“The Establishment” was a phrase coined by Henry Fairlie in the Spectator in 1955. “By the Establishment,” he wrote, “I do not mean only the centres of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.” Well. The Establishment of 1955 to 2015 has been rattled in our time by the first great challenge to its authority. This Establishment – represented by its voices in the media – has for some time been irritated into attempting some sort of analysis of what is going on: what the recalcitrant are up to. There are three major suggestions. In short:
- We have lurched to the Right. Reality remains what it was, and we are simply changing position in it.
- We have diagonalised: which means that we are trying to break up the old distinction of Left and Right in order to form a new consensus. We are reforming reality.
- We have gone down the rabbit hole, gone off the deep end, crossed over into the mirror world. We have left reality altogether.
The first and third are lazy. The second is trying to be clever. All have some truth in them. But they are all incorrect. All avoid asking why we are doing this.
But of course the Establishment is not interested in asking why.
1
You must have noticed that everyone nowadays is “lurching” to the Right. I cannot be bothered citing examples. Simply search the internet for “lurch to the Right” and you’ll see that you can find it being used by Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Newsweek, Politico, the American Conservative, the New European, the BBC and others. Seldom does anyone lurch to the Left. No, they shift to the Left, in fact, probably glide. Though we should note that the Right only tends to “lurch” in headlines: in the text one finds gentler words like “swing” or “move”. (Who controls the editors?) Nonetheless, in the headlines everyone lurches. “A huge lurch to the Right and more austerity”, groaned Owen Jones a few years ago. I wonder who invented this form of speech: everyone took it up and it is now a glorious cliché.
The suggestion, delightfully, is that anyone who is even slightly critical of the Establishment is not quite in control of their movements. For the word “lurch” means a sudden, unexpected movement, apparently uncaused: associated with the human stagger when tired and emotional. It is not deliberate, it is accidental: caused only by one’s having drunk too much alcohol or one’s having been rebuilt as a Frankenstein’s monster, thereby disqualified from comprehensible behaviour. There is something alarming about a lurch. So anyone who talks about a lurch to the Right is using language to imply a complete lack of justification for the movement.
Incidentally, I noticed a few days ago that the Guardian in the last few days described Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump at a rally as evidence of his having “swerved” to the Right.
Trump then veered into more familiar territory of falsehoods about immigration and other topics. Later he called up on stage Musk, the Chief Executive of Tesla and owner of social media platform X, who has swerved politically Right. Wearing a black cap and black “Occupy Mars” shirt and coat, Musk jumped around with his arms held high and was greeted with cheers… Musk argued: “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America. This is a must-win situation. Get everyone you know, drag them to register to vote. If they don’t, this will be the last election. That is my prediction.”
I thought that the use of the word “swerve” was unusual. Perhaps the writer, one David Smith, was, like Blur, thinking of cars? Whatever the cause, the metaphor is revealing. For one lurches as a consequence of something unexpected: it is unintended, uncaused: one is stupid. But one swerves to avoid something. One swerves consciously. Something is happening and there is a tiny concessionary hint that one is responding to it with one’s intelligence.
Still, the language is unflattering. As analysis, it is very lazy. It certainly fails to mention why Musk “swerved” and what he was “swerving” away from.
2
“Diagonalise” is the sort of word you’ll forget three minutes after reading this article. Hang on, what did diagonalise mean again? Can’t be bothered checking, forget about it. But, while you are here, let me tell you that it is a clever coinage by two writers for the Boston Review, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, who in 2021 published an article on “Coronapolitics“. They wrote:
Diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of Left and Right (while generally arcing toward far-Right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.
The suggestion seems to be that people are not lurching or swerving to the Right, but doing something else entirely: namely, tearing up the very distinction between Left and Right. Our authors derive the term “diagonalising” from a German term, Querdenken, which was used to describe the German, Swiss and Austrian Coronaskeptiker movement.
Callison and Slobodian observe rightly that not all sceptics are on the Right. So no talk of lurching or swerving here. They say that diagonalists are a Widdecombe Fair (Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all) of odds and sods and rags and tags who, whatever their old politics were, are now agreed that all power is a conspiracy and hence that the Establishment in all its manifestations (they list “the state, Big Tech, Big Pharma, big banks, climate science, mainstream media and political correctness”) is tending or trending totalitarian.
Callison and Slobodian are unfriendly analysts. We find them occasionally lapsing into standard Establishment scorn: “It would be easy to dismiss… freelance media hustlers, movement messiahs and entrepreneurial contrarians… neo-Nazi attendees… lack of charisma… river of falsehoods… Alex Jones.” They say, for instance: “When removed from platforms like YouTube for spreading unfounded conspiracies, they decry their loss of ‘free speech’ and ‘constitutional rights’ and often blame the Government for their newfound unfreedom.” This in fact is one of the most irritating moves in the entire anti-sceptical, anti-diagonalising Establishment strategy. What everyone does, from the BBC to CNN to the Guardian is, when they are not 1) quoting Establishment “experts”, is 2) quoting the lurchers and swervers and diagonalisers in exactly the opposite manner. When they quote an expert, that is the story. But when they quote an anti-expert, a critic, a sceptic, then the story is about the self-evidently rhetorical trickiness and falsity of whatever it is they – we – are saying: a lot of inverted commas, scare quotes are needed, the more the better.
