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Notes -
Classical liberalism vs. The New Right
Tyler Cowen responds to the ‘New Right’-
The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated by technological, political, and demographic shifts. The future is now, old man, and it’s all about groups, and Kaldor-Hicks efficiencies. Given our degenerate institutions there is no way any particular set of losers can actually expect compensation for their damages, and so all one can hope for is that our particular sect wins out in the scrum of sectarian squabbling.
Yet, listening to a recent interview of his, I was struck by his (likely correct) bone-deep cynicism towards grand reform. His marginal revolution is lower variance than a monarchy or integralist state, and so intrinsically less ambitious. X-risks seem to demand a serious response, but Cowen just shrugs and hopes we have a nice few centuries before we destroy ourselves.
I think this is the key difference. I also think there's a racial angle here. Whites in the US (and in the West more generally) have been the most ardent defenders and practitioners of individualism. The people who told them to do this were using arguments very similar to the ones employed by Jordan B. Peterson.
How did that go? The right has been losing on nearly everything. The only area where the right has won is on economics, but even here there's a question to what extent we should treat neoliberal victory as "right-wing". Previous incarnations of US conservatism (think late 1800s, early 1900s) were deeply critical, if not outright hostile, to capitalism. Those intellectuals viewed capitalism as uprooting traditional ways of life, destroying the countryside and spoiling nature.
It was only with Reaganism (about the time when Cowen was a young lad) that the shift towards equating rampant capitalism somehow became associated with being "right-wing". Perhaps there is a generational divide here.
So to me, the two big differences with the New Right are: A) understanding that working collectively, including using state power, is necessary and dogmatic individualism has failed to reap benefits together. B) neoliberalism is less important than cultural and social issues and can in fact work against you, e.g. many corporations are very woke and have done next to nothing to push back at social trends that the New Right views as harmful or unwanted.
Are we watching the same movie?
Because from where I'm sitting it doesn't look like the right is loosing at all. We're watching 60 years of progressive academic dogma implode before our eyes in exactly the way that old school Republicans have been predicting it eventually would. The Gods of the Copybook Headings have returned and this is somehow supposed to be a strike against Kipling? I don't buy it.
Sure the Libertarians are loosing but that is as was expected. Their alliance with the wider right wasn't so much a matter of shared values and ideology as it was an accident of history. The US' founding as a frontier state allowing many who were anarchists by temperament to kinda-sorta paint themselves as "conservatives". In any other democratic nation they'd be caucusing with the rest of the utopian radicals.
Clearly we're not, because in the film I'm watching, conservatives are losing basically every culture war battle: race, religion, drugs, sexual mores, abortion, immigration, LGBT. Rural America is dysfunctional and dying. The soft power of conservative communities has never been lower, with conservatives basically reduced to trying to secede from civil society because they're completely unable to gain any traction. Instead of going to church the kids keep moving to the big city, turning gay, and engaging in unmarried cohabitation with a trans atheist who immigrated illegally from Mexico, and there's no indication that this is reversing.
These political defeats are not totally unqualified. Gun rights have been entrenched, the post-Dobbs status quo remains to be seen (though I am fairly confident that it will highly unsatisfying to most pro-life activists), economic and environmental policy are much more of a fight, and conservatives still enjoy a tremendously favorable position when it comes to the exercise of hard power. But the idea that we're witnessing a liberal implosion seems pretty dubious.
Social conservatism is politically dead, but the Right is not -- but it does need to grow past social conservatism. We can never go back; we can make something new.
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In the film I'm watching the woke are exercising greater and greater control over a rapidly shrinking sphere. There is broad agreement amongst members of both sexes that the "liberation" of the sexual revolution was nothing of the sort. The idea of rational technocratic rule by academics and experts has been utterly discredited. and at least where I'm at, church crowds are growing and skewing younger, lots of couples with kids.
Accordingly I say "stay the course" and "Go with God".
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Not to mention abortion wins.
That's the thing, from where I'm sitting the the right is winning on economics, winning on, gun rights, winning on abortion. The trans/groomer stuff has proven hilariously unpopular and has rendered a bunch of formerly "safe" progressive seats competitive for conservative candidates for the first time in decades, ditto the "defund the police" nonsense. While I would advise against getting cocky I think it's indicative of the current state of the Democratic party that Biden is already a lame-duck less than half way through his first term.
The right is winning on economics only in as much as we're not headed towards actual Communism. The right is winning on gun rights and abortion only in red states. And for gun rights, not at the Federal level in particular -- NFA1934 and GCA1968 stand unencumbered, as does ATF and its burdensome variety of regulations. The "defund the police" nonsense is unpopular but happening (just not as much as the left would like), as are DAs who don't want to charge crimes.
