Amid uproar over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper, Emily is joined by UnHerd contributing editor Mary Harrington. Mary argues that revisionist historians like Cooper signal the rise of a “woke right” that parallels the woke left.
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While Trump drives the Left crazy, neoconservative foreign policy and proxy interventions in the Ukraine have made the Right absolutely obsessive too.
I don’t blame them coming off 20 years of disastrous US policy, but they have merely joined the BRICS and can’t themselves contribute much to the geopolitical conversation.
Thomas Harrington
3 months ago
Yes, Mary is right. Tucker is encouraging and engaging historical revisionism and that this in some way makes him look like those on the left who engage in the same practices. But she is missing the larger point, one that shatters this rather obvious—and surprising coming from Mary—superficial analysis: the issue of coercion. We should all engage in revisionism of both received and self-generated wisdom all the time. It’s what keeps us fresh and rigorous in our thought patterns. The problems arise when institutional powers demand under pain of mob-led defamation and/or loss of livelihood that we embrace their new revised version of past events. Unlike the woke left as exemplified by the 1619 Project, neither Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper are in any way demanding or coercing us into accepting their “new” views on the past, nor are they using the power of established institutions to make us think a certain way. This is an important distinction between the two camps of revisionists.
I agree. I do see the parallels she does, in particular, the endless urge to prove yourself ever more enlightened than others by being that bit more revisionist. But I’ll be alarmed when university syllabuses are peppered uncritically with whatever the right-wing equivalent of ‘orientalism’ or ‘decolonial subaltern voices’ would be.
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SubscribeWhile Trump drives the Left crazy, neoconservative foreign policy and proxy interventions in the Ukraine have made the Right absolutely obsessive too.
I don’t blame them coming off 20 years of disastrous US policy, but they have merely joined the BRICS and can’t themselves contribute much to the geopolitical conversation.
Yes, Mary is right. Tucker is encouraging and engaging historical revisionism and that this in some way makes him look like those on the left who engage in the same practices. But she is missing the larger point, one that shatters this rather obvious—and surprising coming from Mary—superficial analysis: the issue of coercion. We should all engage in revisionism of both received and self-generated wisdom all the time. It’s what keeps us fresh and rigorous in our thought patterns. The problems arise when institutional powers demand under pain of mob-led defamation and/or loss of livelihood that we embrace their new revised version of past events. Unlike the woke left as exemplified by the 1619 Project, neither Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper are in any way demanding or coercing us into accepting their “new” views on the past, nor are they using the power of established institutions to make us think a certain way. This is an important distinction between the two camps of revisionists.
I agree. I do see the parallels she does, in particular, the endless urge to prove yourself ever more enlightened than others by being that bit more revisionist. But I’ll be alarmed when university syllabuses are peppered uncritically with whatever the right-wing equivalent of ‘orientalism’ or ‘decolonial subaltern voices’ would be.