Our Heterodox Moment
Heterodoxy deserves to be a thriving part of our intellectual culture. Here's what that requires.
There are very many ways to parse the 2024 election, but one of its features is that it was the first election in which “heterodoxy” played a prominent role.
Actually, it could be argued that it was the heterodox election. Most of the figures associated with heterodoxy—Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, etc.—have fairly niche audiences that are unlikely to have reached low-information undecided voters in swing states, but that’s the not the case for Joe Rogan, the Emperor of Heterodoxy. And, in post-election analysis, it’s Harris’ decision to skip out on an interview with Rogan—in large part because her staffers and the Democratic Party in general seemed to have trouble understanding Rogan’s appeal or influence—that emerges as the single greatest miscue of her campaign.
But, leaving Rogan to one side, this was also the election when heterodox ideas first featured on a national stage and when it became possible to assess the heterodox movement as such. And at first blush it’s… not great. The accusation against the Intellectual Dark Web and the heterodox movement in general had always been that heterodoxy was basically a feeder for Trumpism, and at some level that is exactly what happened. Rogan, with his buddy-buddy chat with Trump, may well have tipped a close election. Taibbi reacted to the election by writing “Ding Dong The Cult Is Dead.” Michael Shellenberger called Trump’s win “cathartic” and in a video said, “Many of us feel enormous relief over Trump’s victory.”
For me, the bitterest blow of the election was to see Martin Gurri—the former CIA analyst turned media analyst, whose The Revolt of the Public I regard to be the best non-fiction book of our era—endorse Trump. “There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled,” Gurri wrote in The Free Press. “I will vote for [Trump] because he’s taken a stand against the forces of control, and has been persecuted and vilified by them.”
My hope in my own journey in heterodoxy space had been that the heterodox movement would help to curb the excesses of progressives and to speak truth to the Democratic Party—and that the breakers would be hit in time to vote against Trump. That hasn’t happened for many of the leading lights of heterodoxy, but I don’t think that’s proof that heterodoxy is really just MAGA-lite. My argument is two-fold. One is that to assess heterodoxy on ideological terms misunderstands what the movement is about. And the other is, simply, that it’s still early days for heterodoxy. The movement has changed dramatically since its first branding as the “Intellectual Dark Web” in 2018 and there is every reason to imagine that it will change again. It is based, actually, in more powerful ideas than MAGA; and may well outlast it.
The Intellectual Dark Web had its public christening in a New York Times article in 2018. From the beginning, it was introduced as a paradox—an “alliance of heretics” being something of a contradiction of terms. Rogan, who was featured in the article, explained it simply. “People are starved for controversial opinions,” he said. “And they are starved for an actual conversation.”
That’s as good a summation as I can come up with of what the IDW represented. Or as Bari Weiss, then with The New York Times, put it in the article: “It is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation—on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums—that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now.”
The emergence of the IDW has to be understood as an artifact of a particular era. Established journalists, academics, and so-called intellectuals seemed to take it on faith that their own individual opinions mattered less than their fidelity to the direction of history. In other words, vast swaths of people whose job it was to exercise critical, independent thought, to be skeptical of any claims however fervently advanced, chose simply not to do that—to suspend their own judgment for the sake of opposing Trump or supporting women or trusting the science or whatever the right-think of the day happened to be.
That abnegation of journalistic and intellectual responsibility left an opening and it was filled in an extraordinarily inchoate way by people who for one reason or another—as often as not just because they happened to have cantankerous personalities—were not cowed by the group-think. Some of them had been in the public discourse before—Joe Rogan had had his show since 2009—but many, like Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, and Weiss herself, were tied to well-known institutions and left the institutions with obvious, immense reluctance.
The figures of the IDW were not, in the beginning, ideological warriors. In some cases, they seemed slow to embrace their new careers as maverick outsiders, and part of the wider fascination was with their attempt to position themselves as loyal opposition in the institutions that they had been part of—this was most famously the case with Weiss’ open letter to the publisher of The New York Times in 2020 as she left to start what became The Free Press.
But, around 2020, that divide seemed to become intractable. The liberal institutions certainly didn’t seem very interested in reforming themselves along the lines the heterodox advocated. And, meanwhile, a new media ecosystem emerged in which the IDW figures—who at one point seemed like they might die slow, sad deaths as pariahs—were remade as stars. Rogan has a $250 million contract. Peterson at one point made around $6 million a year. The Free Press has a valuation of $100 million. That combination of continued hostility from the “mainstream,” combined with startling fame and wealth in a new media culture, pushed the figures of the IDW, by this time rechristened as “heterodox,” in a new direction.
The heterodox leading lights had usually gotten that way by having proper institutional credentials—Peterson, Weinstein, Heying as professors, Weiss and Taibbi as successful journalists—but, now, as the heads of their own media companies, they found themselves cast not just as non-partisan truth-seekers but as shapers of public opinion. Weiss slotted herself in as covering the exact stories that, she knew from experience, The New York Times would tend to avoid. Weinstein and Heying used their scientific background to challenge received wisdom on Covid. Taibbi and Shellenberger branded themselves, above all, as challenging the “censorship complex.”
There had been some idea that, if the institutions recovered their footing after the excesses of the Woke Era, there would no longer be a need for heterodoxy. In early 2024, Claire Lehmann, a charter member of the IDW, told The Bulwark that there was “real progress in the media ecosystem opening up,” which meant, in other words, that the heterodox could fold their tents.
But, by then, it was obviously too late.
For one thing, the leading heterodox figures were launched on new careers in new media ecosystems and needed to just continue plunging forward. And, for another, Lehmann seemed, strangely, to misunderstand the role of a public intellectual. There is always a need for heterodox intellectuals because there are always flaws to point out in conventional thinking, always topics that can be examined with open minds. That is the job of intellectuals—not necessarily to be right all the time but to take risks in their thinking that officials, people with salaried jobs, etc., can’t afford to take.
