Here's my quick take on @jordanbpeterson as media phenomenon. Whatever his merits, I'm alarmed by how the camps in the culture war are able to so quickly transfigure people into such charged symbols.
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Almost as soon as people figured out he had a fanbase tilted to one side, the polarization game took over and now it is like two camps saying, "He's saving civilization," and "He's a fascist." This is a mark of insanity.
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Replying to @michaelbd
Also true for the figures themselves -- if you become famous in a polarized moment, tremendous pressure to "join the side you're on."
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Replying to @DouthatNYT @michaelbd
Which is how lightning-rod figures become the caricatures of themselves that their opponents draw.
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Replying to @DouthatNYT @michaelbd
Or perhaps they were that all along, and the fact that they openly “became” it was proof that one side was correct. (For the record, I don’t think this is just true of people on the right.)
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Replying to @IChotiner @michaelbd
Caricatures generally capture something that there's already. At the same time even Sarah Palin governed Alaska differently from how she sold herself to Fox viewers post-2008.
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That's a good analogy. In Peterson's case, there's an even steeper difference between careful empirical scholar of his clinical work & Jungian he-man caricature of his (self-created) public persona.
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