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For all the perplexity surrounding his rise, however, there’s a simple explanation for his popularity. Peterson’s writing and lectures, on the surface level, are full of not-too-tough love and legitimately useful life advice; “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” and “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street” are the titles of two chapters in 12 Rules for Life, top-line exhortations he uses to explain his views on dignity and the importance of life’s small pleasures.

What sets him apart is his ability to marry easy-to-digest platitudes with a passionately articulated and deeply conservative worldview, one that goes down just as smoothly for his overwhelmingly white, male fan base. Peterson speaks to the “lost boys” who populate the internet forums and finished basements of America with authority and candor, a comforting-yet-challenging paternal voice to a demographic that’s been the subject of as much scrutiny in recent months as Peterson himself.

And by combining his sensible empowerment program with reactionary treatises against “social justice warriors” and “cultural Marxism,” he’s succeeded where similar ideologues and pundits have failed—for better or worse, winning otherwise disengaged hearts and minds to his intellectual program. Canadian writer Tabatha Southey earned an online harassment campaign at the hands of some of Peterson’s more aggressive fans with a scathing essay in which she warned against his “dreadfully serious message,” asking of his lectures “when you insist the stakes are that high, the opposition that pernicious, who’s to say where the chips will fall?” The answer may be unclear, but in an era when the politics of male backlash helped put Donald Trump in the White House and have reignited a violent, long-dormant culture war, that makes Jordan Peterson perhaps the most important pundit in North America, if not the world.

Peterson’s even-handed, “just trying to have a conversation” style of political discourse allows him to position himself as the last sane man in a world threatened by leftist hysteria, the students in his original star-making videos serving as perfect foils. This dynamic was exemplified in one of the most popular videos featuring Peterson, a January appearance on Channel 4 where he calmly dismantles an overreaching critic in the British journalist Cathy Newman

If, as FDR is supposed to have once said, one should ask to be judged by the enemies they’ve made, it’s illuminating to look at Peterson’s bête noire—the specter of “cultural Marxism.” In Peterson’s conception, it’s a decadeslong conspiracy handed down from French postmodernists to today’s “social justice warriors” who intend to destroy rational meaning, starting with enforced gender pronoun use and ending with the gulag. In reality, the concept of “cultural Marxism” as deployed by Peterson can be traced back to the 1990s, promoted in a primordial form by Lyndon LaRouche’s think tank the Schiller Institute in its Fidelio magazine.

The Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by far-right social conservative Paul Weyrich, then picked up the ball and ran with it in a 1999 video titled “The Origins of Political Correctness.” In the video, the paleoconservative writer William Lind draws a corkboard twine web connecting the work of Frankfurt School philosophers like Adorno and Marcuse to everything from the sexual revolution of the 1960s to 1990s-era campus activism. The assumed endpoint is, for them, the same as for Peterson—brutal repression at the hand of the totalitarian left.

In Peterson’s world, men are besieged by both sinister, pronoun-enforcing Marxists and Jungian “devouring mothers,” a cabal that’s created a culture of paralyzed man-children. His prescription for those man-children is to … throw their shoulders back, clean their rooms and take advantage of the institutional and intellectual infrastructure through which men have had an undefeated historical advantage in improving their station. To him, the hierarchical structures that underlie Western society are preordained, and questioning them is like questioning the weather, or the train schedule, or the Marvel Studios balance sheet. “You don’t change the world by going and waving signs at people you’ve defined as more evil than you,” he insists in a tirade against the efficacy of protest. If life has dealt you a bad hand, summon your inner übermensch and get thee to the laundromat.

It’s a deeply conservative worldview, but a deeply traditional one in contrast with the radicalism that has defined the online right in recent years. And that’s why Peterson has become such a phenomenon—acidic enough for a generation of angry, insecure young men raised on the illiberal, anarchic modern internet, but enough of an institutionalist that he can help them build bridges to the outside world. He tells a vivid story as a pundit, one where meaningful and time-tested hierarchies are under siege by amoral and malicious subversives. It’s a predictably familiar narrative coming from someone who made his academic mark with an ode to recursive storytelling. And for better or worse, that narrative has been deeply resonant with a generation of young men looking to define their own—so if his critics hope to loosen its thrall, they’re going to have to come up with a good alternative.

More: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/08/jordan-peterson-beating-pundits-own-game-217773

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