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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.

Conservatives do not need to articulate a coherent vision of society - by their nature they like things the way they were or at least the way they were when they were kids. Though few really desire a return to the 1950s or the 1920s anymore, I'd say the median right-voter longs for the 90s - peace, prosperity, American power, gays out of the closet but not by much, jokes about transsexuals on TV, and a cordial racial dialogue. If this desire is not articulated by a visionary intellectual vanguard, it's because visionary intellectuals think it's silly and beneath them. Imagine wanting a society that you actually know is possible and desirable because you lived through it! Everyone knows the correct way to reform society is to dream up some ludicrous science-fiction scenario and then try to enforce it on an unwilling majority that just wants to grill.

by their nature they like things the way they were or at least the way they were when they were kids

No? No. Hell no. Absolutely not. The past conservatives point at is always idealised and through no coincidence happens to align with their views perfectly. When the day that conservatives will be glad to return the union membership rates, societal wealth distribution, teenage pregnancy levels, alcohol consumption, the mother fucking housing policies or other issues yet from when they were young, I will in fact believe them. As-is, their link to the past is as tenuous as it's suspiciously convenient, and I'll have none of it.

Oh, it's not that the past isn't idealized by conservatives, or that their preferred policies aren't unlikely to lead to its return. The conditions of the 20s, 50s or 90s were as much the product of long demographic and geopolitical trends that are outside of anyone's control, and of course they had their own problems... but it's not that conservatives think that those times were perfect, just that they were good, and they reason that it's better to have a good society than to chase utopia.

housing policies

Are you talking about bringing back redlining to segregate neighborhoods? You're right that this is an issue that conservatives have mostly abandoned.

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