From callouts to weaponization of “misinformation” labels to suppress competing views, our online world has normalized demonization & borderline criminalization of content. Web 2.0, the modern era of the internet in which we are all content creators (e.g. Alex has a Substack), has seen a concomitant rise in the demonization of content that alienates people unequally and has far-reaching consequences for our society.
By alienating people online, liberals have created tribes of alienated people united in common anomie. These tribes divorce themselves from public fora like Twitter to create content elsewhere, exacerbating a cultural blindness of liberals to the unpopularity of some of their beliefs. This anomie allows a festering for repugnant countercultural like trends like Trumpism, and these counter-normative trends are fanned by the flames of grievances from lost culture wars.
We may be able ton change the world for the better if we study & understand the link between our demonization of people online and their support for counter-normative authoritarians.
The Rise of the Online Society
Born in 1986, I’ve lived many of the changes in our rapidly changing world. I remember a time before the internet. I remember logging into AOL for Web 1.0, perusing fixed web pages and instant messaging my friends back when the computer made strange noises. I got my first cell phone in college (ye olde Nokia brick), and I marched blindly into Web 2.0 with the rest of the world when I joined Facebook back when it was designed as a dating app for college students. I’ve watched and participated with others as we’ve phased into this brave new world of online interconnectedness and decentralized content creation. Based on what I’ve watched, I’m less surprised by the rising authoritarianism that seems to perplex many liberals.
Online interactions are characterized by quick exchanges that lack of curiosity, overstate certainty and broadcast righteousness as people receive reinforcement for their behavior in the form of likes for performative moralizations and posts. The addictiveness of online engagement - an intentional design of our social media - can blind us to ways in which behavior that is addictive to us, and comments which lead us to be glorified by groups of friends, can be perceived by others in our orbit who are either directly targeted by our comments or indirectly observing this behavior.
I’m one of the people who is regularly upset by the online behavior of liberals, not because I disagree with the ends of a more just & inclusive world but because I recognize how the means to achieve those ends can have long-term consequences. My unusual perspective comes from growing up in poor public schools where my friends came from all walks of life and all colors of the political and racial spectra. In addition to learning ways in which one man’s innocuous behavior can be another man’s injustice, I learned to love friends with vastly different worldviews and, through an offline curiosity, understand their sensitivities. Some of my unusual perspective comes from experiencing the unity and brotherhood amongst criminalized kids, which mirrors the tribalism of those affected by the fallout during the rise of social media.
Criminalization, Anomie, Tribalism and Alt Cultures
My friends and I skateboarded, did drugs, and were technically in a “gang”, although that label was primarily used by police officers to justify what we believed were unlawful searches & seizures (e.g. frequent, unannounced calls to the principal’s office that disrupted our schooling just so the state police officers could search our bags). We had a formal name for ourselves, tags, tattoos, and more, but we saw ourselves as a group of hooligans in a grey area of tribal, cross-cultural conflict in-between idealized civility of prep school kids and the organized, tribal criminality of “gangs”. Many of our friends in our school were in other gangs so we weren’t unfamiliar with this aspect of the anthropological underbelly of modern US society, but rather than a black & white “gang” / “innocent” distinction, we saw a continuum of cross-cultural conflict and commitment to the laws & norms of the United States, and we ourselves were solidly in the grey.
We did things that people didn’t like - sometimes things as innocent as skateboarding to my mom’s office, which culminated in a police raid, multiple cop cars with sirens blaring and all of us wearing handcuffs in front of a bank, all for nothing more than skateboarding on the sidewalks close to our home. When you’re criminalized and believe the reasons for being criminalized are unfair, you evade authorities to not get handcuffed in front of a bank. When evading authorities, one slowly internalizes new norms that prioritize following the norms of your friends over the norms of the “other” society. We trusted each other as ride-or-die friends united against a common paternalistic enemy - the state - and distrusted all formal or “mainstream” authorities, and our society became our norm while mainstream society became the “other”. The laws were written by other people, not us, and law enforcement officials criminalized us no matter what we did. Why should we listen to them? By criminalizing kids for skateboarding on a sidewalk, smoking weed in an alley, or even just living in the wrong side of town, the authorities (our teachers, principals, the police officers, and the criminal justice system behind them) alienated us from their society, forcing us to create our own. Reading Lord of the Flies felt like reading our autobiographies as we experimented with norms and values, often re-inventing moral wheels by learning the hard way why some things are bad, and others are good.
There are parallels between young Alex running from the police and Dr. Alex, miraculously getting a PhD from Princeton, observing Facebook and Twitter fights in which predominately privileged and prep-schooled kids, who have always fit in to the “mainstream” society and felt quite comfortable at Princeton, became foot soldiers in a culture war by informally criminalizing the behavior of people they disagree with, by labelling people as “bad” without understanding where they’re coming from or what they truly believe.
