On the use and abuse of Social Darwinism: Sam Ashworth-Hayes in Quillette

There was an article published on 17 November in Quillette by UK-based writer Sam Ashworth-Hayes that highlights once again the ways that a little evolutionary knowledge can be dangerous. For the record, and being extremely charitable, Quillette is a Social Darwinist newsletter that publishes Social Darwinist articles by Social Darwinist writers. And I’m not familiar with Sam’s broader output but I have serious questions about his seemingly obsessive focus on Western fertility and whether a “culture which combines high migration alongside low integration and fertility will be replaced”.

That caveat made, however, I’ve elected to wade in because Sam’s writing combines familiarity with the key concepts of cultural evolution with a blatant and ignorant portrayal of both how it works and how political progressives might make use of it. To do a little shameless self-promotion, my second book, “Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species” [which will be available worldwide November 30th!] aims to dispel once and for all the notion that there is no left-wing theory of human nature that is compatible with Darwin. And it makes the point that darwinian socialism is a venerable left-wing tradition - with roots going back to Bakunin, Engels and Kropotkin - which is not only embedded in a dialectical understanding of human societies but is ‘more scientific’ than the mainstream rational-actor model.

Use and Abuse

To begin, Sam’s reading of how evolution works is too teleological. Like Spencer, Huxley and the other Victorian scientists who interpreted Darwin, he’s wrong to portray cultural selection as an engine of inevitable progress, rather than a quasi-random walk though history, with side-branches, dead-ends and backsliding aplenty.

“From a Darwinian perspective, the point of a culture is to replicate itself. From this, all else follows. The rules and rites that govern a society fall into shape as systems for maximising the fitness of a culture for surviving its environment”.

Cultures of course, do not have a ‘point’. Cultures may act as if they were maximising fitness, but this is only because cultures which failed to be competitive no longer survive. But Sam is broadly correct when he paraphrases that tradition embodies “a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems”.

As I explain in Chapters 16 & 17 of my new book, conservative writers and thinkers are often prone to a naturalistic fallacy, where they presume that any behaviour or tradition which presently exists must do so because it is adaptive. And that traditions or behaviours which are adaptive must, in naturalistic ethics, be therefore considered good. Sam has done his reading, and does not fall easily into this trap. In fact, his summary of this is quite accurate:

“Not all behaviours are adaptive; some are vestigial, remnants of a tradition previously of great importance. Some are not harmful enough to be shed, inefficiencies in a world full of such things, or covered for by other habits. Some were useful and are rendered obsolete by changes in technology, or the capability of society to organise itself. Some are maladaptive, and in the process of being selected against, or sustained in a bad equilibrium.”

But here’s where things start to go off the rails a little bit. It’s of course an extremely difficult question to determine which social behaviours are adaptive and which are not. Sam’s list of adaptive traditions, focused primarily on sexual behaviour, is questionable. Taboos on sexual promiscuity and abortion, as well as social valuation of monogamy, are all debatable points. I would suspect Sam has been reading a bit too much of the evopsych literature, which is heavily focused on these questions of gender relations. I would note for example, that fear of disease becomes of less adaptive relevance in societies with modern medicine and good quality healthcare. And that social and religious attitudes towards abortion have varied widely across different time periods and cultures. I think both Silvia Federici and Jo Henrich might agree that the Western anxiety over abortion has as much to do with the relationship between the family and capital as it has to do with fertility. Indeed, the very debate over the ‘personhood’ of a fetus relies on the modern, liberal ontological framework that grants rights only to philosophical ‘persons’.

Bad philosophy, bad science

I won’t take too much issue with Sam’s characterisation of liberalism. Chapters 13 & 18 my book discuss a couple of ways in which liberalism, as an evolving cultural complex, is uniquely vulnerable. But I’m more appreciative of just how successful and sustainable liberalism has been, since it first emerged as a distinct set of cultural strategies in 17ths and 18th-century Europe. In that time period, it has spread to become the default philosophical position in Westernised nations, converted hundreds of millions of other people to its way of seeing the world, fought off multiple challenger ideologies (including during multiple periods of total war) and delivered astounding advances in material and social progress. Like Marx, I’m an admirer of liberalism, but as socialist, I recognise that it “points beyond itself”.

