Progressives Have a Twitter Problem

H ere’s a take: The online spectacle currently being staged by Felicia Sonmez and some of her colleagues at the Washington Post illustrates in microcosm the growing threat that Twitter poses to the fortunes of America’s progressive movement, and to the institutions that the movement has taken over bit by bit.

There are many good things about the Internet’s relative lack of gatekeepers, but there are also a great number of circumstances in which it can hurt, rather than help, users. Absent social media, there would be no forum in which a figure such as Felicia Sonmez could have performed her bizarre little show. Where, in, say, the 1990s, could such a demonstration even have occurred? She could not have stood on her desk in the Post’s offices and shouted for five days straight. She could not have behaved as she currently is in the opinion pages of a newspaper, or on the evening news. I suppose she could have walked erratically around a public park muttering to herself — but, if she had, she would not have had a band of maladjusted sycophants telling her she was correct.

Sometimes, the Internet helps people advance their careers. Sometimes, it gives them the rope with which they will hang themselves. In theory, those unfortunate enough to fall into the latter category can come from either major party. But, because far more conservative crazies than progressive crazies have been kicked off social media — and because progressive ideologues are more likely to demand cancelation, even of their friends — the emergence of the technology has ended up doing more damage to the left than to the right. This damage has taken two forms. At the micro level, Twitter has ruined the public reputation of influential individuals who had been previously assumed to be sane. At the macro level, it has created a suicidal feedback loop that has made the media, academia, and the Democratic Party badly out of touch with the real world. Together, these trends are proving catastrophic for progressives. Before I joined Twitter, I believed that the majority of journalists and academics were normal, well-adjusted people who, while typically left-wing, were interested in doing good work. Ten years later, I no longer think anything of the sort — and neither, I suspect, does anyone else.

Sometimes, social media simply shine a light on who an individual was all along. Until Laurence Tribe signed up for a Twitter account, most Americans had every reason to think of him as a normal person; it took a window into his every thought to show them they were wrong. In other cases, the incentives that Twitter provides can reveal just how solipsistic, dogmatic, or out of touch a given figure truly is. This problem can best be summed up by the irritating phrase, “If you’re taking flack, you must be over the target,” and it tends to affect people who cannot grasp that they — rather than the amorphous glob of enemies they perceive — are the ones who have said something dumb. We’ve all seen this happen. A prominent Twitter user will say something abhorrent, and, having been called out for it, will respond to the criticism first by complaining that “the right-wing trolls found this one” and then by lamenting that the comment has engendered a great deal of attention, some of which was “hateful.” Rarely if ever will the user in question realize that he is actually in the wrong.

This problem obtains at a broader level, too. Joe Biden won the 2020 election in large part because he recognized that Twitter was not real life; Joe Biden is enduring a failed presidency in large part because he has forgotten that Twitter is not real life. It is difficult to overstate just how weird and unrepresentative a place Twitter actually is — and yet, inexplicably, President Good Ol’ Joe and his merry team seem to be laser-focused on its users’ every whim. The obsession with student loans is pure Twitter, as are the relentless focus on transgenderism and race-essentialism, the preference for neologisms such as “Latinx” and “birthing people,” and the belief that anyone who matters is going to notice when the White House pulls stunts such as this one. “Defund the Police” was a Twitter thing. “Jim Crow 2.0” was a Twitter thing. “Mint the coin” was a Twitter thing. They all led to electoral annihilation.

For comprehensible reasons, conservatives worry about the assiduous manner in which the cultural deck has been stacked against them — the media are biased, the universities are biased, social media are biased. And they’re right. But past a certain point — the point at which our elite institutions have been left embarrassing themselves before the country at large, and their new custodians are determined to burn down their own houses — that may turn out to be less of a problem than we once thought.