In a National Review article in 1989, the columnist and veteran Margaret Thatcher speechwriter John O’Sullivan struck upon O’Sullivan’s First Law (often attributed to Robert Conquest), which states: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
There is evidence enough to make this plausible. O’Sullivan offered Amnesty International as an example. Amnesty was founded by Peter Benenson with the aim of defending prisoners of conscience. Benenson ensured that left-wingers, liberals, and conservatives were represented in the group. William F. Buckley sat on its board of directors for years, but in 1978, he resigned when Amnesty took an official stand against capital punishment. Buckley said this would lead to the “inevitable sectarianization of the amnesty movement.” He was right: Amnesty is now hectoring people about using the correct pronouns to be a “great trans ally.”
Buckley’s warning covered a lot more ground than might have seemed the case at the time. The magazine world is demonstrating the effects of O’Sullivan’s Law. Many publications are evolving in ways that ensure their extinction. Vice, for example, began as an alternative magazine. It was founded in Montreal and had a DIY aesthetic and a cheerfully obsessive focus on underground music, pranks, and bodily functions. As it grew more popular, it became more serious, becoming an alt-media empire with more deep, substantive journalism and documentaries. Gavin McInnes, the proto-hipster who had co-founded the company, made a quiet exit, and there was an influx of money from Viacom and Intel. Still, the other co-founder, Shane Smith, insisted that Vice was not partisan: “We’re not trying to say anything politically in a paradigmatic left/right way. … We don’t do that because we don’t believe in either side.”
Fast-forward to the present day, and Vice is whining about Spotify not doing more to censor its new star, Joe Rogan. The writers are not disagreeing with Rogan’s opinions about transgenderism. They want to have them removed. “Spotify CEO Defends Keeping Transphobic Joe Rogan Podcasts Online,” a headline blares bombastically, as though it were a serious scoop. This is like G.G. Allin somehow surviving long enough to lecture people on the effects of caffeine on blood pressure. Perhaps it should be no surprise that in a poll intended to reveal which brands young people consider the coolest, Vice was ranked last, behind Chick-fil-A.
What happened is that a version of O’Sullivan’s Law kicked in. Magazines that appeared to occupy a more or less apolitical space, dedicating themselves to particular cultural spheres, are now drowning in left-wing moralism. Teen Vogue is an especially farcical example. Launched to focus on “fashion, beauty and style,” it is now far better known for articles such as “Who Is Karl Marx: Meet the Anti-Capitalist Scholar.” There is also a great deal of effort put into promoting sexual adventurism. Interestingly, and mercifully, less than 5% of the Teen Vogue readership is under the age of 24.
What the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe called the “woke suicide of women’s media” is mirrored in men’s mags. GQ was founded for the sort of man who wanted to be James Bond. In the ’90s, it appealed to the “metrosexual” man, and by 2019, it was releasing a “New Masculinity” issue with a cover photo of Pharrell Williams in a dress. When Will Welch landed the job of editor, most friends wrote congratulations. But, Welch recalls, a “particularly perceptive friend reacted in a way that I’ll never forget. ‘Yikes,’ she said. ‘Hell of a time to be in charge of a men’s magazine.’”
But, Welch explains, “One of the key principles at GQ is that if we tell stories that excite our own smart, voracious, politically and socially engaged team, we will connect with a smart, engaged, diverse, and gender-nonspecific audience.” In other words, it’s no longer a men’s magazine at all. It makes sense to appeal to a wider audience, especially in an age of declining sales, in which clicks are currency, but how this was meant to be achieved with finger-wagging lectures from Hannah Gadsby about how awful men are is beyond me. It appears that Teen Vogue and GQ have the same target demographic.
You can’t get away from this stuff. Even more niche publications seethe with it. The gaming website Polygon, for example, greets you with the headline “Why I’m not buying the Harry Potter game.” In a breathless article, the reader is informed that J.K. Rowling is “transphobe-in-chief,” “the world’s leading transphobe,” and building an “empire of transphobia,” “not to mention the various racist tropes in her books.” Somehow, despite taking what feels like 100,000 words to fulminate against Ms. Rowling’s tyranny of transphobia, the author never tells us what her offenses are.
I will go further and say that the legendary demand to “stick to sports,” which was imposed on the ill-fated Deadspin, the writers of which seemed more interested in arguing with Ted Cruz than in watching football, has its limits. One could not cover the NBA and ignore Daryl Morey and his criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. One could not report on soccer and ignore corruption. One could not write about movies and ignore #MeToo. There are political elements to everything, worthy of coverage.
Yet, it’s still a legitimate question of degree: Why are magazines so political, and why are the politics so one-way. Investment from “woke capital,” or corporations that go big on causes such as feminism, immigration, and gay and transgender issues, which, conveniently, do not endanger their bottom lines, doubtless guides their editorial decision-making. Progressive hot takes can summon up attention, at least in theory, without offending advertisers or threatening one’s social status.
The nature of the staff is also significant. Writers and editors these days are chronically pretentious, perhaps as a result of broad yet shallow education, and chronically insecure, as a result of competition. This downgrades the role of enjoyment in cultural pursuits. It is not enough to be enthusiastic about something. One must be outraged, and aggrieved, and oppressed — with one’s individual thoughts and feelings towering above the field.
This can inspire a feedback loop in which readers’ resentment of writers and writers’ contempt for readers drive each other to new heights, with readers resenting the writers’ apparently joyless politics and writers disdaining the readers’ supposed boorishness. An example of this was the furious back-and-forth between gamers and journalists that became known as “GamerGate.”
It would be silly to romanticize the past era of publishing. Vice was hardly a pillar of great journalism when it published guides to “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll,” and I would never have picked up a copy of GQ, let alone Teen Vogue, except to swat mosquitoes, so I won’t pretend to be a spurned subscriber.
But in general, these publications’ turn toward the woke has not been a successful strategy. A series of like outlets, such as Mic, has collapsed, because of profligate spending but also because they are dull. An autopsy of Mic in the Outline states: “Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes.”
Surely, it’s not difficult to see that readers will not stampede to websites offering plus-size models, manspreader-excoriation, and George Takei.
Outlets from Vice to Teen Vogue, as we have seen, are failing with their target audiences. Last year, Disney announced that the $400 million it had invested in Vice Media was worthless. As Vox reported, with an entertaining self-consciousness, “Investors have decided that high-flying publishers that once confidently explained that they’d created a new media paradigm are now worth very little … or even less.”
It would be childish and simplistic to suggest that these struggles are wholly due to politics. In a time when people want news and opinion for free, it is hard for anybody to make profits. But the least that one can say of this almost monolithic politicization is that it is doing nothing to help.
It is dangerous, too. One will naturally find left-wing invective obnoxious if one is not on the Left. Its pervasiveness in previously nonpartisan spheres of culture, though, also diminishes one’s chance of escaping politics of any kind, even for a while, and finding common ground with those with whom one disagrees. This exacerbates both the scale and the intensity of societal conflicts.
Someone could argue that in writing about O’Sullivan’s Law, I am endorsing “actually right-wing” organizations. I certainly want them to exist. But if I am reading about sports, I do not want the author to veer off into a tirade against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Perhaps refusing to be a bandwagon for the Left is enough to make an outlet “actually right-wing.” I am sure that the staff of Vice thinks so.
Ben Sixsmith is a writer living in Poland.
