Jordan Peterson’s marketability has always been a bit surprising given his weirdness. He speaks exclusively in a glottal cadence that sounds like Kermit the Frog after a night of heavy drinking. He calls hostile interlocutors “bucko.” He breaks down in tears when discussing children’s cartoons and has occasionally been known to dress like the Joker. But these days, the reactionary right is miserably bereft of real intellectuals, and a decade or so ago, Peterson stepped into this void and was rewarded with global success.

That success, improbably, comes from a unique fusion of obscurantism and conservative pomposity. There’s a certain genre of left-coded writing, for example, that’s rightly derided for its convolution, even meaninglessness. Perhaps the most common hallmark of this style is the incessant bracketing of words in scare quotes, a tactic that often allows the author (or “author”) to assert ideas or concepts while remaining aloof and evasive about what it is they’re actually saying. Sometimes, there are random capitalizations as well, or particular sentences are italicized for no discernible reason. In this genre, everything—right down to the very act of writing itself—plays out in linguistic abstraction, and at a convenient remove from anything tangible or concrete.

The worst reactionary prose, on the other hand, is often the precise inverse, its most recognizable hallmark being the needless adornment of extremely banal thoughts or truisms with pompous verbiage designed to make them sound smart. Thus, as Nathan Robinson observed in a 2018 essay, someone like Peterson simply cannot bring himself to write “the man’s cancer metastasized” when the sentence “the man fell prey to the tendency of that dread condition to metastasize” is readily available.

The incredible thing about Peterson is that, in writing and speech, he somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook. He is a master of faux-Confucian aphorisms—“There is no being without imperfection”—and spouts kindergarten morality with the self-serious gravitas of a bearded prophet who has just been handed stone tablets by the Almighty. But he’s long been equally prone to deconstructive cul-de-sacs and conceptual negations that save him from ever having to explain what he actually thinks or means. (“You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you........

© The Walrus