Sam’s advocacy of higher fertility ultimately fails because he does not understand how cultural replication works - a fault of most Social Darwinists, and incidentially a point on which many sociologists and constructivists have useful things to say. Any evolutionary system is defined by three key processes - variation, selection and replication. Because many Social Darwinists are genetic essentialists, they assume wrongly that the only way a behaviour can be transmitted is through descent. i.e. that liberal cultures reproduces themselves by having more children, who are somehow biologically predisposed to being more liberal. Sam, to his credit, recognises that liberalism may spread through the ‘conversion’ of others, and hey, he’s completely right on that. Culture spreads through teaching and imitation and comparatively little of the behaviour of modern humans is encoded genetically - a much greater proportion of our strategies are learned in childhood, either from our parents or absorbed from our teachers, peers and other members of our culture.

John Maynard-Smith, the biologist and mathematician who laid much of the groundwork for evolutionary game theory, originally rejected the concept of group selection precisely because genetic inheritance was a poor mechanism to maintain inter-group differences. When breeding-age individuals migrate between groups, they contribute half of their DNA to any offspring. Very quickly, this extinguishes the genetic diversity between groups that is mathematically necessary for group selection to function - and humans are certainly a migratory and promiscuous species! But when humans migrate between social groups they also inherit behaviours culturally and tend to more-or-less conform to the culture of their new home. A human who left their home tribe to migrate to a new one might contribute half their DNA to their offspring, but much less of their cultural complex. As a result, cultural evolution maintains sufficient intra-group cohesion for group selection to operate.

Sam writes that “those raised by parents of other cultures may not always turn out to be liberals.” This is of course, true. A small minority may in fact violently reject their new culture. But in the vast, vast majority of cases migrants successfully accommodate themselves to the culture of their new home, especially ones that ask relatively little of them in return. It’s a tired cliché, but by the third generation migrant communities are often largely culturally indistinguishable from other inhabitants of a place.

In defense of liberalism

But of course the question of migration is only relevant insofar as Sam defines the terms of the debate in terms of liberalism’s consequences for population size and fertility. I hate to be the one to tell the readers of Quillette this, but smaller family sizes are both a consequence of and a contributor to higher levels of parental and societal investment in children, such that individuals in liberal societies are astoundingly more productive than their forebears who had more children. I would note that many of the countries with the lowest fertility in the world - South Korea, Singapore, Japan - have only a recent historical association with liberalism, and those in Europe with the lowest fertility - Spain, Italy, Portugal - are largely Catholic and only recently democracies. Sam also ignores the extensive sociological and economic literature that correlates below-replacement birth rates with economic inequality and low social mobility, as well as the strong leftist support for ‘pro-natalist’ policy proposals such as universal childcare and worker control over their terms of their labour.

I’m uninterested in having a debate with any writer for Quillette of their critique of ‘progressivism’, which is childish and irrelevant. But I will engage with alt-centrist writers who argue their critique in terms of evolutionary science. The debate between Social Darwinism and darwinian socialism has been going on now for more than 150 years. It would be fair to say that for much of the twentieth century the Social Darwinists won that debate. There is an ongoing and serious risk that racial supremacist arguments are being repackaged and recycled in terms of cultural supremacy. By understanding how genes and culture co-evolve, and work together to generate complex social behaviour, progressives can make a stronger case that social change and experimentation has been, is and will continue to be both ‘adaptive’ and ‘good’.

The new right is not what you think. It's worse.

I said in my interview with the Connect & Disaffected podcast last year that following the collapse of the neoliberal consensus both left and right were casting around for new or previously discarded ideologies to help us make sense of the world. The faultlines of modern politics are being shaped by familiar historical struggles as socialism and fascism modernise themselves in response to the manifest recent failures of liberalism. I wrote recently on the more mainstream right-wing liberalisms and recognised them as a sort of 'honourable enemy', noting their respectable philosophical roots and still significant political base.

Today's blog on the other hand concerns the new right. I am not here referring to the Trumpian 'new right' nexus as it's commonly used as a term in US-facing news media. The constellation of  alt-right, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim xenophobes, the traditionalists, neo-reactionaries and paleo-conservatives who have rallied around Trump's presidency reflect an easy-to-understand conservative impulse – the right rummaging through its graveyard of dead and discredited ideologies.  

