In the past two days, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro sat for two interviews. One is a rigorous and nuanced debate on whether his new book, The Right Side of History, fully encapsulates the underlying woes plaguing the West, and the other is a thinly veiled hit job consisting of the interviewer lobbing decades-old tweets at Shapiro that he’s since issued a comprehensive mea culpa to disavow.
One was conducted by a BBC host and the chairman of the Spectator, the world’s oldest weekly magazine and a conservative one at that. The other was conducted by a writer at the left-leaning site Vox.
Sean Illing of Vox issued the interesting interview, one that made it abundantly clear he spent time mulling over the minutiae of Shapiro’s argument. The BBC’s Andrew Neil conducted the rhetorical barrage more suited for reality television than any program masquerading as a legitimate news network.
On its face, this incongruence may not make much sense, but as the American and European right-wings continue to diverge in both style and principle, and the American left-wing increasingly splinters between left-wing liberalism and left-wing authoritarianism, this dissonance makes more sense.
Illing’s interview is too thorough for me to excerpt in any meaningful way here. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but for simplicity’s sake, I’ll list a few of the topics with which Illing and Shapiro find points of contention:
- Whether Shapiro ignores economic factors, such as automation and stagnant wage growth in his assessment in the West’s malaise.
- Whether Shapiro’s definition of “America” discounts those historically marginalized by law and society.
- The impact of religion on both the great goods and great evils of modernity.
- Whether Shapiro prioritized his focus on religion and brevity to the detriment of his readers.
It’s a comprehensive, difficult debate, and one where any reasonable reader comes away with a heightened respect for both men. Illing clearly did his homework to unpack Shapiro’s argument rather than “own” his persona, and Shapiro is obviously eager to engage with a liberal counterpart to defend, but more importantly explain his views. As much as conservatives may love to hate on Vox’s penchant for seriously entertaining “let’s just abolish time zones/the Senate/the Electoral College/etc.,” the fact remains that plenty of their writers and reporters exemplify what the future of liberal journalism should be rather than the metaphorical clickbait clogging cable news.
Then there’s the BBC interview, which according to the clip braggadociously posted by the Spectator’s new American sub-site, begins with Neil asking Shapiro about a 2010 tweet in which he crudely lambastes terrorist activity by Hamas by claiming that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage.” Though he clarified later that day that he was specifically referring to the Palestinians who “oppose Israel,” he has since issued a full denouncement of the tweetstorm in an article entitled, “So, Here’s A Giant List Of All The Dumb Stuff I’ve Ever Done (Don’t Worry, I’ll Keep Updating It).”
Considering that Neil presumably had Shapiro on his show to discuss his bestselling book, you’d assume that Neil would then take a deep dive into The Right Side of History. You’d be wrong.
“Your words are hardly designed to produce the consensus and understanding that the book seems to want to produce,” Neil refuted. “That’s my point.” Neil then challenges Shapiro’s ability to defend Judeo-Christian culture, which Shapiro points out comes after Neil calls the pro-life position barbaric.
Those are all the questions included in the three-minute “Neil OWNS Shapiro” clip posted by the Spectator. That’s all. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, and if anything, indicative of European conservatism’s persistent discomfort with American conservatism’s evolution of rhetorical style, alliance with Israel, and embrace of young voices who have erred and atoned in the past.
There’s not much to celebrate about the state of American politics today. But that a prominent left-wing website can still engage respectfully and intellectually with one of the Right’s most ardent firebrands better than the remnants of British conservatism should give everyone dreaming of a productive American political sphere at least a modicum of hope.
