Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conspiracy Theory of Western Decline
THE LATEST SENSATION in the “heterodox” media ecosystem is a long essay by celebrated author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali titled “We Have Been Subverted.” Bari Weiss, whose Free Press website published it this week, touted it as “one of the year’s most important essays.” Ali’s husband, British historian Niall Ferguson, called it “essential.” Several tweets linking to the essay went viral.
In fact, the essay is notable mainly for one thing: it represents a startling plunge, for Ali and evidently for the Free Press, into outright, unabashed conspiracy theory.
The core of Ali’s argument is that much of today’s social and cultural turmoil in the United States and more generally in Western countries—or, at least, the destabilizing trends on the left—are the product of deliberate anti-Western subversion. While Ali makes the disclaimer that not everyone advancing the ideas she considers destructive (for example, a teacher who bring racial identity politics into the classroom) is knowingly working for the conspiracy, she believes that even they are unwittingly participating in processes that were set in motion by the West’s enemies and have taken on a momentum of their own.
And who are those enemies of the West? Ali identifies a trifecta: American Marxists, who have switched from Soviet communism to “cultural communism” (a “fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles”); “radical Islamists” represented by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Chinese Communist Party. She also believes that “Vladimir Putin is currently waging his own subversion campaign by supporting and advancing the three other forces.”
WHAT MAKES ALI’S CONSPIRATORIAL TURN so unfortunate is that her critique of toxic cultural trends in America and the West is often on point. Yes, shunting fourth-graders into “racial affinity” groups and having them map their “oppressor” and “oppressed” identities is bad. Yes, focusing on Thomas Jefferson’s slave ownership while giving short shrift to the liberatory politics of the American Revolution that eventually paved the way for the abolition of slavery can invite what Ali calls “civilizational self-loathing”—the idea that America and the West are no better than authoritarian societies around the world, or even uniquely evil. Yes, the embrace of Hamas by many social justice activists in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel exposed the movement’s moral bankruptcy, and the emergence of groups like “Queers for Palestine” which try to blend a Hamas-friendly worldview with an LGBT-friendly one is a spectacular case of intersectionalist idiocy. Yes, the movement for transgender equality raises some difficult questions—about women’s sports, single-sex spaces, puberty blockers, etc.—that often get labeled “transphobic” instead of being given a nuanced look. Yes, the push to destigmatize nontraditional sexuality can lead to almost certainly unhealthy trends like the romanticization of polyamory. And so on.
The problem is with Ali’s explanation for these tendencies, which amounts to a Grand Unified Theory of Subversion. Here, she relies on the late Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, who once worked for the Novosti news agency in India (and, covertly, for the KGB), defected in 1970, eventually settled in the United States, and devoted his career to talking about Soviet subversion. Bezmenov, who died in 1993, claimed that the KGB’s real agenda was not espionage but the slow infiltration, demoralization, and subversion of Western societies from within by means of hijacking, corrupting, and replacing these societies’ values. Over the last ten years or so, I’ve had a number of people ask me about Bezmenov and, specifically, the possibility that the wave of social justice activism and the attendant leftward shift on cultural issues were a part of the subversion strategy he had identified. I thought this notion was, to put it politely, extremely far-fetched, if only because many of this movement’s ideas (e.g., the preoccupation with emotional “safety”) seemed so drastically removed from anything a KGB or FSB agent could have invented.
While some of Bezmenov’s work has been cited by analysts of Kremlin “active measures” and disinformation such as former FBI special agent and Yale senior lecturer Asha Rangappa, there is no question that he is primarily a cult figure on the far right. His lectures in the 1980s were hosted by a John Birch Society offshoot; he complained about being rejected by the CIA and claimed that there was a “conspiracy at the highest level” in the United States to prop up the Soviet regime. That was in 1984 under Ronald Reagan. You get the picture.
Ali concedes that Bezmenov’s formulation of “subversion” may not explain or address “all the West’s problems.” However, she writes, “once I immersed myself in his formulation, many of the topsy-turvy developments in our institutions fell into place.”
Of course they did. That’s how conspiracy theory works: Everything falls into place once you accept it. And it’s unfalsifiable.
