I never shared George Monbiot’s admiration for Russell Brand and so I’m not quite so bitterly disappointed that the comedian seems to have disappeared down a conspiracist rabbit hole (I once admired Russell Brand. But his grim trajectory shows us where politics is heading, 10 March). I would also be reluctant to cite him as a reason to despair about the politics of “younger people”.
For a start, Brand is not that young – at 47, he is five years older than the prime minister. Is he really such an influence on the genuinely young? He gets a lot of views on YouTube, but the values of the young, especially in relation to climate change, are closer to Monbiot’s than Brand’s.
What I find interesting is that Brand’s conspirators are just the usual suspects – Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum etc. Monbiot finds this lack of originality “dispiriting”. I find it curiously encouraging. If the conspiracists can’t come up with any new material, they will find their audience tiring of the same old tunes and the same old puppetmasters.
Jonathan Allum
Amersham, Buckinghamshire
• I could not agree more with George Monbiot on Russell Brand’s rants. He has moved, apparently unaware of it, from left to middle (his spiritual phase), to flat-out right. I think a lot of people forget to unsubscribe from his channel, and I suggest all those who stopped watching Brand a while ago (I stopped during that spiritual phase) should unsubscribe. Brand interviewed Jordan Peterson not long ago, and it felt like love. Both expressed that wounded male pride that underpins the exploitation of feelings of sexual inadequacy in (older, white) men by the far right. And it works. See the US philosopher Jason Stanley’s book, How Fascism Works.
Dr Helen Hintjens
Swansea
• I wonder if the bleak arc followed by Russell Brand and his fellow populist online conspiracy theorists is quite so new? The idea of transcending left and right became popular in the 1990s with Bill Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s “third way”, a social democratic theory of mild redistribution and liberalisation that would overcome the staid old dichotomy between the state and the market. In 1994, Blair’s academic guru, Prof Anthony Giddens, published Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics – an imaginative guidebook to the new way of doing things. I remember the hype: as an impressionable student at LSE, I attended Giddens’s lectures. The bright morning sunshine of 1 May 1997 was an intoxicating tonic.
It was as if these former leftists were implying that there was no longer any need for broad debate. “Trust us,” they were saying. “We’ve found the answers, and the old divisions are no longer relevant.” But we couldn’t trust them, and they were wrong. Claiming to move beyond established dialectics imperils democracy. Conflict between left and right endures. It seems presumptuous to declare its demise.
Dr Daniel Gay
St Jorioz, Haute-Savoie, France
• Like George Monbiot, I have been disappointed to follow the career of Russell Brand over the last decade. It’s sad to see what was a rare positive and inspiring voice in the darkness descend into a murky, click-rate-driven negative feedback loop, where “free thinking” meets Andrew-Tate-style “red pilling”. It’s a far cry from the message of tolerance and unity in search of fairness that we used to hear from his corner.
Andy Ruff
Muswell Hill, London
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