Unity 2020: A Tragicomedy
Bret Weinstein’s dual-candidacy experiment is hopeless. So why is he doing it?
The American political system is hopelessly riven, and that’s exactly the way a lot of people like it. For some, the dysfunction is an opportunity to gain money, power, or influence. For others, it’s a grim, curiously exciting confirmation that the old way of doing things no longer works. Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor with a large social media following, appears to be one of those people. As a committed left-winger — or former left-winger, if you ask some of his critics — Weinstein believes the American two-party system is fatally corrupt. Which is why he is proposing a new way of doing things.
Optimistically named Unity2020, Weinstein’s project envisions two candidates, one from the center-right and the other from the center-left, running this year for president of the United States. The two would not be in a hierarchical president/vice-president arrangement — no, they would jointly share the presidency. In the event they are unable to agree on a given solution, a coin toss would decide whose vision prevails.
Twitter has banned the Unity2020 account, and it is fair to speculate that the social media company views Weinstein’s project as a bad-faith election spoiler.
Who is Bret Weinstein? And why is he prying into an election that everyone not named Kanye West has accepted as being between Donald Trump, the incumbent, and Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger?
In the spring of 2017, Weinstein found himself at the center of a campus firestorm at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where a group of students berated and intimidated him for his position on the school’s annual Day of Absence. The students were angry that Weinstein, who is white, had declined the invitation to participate in off-campus race-consciousness workshops.
Weinstein wasn’t the only faculty member the student protesters engaged; one of the more enduring episodes involves their treatment of George Bridges, the university president. But Weinstein’s attempts to calmly and gently reason with protesters who did not seem to want to dialogue, and his subsequent lawsuit against and resignation from Evergreen, have become a symbol of the excesses of campus “wokism” and the illiberal new puritanism of the identity-obsessed left.
Post-Evergreen, and propelled by what happened there, Weinstein carved a place for himself outside academia where, as a central figure in a loose collective of anti-identitarians sometimes referred to as the Intellectual Dark Web, he’s become something of a cause célèbre.
Since then, Weinstein has registered grave concerns over the turn he believes his political tribe has taken, from a class analysis of the world to an identitarian one.
Progressives, Weinstein says, have become hyper-focused on a supposed pyramid of oppression, which holds that straight white men enjoy an unfair advantage over the rest of society. Identity politics promises a fairer society by uncovering the intersecting ways in which too many of its members are differentially oppressed by a heteronormative, white-supremacist system, but Weinstein doesn’t think it can make good on this promise. He believes that the facts of biology and contemporary demographic trends do not support the identity discourse. He prefers the time-honored left-wing approach, which views financial power as the scandal at the heart of inequity. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter during the 2016 primaries, and like many Bernie supporters, he views Hillary’s nomination in 2016, and Biden’s triumph this year, as a sign that the Democratic Party is hopelessly corrupt.
But why a Unity project? There are millions of disaffected Bernie supporters out there, and to the best of my knowledge none of them save Bret Weinstein have responded by conjuring into existence a centrist candidacy experiment as an alternative. So what details are we missing here?
It is possible that the Evergreen episode, not Weinstein’s professed politics, best explains why the Unity 2020 project has come into being. What started happening then, and what Weinstein believes has continued happening since, is a near-total abandonment of the norms of civil society. The right wing has come to tolerate the worst elements in their ranks, and the left has been as quick to abandon mundane material truths in pursuit of its objectives. Perhaps to a scientist like Weinstein, the left’s airy disregard of evolutionary realities is the hardest blow. The Unity project is thus a morally urgent response, as Weinstein sees it, to a particular kind of societal breakdown.
The U.S. has been in a state of upheaval since the 2016 election. From that point on, each side has engaged in an ongoing project of mutual delegitimization. The era’s very starting point, which saw Trump eke out an Electoral College win but lose the popular vote, provides an example of the breakdown Weinstein sees. Critics understood Trump’s win as de facto illegitimate given that three million more Americans voted for his opponent, all the while Trump claimed a popular vote victory that he said was denied him by fraudulent votes. Neither side has been content to construe their rivals as merely wrong in their views; no, they see their rivals as criminal and evil. The resulting atmosphere has been one of disintegrating public trust and social cohesion.
Recognizing that the political status quo is untenable for democracy, Weinstein claims to want to bring the country together by using the best people and ideas from both sides to drill through the gridlock and get us back on track.
One problem with this idea, as many have pointed out, is that Weinstein’s project has no shot at winning, but a non-zero chance at disrupting the election in undesirable ways. If Weinstein manages to convince tens of thousands of people to write in the Unity candidates, or not to vote at all, Unity2020 could end up functioning as an election spoiler.
