Is Jordan Peterson More Postmodern Than He Thinks?

“Peterson is aligned with the alt-right not because he is a card-carrying member but because both he and the alt-right are nostalgic for previous paradigms. They yearn for the America of yesteryear—the same time period Trump and his supporters envision when they call to ‘Make America Great Again.'”

Jordan Peterson has been called “dangerous,” a “custodian of the patriarchy,” and “full of shit.” In each of his appearances, he articulates his frustration with what he terms “postmodern neo-Marxists,” which he defines as a group of radical identitarians who believe in “making over humanity in the image of [their] ideology.” “It doesn’t matter who you are as an individual,” Peterson explains of the ideology, “it matters who you are in terms of your group identity.” He assumes radical leftists think hierarchies are “constructs of the Western patriarchy” and must be done away with. Armed with leftist identity politics and an understanding of gender as socially-constructed, the postmodern neo-Marxists, Peterson fears, will tend towards authoritarianism by policing free speech and undermining Western society.

Peterson is one of the latest figures to assume celebrity because he peddles nostalgia for a time before postmodernism and identity politics. And he is not the only public figure to do so. In the wake of globalization, a worldwide financial depression, and intense technological acceleration, nostalgia has taken a firm hold of Western culture.

Nostalgic rhetoric peaks during times of crisis as individuals seek meaning and stability. The anxiety and fragmentation that accompanied globalization in the 1980’s and 1990’s intensified tremendously after the one-two punch of 9/11 and the financial meltdown of 2008. Resulting from global bankers engaging in predatory and subprime lending, the 2008 financial crisis only exacerbated this anxiety of a postmodern world in which the codes of meaning became scrambled beyond recognition. Palliative measures such as the bailout of major multinational financial institutions hammered the final nail in the coffin and ensured corporate capitalism is indeed “too big to fail.”