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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.
These people have been around for at least a decade. There is nothing new about them, nor are they part of the political right or that right wing.
It's more like the intellectuals, such as university professors, are gaining influence online, not that the internet is replacing intellectuals. Tyler's article got 350 comments, which is nuts. That's comparable to influencers on on YouTube. University professors are not losing influence at all.
This is not evidence of it having peaked. DEI is still a big deal.
This has been the basic conservative view for decades. It's not a new thing.
That's because it's not so much as a political movement as it's an online or pundit movement. People like Tucker or Yarvin do not aspire to public office.
The pandemic response, such as shutdowns, quarantines, and mask mandates (which were of at best dubious efficacy) was a major blow to the status quo. This was their own doing. Then the inflation surge, which none of the experts saw coming. These events made the public lose faith in experts.
Lawrence Summers, who is about as mainstream an expert you can think of, was predicting high inflation as early as Feb of 2021.
Yes, but the political right was predicting high inflation from 2020.
Yeah, but the political right is constantly predicting high inflation A stopped clock, etc ...
yeah, peter schiff has been saying this forever , and was wrong about the dollar falling
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