In fact, Ali acknowledges that the primary evidence of Bezmenovite subversion is a “vibe.” (I thought relying on subjective feelings as proof of systemic social problems was “woke” and bad?) What’s more, in the schema of subversion that Bezmenov outlined, the first phase, “demoralization,” can be a gradual process that takes as long as thirty years to brainwash a new generation. In other words, this is an extremely amorphous theory for which actual evidence is going to be scarce. No wonder analyzing Ali’s explication of the evidence she sees all around her is like nailing Jell-O to the wall, or trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that come from several different sets.
For instance, Ali writes that for many people, the alarm bell signaling something wrong was the 2020 “omni-breakdown . . . with the crises [of] the Covid-19 pandemic and the draconian controls that governments imposed, and the George Floyd riots.” In her view, this was “the revolution” reaching boiling point after years of subversion. Is she suggesting that the “draconian controls”—which differed greatly from country to country—were somehow part of the same agenda as the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd? You could certainly argue that social tensions in the summer of 2020 were exacerbated by stresses caused by the pandemic and by the mitigation strategies. But sometimes, a perfect storm of crises happens. It doesn’t mean that someone is pulling the strings and levers, or even that someone set the machinery in motion at some point in the past.
(Let’s pause to note, by the way, that the “draconian controls” imposed during the pandemic did not, as some on the right darkly warned, turn into a prelude to broader regulation to achieve progressive goals; instead, they were phased out when the pandemic passed. Also, no one has explained why Sweden, definitely one of the more “woke” countries in Europe, became an anti-lockdown Mecca in 2020.)
Ali’s grab-bag of “demoralization” also includes the “defund the police” movement as one of the assaults on traditional institutions. But that movement turned out to be extremely short-lived; now, even progressive jurisdictions (San Francisco!) are boosting police funding.
Even more mystifying, Ali asks us to “consider, for example, our culture’s attitude toward pedophiles, now rebranded as ‘minor-attracted persons.’” But rebranded by whom? (Ali’s link on “minor-attracted persons,” which I removed, goes to an obscure advocacy site.) There have been fringe efforts to rebrand pedophilia for decades—dating back to NAMBLA in the 1970s—and they have all been met with public scorn and revulsion. That remains true today. While a few articles have appeared in progressive publications over the years advocating tolerance toward non-offending pedophiles, they have invariably caused a strong backlash. Salon, which ran a couple of such articles in 2015, eventually took them down. In 2021, Allyn Walker, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, published a book that attempted to reframe adult-child sexual attraction as a sexual orientation rather than a disorder and “minor-attracted people” as a part of the “genderqueer community.” The outcry that ensued was such that Walker was placed on an administrative leave and then agreed to step down from the faculty.
Ali’s bizarre grab-bag also includes the movement for assisted suicide, activism by self-immolation (which is exceptionally rare), and the proliferation of “DINKS” (“dual-income, no kids”) couples that supposedly deride the “natural human urge to create and nurture new human life.”
And, in a telling moment, Ali excoriates progressive critics of “systemic racism” in law enforcement for undermining trust in the rule of law—but also cites “the conviction last week of the front-runner presidential candidate on 34 counts of obvious political charges” as an event that sows distrust in the justice system. Here’s how the logic works: When left-wingers talk about racial bias in law enforcement and the courts (which does exist, even if it’s far more complicated than progressives claim), they are the ones subverting the justice system. When right-wingers complain that Donald Trump’s prosecution is a witch-hunt, the prosecutors are the ones doing the subverting.
Ali does briefly acknowledge that “Republicans also demonized the Justice Department, the FBI, and members of the judiciary when it suited them.” But she promptly suggests that conservatives’ cynicism is mainly the fault of “what they see as the lax enforcement of the law as applied toward groups like antifa, Black Lives Matter, and pro-Hamas demonstrators.” By the way, “What they see as” is doing a lot of work in this sentence.
WHEN ALI DOES CITE a specific example of “subversion” grounded in legitimate evidence instead of baseless speculation—the Chinese-government sponsored “Confucius Institutes” on numerous college campuses, including some in the United States, which supposedly promote Chinese culture but often engage in espionage, propaganda, and intimidation toward critics of Beijing—that example, too, turns out to be pretty weak. There is no indication that these institutes promote any broader ideologies, other than trying to polish China’s image in the West. What’s more, many schools are now shutting them down precisely because they are viewed as propaganda vehicles. And while I agree with Ali that Chinese ownership of TikTok is a problem, especially where data security is concerned, I seriously doubt that TikTok’s promotion of “wokeness” among American kids is a CCP strategy. Ten years ago, American-owned Tumblr played the same role with no foreign or domestic puppet masters.
