Whilst the majority of viewers yelped at the saluting hand of alt-right granddaddy Steve Banon, it was easy to miss the more interesting array of speakers at this month’s conservative conventions, ARC and CPAC. One who has largely gone unnoticed is associate editor of the Spectator, Douglas Murray.
Once the golden boy of the neoconservative right, he’s taken an odd turn in his output over the last few years. In this, he is a representative of a wider plague amongst once “moderate conservatives” who have taken the plunge into something much more vulgar.
Murray delighted the crowd with his comments that either implicitly or explicitly slagged off various groups including Palestinians, migrants, and trans people. He pulled out all of the right’s best tools, such as the infamous “what are men and women?” query.
Ultimately, this residue from the culture war is mostly nonsense. But what is perhaps most striking is this turn in ideology Murray has solidified, namely his more far-right approach on every issue – economic, cultural, and other. The man clearly sees himself to be our generations answer to Bill Buckley, but better resembles a bloated Brownshirt.
Douglas Murray: part of the intellectual dark web
Douglas Murray began his, admittedly, quite prominent career as a descendent of the neoconservative political movement, choosing to dedicate his first book on the subject. Emerging from this committee, he modelled his style of oration on his elder contemporaries, embarrassingly being seen to imitate the exact phraseology of famous leftist-turned-neo imperialist Christopher Hitchens.
He wrote a rather wet eulogy for the old war-monger in a 2011 edition of the Spectator and clearly took a lot from his persona – portraying a bombastic and thick-skinned character. This has obviously aided him in the transition he’s made from neoconservative missionary to podium-thumping far-rightist.
In 2012, Murray became associate editor of the Spectator which is far more of an important detail than at first it may appear. The Spectator is a large publication from the right in the UK and has a circulation two-fold bigger than the New Statesman, its historic (though desperately turncoat) competitor. It reaches a tremendous audience and had significant links to the annals of authority in the Conservative governments of the last 15 years. Murray’s reach, just in regard to his day job, then, is not to be underestimated at all.
Sheltered from a storm
The growing “intellectual dark web” sheltered him from the right-wing storm against neo-conservativism in the mid 2010s and he hasn’t really gone back. Disgraceful figures from this period like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson slowly became fellow travelers on this journey of his.
This group, for the blessedly unaware, constituted a group of intellectuals and pseudo intellectuals writing and speaking on subjects which had little to do with their field of study or experience. And if one took a critical lens to what they were claiming in their tweets, podcasts, and sad excuses for books, you wouldn’t be stunned to know that they and Murray have taken their flags and driven them far into the ground of the Euro-American Far-right.
Immigration – as always
Of course, at this time Douglas Murray was still adjusting his scope to take shot at Europe’s recent immigrant and refugee populations, in light of the contemporary shifts like the Syrian Refugee Crisis. These arguments are one’s he’s devoted serious thought to and uses in almost every slapdash diatribe published under his name.
Those seemingly coherent lines about how multiethnic migration into “The West” – by which he means the white world – has watered down our culture have become more explicit. This is seen in his recent ARC speech, in which he failed to quite hit the register of humour (even in that sweaty locker room of fascists) as he compared “western culture” to the complexities of vanilla ice-cream. For a man who built his lot on identity politics, he’s more than happy to rile up “Westerners” with their own notions of identity.
It is on the immigration issue that Murray first seemed to take his more overtly right turn. His casual Islamophobia is clear, yet what he has attempted to shelter under an auspice of “skepticism” is his flirtation with the most right-wing of the British conservative movement.
The race riots
In his famous article on the subject of the 2024 race riots, Murray states correctly that one of the causes of the unrest was the unemployment in Northern Towns, inflated by the Conservative government post-2008. He on the one hand slams those who undertook class analysis on the 2011 riots, stating that he was “reluctant” to “assume that unemployment and the resultant hopelessness were factors” in that year’s violence. But he then undertakes the precept as the key factor of analysis in the case of the post-Southport riots.
In her recent book, Ash Sarkar points out that many journalists, and in this I would include Murray, only deign to care about the working-class when they’re white and can be crow-barred from their black and brown neighbours.
Douglas Murray: a mid-life radicalisation crisis
As is to be expected from a right-winger like Douglas Murray, he takes on absolutely no critical class analysis whatsoever, as I’m sure he would claim this as a facet of “cultural Marxism”. He doesn’t blame unemployment on deindustrialisation, or on austerity imposed on the North by Conservative governments, but instead on immigrants.
The real “uncomfortable truth” is that wages and jobs are not cut by immigrants, but by bosses and boards of directors, incentivised by the financialisation of our economy and by the British government.
Murray will likely not stop in his swing further and further right. But the story of his trajectory is perhaps an interesting example of what happened to many moderate conservatives. In the late 2010s, those “right-of-centre” commentators were given a wink and a nudge to say what they truly think by powerful far-right political leaders.
Featured image via the Canary
