Jonathan Rauch at Persuasion:
In November, James Lindsay—an independent scholar, author, and sometime prankster—decided to test his observation that the American right’s illiberalism and irrationalism have, bizarrely, converged with the woke left’s illiberalism and irrationalism. He grabbed verbiage from the Communist Manifesto, changed left-wing valences to right-wing, and submitted the result to an online conservative journal. He did not have high confidence in going undetected; after all, his opening sentence (“A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right”) is a blatant rip-off of one of the most famous sentences in world literature. Nonetheless, American Reformer ran the piece under the headline “The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right.”
All good fun. But what flabbergasted Lindsay was what happened when he revealed the hoax. Instead of repudiating its inadvertent endorsement of the bloodiest left-wing ideology in human history, the supposedly conservative journal embraced it: “While we were unaware of its authorship and motive, it is still a reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas (repackaged into Marx’s effective rhetoric), and we have corrected its authorship to properly credit Mr. Lindsay.”
More here.
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