Meanwhile, Ali’s mention of Putin as an agent of subversion somehow manages to leave out the well-known fact that, while the Kremlin’s operations abroad do have links to Islamism, Russian “active measures” in the West are very distinctly linked to the nationalist/populist right, including one Donald J. Trump. (Robert Mueller’s investigation and the report of the Senate intelligence committee provide compelling evidence of Russian meddling intended not just to promote chaos but to help Trump in 2016.) Nor does Ali mention that a lot of people on the right regard Putin as their anti-woke savior: presumably, that doesn’t fit into Ali’s Grand Unified Theory of Subversion, or into the Free Press’s reluctance to criticize the right.
Of course, to see the recent growth of nationalism and populism in the United States and other Western countries as primarily due to Kremlin malfeasance would be absurd: at most, Putin’s minions are exploiting, and sometimes escalating, existing problems and trends. But to see the cultural and social upheavals of the past ten years as manifestations of a “subverted society,” to use Ali’s words, is equally preposterous.
THE REASONS FOR THOSE UPHEAVALS—some of which are cycles in long-term trends going back to the 1960s and 1970s, or even earlier—are varied and complex, especially since Ali is trying to pull together such disparate phenomena. Changes in family structure, for instance, are the result of women’s evolving roles, the advent of reliable contraception, and the rise of the affluent consumer society. The right-to-die movement, which is now widely viewed as having gone too far, is partly a response to medical advances that can keep people alive—and in pain or at least severe discomfort—for much longer than was possible in earlier generations. Finally, many of the trends Ali discusses are extensions of the principle of individual autonomy, a part of the set of post-Enlightenment Western values that she (rightly) credits with enabling unprecedented human flourishing. Can such principles as personal freedom and tolerance be taken too far? Can some important humanistic values clash with other equally important ones? Yes, of course. But free societies constantly negotiate such questions.
Likewise, the social justice movements that Ali regards as subversive—and which are, in fact, often toxic in their attacks on modern liberal democracies—are largely an extension, or distortion, of liberal principles that seek to extend the benefits of liberty and equality to traditionally excluded groups (women, racial minorities, gays, etc.). The 1619 Project, which Ali mentions in passing, arguably distorted American history. But the impetus for it came in large part from the failure to grapple with the tragedies of black history in America (not just slavery, but the betrayal of black Americans after the Reconstruction for the sake of national unity). The feminist movement was born from the contradictions between the Western, and especially American, ideal of the autonomous individual and social and cultural norms that circumscribed female autonomy. Sexual liberation movements applied the principles of liberty to sexual choices.
The internet and social media are another elephant in the room. Just as mass affluence enabled many ordinary men and women to pursue “liberated” lifestyles that were once the province of the upper class, the new media landscape took democratic self-expression to unprecedented new levels. In some ways, this is comparable to the rise of mass print culture and rudimentary consumer culture in the eighteenth century—only with a far bigger and more dynamic reach. The technological and economic changes of the eighteenth century generated the Enlightenment and finally erupted into the American and French Revolutions. And then, too, there was also a proliferation of conspiracy theories that blamed the social and political turbulence on subversive activities by the Freemasons and the Illuminati.
Chinese propaganda, radical Islamism, and homegrown social justice radicalism absolutely deserve criticism and pushback (and they are already getting it: for instance, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements, which Ali asserts are “now a requirement at universities across America,” have already been jettisoned by some major institutions including Harvard and MIT). But the Grand Unified Theory of Subversion should be just as resolutely rejected. Like all conspiratorial explanations of complex phenomena, it inhibits rather than promotes understanding.
Many people agree with Ali that “Western” values—“the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism”—are worth preserving and are currently under attack. But the attack is not coming only from the left. And paranoia about left-wing subversion can easily feed right-wing desires for an authoritarian state that crushes pluralism, tolerance, and liberty in the name of crushing the insidious enemy.
