A thought brought on by the Requires Hate saga.
Years ago, the most unpleasant and intolerant Internet wingnuts tended to come from the hard right of the political spectrum, typically motivated by Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, reactionary forms of religion, or old-fashioned racism. But in recent years more and more of the worst wingnuts seem to come from the authoritarian left, using the rhetoric of social justice to demand censorship of art and media, and ostracism of people that they don’t like.
Is this is a consequence of positive social change, in that things like gay rights and feminism have become increasingly mainstream, and have attracted the sorts of people who, had they been born a generation earlier, would have gravitated towards cultural conservatism?
Or is it just an illusion, a consequence of social media filter bubbles? Does the shift from subject-specific forums to people-specific social media platforms means that there are just as many conservative wingnuts out there, but they are no longer as visible on an impossible-to-ignore basis? Have the leftist wingnuts always been as common, but just never had much of a presence in online spaces I used to inhabit a decade ago?
Or am I just getting more conservative with age?
“Politics swings like a pendulum do…”
Or, as a libertarian said to me “In the last part of the 20th Century, the left won the cultural battles but the right won the economic ones. In the 21st, it will be different”.
It’s certainly time for the economic pendulum to start swinging back the other way.
In my observation, the right wingnuts tend to be closer to mainstream for their particular group and thus tend to be more visible from the outside of it. Left wingnuts (or social justice wingnuts – there are feminist nutters I’ve read who aren’t otherwise especially political) had fewer people listening to them before.
The shift (I think) has been 1) that the internet means that you don’t have to be Glen Beck or Alex Jones (i.e. be funded by your listeners or by a corporation) in order to get heard and 2) people (specifically slacktivist youtube political types) seem to do very little research before linking to something they agree with (I’m thinking of self-declared “atheist feminists” who link to videos by violently misogynistic fundamentalist Christians because they said something nasty about Islam, for example) so you need to be on point exactly once at the right time, and your other nutty views can get a whole bunch of exposure.