Fuentes Vs Morgan, and Liberalism Choosing the Form of It’s Own Destructor

What does a moralising liberal do when their opponent "arrives at the moral mud-slinging contest having pre-emptively covered himself in mud"?

At the end of the movie Ghostbusters (the 1980s one) the heroes confront the Mespotamian demon intent on destroying New York. Instead of battling the team directly, she tells Bill Murray and company that she will pull an image from the forbidden depths of their minds, make it real, and that they will be forced to fight. I get the logic: the thing they have always turned their minds from, that has grown powerful through their failure to confront it, is exactly the thing that they will be forced to stare down. In issuing this challenge, she orders them to “choose the form of your own destrcutor”. I think about that phrase all the time in relation to politics, and in particular Liberalism’s struggles comprehending the illiberal populist challenge.

When challenged directly in conversation, mainstream Liberalism is a careless giant - apt to ruin your life or tear down your world with a casual swing of its mighty arms, and unconcerned when it does so because its opponents seem so distant and insectoid. Its adherents often don’t fully comprehend the scale of its dominance, or what the totality of its power looks and feels like from below. In the era of mass media and mass-produced culture, that dominance through is exerted through what feels like a suffocating micromanagement of language, manners, and narrative framing, and through threats to social status. For it’s opponents, participating in this culture has required them to explicitly venerate ideas they support in a qualified way or under certain circumstances - kindness, charity, individual choice - but also to do so with ideas they think are flat out bad - marginality, unaccountability, victimhood, incapability and inadequacy.

Thanks to social outside this supposedly total system of neurotic narrative control has arisen an entire other world of uncontrolled dissent, much of it pathological and neurotic in its own ways. The customisation of information feeds means like-minded people disparaged, discredited or dis-comfited by the mainstream (whether they’re right to feel that way or not) have cohered into a kind of clumsy giant of their own, like a million poisonous ants arranging themselves into the shape of a man, and beginning to walk and talk and think and act in concert.

As though to emphasise all these trends, here comes Nick Fuentes, capping off his generational run being interviewed by Piers Morgan. If anyone won this exchange it was Fuentes, though “won” seems like the also the wrong word to use in summarising an unedifying spectacle of pompous tabloid windbagging on one hand versus self-satisfied trolling on the other. Either way Nick Fuentes is the nemesis of the Liberal style of discourse control - but also its logical conclusion. He is the destructor that the system has designed by default - with every other climate rendered inhospitable, here we have the person who can fit himself exactly into the gaps that the system can’t or won’t reach, and that are most frightening and alien to it, and who has a personal style and outlook that suits those desperate conditions. Piers on the other hand is the perfect example of gatekeepers who have grown plump on easy victories. It became so simple to wrong-foot opponents through the application of correct sacred labels that the role of those gatekeepers shrunk to just that and nothing else; even understanding why those claims were sacred became unnecessary.