You're kidding me right? Gun Rights advocates have not just been winning but winning decisively for the last 15+ years. 94 AWB repealed, 2nd Amendment incorporated against the states, magazine bans struck down, may-issue permitting struck down, transport bans struck down. "Constitutional carry" has gone from being legal in 3 states to 24 states, and gun-control is viewed as electorally toxic in all but the bluest of blue enclaves.
Far from being evidence of impending defeat, the fact that things like national permit reciprocity and the possibility of amending or repealing the NFA are even in the conversation is a mark of just how far we've come.
One could argue that there's a difference between winning de facto and de jure; pistol braces, bump stocks and triggers, 3d printing, general fabrication tech proliferation and the cultural effects of these have been quite successful on a de facto basis. It's true that ink on paper can't bind willful humans, and the willful have never been better-armed.
De jure, as you note, significant progress has been made on a number of fronts. Concealed carry is steadily marching its way through the states. There have been court decisions that should, in principle, be decisive.
Only, the court decisions are not, in fact, decisive. Blue states and orgs have proven themselves willing to simply thumb their noses at court decisions they don't like, and the courts have not, to date, been willing to actually call them on it with sufficient penalties to make the gamesmanship cost-prohibitive. Heller still can't have his gun. Changing this would require the SC to actually lay down the law, and lesser courts to fall in line. The former is questionable, the latter seems very unlikely. The SC certainly has come farther than I expected, but whether it can deliver a true social victory on the scale of Roe or Obergefell remains to be seen.
Self-defense took a horrible hit in 2020. Every case of armed self-defense that rose to prominence in the riots saw the defendant scapegoated and pilloried by the entire force of society and government, frequently to disastrous effect. Blues might not be able to stop you from defending yourself, but they are willing and able to fuck your entire life up if you try in a way they disapprove of, and law and norms be damned.
Likewise, I see no evidence that Blues have given up on confiscation, and think it entirely probable that they'll push for it at the federal level the exact moment they think they can. I don't think they care about the logistical problems. My guess is that they'll simply start ruining lives in as messy and public a way as possible, and then just keep doing that at whatever rate the system can generate, indefinitely, until the public either caves or things come unglued. that's been their strategy in other situations, so why expect different here?
One can, again, argue that none of this matters, because our choices remain as open as they ever have. But "you can exercise your rights if you're willing to have your life ruined" is not a central definition of "winning", and that does seem to be what we're moving toward.
You and I see 2020 very differently. If anything i think the 2020 riots helped our case. The blue tribe base was forced to face what many in the opposition have been telling them for years, guns are already pretty well regulated, and when seconds count the cops are only minutes away. Yes the media and the democratic party establishment did their best to pillory who stood up to their shock-troopers, but they are also becoming increasingly irrelevant. Their attempts ultimately failed further damaging their credibility in the process. They might still be stupid enough to attempt to confiscation but my confidence in public willingness to resist and their subsequent failure has never been higher.
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I have the last +10 round magazines that can legally be imported into my state. When I die they must be destroyed. This happened the year after "sensible liberals" in this very community told us "fun control is a dead issue after 2020, don't worry about voting (D) because nobody's trying to take your guns you paranoid hicks".
What's this "winning", and who's it happening to?
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Sunsetted, and effective only in red states because blue states went and outlawed all that stuff anyway.
In theory only.
NJ magazine possession ban upheld at the appeals level. Case vacated and remanded by Bruen but not overturned.
So maybe 10 years after getting "caught" transporting a gun through an anti-gun area you'll clear the felony charges hanging over your head. Unless they decide the gun was too readily available (and thus not subject to the safe transport law) because you could have lowered the rear seat to access the trunk.
If there was a real win here, I could go to a gun store tomorrow -- in my home state of New Jersey or in New York or Pennsylvania or any other -- plunk down some cash, get a gun and ammo and a holster, strap that gun to my hip, and take that gun to my office in New York City without breaking any gun laws. I cannot do most of that. I cannot buy a gun in New Jersey because there is an onerous permitting system to buy a gun; I need to disclose some information I do not know and get two unrelated adults to swear I'm moral enough to buy a gun. I cannot buy a gun in New York or Pennsylvania because interstate sales of guns are forbidden. I can buy the ammo in Pennsylvania, at least, though what good it does without a gun I don't know. If I strap a gun to my hip, that's a felony; there's ANOTHER onerous permit system in New Jersey (THREE unrelated adults now to swear I'm moral enough to carry a gun) and yet another in New York (and one in PA which I believe is less onerous). And even if I had the permit, the various restrictions on carry would make it impossible to get to my office without violating some gun law or another.
Consider what a real win looks like. Obergefell. All the gays could get married, everywhere in the country, almost immediately. Officials who resisted (and I only know of one) were punted aside like nothing.