The real 'new' right, the ones who represent a genuinely innovative response to the crisis of liberalism, are the so-called 'intellectual dark web' (IDW). Although IDW like to label themselves 'classical liberals', it's not accurate to see them as a simple resurrection of some form of Victorian British liberalism [although there are certainly superficial similarities, which we’ll return to]. Nor is it sufficient to understand the IDW purely in terms of what motivates them – their [white] [male] Gen X grievance and fear of loss of relative status. There are features of the IDW – most notably their hostility to universalist liberalisms, their deep commitment to Santa Barbara-style evolutionary psychology, general support for UBI schemes and flirtations with race realism – which they share in common with the alt-lite and which suggest a different perspective on archetypal liberal universalism. If the IDW are neo-Victorians, then they believe in social Darwinism on steroids. 

Michael Brooks is right on this. The IDW are laying the seeds of a new political narrative – a narrative that seeks to supplant the discredited rule of the neoliberals and co-opt the resentment of the alt-right, while outliving them both. The left is building its own counter-narrative, quite successfully so. But we need to know our opponents, and pay attention to what they're saying, because if the popularity of the Petersons and Harrises of the world is any guide, IDW-like ideas are finding an audience on YouTube and Twitch and spreading into a mass consciousness.

 A thesis statement

Which brings us to the motivation for today. The race realist Winegard science bros have a new piece on Quillette "The Twilight of Liberalism?", laying out the clearest thesis statement for the IDW I've yet encountered. To be clear, the Winegards are trash. So is Quillette - which is essentially the house rag of the IDW. The Winegards latest piece hits all their usual tropes – cultural Marxism, the authoritarian left, IQ fetishism and the cult of automation. But buried in the piece are hints of something honest about the IDW.

“[I]t is not the abstract logic of liberalism that is flawed,” they write, “but rather the attempt to apply it to fallible humans. Like communism, liberalism conflicts with immutable human characteristics.” Immediately, we encounter a pessimism that is at odds with the liberalism tradition, which is fundamentally optimistic about human nature and grounds its conception of natural rights on axiomatic suppositions about the universal human experience. The Winegard bros dismiss this outright in terms that are familiar to critics of capitalism on both the right and left: classical liberalism as an ideology was adapted to a social world still rooted in a traditional social order, which provided the social reproduction necessary for the capitalist mode of production to take off. Their critique - shared by many communitarians - is that as it matured, capitalism eroded the social foundations on which it relied and what it offered in exchange (universal equality, unlimited freedom, and ‘hedonism’) was a poor substitute.

The Winegards propose an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ between the ideology of capitalism and features of the human mind - or at least the minds of most people - that is as a severe as the supposed mismatch between utopian socialism and human nature. Determining whether a cultural technology is in fact maladapted is notoriously difficult. And it ignores the fact that biology and culture co-evolve. But as a thesis statement, the idea that [some] people cannot adapt to modern social life unites the misogyny of Jordan Peterson to the racial pontificating of Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris, to the elitism of Steven Pinker, and the cultural conservatism of Ben Shapiro and Christina Hoff Summers. It dichotomises the ‘cognitive elite’ - the genteel folk of the IDW who can calmly philosophise and make a living from Patreon - and the masses who engage in manual labour and require a firmer hand. The ‘cognitively inferior’ include women, of course, but also non-whites, cultural Muslims, trans men and women, the poor, the young, the religious and the irreligious alike. Some people simply aren’t morally equipped to be ‘free’.

There are precedents for these beliefs, of course. The Winegards are barely disguising their re-purposing of the Bell Curve, and Murray has long argued that his argument in that book is all about meritocracy and its totally not his fault at all that cognitive differences happen to be racialised. Sure buddy. But this worldview is also implicit in much of behavioural economics and the ‘authoritarian libertarianism’ of Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein’s ‘nudge’ approach to public policy. Neoliberals, drawing on mid-twentieth century views of the Mont Pelerin society, have long believed that society needs to be governed with a firm hand to deliver outcomes that are optimised for the greater good. The wrinkle that the IDW add is that some [Westernised men] can govern themselves free from the state, but that others [largely women and non-Westerners] are categorically incapable of doing so.

The IDW are therefore critics of liberalism, but critics who think we cannot possibly improve upon it. The theory is not wrong, it just has the wrong subject. Classical liberalism is therefore an ideology by and for the ruling elite - and not for everyone else. Liberty for me but not for thee. The various members of the IDW have different emotional reactions to the burdens of rule - the Weinsteins and more centrist-leaning adherents look upon the ‘cognitive inferiority’ of humanity with regret, but treat benevolent rule as the white man’s burden [recall Brett Weinstein’s incredibly patronising response to the Evergreen controversy]. Those of a more conservative inclination, including Shapiro, Peterson and the Winegard bros, believe strongly in the need for order and discipline of the masses, lest they ‘slump into an empty and unsatisfying hedonism that is ruinous to communities and to society more broadly.’

