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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.

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.

How did that go? The right has been losing on nearly everything.

Are we watching the same movie?

Because from where I'm sitting it doesn't look like the right is loosing at all. We're watching 60 years of progressive academic dogma implode before our eyes in exactly the way that old school Republicans have been predicting it eventually would. The Gods of the Copybook Headings have returned and this is somehow supposed to be a strike against Kipling? I don't buy it.

Sure the Libertarians are loosing but that is as was expected. Their alliance with the wider right wasn't so much a matter of shared values and ideology as it was an accident of history. The US' founding as a frontier state allowing many who were anarchists by temperament to kinda-sorta paint themselves as "conservatives". In any other democratic nation they'd be caucusing with the rest of the utopian radicals.

Are we watching the same movie?

Clearly we're not, because in the film I'm watching, conservatives are losing basically every culture war battle: race, religion, drugs, sexual mores, abortion, immigration, LGBT. Rural America is dysfunctional and dying. The soft power of conservative communities has never been lower, with conservatives basically reduced to trying to secede from civil society because they're completely unable to gain any traction. Instead of going to church the kids keep moving to the big city, turning gay, and engaging in unmarried cohabitation with a trans atheist who immigrated illegally from Mexico, and there's no indication that this is reversing.

These political defeats are not totally unqualified. Gun rights have been entrenched, the post-Dobbs status quo remains to be seen (though I am fairly confident that it will highly unsatisfying to most pro-life activists), economic and environmental policy are much more of a fight, and conservatives still enjoy a tremendously favorable position when it comes to the exercise of hard power. But the idea that we're witnessing a liberal implosion seems pretty dubious.

Social conservatism is politically dead, but the Right is not -- but it does need to grow past social conservatism. We can never go back; we can make something new.

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