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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31229 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.

And Karl Marx was an bourgeois wannabe who lived on handouts from his parents and Engels and never worked a day of real labour in his life. And neither was he able to fully articulate what the ideal communist state would look like.

Just because their personal lives don't perfectly reflect their stated ideological preferences doesn't mean their preferences aren't real or don't resonate with a lot of people.

You say this as if it were an argument in support of the, you know, those ideological preferences.

No, I'm saying that simply pointing out that people aren't the perfect paragons of the ideology they support isn't actually a rebuttal of that ideology or their arguments. It's the textbook definition of ad hominem.

Perhaps it is exactly because these 'New Right' live in a modern liberal society and have modern liberal lives they can articulate their dissatifaction with it. Someone like Meloni would probably agree that raising a child as a single mother is not ideal despite being one herself, and probably supports (and does to my knowledge) support traditional social institutions that would make it less common.

Why do you think that ad hominem is necessarily a fallacy?

Suppose you meet a guy at a party who explains in detail why modern plumbing sucks and how to improve on it vastly. You're intrigued and ask how his elegant mutations and cunning annihilations worked out in practice--only to discover that not only he never tried them ever, but also never did any plumbing at all, modern or otherwise. Is it wrong to disregard his special plan for your toilet with extreme prejudice? I don't think so, because there are vastly more completely deranged plans than actually good ones, one can't end up with a good one without actually trying them in the real world, a lot, and it's not worth your time to debunk a theory that was never put into practice.

Similarly, OK, we can accept it when someone says "it sucks" about a situation they are not themselves necessarily in, or in but having never experienced something different. Marx complaining about labor conditions, a single mother complaining about single motherhood, yeah sure. But when they start proposing their fixes that they have no experience living with whatsoever, then it's entirely valid to ad hominem them.

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