Virginia Heffernan writes a brief but rather insightful piece at the Medium blog of the New York Times about how the Web has become the breeding grounds of what she is calling “feminist hawks.” What is a “feminist hawk,” you ask? She has a succinct definition:
…one that advocates the use of force to liberate Muslim women from persecution and burkas.
As she argues, this position began its widespread movement on the web.(She even calls it an “artifact” of the web.)* The example she gives is of course the right-wing turncoat David Horowitz, who now makes a career off, what I’m calling, an ideological re-alignment that the Web has facilitated. Structurally, the Web seems like it is bent left. Or, as Heffernan describes it, in reference to online petitions:
[It contains] the promise of global participation implicit in online communication. It made clear that a far-flung community with eyes and ears everywhere — and connections in high places — already existed. You could add your name to its moral ranks with a few keystrokes.
But in fact the Web has done just as much to spread right-wing nonsense. How does one explain it? The expert Heffernan cites is Tim Hwang, of the Web Ecology Project, who suggests that what Horowitz is doing, by “championing” the rights of women in foreign countries(enough to invade them, that is) and using the Web as the primary platform for his hawkishness, is a new instance of an old technique– right-wingers using left tactics.
This is quite odd to me, as Hwang is functioning in Heffernan’s piece as an expert on how the mechanics of the Web influence the spread of certain ideas. His explanation is rather untechnological.
“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social spher
This kind of explanation is no different than what writers in the Frankfurt School tradition have been saying forever about the spread of Fascist ideology, but without the key insight. The spread of fascist ideology, the Frankfurt school generally argues, is not rooted in the use of fascist tactics or strategies. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Fascism spreads so rapidly because it sells itself as emancipation.** So where my confusion stems from is why Hwang is not talking specifically about how the Web functions differently in the spread of ideas. Isn’t that the point that Heffernan was trying to make at the start of her piece–that this kind of ideological realignment or “unholy alliance” or “unlikely bedfellowship” is symptomatic of the Web? So why is Hwang recycling the “ideologycritique” of mid-20th century critics, who have since been critiqued for theories of ideas that were too top-down(which I believe Hwang’s to be as well)? It may have served Heffernan well to interview Alex Galloway instead, for an alternative theory of the spread of ideology as well as a perspective far more attuned to how the technics of the Web help it do so.
*I think there is room for disagreement with Heffernan’s attempt at periodization here. For one, the rise of Western feminism (as Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty have argued) relies on a certain kind of racialized savior-status for white feminists(who can be men or women), who see themselves as on a mission to “save brown women from brown men,” as Spivak has noted.
**The loci classici of this kind of criticism, in my estimation, are: Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man as well as Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. But nearly all the thinkers in this tradition have written similarly. Another one to look at is Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom.