Liberal Online Demonization of Conservatives & the Conservative Responses
The common righteousness and liberal hostility for conservative views on social media effectively (informally) criminalized real beliefs from real people who would go on to feel severed from the online society we were building on this brave new world of the internet. There’s no surprise to me that conservatives go great lengths to call themselves the “Real Americans” - because in these online culture wars conservatives often feel like they are the “bad Americans”. When someone says you’re bad based on some moral code or ideal, one way to respond is to say “No, I’m good based on the REAL moral code”. Consequently, while many liberals see conservative hyper-patriotism as an offensive tactic, I see it as a partly defensive tactic, at least in the way it functions in the minds of many conservatives.
When we were criminalized as kids, some of us said “No, we’re good kids” and tried to redefine “good” in our image - this was a defensive tactic. Of course, the roots of American patriotism go back farther than social media, but these roots reach through the Vietnam War in which conservatives who supported the civil rights movement also supported civil rights in Vietnam, saw anti-war protests as hypocritical and misguided in their views of what is good and how good is achieved, and branched off to become the jingoistic neoconservatives who supported the 21st century Iraq war based on similar, deep-rooted beliefs. Before Vietnam and the Cold War, there was World War 2 in which, the story goes, United States rallied to save the world from Nazis, and some of American patriotism derives from the post-war image of American military might as a force for the good. Modern patriotism has deep roots, and the forces generating & maintaining patriotic beliefs vary from person-to-person and over time, but I feel it’s important to empathize with an internalized patriotism, a belief in what America is or ought to be, when understanding conservative responses to online culture wars.
If we’re not careful, some proud, alienated people will divorce themselves from our community and it could be nearly impossible to win them back. This is especially true for people who believe they are the mainstream community, who never believe they are bad but, instead, grow to believe external or “other” forces are responsible for their alienation. While some of my friends growing up kept their eye on the prize of being truly Good, delineating between Just and Unjust laws, others resorted to a visceral response. In response to any effort to argue what is good or bad, these friends had but one answer: “Fuck you.” Alienation and anomie gave rise to a punitive retribution, an abandonment of common morals or any effort to achieve common morals, and this predictable response to social alienation is essential to note.
Anti-Elitism and Counter-normative Authoritarianism
I see an important precedent in the history of conservatives feeling alienated by poor representation of their beliefs in mainstream media outlets, forcing them to create their own right-leaning media ecosystem. The people who abandon society, as my friends and I did growing up, continue to exist. However, as their grievances mount without reconciliation, they become motivated to tear down the institutions that alienated them to begin with. Some may continue to engage and convince others to see their point of view, but if those efforts fail, more will abandon common norms altogether and join the cause of tearing down institutions with less concern for what to build on top of the rubble. I worry that such metastasized grievances are the long-term risk, the most radioactive fallout, from the rise of our online world. Such metastasized grievances raise the risk of reactive authoritarianism motivated not by a specific vision of how the world should be, but by antipathy towards how the world is and those who write the rules, the “elites”.
An important analogy behind my fears of metastasized grievances is the rise of the Nazis after World War I. After defeat, Germany was forced to demilitarize the Rhineland, cede territory, and accept an international label as guilty for the crimes of the past war. While the victors of World War I saw these terms as a moral arc bending towards justice, many Germans felt wronged and, consequently, alienated from the international society that labelled Germans as “bad”. The grievances metastasized, fed by the sugars of German demagogues with their fingers to the pulse arguing that the grievances were caused by an inferior international community, that Germany and its Aryan ideals was superior. The commitment to Aryan ideals tapped into a deep tribalism that enabled aggrieved Germans to disregard the norms of the “other” countries, and so it came to pass they normalized genocide and brought on a second World War. While victors of culture wars parade over the conservatives and sling tomatoes at the latest immoral conservative hung in a pillory, they fail to understand or be wary of the nature of anomie to metastasize and, if left unattended, grow extremely dangerous.
Most liberals were surprised by Donald Trump because they didn’t know that Donald Trump had his finger to the pulse of many Americans and was, in some ways, the perfect manifestation of reactive authoritarianism to collective anomie. Trump rose to fame on Twitter by being notoriously politically incorrect, he flaunted his deviance from the mainstream norms and values. His views were not coherently liberal nor conservative - he pursued an aggressive trade war and ballooned the national debt to make economic conservatives shudder, all while abandoning international agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership or the Paris Agreement. Neither conservatism nor liberalism mattered - the Trump administration was Wagnerian in how epically and intentionally outrageous and offensive it was to liberals and their morals. Liberals have a tough time seeing beyond their outrage to understand the predictable grievances and social forces driving many Americans to despise the mainstream liberal norms. Liberals today are playing the part of Versailles in the 1930’s, completely unaware of how the large body of people they’ve alienated by their culture war victories may be metastasizing to form something dangerous. I believe that Trumpism was primarily an effort to say “Fuck you” to everyone who, collectively, alienated Americans during the assembly of our online community.