It is for this reason that the IDW are properly categorised as a right-wing movement. Their reverence for order and hierarchy puts them in good company amongst conservatives. The alt-right, neoliberals and libertarians all serve the interests of power and hierarchy in different ways. Fascists do so consciously, libertarians by neglect and neoliberals behind a veneer of technocratic governance. The IDW are the apologists of domestic empire. If fascism can be thought of as the application of the tools of colonial rule to the metropolitan population, then the IDW narrative is the justification of imperialism and the ‘tutelage’ of ‘inferior’ peoples brought home to justify dominion over the majority of the population.

Unlike their neoliberal colleagues like Pinker, who tend to believe that with the right combination of education and public policy, the masses can [eventually] mature to enjoy the full right and privileges of liberal citizenship, the IDW are pessimists who are prepared to write off the vast bulk of humanity as a burden upon the white man’s pursuit of a glorious future. As best, the masses are to be pensioned off with a UBI so they no longer disturb the peace - at worst, as Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House fears, they are rhetorically preparing for a future in which their ‘cognitive inferiors’ are either permanently enslaved or fenced off and left to die on the doorsteps on the enclaves of the elite as climate change burns the world down around them.

It is for this reason, also, that the IDW serve as such a gateway to the actual alt-right. It’s not fair to call a fan of the IDW a fascist. But they are certainly travelling on the same road, because their diagnosis of the crisis of liberalism is the same [including their complete and utter aversion to any consideration of a socialist solution]. An IDW-rationalist looks at the cognitive divide and thinks they’re going to come out on top; a supporter of fascism probably recognises they aren’t going to. At the leadership level, the two movements probably share 99 per cent of their beliefs, but unlike the Richard Spencers of the word, the writers at Quillette are unwilling to lower themselves to engage with the MAGA cultural wasteland. It remains to be seen which is the more effective political strategy.

What is to be done?

I’ve said many times that the first step of any socialist movement is to defend and uphold liberal democracy. Without upholding the basic principle that every citizen is entitled to equal dignity and equal say over the decisions that affect their interests, we cannot argue that a materially unequal society is one that does not uphold the social contract. Mere rejection of the IDW is not enough however. The IDW are very, very good at propaganda and are learning how to package misogyny, racism and transphobia under a veneer of scientific and philosophical legitimacy that is superficially persuasive to many people.

The left is getting better at countering these narratives - but there’s a disconnect between the very online progressive movements who are the ground troops of this war of stories and the movement activists who are seeking and contesting power. It doesn’t help that many of the [white, male] writers and academics who naturally support this movement enjoy socially privileged positions and access to expert knowledge. For many serious politicians, the IDW may be beneath their notice. But its cultural influence should concern us. We won’t be able to enact our agendas if the narrative ground has been disappeared beneath us.

Politics for the New Dark Age on the David Pakman Show

On 11 July, David Pakman invited me on his internationally syndicated radio show to talk about my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amdist Disorder", and the Intellectual Dark Web. David came across my article "On Reputation: Or, how and why bad ideas need rebranding" and wanted to discuss my hypothesis that Harris, Peterson & Co. are more interested in protecting their personal reputations than in promoting free speech. It was a good conversation, and went in some interesting directions. You can find the podcast here (interview starts at at the 29:45 mark). The YouTube version of the clip is embedded here:

Are the Intellectual Dark Web snake oil salesmen?

During the show, David advanced the thesis that the Intellectual Dark Web are akin to charlatans who inflate their social reputations during eras of uncertainty in order to spread ideas of dubious value. I actually wrote a piece advancing a similar metaphor a few months back, which you can find here: "The Omnivore's Dilemma Redux: Understanding Anti-Vaxxers". For the record, the IDW seem to me to be the inverse of that phenonmenon: they're not promoting new, bad ideas by exploiting uncertainty about their personal reputation, but rather propagating old, bad ideas by defending the reputation they already have as a result of their high social status. If we're looking at a nineteenth century medical paradigm, the IDW are not snake oil salesman selling miracle cures in fake lab coats, they're the existing establishment getting huffy when new science shows that bloodletting and treating the humours were never effective in the first place.