They put ‘free speech’ in brackets, so that it is not a thing, not a value, not something important, but a talking point: a bit of noise made by the excluded Skeptiker. They mock the idea that there is a sense in which all power is a conspiracy, whereas, read Machiavelli or Naudé, or anyone, the Bible, for God’s sake, it is. They engage in sneer and smear and slight: “Typical of diagonal entrepreneurs worldwide, the Querdenken cohort battles the ‘Corona Dictatorship’ on behalf of the ‘Truth Movement’ while making a buck on the side.” They do not mention the fact that they are making a buck on the side too: oh, and that Fauci made a buck on the side, that Mann made a buck on the side, that Kerry made a buck on the side.
This is my favourite bit:
Angela Merkel spoke to the topic of Querdenken in mid-December [2020] with rare emotion. Calling the movement “an attack on our entire way of life”, she said that “since the Enlightenment, Europe has chosen the path of building our view of the world on the basis of facts”. Confronting an “anti-factual” movement was very difficult, she said, “perhaps it will be a task for the psychologists”.
Again, what Callison and Slobodian miss is that there are two sides to this question, and that while there is, no doubt, Merkel’s Enlightenment, there is also another Enlightenment, which alleges that the facts that Merkel and her cronies were standing on were not facts at all but something else entirely: and that there was an enlightened way of trying to oppose them. In short, that Merkel’s “faktenbasierten Sprache” was balderdash on rollerblades.
Anyhow, Callison and Slobodian are onto something. They say we tend to “paint a dystopian picture of the conspiracy of power”. They also say this, which is (almost) fair:
Diagonalism could be seen as a fight over science. But both sides put open-ended investigation at the centre of their identity. Public health officials acknowledge that science is done in public, knowledge of the virus is evolving and forecasts are only ever provisional. Diagonalists respond that the truth is hidden by elite obfuscation and constant search is necessary in alternative fora.
Aye, aye. Still, they cannot explain why neo-Nazis, libertarians and members of the Green party, plus Thomas Fazi and other aggrieved Leftists bother diagonalising when they could simply swerve instead.
3
If one is tired of reading headlines about “lurching”, and gets a headache from words like “diagonalising”, then the quickest fix is to say that we have gone “down the rabbit hole”. This is simplistic, but not as simple as “lurch”. “Lurch” assumes one world. So, does that matter, does “diagonalise”, even if it hexes and vexes that world. But “rabbit hole” assumes the existence of two worlds: one world of appearances, and another of reality. One, the world we have always known, the world we live in, the world of convention and, indeed, the Establishment: the Matrix. And another world, the world of esoteric knowledge, hidden conspiracies, fascinating possibilities, and the dark suggestion that cancer is the grandest taboo subject of our time.
“Down the rabbit hole” is the favoured phrase of James Delingpole. But it is also used by people, like Alice’s sister, who very strongly doubt that it is possible to go down a rabbit hole, unless one means to go as mad as a hatter, ha, ha, how do you know what a mad hatter is, eh?, unless you have done down the rabbit hole? Naomi Klein used the phrase in her book Doppelganger, in which she tried to work out what was wrong with Naomi Wolf. Klein is a one-worldist (“there’s nothing to see here that you can’t already see on CNN”). To her horror, Wolf is a two-worldist (“there’s something you have not been told…”).
The problem with the language of “going down the rabbit hole”, though useful, in fact, a lot more useful than “diagonalising”, or, of course, “lurching”, is that it does not explain why anyone would go down the rabbit hole. Because it’s there, is one answer. But that is not an answer for those who don’t want to go there.
4
So I’ll just suggest instead that all these bits of analysis are flawed by the fact that Establishment types cannot believe they are wrong. So their analysis is actually incomprehension under a thin and cracking veneer of analysis.
The truth is, of course, that the Establishment is heavily invested in denying that argument is possible, and that its members have engaged in a great conspiracy to commandeer knowledge on the old Baconian and new Foucauldian ground that “knowledge is power”. They might prattle about “‘”Enlightenment”, but they have wholly forgotten the good old Scottish Enlightenment insight – found in David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and others – not only that what goes up must come down but that what goes up goes up at the same time that something else goes down. There is more in the world than in their philosophy, Horatio. The world is a complicated dialectical contradictory mess. They fail to see this, or are paid to ignore it. So they have fallen back on strange abuse and stranger analysis to try to shore up their trumpery sandcastle.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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