Robert Spencer: No Cigar?

 

Spencer writes recently:

... a principal focus of the Left’s culture war has been to mainstream its own perspectives, practices, and proclivities, treating them as if they were axiomatically true and accepted by everyone, while tarring dissenting views as “fringe” products of the “far right.” 

Spencer here begs the question: How could the Left have been able "to mainstream" its Leftism?  Unless one has a severely delimited conception of what the Mainstream is, this is a remarkable feat that requires explanation. 

It seems Spencer has put the cart before the horse. It's not so much that the Left has managed to mainstream its Leftism, but rather that the Mainstream itself has become Leftist or dominated by Leftism. It may be a fine distinction, but I think it's valid and leads us to a deeper cultural process, whereas Spencer still seems to labor under the conventional view that the Mainstream is some kind of overarching neutral warehouse wherein Leftist and Right-wing actors vie for dominance over fashions and trends, one or the other enjoying the upper hand temporarily, pendulum-swinging-wise. The situation seems stranger, and more dire, than that.  It seems we have entered in on an era where that neutral warehouse has become co-opted by Leftists (no doubt at the behest behind the scenes of Communists):  Leftists now own the warehouse; non-Leftists merely rent space therein, often at the ideologically capricious mercy of their new Landlords.

 

Another result then of seeing this properly -- as the horse before the cart -- is that we come to appreciate how broad and deep the phenomenon actually is, leading us then to the reasonable inference that it's unlikely to have been merely an organic process, but a conspiracy -- one that no doubt has been percolating and brewing not only for many years but perhaps decades. I've written elsewhere about this, and would only say at this juncture that for a rational conspiracy theory, one does not want to push back the timeline too far, because the further back you go you begin to lose plausible concrete institutional and generational continuity. Similarly, one does not want to expand the boundaries of the conspiracy to include all elites and all institutions.  A rational conspiracy theory will include in its educated guesses the factor of the non-conspiracy -- among influential individuals and institutions.