On Reputation: Or, how and why bad ideas need rebranding

I've been holding off writing anything about the New York Times' latest safari through the intellectual subcultures of the conservative movement. There was nothing I really felt like discussing about Bari Weiss' piece about the "Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" that hasn't already been said over and over again by commentators I respect, and who possess far larger audiences. With the alt-right imploding thanks to public ostracism and constant pressure, and the neoreactionaries continuing to be too esoteric to want or obtain mainstream recognition, it's about time the unholy alliance between right-libertarian think tanks, New Atheism and evolutionary psychology got some critical attention. Hey, at least now we have this handy list of the worst people on the internet.

For the record, the greentext version of the Intellectual Dark Web ('IDW') looks like this:

1. be personally or ideologically committed to the preservation of the status quo
2. encounter viewpoints, typically from a minority, that critique the status quo
3. attempt to tone police critical minority
4. minority continues to exist, and be critical. WTF I'm oppressed now. 

The nature of the IDW's ideological commitments

Vox's take on the men and women of this self-professed intellectual movement strikes me as essentially correct in aggregate: this is a privileged group concerned about their relative loss of status and desperate to defend their established cultural hegemony. I've said as much myself in my previous blog on the interaction between structure, privilege and preferences. I'm less interested in why the members of the IDW position themselves ideologically as they do, than what form of status quo ideology they are actually committed to advocating. But this too, turns out to be largely uninteresting: while the IDW includes overt social conservatives (Shapiro, Hoff-Summers & Peterson), most of the 'classical liberal' contingent espouse philosophical positions will long traditions on the right wing of Western philosophy.

Put simply, inequality is the paradox at the heart of liberalism. As a philosophical and cultural system, liberalism puts priority on the equal dignity of all adult humans. And yet, inequality continues to exist in many forms and is measurably getting worse over time. Much like Christians grappling over centuries with the problem of the existence of evil, the intellectual history of liberalism is the story of attempts to variously justify or challenge the existence of inequality. Because the Intellectual Dark Web-types are terrified of Marx and other radical philosophies which [correctly] identify the actual causes of inequality in the structure of society, their intellectual options for resolving this dilemma are limited. 

Quillette magazine is the respectable mouth-piece of the IDW, and they had a decent piece up recently summarizing the two main arguments justifying inequality: the consequentialist and the libertarian positions. In brief, the former argues that the unequal distribution of outcomes is justified when it is necessary to improve [economic] outcomes for society as a whole; the latter argues that inequality is justified because any attempt to remedy it would put at risk values of individual liberty and private property that are more highly valued. 

The consequentialist position is arguably the majority position within mainstream economics, and in its Rawlsian form (the 'Difference Principle') it represents the standard position of liberalism from the centre-left to centre-right. For those unfamiliar, the Difference Principle requires that for inequality to be justified, it must improve the position of the worst off in society. As I argue in Chapter VIII of my book, "Politics for the new Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", the Difference Principle is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic justice. In any event, consequentialism is an inherently flawed methodology: objective utility preferences are hard to define, much less measure, and the use of utilitarianism in decision-making is an inherently undemocratic and illiberal exercise. 

The libertarian position is well known and understood within right-wing or 'choice' liberalism, and has been espoused for decades by the likes of Hayek, Nozick, Rothbard & Murray. In short, the libertarian position is that unequal outcomes are the product of individual choice and merit alone, and are therefore morally justified. When the patent absurdity of this viewpoint is pointed out, given that wealth, social status and income are all extremely heritable, we end up with compromises like luck egalitarianism which attempt to distinguish between moral and immoral inequality. Again: Rawls' Veil of Ignorance sets a sort of agreed minimum floor for the kind of inequality in a liberal society that is still consistent with the inherent dignity of all individuals: if an individual is denied their social contract rights, then they are not just unequal, but are de facto excluded from mutual recognition as a member of the social contract. 

If pushed on their positive position, most of the self-described classical liberals in the IDW would posit the libertarian position, which offers a pleasant justification for the personal privileges they enjoy atop the media pyramid. When asked to explain why others fare less well, they typically offer variants of either the libertarian or luck egalitarian position: people are less well off because they either make bad choices or they had the misfortune to belong to a group (defined by race, gender, culture or sexuality) less well-equipped to 'succeed', or both. In summary, and as Ezra Klein has pointed out, the 'dangerous ideas' of the IDW are neither new, nor interesting, nor even particularly controversial within a certain ideological milieu. 

On reputation, or "why are y'all so sensitive?"

