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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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If left and right are different versions of enlightenment philosophy, this leaves open the possibility of an opposition from outside the enlightenment. But you dont seem to think theres anything in that box. Anytime you argue that someone is not a real rightist, they are placed firmly in the "left" box. Why do you think that is?

I argue that they're both versions of Enlightenment philosophy. @HlynkaCG, if I've understood him properly, believes that the Right we mutually draw from is the true Enlightenment, and the left branch out through the Jacobins and Hegel and Marx is something else. This is, near as I can tell, pretty near to a purely terminological disagreement.

He's putting them in the "left" box for the same reason I put them in the "Enlightenment" box: They're secular materialists who believe that they know how to solve all our problems through the twin powers of meticulous sociopolitical theorycrafting and permanent removal of all the Bad People. They have a number of qualities they share between them, and our argument is that those qualities are vastly more consequential than their differences. These similarities are not a recent development, and go back all the way through the history of hard-left and fascist movements.