Sociological Fallout from “Culture Wars”
There are many forces at play, and it’s important we understand them to understand what options we have to avoid painful futures. It’s argued that conservatives are losing the culture wars because previously marginalized people are granted rights and the voices of previously marginalized people are starting to be heard. There is a lot of truth to this argument. The arc of US history has bent towards diversity, equity, and inclusion from the civil war to civil rights and now modern social justice movements, and indeed, the changing demographics of America add to tension and feelings of alienation for a group of people who previously saw themselves as mainstream.
It’s also true that the people who lost these culture wars didn’t cease to exist, nor did they cede defeat. As their deeply held beliefs became unpopular in the rising online community, they have slowly abandoned the public sphere out of fear of being called out. They may not say publicly what they believe privately, they may respond to polls differently as they vote, as surely as my friends would tell teachers “drugs are bad” a few hours before smoking a joint. As surely as Schindler played the part of a good Nazi while saving the lives as Jews, people who are alienated in America through criminalization of their beliefs find ways to play the part of a good, modernized liberal while deeply desiring to end the culture they despise.
I’m not making any claims that people alienated on social media are either Nazis or Schindler, nor am I making any similar claims about people advocating strongly for liberal positions on these online communities. Rather, I’m attempting to capture what I believe is a deterministic effect that many liberals fail to consider: that criminalizing content can backfire in ways they don’t expect, and that better understanding the fallout from the rise of our online community can help one understand why Trump won the presidency not despite but because of his flagrant deviance from liberal norms, why Brexit happened, why Marine Le Pen is popular in France, and more.
By winning the culture wars through brute force call-outs and demonization of conservatives, as opposed to by call-ins, curiosity, engagement, and the participatory construction of common norms with conservatives, liberals are creating a large body of conservatives who feel alienated from their mainstream norms. These conservatives and even moderates have abandoned what they see as “liberal” news outlets like the New York Times. Some lurk as anonymous accounts on Twitter who, like me, deleted Facebook after the Nth argument with a closed-minded person, and they might post bland, professional content on LinkedIn.
Does demonization help?
Many people see today’s rising authoritarianism in democracies as analogous to the rise of the Nazis. In some sense, I agree that analogy is useful. What’s missing in the analogy and its demonization of Nazis and right-wing authoritarians is a consideration of what Versailles could have done differently to avoid World War 2. It’s not clear to me that increased demonization of Nazis in the run up of World War 2 would’ve helped any more than the demonization of Putin & his grievances of a severed USSR in the run up to his invasion of Ukraine stopped his invasion of Ukraine.
We have successfully alienated Putin from our international community as liberals have successfully alienated conservatives from many online communities. Yet, they still exist, and their grievances may only metastasize with this demonization and could very well become something far worse. If Russians begin to see their economic suffering as the result of Russophobic international “elites” - and that is the narrative Putin is sharing with them - Russians will be easy to goad into larger, riskier wars. If conservatives continue to see their alienation from mainstream US norms in our large & ideally pluralistic society, they will be easy targets for authoritarians and accept riskier actions if it means securing power or sticking it to the people who caused their grievances in the first place.
What could Versailles have done differently in 1930? The harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles did little to settle the disputes that caused World War I, and instead interfered with inter-European cooperation during the Great Depression. Similarly, the continued criminalization of conservative ideas & content by liberals online is interfering with bipartisan cooperation and consensus-building during our repeated international crises, from pandemics to wars in Europe.
If we want to fix our broken democracy and heal these deep wounds, it’s imperative that liberals learn to show compassion towards, curiosity for, and appreciation of conservative views. There are many brilliant conservatives and many ways in which conservative positions advance our underlying humanitarian goals, such as the conservative position to avoid extreme interventions in COVID as they risked causing famine, long-term economic disruptions, and other public health considerations that weren’t being considered in the online fervor to tackle COVID at all costs. Had we better listened to conservatives throughout COVID, as opposed to liberals seeing their job as “convincing” conservatives to support liberal policies, we might have reduced the collateral damage from our misguided containment policies, and may even have improved conservative trust in federal public health officials to reduce the political inequities in vaccination rates.
