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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31239 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.

Can we have a sensible right that also is not concerned with people's private sex lives? If that lesbian can decrease how many economic migrants are let into Germany, who cares about her Swiss wife? This new right may be incoherent, or maybe they are taking a page from the libertarians and not caring about strictly personal matters of strangers. As shocking as that would be to a 1950s conservative.

What has Donald Trump done that was concerned with people's private sex lives? (Not counting anything anti-trans, which isn't really about private lives anyway)

He appointed the judges who overturned RvW.

Can we have a sensible right that also is not concerned with people's private sex lives?

I would love to be able to not care about other people's sex lives, but it seems like there is a direct line from "well we'll let gay people be gay" through to "we are prescribing puberty blockers to your son/daughter and cutting his/her dick/tits off" and "we're fucking your kids and there's nothing you can do about it"

Pretty ominous in light of California SB145. Always get a chuckle from their unintentional mask off moments like: The bill would put an end to “blatant discrimination against young LGBT people engaged in consensual activity,”.

I think it’s morally consistent to care about people’s sex lives as part of caring about people’s happiness. It’s something most people want to take care of itself so they don’t have to think about it except when it’s personal, but if sexual dissatisfaction were way up and procreation was in mortal danger it could be reasonable to hash out sexual ethics publicly.

Given that it took less than fifteen years to go from "get the government out of our bedrooms" to "we're coming for your kids", I'd expect future movements to become even more concerned with people's personal lives--seeing demands for "privacy" or "live and let live" as nothing more than evil ploys by a group that isn't (yet) powerful enough to impose their will on the majority. A right that embraces "the personal is political" will not become more tolerant of private immorality.

The left's whole "we pulled that 'free speech' trick on you, we're not about to let you pull it on us now we have power" thing has been a more important lesson than people currently appreciate. When they're being directly told by the gloating winners that's how culture war works, reactionaries and even some conservatives are smart enough to realize: "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice... I won't be fooled again."

I expect the upcoming culture war curbstomp of conservative resistance by "minor attracted persons" activists will solidify that, if nothing else does. Watching that swing into low gear has been fascinating.

The left's whole "we pulled that 'free speech' trick on you, we're not about to let you pull it on us now we have power" thing has been a more important lesson than people currently appreciate. When they're being directly told by the gloating winners that's how culture war works, reactionaries and even some conservatives are smart enough to realize: "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice... I won't be fooled again."

TBH I'm shocked that rightists stick by liberal principles at this point. If you're a conservative Jew like Ben Shapiro I guess you feel you have no choice since, as a minority religion, you want the strong minority protections of liberalism.

But any conservative Christian who watches not only the short-term - where the Left basically suckered them that LGBT matters weren't going to be a big imposition - but the greater sweep of history in liberal countries where Christianity (after 2,000 years of resiliency) is facing demographic eclipse and destruction, not to mention legal restrictions on Christians (it's your business but you can't decide to not support a fundamentally unChristian activity)...

By their fruits will ye know them, surely?

Rightists don't stick by liberal principles when they can get away with not. Sure, it isn't illegal to be gay in hungary and poland, but gay propaganda is totally illegal.

The US is different because the civil cold war isn't yet in full swing, and aside from Texas(whose reactionaries both very much exist and are very, very procedural in a way of slowing down the implementation of their agenda) there isn't really a political jurisdiction which is both big and rich enough to do whatever it wants and dominated by conservatives enough to try.

I think this is only a partial answer, but in some cases, people broadly on the right picked up some liberal principles and then grounded them in right-oriented justifications. On the face of it, there was then agreement on the point across the aisle, but via different paths. Roll the clock forward, those liberal principles fell out of favor on the left, and the right looks confused because they thought that point was settled. One example: "colorblindness" as a rejection of racism. This fits in well with the universalist aspects of Christianity, and was adopted by much of the American right as such.

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