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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31241 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Classical liberalism vs. The New Right

Tyler Cowen responds to the ‘New Right’-

There is also a self-validating structure to New Right arguments over time. You can’t easily persuade New Right advocates by pointing to mainstream media reports that contradict their main narrative. Mainstream media is one of the least trusted sources. Academic research also has fallen under increasing mistrust, as the academy predominantly hires individuals who support the Democratic Party.

Most classical liberals are uncomfortable with the New Right approaches, and seek to disavow them. I share those concerns, and yet I also recognize that hard and fast lines are not so easy to draw. The New Right is in essence accepting the original classical liberal critique of the state and pushing it a few steps further, adding further skepticism of elites, a greater emphasis on culture, and a belief in elite collusion rather than checks and balances. You may or may not agree with those intellectual moves, but many common premises still are shared between the classical liberals and the New Right, even if neither side is fully comfortable admitting this.

The New Right also tends to see the classical liberals as naïve about power (the same charge classical liberals fling at the establishment), and as standing on the losing side of history. Those aren’t the easiest arguments to refute. Furthermore, the last twenty years have seen 9/11, a failed Iraq War, a major financial crisis and recession, and a major pandemic, mishandled in some critical regards. It doesn’t seem that wrong to become additionally skeptical about American elites, and the New Right wields these points effectively.

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.

The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated

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.

Previous incarnations of US conservatism (think late 1800s, early 1900s) were deeply critical, if not outright hostile, to capitalism.

"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!

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.

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.

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'.

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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