it always does, and in lieu of an actual Democratic platform, or inspiring Democratic figure, instantly fabricating a new objective political reality out of its hopes and dreams. Maga is splintering into factions. The centre, supposedly exemplified by the “neoconservative” and “establishment” Shapiro – he is not remotely either – is crumbling under the weight of extremists like Carlson, Owens and Megyn Kelly. Harwell quotes an academic concluding that “Ben Shapiro has become the avatar of a strand of conservativism that has been taking it on the chin for years. And they are now losing favor within the conservative movement, which is as much a problem for Donald Trump as it is for Ben Shapiro.”
In fact the Ice-defending, gay and trans-attacking, militarily hawkish Shapiro is smack in the middle of the Maga movement, the overwhelming majority of whom support the Iran war, despite dissenters. To the extent that Shapiro’s media company is losing some ground to rabble-rousing newcomers like Carlson and Owens, well, that’s called commercial competition.
American politics now exists in two dimensions: entertainment and the interplay of vectors of power that politics is. Maga, as a movement built solely on emotion, believes it is being political when it roars its approval of Trump before his Truth Social feed and at his rallies. But it is simply fulfilling its destiny as a movement configured out of simmering rage and instant gratification through the release of rage. Maga thinks, or rather feels, that it has found the cure for what it regards as its political impotence in the figure of Trump. The contrary is true. Its very worship of Trump is the institutionalization of its impotence.
Trump is the sewer along the side of the street that catches the runoff from a mighty rainstorm. The current of water that remains coursing down the street is still powered by the same Republican kingmakers that have driven the GOP at least since the elites behind Nixon began the long process of mainstreaming America’s radical right. The increasing radicalisation of Maga is hardly a problem for Trump. It is a way to keep them addicted to him. Whatever twists and turns that radicalisation might take – toward Israel, away from Israel, isolationist, interventionist – Maga has nowhere else to go.
It’s not the naturally fluctuating fortunes of a media company fighting to survive in a wholly new media environment that makes the Daily Wire a bellwether of political trends now. It’s the nature of some right-wing attacks on it. Extremist figures like Owens and Nick Fuentes are advancing the dynamic of mainstreaming the radical right by openly insulting Shapiro with anti-Semitic slurs; at a recent Turning Point USA convention, Shapiro was also the target of anti-Semitic invective. Just as Shapiro’s Orthodox Jewish attitudes toward sexuality converge with those of the Christian right, anti-Semitic attacks on him from the right are mirroring an anti-Semitism often hiding behind anti-Zionism on the left.
With utter historical weirdness, Netanyahu the war criminal has unified, at least in this context, American political extremes. The difference is that Maga couldn’t find Israel, or Palestine, or Iran for that matter, on a map. Their Jew-hatred is pure and homegrown and finally unforbidden. The Daily Wire’s decline, such as it is, does not portend a radical right tearing itself apart. The very name “Shapiro” is helping keep it together.
[Further reading: Silicon Valley’s “Get Rich University”]
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