The other way to understand heterodoxy is that it has—probably not through any deliberate design—filled a significant gap in the political discourse. The way I would analyze it is that the United States, for about fifty years, had enjoyed stable parity between a left-of-center party that advocated for slightly greater government interventions and coded itself socially liberal; and a right-of-center party that favored lower taxes and a more conservative ethos. But then, in the 2000s, the Republican Party took itself off a cliff. It initiated two unending Middle East wars. It crashed the economy (or, to be maybe more fair, the economy crashed on its watch). Within a few years of that, the Republican Party had managed to reconstitute itself but along completely different lines—it was now a party of grievances and populist resentment. The old center right completely disappeared as a viable intellectual position.
For the liberal left, the demise of their long-standing opponents seemed like welcome news and a tremendous validation of their own worldview, but it turned out actually to be a poison pill. Liberals found themselves with a monopoly on “mainstream opinion”—The Wall Street Journal, for instance, had become a shell of its former self, while The New York Times seemed to be ever metastasizing. The slightly right-of-center news anchors (Chris Matthews, etc.) seemed to disappear from the air, and commentary became reliably liberal with cray-cray Fox News and conservative talk-radio as beyond-the-pale foils. And the liberal-left institutions started suffering from what anyone with a monopoly suffers: myopia. There was no one to keep them honest. And it became almost impossible to imagine that there could be any flaws in the worldview. Within a few years, it wasn’t possible to ask if all the #MeToo accusations really were of equal merit; if people who’d already had Covid really needed to get a vaccine; if the virus that originated in Wuhan by any chance had anything to do with the virological lab up the street; if gender transitioners might occasionally have regrets about it; if Canada’s permissive euthanasia laws might occasionally get abused, and so on.
There wasn’t a viable center right in public space. The liberal-left institutions were under concerted pressure from the progressive left. And asking the wrong question meant aligning oneself with the “far right.” That was the gap that the IDW set about trying to fill. The cohesive political position still wasn’t there—Michael Shellenberger ran for Governor of California but didn’t get very far; Christopher Rufo advised Ron DeSantis and pushed a single-mindedly anti-DEI position—but a cluster of views was coming into focus. There was a belief in the state continuing to carry out the normal order-and-security functions of a state—not abolishing the police, not utterly ceding control of public space as some of the northwestern progressive cities had done. There was a belief in retaining America’s alliances around the world—with NATO, Ukraine, Israel. There was a belief in getting back to basics in education—as opposed to endless progressive meta-analysis. Heterodoxy came across as snarkier and angrier than the old GOP, which had a we’ve-been-here-longer-than-living-memory vibe and occupied the political swathe between Ned Flanders and Mr. Burns. But between Louise Perry’s critique of loosened sexual mores and Shellenberger’s “just say no” approach to drugs and Peterson’s emphasis on “family values,” it actually sounded a great deal like the Grand Old Party before Dubya tanked it.
Right now is clearly a kind of crucible for heterodoxy. My personal belief is that the heterodox leading lights are making a major mistake in their blithe acceptance of MAGA—and I suspect that their current post-election sanguinity will not be a good look once Trump II really gets into gear. But it is understandable—they spent so many years being called various names by the liberal establishment that, basically, they needed to get this out of their system. In his emotional post-election video, Shellenberger made this point explicitly, saying, “If anybody really wants to understand why so many of us … feel relief and vindication from [Trump’s] victory, they need to consider that it has more to do with [wokeism] than with Trump … Those of us who have been stigmatized or ostracized by it feel like we can finally breathe again.”
But the heterodox figures—with their institutional training—are very different from MAGA, and that alliance is likely not to last all that long. In a sense, what the heterodox figures are doing is trying to hit the breakers in a different way—with Trump as a reset, however chaotic, from an increasingly self-absorbed and self-enclosed Democratic group-think. If everything shakes out the way it should, the heterodox will find themselves the nucleus of a new center-right movement in American politics. Much of the responsibility for that will fall on the heterodox themselves—to not get too hung-up on their progressive hobby-horse and to call out the excesses of MAGA when they see them. But the more significant factor, actually, is for liberals to, in a word, cut the heterodox some slack.
As Meghan Daum aptly observed in 2023, there is nothing to break up a dinner party as quickly as a mention of Bari Weiss. But, really, ultimately, there was no need to be so apocalyptic. The body politic had been far healthier back in the pre-Dubya days when there were two viable points of view and it was possible to have robust debates between them. (I have many happy childhood memories of my father bringing home both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and then our family dinner conversation hinging on an argument between those two perspectives.) I did and still do regard that as a good way to structure a public sphere—pressure from competing sources of information forced an outlet like The Times to cover all stories even if some were embarrassing to the liberal side. It was good for journalism, good for debate, good for the body politic as a whole. If that is the trend that’s happening, liberals should be far-sighted enough to welcome it. That kind of debate is good for everyone.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
Heterodox is only meaningful when it's compared to the orthodox. The heterodox thinkers are not a group that will coalesce around the same sets of ideas; they are not "center right" (though certainly some are). They are defined against the orthodoxy of their group, which is ultimately liberal, stretching from classical liberal to anti-progressive leftist.
What brought them (us) together was resistance to and rebellion against the stifling progressive identitarian orthodoxy. Some groups may form from the heterodox where there are overlapping values beyond simply "we think an orthodoxy that bans dissent is very bad both for our political success and for our success as a country." But "the heterodoxy" will not become some cohesive group, because we're not one.
I don't think it was a miscue for Harris to skip Rogan. Her performance would have been so catastrophically bad that the election results would probably have been even worse for her than they were.