A Ghettoized Kid’s Alternative to Criminalizing Content
I write this as someone who is predominately liberal, who was practically registered as a Democrat 9 months before birth, and as someone who deeply admires & aspires for the same goals of a more inclusive & equitable future for our country and our world. I suspect most reading up to this point would believe the person writing this article is a die-hard conservative, an aspiring Milo Yiannopoulos. The primary thing that makes me different from most liberals online is that I grew up in a gang of sorts, as a criminalized kid, and I see the rising tribalism of the Republican party through parallels to the tribalism of my ghettoized youth.
I have also been largely alienated from liberals during COVID-19 after my own research estimated COVID burden would be lower and the collateral damage from our policies higher. In my alienation and anomie, I’ve found a large community of conservatives, independents, and former Democrats who feel similarly alienated by the one-sided discussions and extreme moralizations of all things COVID, and the more I listen to them with curiosity & compassion the more I see parallels between my alienation during COVID or my criminalization as a kid, and their alienation during other major events in American history. This community of people on the “losing” side of liberal online culture wars is, like the community I grew up with, full of good people eager to live a good life and make the world a better place, but they are reliably demonized & informally criminalized online. They are alienated, they have abandoned the New York Times and “mainstream” media. They loved Donald Trump’s ludicrous deviance precisely because it enervated the mainstream liberal norms. These folk see Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter and, like me, feel either indifference or a deep sense of promise that his commitment to reduce online censorship can improve our public forum. As men may underestimate the importance of sexual harassment in defining women’s experiences, and White people may underestimate the harm from microaggressions increasing allostatic load of historically marginalized people in America, it’s apparent to me that liberals underestimate the importance of “censorship” and liberal demonization in shaping the experience of American conservatives.
I encourage liberals to give conservative the benefit of the doubt. Talk with them, ask them questions, and get to know where they’re coming from. Avoid throwing verbal stones - you will never kill them with your words, only alienate them and the hundreds of people watching you cast stones. If someone says something you disagree with, either (a) move on or (b) inquire with curiosity & compassion instead of call outs and criticism. Avoid confusing “conservatism” the belief system with other more justifiably immoral actions like “racism” or “sexism”. Demonizing groups of people often lumps many good people into your bucket of “bad”, and, as surely as arresting skateboarders is a gateway drug to further anomie and deviance culminating in countless arrests and 6 of my friends getting shot & killed before graduating high school, demonizing conservatives will increase anomie at a time when our pluralistic country needs love & cohesion. The alienation of any group of people can metastasize into something terrible.
I also encourage conservatives to avoid the path of “Fuck You” and, instead, to continue pursuing the common ground, participating in our democratic discourse, and engaging in our public forums. I’ll say emphatically, as a liberal, that you are Good, and I will not shut up until the world sees it. I want you all to know that there are people like me who may have different opinions, but who respect you & your beliefs, who want to learn from you, who want to work together to build a better country, and who also work to dismantle the systems that criminalize, stigmatize or demonize our neighbors whether they’re black, white, Red or blue. I’m not alone - David Campt wrote a book whose title you might roll your eyes at, but which is a good book and makes precisely the points I make above on the importance of giving people benefit of the doubt & separating “conservatism” from “racism”. If you’re a Republican taking the high road and bringing others away from the path of “Fuck You”, I’m here as a former Democrat willing to work with you on a platform that can recruit voters from all walks of life and reestablish conservatism as a potent intellectual force in America.
I was criminalized as a kid, leading me into a group with gang-like tribalism and organized deviance from mainstream norms, yet I eventually “returned” to society. I retain my desire to abolish the school-to-prison pipeline that criminalized us, I laugh at our zero-tolerance principal for getting busted driving drunk & stuffing a bag of cocaine in his mouth. I retain my desires for restorative justice that would’ve helped my friends stay out of jail, I still skateboard, and I still get high. The only thing that changed, that kept me out of jail and kept bullets out of my chest, is that in college, by getting straight A’s and getting a PhD from Princeton, the people around me started to see me as “good” instead of “bad”.
Simply knowing that you are valued in society can be enough for one to value society, to put down the pistols and pick up the pen. With the rise of our hostile online society, our informal criminalization of content effectively criminalizes people. Criminalizing people can alienate people, alienation can lead to tribalism, and tribalism can lead to legitimization of violence against people outside our tribe. This predicable social cascade from anomie to violence can be mitigated by deliberately casting other people as “good” instead of “bad”, avoiding anomie in the first place.
What do you say? Let’s try this out. If you’re a liberal and reading this, reach out to someone you’ve disagreed with, let them know you love them, and list out some specific virtues you love about them. That’s all. Don’t try to convert them to liberalism, just start by opening the door to civil society. Remind them that they are valued by your norms, and perhaps they will better value your norms.