The IDW are, on the whole, an extremely sensitive lot whose interest in freedom of speech has less to do with principle than ensuring that they, and people like them, continue to be heard. It's unclear, at first, why they're so triggered by critics of the status quo: while it's possibly the manifestation of a backlash bias against perceived threats to the social order, I suspect that on the whole that the members of the IDW are closer to the 'virtue ethics' end of the backlash spectrum than the 'asshole' end. In other words (again, Shapiro, Hoff-Summers and Peterson aside), they're less interested in actively defending the status quo order than in defending the personal virtue they see themselves as possessing by being members of that order in good standing. In other words, they've done everything 'right', so why are they being protested?

A quick diversion. Quillette  has published an interview by the site's founder and Australian (ugh) libertarian (ugh) Claire Lehmann with sociologists Brad Campbell and Jason Manning about their new book on the campus culture wars. In all honesty I haven't read the book, but as represented by the interview their argument is . . . just awful. They posit three moral cultures: "honor cultures", where an individual's reputation matters and is vigorously defended; "dignity cultures", where human equality is guaranteed and disputes are regulated by social institutions; and "victim cultures", which combine the worst elements of both (i.e. those damn college kids are both too sensitive and too totalitarian!).

The former two concepts are well known in the sociological literature, although they operate less as hierarchical levels of development and more a contingent function of social history and environment. The idea of 'victim culture', on the other hand, is a ridiculous straw man with zero anthropological support other than the existence of people who disagree with one another. I'd not be the first to point out that Quillette's promotion of the idea of 'victim culture', both in the interview above and more broadly, is a pretty obvious example of psychological projection. The IDW are not interested in the free speech or right to protest of their critics and engage in rampant appeals to authority to shut them down. Dave Rubin has said that self-identifying as a heretic feels personally empowering, yet appears incapable of making the intellectual leap of attributing the same motive to critics of the status quo.

If the IDW's concern was merely arbitrating between the respective speech interests of competing positions, then that clash of rights could be easily adjudicated by existing social mechanisms. Rather, the IDW are asserting a different right alongside their right to speak: a right to protect their reputation. They are arguing for a privilege that men and women of their class have implicitly enjoyed for centuries: to express bad ideas in public without suffering any kind of adverse reputational consequences. One need only listen to Sam Harris whine about how he's continually misrepresented to see that the primary concern of these people is their personal social standing and self-image. 

As experiments in evolutionary game theory have shown for decades, a person's reputation is in fact an essential tool for regulating cooperation in small-scale societies. There's even biological evidence (in our human capacity for facial recognition and proficiency at gossip) that reputation mechanisms were important enough for long enough time in our evolutionary history to become genetically rooted. It's true that for the most part modern societies generate social trust through ideological tools grounded in universal human dignity and vast cooperative institutions to resolve disputes. However, it's an uncontroversial hypothesis that in the 'marketplace of ideas' a person's reputation is still a valuable currency: experts and public intellectuals rely on their reputation to ensure that their ideas are successfully propagated. 

Hence the New York Times piece, and the signal-boosting of the IDW by other conservative sources. As Dave Pakman has pointed out, the IDW is ultimately a re-branding exercise for bad ideas. Like all advertising, it aims to preserve market share for products that don't deserve it based on quality. Unlike many on the left with unfashionable ideas, the IDW are capable of cashing in their social and economic status to marshal a defense of their intellectual and moral reputations and thus shield themselves from the detrimental effects of robust criticism of their positions. Personally, and as I've stated before, I'm something of a free speech fundamentalist so the idea of a right to one's reputation is not something I'm inclined to view favourably. Let ideas, words and art stand for themselves, and if people lower their estimation of you because of them, then you have to live with those consequences. The Right - and Bari Weiss - have certainly never held back from attacking the reputations of their opponents. But culture is static if existing ideas and artforms are shielded from criticism by entrenched privilege. 

And yet: Article 17(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does establish something like a right to one's reputation, and the appropriate scale and extent of libel and defamation laws is something that's been debated constantly and keenly in the legal philosophy literature for centuries. The law does generally recognise that we have a legitimate interest in our reputation, particularly when it has commercial value, and protects it against unlawful, deceptive or malicious interference. Of course, the IDW are more interested in claiming victimhood in order to attract resources from right-wing donors than, y'know, actually engaging with the philosophical or legal merits of their own positions. But I think it'd be fair to say to critical engagement with the ideas promoted by the IDW, even to the extent of forms of protest and ostracism recognised as legitimate in a free society, does not constitute an interference with their fundamental reputational rights. Instead, their diminished reputations are just the [small] price they have to pay for promoting bad and discredited views.