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Richard Hanania continues his criticism of Musk, as a guest author for UnHerd. (Sidenote: On his own website, he wrote "I never thought I would write an article for Sohrab Ahmari, as we disagree on a lot and I’ve regrettably insulted him a few times, but he reached out after my recent piece on Musk and asked if I would like to write something for UnHerd.") It's a combination of criticism of Musk as an intellectual, criticism of DOGE, and contrasting the intellectual traits adaptive for business and non-business success. The closing paragraphs are interesting:
Have we considered how destructive having the political left be angry at you is to the sanity of people who aren't cut out for it? That is, people who aren't politicians?
As a prior example, I'm thinking of Jordan Peterson, who seems to have followed a similar trajectory of brilliant man becoming increasingly unhinged as political attacks step up.
Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
His fallout with Sam Harris over losing a bet re: the number of total COVID cases there would be in the US seem like early hallmarks of Musk's decline.
Since then it seems like the left's hatred of him has only intensified, not that he didn't help himself by indulging in trolling them back. Basically, having an irresistible urge to troll and being a target of the left can drive some men to ruin.
To some extent I'd argue that that's the crux of the entire culture war. The left, via their march through institutions as well as their early control over new media, gained access to a super weapon; the ability to point the whole of society against any individual. Western democracies, influenced by Hobbes, had gone to great lengths to make sure this could not be done without considerable hurdles. But suddenly this super weapon was not only available, but at the beck and call of anyone on the left with a good enough narrative. The only constraint was that it could only be pointed rightward.
So for a decade, we had ever increasing use of this weapon against a large number of people. But more often than not, those who were targeted were the "powerful", that is to say, successful people with something to loose . Anyone caught in the crosshairs was ruined; their career, social life, in some cases even freedom suddenly forfeit. But at the end of the day, those people were still alive. Still part of society. And as you said, I think the experience of having your world ripped away for seemingly no reason is enough to genuinely drive someone mad.
And that's what we're now seeing. A horde of these people, crazed to the point of mayhem, ripping apart the core foundations of society. And the left, like a child who shot their parent in a fit of anger, suddenly waking up to the fact that they destroyed their primary means of protection, and that there is no way to wind back the clock.
And while I think quite a few of us might take some grim satisfaction in that last statement, it doesn't change the fact that we're all on this ship as well. If it goes down, every one of us is going to suffer.
This isn't really true*, but it gestures towards something true: the fairly novel experience for social conservatives of not being in the normative driver's seat. For a very long time, social conservatives defined collective norms while social liberals rebelled against them. Every so often the liberals would win a fight and move consensus, but the center of gravity remained with conservatives. Even institutions that tended to be dominated by liberals in composition (e.g. Hollywood) still had to submit to a broader conservative consensus.
In the Obama era, this was upended and for the first time conservatives were in the uncomfortable and bewildering position of being censured for failing to adhere to liberal values rather than vice versa. The cultural center of gravity shifted away from conservatives. Liberals were defining standards of public behavior, and generally not in ways conservatives found agreeable. The entertainment industry shrugged off the aforementioned conservative consensus and started pushing overtly progressive themes (e.g. LGBT/minority representation) in a way that challenged conservatives' sense of rightful cultural hegemony.
This is part of why we get the peculiar phenomenon where conservatives seem to care far more about what liberals say about them than vice versa. The former were accustomed to being able to demand respect and unaccustomed to finding themselves on the outside;the latter were already acculturated to a certain amount of social opprobrium and often took pride in it.
*social media cancellation overwhelmingly affected people in liberal-dominated spaced and was an emergent behavior rather than a directed one. Rupert Murdoch was in no danger of being canceled even though left-wingers absolutely despised him; we can argue about why Musk shifted right
Or rather, what "conservatism" was started to cut over at that time. This is a consequence of the Boomers taking over as the primary political power bloc in the US from the generations before them (enough of them had died off at that time to make this possible).
Progressives (which you both do and don't call liberals, and hints at part of the problem for the real liberals and one they've been grappling with for some time) are conservatives, because they act like everything they complain about conservatives for doing. They attempt to enshrine a self-enriching lie that makes them feel better. There is no difference between a Moral Majoritarian of the 1980s and a Moral Majoritarian of the 2020s outside of the fact that the 2020s one no longer feels the need to pretend to be Christian (the '80s Moral Majority wasn't either, of course)- they're both majority-female-led movements, too.
This is what the modern liberal movement, typified by Musk/Trump and those who voted for them, is starting to rediscover. It's going to be really destructive for a while because the only lever any liberal-minded individual knows how to pull is the one that flushes conservatives (and any good they did) right down the toilet, and so you're going to get people who are more hardened than usual against conservative caterwauling to the point they enjoy it, at the expense of more stable reforms.
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