Sunsetted because every attempt to renew or extend it went down in flames. Likewise when you say "effective only in red states" what you actually mean is "effective in 43 states out of 50", the 7 exceptions being California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. (Fun aside, a lot of cold-war era battle rifles are over 50 years old now and can be exempted as antiques )
California's magazine ban has been struck down so if New Jersey's ban was upheld as you claim we now get to see the supreme court rectify the disagreement between the circuits.
As an aside, we've been going back and forth on this and other topics for 10 years now (since summer 2012), and that whole time your schtick has always been that wokeness is all powerful, wokeness is omnipresent, the right is doomed, resistance is futile, etc... etc... Has it occurred to you that it only seems that way because you keep seeking it out? Like I get that a FAANG job in NYC is a big status boost, but you were ultimately the one who made the choice to step into the lion's den.
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There was a recent district court ruling using the Bruen standard that found 18 U.S.C. § 922(k) unconstitutional and dismissed a federal indictment for violating the statute, wasn't there? Section 922 is from the 1968 GCA.
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Through who's action is that occuring?
The left retains the initiative, through all it's panic the right hasn't actually done anything.
The attacker always holds the initiative. That is just the nature of warfare. Furthermore repulsing your enemy's attacks, exposing their weaknesses, and forcing their withdrawal is not "nothing" it's how you win a defensive action.
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The whole post-war post-modern "rule by experts" intellectual edifice.
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What implosion would that be?
"It failed, but still, nobody's going to stop it" is not an implosion.
What makes you think there's a difference?
It doesn't make sense to count something as having imploded unless as a result it's not there, or at least drastically cut down, or gotten weak enough that outside forces could cut it down. There's no sign of any "implosion" like this.
Infighting that doesn't weaken the group is not an implosion.
Infighting has absolutely weakened the group. Like i said wokism is deeply unpopular and has made a bunch of formerly safe seats competative, and partisan Infighting has effectively ensured that there are no "young up and comers" in a position to take over on the democratic side when Pelosi inevitably kicks the bucket. Who are the democrats going to run in 2024? Who are the going to run in 2028. Lightfoot? Coumo? Cortez? Who else do they have under the age of 75?
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Hlynka is confusing purity spirals with implosions of the whole movement.
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It depends how you define 'right' or 'won'. Politically, the right has held its own in the courts and major branches of government. The House is spilt, and Republicans and Democrats have held executive office roughly same amount of time. Roe v. Wade was overturned. The left has faced enormous resistance regarding gun rights. In the private sector, except for low taxes, the left has won (such as DEI). The left obviously won the universities. THe right is winning in terms of sentiment, such as anti-woke backlash on YouTube and on Twitter, I think, but this is not enough to secure power.
Roe v. Wade and gun rights are due to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court got that way because of Trump and is still like that because it can "hold its own" just by having the justices stay alive, bypassing the political process.
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In what sense did the right win there? Government social spending has pretty much been a straight line up for eight decades in the United States.
Probably in regard to taxes. Trump slashed corporate taxes considerably. The left has been pushing for a wealth tax for a long time.
Abortion, that is a major win.
I would consider it the only major victory of the right.
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"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. "
I can't think of a time where a recognizably conservative movement in the US was anti-capitalist. The WJB style populists might, in some sense, be called conservatives (them being as much a religious revival movement as a political movement) but, I think, instead they just demonstrate the difficulty of applying modern categories too closely to the past. After all, one would hardly call Grover Cleveland, whose faction WJB drove out of power in the Democratic Party, the left of the contemporary Democrats!
This is really just absolute nonsense. The association of capitalism with the American right-wing is about as old as the country itself, depending on exactly what you mean by capitalism and 'right-wing'. It's telling that the modern left thinks of the Jeffersonians as the 'conservatives' in the First Party System but really both parties in that era were pro-capitalism. The Federalists were an alliance of commercial and incipient industrial capitalists in the Atlantic port cities and the Republicans were agrarian capitalists more interested in trade and export. As you trace the lines forward, probably the only really thorough-goingly anti-capitalist sentiments you'll get are from the pro-slavery apologists like Fitzhugh but, even then, in practice the pro-slavery faction of the Democrats just wanted the same kind of export oriented commercial capitalism that the Old Republicans had. The post-Civil War Republicans were very pro-capitalism, so was the Conservative wing of the Democratic party. As the left-leaning labor wing of the Democrats developed and the various flavors of the original Progressive movement came into being you got anti-capitalism showing up again in American politics, but always invariably from the Left. Some of the more elitist strains of Progressivism are arguably more right-leaning than left but they just show useless the scale can become in the margins.
Honestly, the anti-capitalism of the New Right comes more from a deep-seated leftism at its heart. It's mostly young people who come from a youth cultural milieu that is extremely left wing (both socially and economically) and it just kind of swaps in a cultural conservatism (although one that honestly feels weirdly different from the Christian conservatism of decades ago) while maintaining the anti-market prejudices of their roots. In that way they're kind of like the original Populists, but they're not usually particularly closely related to the actual cultural roots of 19th century populism: few people who consciously identify as 'New Right' have an agrarian, Christian background and are instead usually suburban or urbanites from more-or-less de facto secular backgrounds.
