The far-right American broadcaster Alex Jones has brought his signature brand of culture war sortie to the mainstream news again of late.
This time it is not due to picketing ballot booths in defence of the 2020 election “Big Lie”. It’s not even due to being successfully sued for millions of dollars for lies claiming the massacre of children and staff members at Sandy Hook elementary school was some kind of hoax.
This time, the man who has insisted that modern water treatment turns frogs gay, is making culture war on the culture industry.
Footage of Jones from one of his broadcasts went viral online this week with his claim that contractual agreements for national TV shows and record deals oblige a pact with Satan. “It happened to me, it happened to a bunch of other people I’ve talked to,” Jones insisted to a studio guest, “they get you in a room and they say, ‘Listen, we want you to reject Jesus Christ and pledge yourself to Lucifer’”.
Whenever footage like this goes viral in Australia, it’s shared with a comfortable smugness. The American mainstreaming of political kook and conspiracy theory, represented by Jones, is something that the combination of compulsory voting and community taste pushes very far to the margins of our social experience.
Even so, our sleepy western outpost can’t afford to ignore the implicit threat to democracy posed by the rise of Jones and others elsewhere – especially not in a world where the internet’s dark corners are global and authoritarians energetically connive our system’s overthrow. It’s been known for years that authoritarian regimes, like Russia and China, dabble in the amplification of western culture-war conflicts online. The point is to portray to their domestic audiences democracy as a cradle of unreason, civil dysfunction and extremes. Doing so has the secondary benefit of weakening and polarising electoral communities that might otherwise form powerful coalitions that resist their own imperialist encroach.
But as I discovered in the research for my book about QAnon, the broader threat exposed by Jones and the people who follow him is their embodiment of a truth today’s most dangerous rightwing western intellectuals understand and what its leftwing ones ignore at our collective peril. The “Breitbart Doctrine” is the truism that “politics flows downstream from culture”. Enough years have passed to demonstrate that the consumption of Jones-style, news-themed entertainment products has mobilised what used to be a centre-right American electoral community into rituals and behaviours that have become so familiar many can no longer recognise them as extremist. You don’t have to labour explaining the ideological details of aggressively individualist, authoritarian politics to a base if the same assumptions can be easily intuited by them just by watching Alex Jones, the GOP leadership or anyone on Fox News performing the script and character of a cultural pose.
The left used to be good at this kind of communicating. In Australia as elsewhere, the social transformations of the 1960s were catalysed in part because the vastness of resentment to calcified and oppressive social institutions could be signified by the length of men’s hair. Folk songs didn’t have to explicate politics for political communities to form around them; their DIY presentation was an implicit up-yours to establishment values. Turns out, it was the furthest part of the western political right that heeded the lesson on offer.
Australia has a centre-left government, and with it a chance to right some prevailing social wrongs, address climate threats and re-structuralise fairness and shared opportunity into the economy. This isn’t going to happen if the cultural expression of “leftism” remains fixated on individualist identity projects, nor if a policy understanding of “diversity” extends only as far as representing experiences contained within a privately-schooled middle class.
If we want the pace of transformation to increase, it’s on the makers and distributors of culture to develop accessible, recognisable and immediate symbols and narratives with the muscularity to advance a truly democratic and collectivist worldview.
Everything from song, to fashion, TV and theatre, to internet culture and, yes, news entertainment, can, should and must be vehicles for this goal. The progressiveness the modern left once achieved just through “feeling groovy” is something we will only now realise through deliberation, dedication and design.
It’s what the American right are doing. Yes, we can and should laugh at someone like Alex Jones. But if we want the world to change, we’d be crazy not to study him.
