The Scam Artistry of the Right’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Ayn Rand once said, “I will not die; it’s the world that will end.” This is more than a little odd coming from a woman who confidently called her philosophy “objectivism” and thought that if you accepted that A=A, eventually you’d eventually conclude that the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of the world are the only ones doing much of value. But reading Confidence Men, one comes away convinced that Musk and Tate would be happy to sign off on Rand’s dictum. As far as they’re concerned, this is their world, and we just happen to live in it — and not work for them yet.A key question that Confidence Men tries to answer is why so many people look up to these grifters when it clearly isn’t in their interest. Quoting Spinoza, Frim and Fluss wonder why ordinary people “fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” A weakness in their otherwise excellent book is that Frim and Fluss don’t have a comprehensive answer to what the appeal is. One suspects this is largely down to their simply not finding anything appealing in what Peterson, Musk, and Tate are offering. But the successes of the titular con men belie that sort of dismissal. Until the Left better understands the affective appeal of right-wing ideas, we will be less equipped than we ought to be to confront them.The reality is that the Left proposes to create a world where everyone is treated more or less equally and has a decent shot at being happy and fulfilled. For most of us on the Left, this vision is inherently appealing and moral. We struggle to understand why the Right’s pitch that some types are better than others resonates with ordinary people.But it isn’t that hard to understand. For many, being told you are a dispossessed superior or a temporarily soyed alpha will always have more attraction than being told you’re the equal of someone who looks down on you. Contemporary right-wing rhetoric intoxicatingly combines feelings of superiority with a sense of dispossessed victimization. It tells its constituencies that, were it not for wokescolds, liberal nerds, and egalitarian socialists, they would enjoy the “pathos of distance” that comes from occupying their natural place in the sun and looking down on others.There is an inherently paradoxical quality to this pitch that maps many of the contradictions in right-wing ideology. If it was true that Peterson, Musk, and Tate are so perennially victimized and silenced by the woke mob, the state, the Matrix and so on, how did they become some of the loudest people in the world? If we truly lived in a world where hard work and will alone were proof of excellence deserving reward, why the fixation on immutable characteristics people have no control over — race, gender, natural talents? The thing is, these seeming tensions are generative and add to the appeal of right-wing ideology precisely because they don’t fully make sense. They offer their constituents the chance to both feel like persecuted victims and masters-in-waiting — to individually applaud themselves for being self-made visionaries and collectively part of a genetic or civilizational elite.But Frim and Fluss are surely right to call this a con. It is “pure nonsense” to insist that, but for the oligarchs like Musk and Trump or misogynists like Tate, everything would fall apart, so we should therefore be grateful for what little they deign to give us. As the authors put it, “human beings are entirely capable of comprehending the human good” and creating a world everyone can enjoy. That is the world promised by democratic socialism, and unlike the con pitched by the Right, it’s the real deal.