Indeed, the stereotype of "the yankee trader" predates the declaration of independence. Its a running joke along the gulf-coast that the US national pastimes prior to baseball were bootlegging and piracy.
Yeah, and even the ultra-wealthy Southern plantation owners were the analogical poor cousins of European nobility, who were forced by markets and circumstances to take an unseemly level of interest in the day to day management of their farms, ie. they were rural capitalists subject to market pressures.
Their favorite pastime was even bitching about their Scottish factors.
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Really, they're more remarkable not for individualism (which would presumably manifest as no significant difference in attitude towards different racial groups), but instead for flipping the old tribal paradigm on its head and concluding that their racial ingroup is uniquely wicked.
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I think you're missing some pretty big things here. For instance, there was notable (though not universal) Republican opposition to the New Deal. In 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater generally opposed the New Deal - a pretty big split from Eisenhower. Nixon (the nominee in 1960 and 1968) supported "New Federalism", which was essentially replacing federal New Deal programs with grants to states. All of this was against a backdrop of Cold War anti-communism.
Even before the New Deal, Hoover was against government welfare (remember Scott's review?). Before him, Coolidge cut taxes and spending.
So, I'm not really comfortable saying that capitalism was associated with being right-wing only with Reagan. It seems to be an association that, if it even has a single origin, came decades earlier - possibly with the New Deal, but likely before even that, with Eisenhower being an exception to the rule.
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This is a telling argument only if one believes that classical liberalism in general, and civil liberties in particular, are valuable only because they tend to lead to preferred policies. It is not so telling if one believes that civil liberties are intrinsically valuable.
That's a contradiction that just exposes classical liberalism as self-defeating.
If:
you believe that civil liberties are intrinsically valuable
and you are an individualist
but individualism loses the culture war and loses political power to groups that cooperate to achieve power
and losing in turn compromises the civil liberties you care about
How is the classical liberal going to respond? He could maintain faith that individualism will win, despite the fact that individualism is an asymmetrically-distributed personality trait predominantly held by the declining demographic of white men, and not a universal value. Or, he could just decide to lose gracefully. But there's no path to victory there.
If by "individualist" you mean complete loner who cannot work with and stand anyone else, you are right. There are such people, but they are few in number and do not tend to care about politics.
Actual classical liberals were, in their time, succesfully organizing on large scale and did not saw it as compromising of their principles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corn_Law_League
Voluntary organization and the whole concept of a 'civil society' is actually central to classical liberal philosophy and practice.
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I think that's a false choice. Many people cherish free speech. Indeed, if we had true free speech, I suspect the right would notch a lot more cultural victories as there would be far more pushback on social media etc. Why are most of us even here to begin with? Censorship on major platforms like reddit.
So the issue isn't civil liberties. It's that classical liberalism has failed utterly to safeguard the principles that it wishes to uphold. In short, it's not enough to want something. You must also actively create the space for it. This is where the differences from the old, libertarian-leaning right that Cowen belongs to and the New Right begin to emerge.
Many on the New Right wouldn't even blink twice about using the state to force private companies to censor less, or to mandate viewpoint diversity in universities by using state power. But that would be sacrilege if you're a classical liberal. So you "lose beautifully" instead. Such an approach has been an utter failure for the past few decades and the New Right has drawn the appropriate conclusions.
Expecting this to cash out into culture war victories is rather optimistic.
As long as “true free speech” doesn’t supersede exit rights, people will quietly self-select away from the witches. Most of them will quite openly seek out the likeminded. The filter bubble doesn’t rely on top-down censorship, even though it can benefit from it.
China’s social credit is an attempt at the converse. Speech isn’t free at all, but interaction with the party line is mandatory. Participants are thus subjected to the filter. This is intolerable to the classical liberals, as well as the libertarians (and thus some of the New Right). Others among the neoreactionaries and traditionalists, not so much. Creating their own sphere is only worthwhile if they can keep people in it.
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Would it? It would certainly be sacrilege to a modern libertarian, who tend to not be overly concerned with threats to individual liberty from powerful non-state actors. But I am not sure if that is necessarily 100% true of classical liberals.
Edit: Eg, Mill wrote at length about the threat to liberty from non-state actors, esp society at large, and Adam Smith was far more friendly to the welfare state than are libertarians. So, libertarian beliefs are not entirely congruent with classical liberal beliefs.
Almost no one cherishes "free speech" -- most people cherish free speech for themselves, but not so much for those with whom they disagree. They cherish free speech instrumentally, not intrinsically. Which is really not cherishing free speech at all.
That's probably correct and a depressing thought.
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