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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32088 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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The mainstream Right wing has no Will to Power, it has no big ideas.

This is a tautology, isn't it? The Right's "big idea" is to be wary of big ideas, so of course they aren't proposing their own big ideas. That's a feature, not a bug. Maybe they need to express this idea more effectively, but what they don't need is to become right-wing progressives.

(It also depends on which "Right" you're talking about. The alt-right has "Big Ideas" that I'd rather not see enter the Overton window. The free-market constitutional center-right should remain anti-big ideas no matter which side they come from.)

EDIT/ADDENDUM: In the scope of history "Don't Tread on Me" is a pretty fucking big idea, and continues to be one.

I think “depress the home values of the DMV area by heavily curtailing the admin state and moving parts of it out of the DC” counts as a somewhat big idea.

Thats just leftist sub speaks that the right doesn’t have any ideas. They do for the most part prefer to govern less.

  1. There are actual national socialists on the right (in the economic sense) Who want a bigger welfare state in the ways they like it and with the cultural package of the right (pro-marriage);Such as family support.

  2. Build the wall was a policy prescription. And from a HBD perspective there’s a fairly rich debate in coded language on what kind of people we can let in. Garret Jones versus Kaplan debate and probably more important for civilization but can’t be open about.

  3. Taking China seriously was a policy that has jumped from the right to the left. That was a big break from the neoliberal prescription of being pro-China growth.

This is a tautology, isn't it? The Right's "big idea" is to be wary of big ideas

The "big idea" of being wary of big ideas loses to the people with big ideas. It's a feature not a bug to the extent that mainstream conservative thinking was consciously designed to keep a potential Right on the reservation.

EDIT/ADDENDUM: In the scope of history "Don't Tread on Me" is a pretty fucking big idea, and continues to be one.

Progressives have a far better claim on "Don't Tread on Me" than libertarians. Who the hell is scared of treading on a libertarian? People are genuinely afraid of repercussions for treading on progressivism, even the most red-tribe conservatives. Even faithful conservatives here will admit that it's a losing proposition, they just say they would rather accept a losing proposition than "become a bad person", and their conception of "being a bad person" suspiciously conforms to progressive demands on the boundaries of their way of thinking.

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