Does Weinstein have that kind of influence?
There is a narrative we can tell that suggests he does, or that his style of political engagement does. Here’s how it might go.
We’re living in a conspiratorial age. Conspiracy theories and agents of disorder threaten to take down the liberal world. Most of the “theorists” are dupes: stupid, frightened, gullible, or desperate. The agents of disorder are far more sinister. Europe and North America are facing crises on several fronts, from the coronavirus pandemic, to the rise of populism, to a loss of faith in liberal institutions and educated elites, and to a widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Technological advances have radically reshaped our world, with the most profound changes taking place at the interpersonal level.
Deluged with information from interested parties seeking power and money, ordinary people struggle to understand what any of these chaotic changes mean for themselves and their families. They are prodded in all directions by ideological messengers pulling every lever available. They fight through thickets of counterprogramming. They are made to feel like idiots, or like racists. Or like avenging heroes in a covert war. That’s expected when the other side get construed — daily and incessantly — as villains rather than as mere political opponents.
In this turgid fog, it can be hard for regular citizens to see the wires jerking them around. Too many subplots compete for their attention. Cancel culture and its discontents, battling it out on thin ground; libertarians calling for individual rights and the glorious destinies of those who won’t submit, entering into alliance with authoritarians who employ the language of liberty but deploy the guns of war; peaceniks falling in with anti-racists and anti-fascists at the public square, where they weep for the weak, finding victims under every rock they hurl at the red hats. (Oh, the red hats. Deplorable, oppositional, and so excited that they might be winning. Winning, at long last!)
And then there are the lonely smart kids. The keyboard warriors, the desk jockeys, the basement-bedroom boys who’ve been joined by the masses sent to their own “home offices” by the coronavirus pandemic. But the nerdy smart boys’ entire Weltanschauung is their aloneness. Their aloofness, born of necessity and honed by hard experience into brittle spears, requires further retrenchment. The masses hiding in their homes are lemmings. The nerds in their basement are there by choice. After all, who wants to be a member of a club that’ll have you?
Bret Weinstein has a lot of fans among the basement boys. So do other members of the Intellectual Dark Web. These young people are tech-savvy, in many cases bereft of the full range of social encounters, challenges, and joys once afforded to boys and young men. Indeed, many of the usual markers of exuberant manhood are vilified and scorned in (liberal) popular culture. Roughhousing, competitiveness, swagger, and risk-taking behaviors associated with traditional masculinity have been labeled toxic.
What remains to the basement boys is the war of words, memes, and ideas waged on computer screens. Left-wing politics have been co-opted by moral scolds, those hallway monitors patrolling speech and extracting apologies for the smallest of slights. The Democratic Party, heavily reliant on votes from minority populations, in particular African-Americans, has shifted its focus to race politics and a minute examination of the myriad indignities suffered by ethnically-sectioned voter blocs. The basement boys use reason, logic, and data to slay the prim shibboleths of the left.
That’s the story. Is it true? If so, might it propel Weinstein’s Unity2020 project into electoral success?
If we’re measuring that in terms of winning the election, the chances are literally zero. If, again, we have something like a spoiler effect in mind, then the answer is not so clear.
And with the country in a state of emergency, that’s not very reassuring.
Ultimately, it’s unclear why a former Bernie supporter should find himself so troubled by Biden that he feels unable to back him against Donald Trump. Bernie himself has endorsed Biden — But Weinstein has instead chosen to dream up a centrist spectacle that has no shot at winning but a very small shot at granting Trump four more years. Why? For what?
If we take Unity2020 seriously, it suggests Weinstein is eyeing a Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard joint presidency. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is no more or less imperfect than the average politician. Why does Bret Weinstein rate a Crenshaw/Gabbard ticket as so superior to a Biden/Harris ticket that it’s worth the risk of granting Trump four more years? It’s moot, anyway — Weinstein says he wants common sense to prevail, but Crenshaw and Gabbard will never share the presidency, because that is not how the political system works.
The frustrations Weinstein’s followers have with the status quo is understandable. But good change tends to come incrementally, and it requires engagement with reality. The deus ex machina is theater, not reality. This November, either Trump will be granted four more years, or Biden will be elected president. Those are the options.
Weinstein may genuinely believe the Unity2020 is a worthy political project. He may think that he is adding value to the political discussion. If it’s a great idea now, it’ll be even better in a few years, when it’s been fleshed out and brought into alignment with the possible. There will be time to work on radical new ideas after November 2020. But only if this cycle’s raging inferno is put out. And that’s a project that will benefit us all.
