My impression is that much of the "new right" in it's glorification of masculinity, hard line Christianity, Donald Trump, and "the triumph of the will, and support of the January 6th insurrection, is inevitably heading for Fascism. Evidence is the deadly increase in mass murders in the U.S., which are inspired by right-wing rhetoric, and the creeping introduction of anti-semitism, white supremacist memes, such as "the great replacement theory", Trump's embrace of fascist militias, the wholesale acceptance of Trump's stolen election lie by the Republican party, and the list goes on. The thing about fascism is that violence, intimidation, and the spreading of conspiracy theories tend to crowd out the liberal order in favour of more violence, civil war and eventually Gotterdammerung. As for any kind of libertarianism, including Hayek, global warming, increasing inequality and the destructive populism that feeds on it, and the great biodiversity crisis have decisively refuted that train of thought. You don't have to be a Marxist to realize that letting capitalists do their thing without regulating them is driving humanity off a cliff.
This was a great read, but I think it gets the causality wrong. Trump's arrival didn't change anything. I think rather his arrival was the *consequence* of terrible conservative intellectualism as captured by the stool example. The populist crazies of Trump and MAGA were a long time coming.
I.e. "Foreign policy hawks" is not a political position so why would that be a leg of the stool at all? Religious collectivists are on the same side of politics as secular collectivists, like communists. Their disagreements are purely superficial. So why would classic liberal types ally with them? May as well ally with some socialists over other socialists because of this or that technicality. Etc. In short, the conservative movement has been politically illiterate and utterly confused pretty much for decades. I think Trump and MAGA are a consequence of this. Not the cause. Basically, Reagan's three-legged stool was made of different size legs at odd angles and cannot be used for sitting.
Basically, if I was to sum it up: in the 60's conservatives had a clear choice to make: Either side with someone like Rand, advocating reason, individualism and rights-protecting gov OR side with Buckley and religious kooks. Conservatives made their choice and here we are.
Crazed religious and conspiracy crackpots ended the peaceful transition of power and nearly installed Trump as dictator, effectively nearly ending the United States itself.
I think until the conservative movement addressed the fundamental intellectual issues at the root of all this, categorically rejects religion from politics and embraces reason and a proper understanding of political theory, then I think much worse is still to come.
> BAP has gone so far as to compare the anti-male and anti-white rhetoric of the new left to the “extermination”-level anti-Tutsi propaganda that the shorter, phenotypically African Hutus in Rwanda deployed before massacring the more European-featured, taller Tutsis (never mind that the extermination of the Tutsis was possible only because they were a reviled minority
And how do they become a reviled minority? In part, by propaganda. It is much easier to treat other people like garbage if you convince yourself they're not quite people, or that none of their concerns are real and serious. Genocides and other patterns of systematic mistreatment start by and are justified by propaganda.
The woke left doesn't merely use rhetoric, they do practice outright open discrimination, too. In the modern West, if there's a "[demographic X] need not apply sign", it always points in one direction, and objections to said treatment are dismissed as invalid. If anyone did the same to any other demographic all hell would break loose.
Against which people is it permissible to say "X people are born into not being human", or if that's too much for our delicate sensibilities, "X people are born human but abused by their parents into [their skin color]"? There is exactly one acceptable target. The second one comes from an education professor's assigned reading, and if said professor assigned reading that described ANY other demographic in those terms, today's math assignment would be figuring out the arc he flies in as he's booted from his job. As is, he's preached that same shit for close to ten years and has a comfy post teaching our new teachers.
Against which demographic is it okay to say "be less [your skin color]?" Which criminals' skin color is emphasized in reporting, whose hidden, if the crime's reported on at all? Nobody bats an eye at "#killallmen", do the reverse and there'll be hell to pay. We have articles decrying that 1/4 of homeless people are women or that 11% of murdered journalists are women. These get published in all seriousness.
"[Skin color] is a condition one first acquires and then one *has*-a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which "[color]" people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind, and in one's world. Parasitic [Skin color] renders its hosts' appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate."
Yeah, we don't live in an actively racist society, no sir.
The relationship between integralists and anarcho-bros calls to mind Salazar and Hitler. The former, a devout Catholic, believed the latter was a contemptible pagan - but that he was also preferable to Communism.
This is a great summary - my one minor quibble would be whether those red-pilled anarcho bros are really so anarcho. Yarvin and others seem to lust after a strongman, just one that so happens to agree with their own program for society. They want monarchy or enlightened authority - that's what they think will stop the true anarchists, who are (in the garbled vision of the far right) indistinguishable from the liberal types who run "The Cathedral".
All of these mentioned right-wing collectivist groups and individuals need liberalism because if a time-machine can be innovated as a result of human creativity and progress, they can all travel back to 17th century
Too bad none of them include an "old fashioned" rah rah, can-do, "Prometheanism" in Bank Lindsey's conception. Or could that be a fifth kind? Ant-"Progressive" because Progressivism gets in the way of progress.
Great article as usual. This 4 legged chair theory is great. I didn’t know that BAP liked using a Tutsi metaphor for USA. I know tucker Carlson has used the idea of Hutu/Tutsi coming to the USA a theme more than once.
My impression is that much of the "new right" in it's glorification of masculinity, hard line Christianity, Donald Trump, and "the triumph of the will, and support of the January 6th insurrection, is inevitably heading for Fascism. Evidence is the deadly increase in mass murders in the U.S., which are inspired by right-wing rhetoric, and the creeping introduction of anti-semitism, white supremacist memes, such as "the great replacement theory", Trump's embrace of fascist militias, the wholesale acceptance of Trump's stolen election lie by the Republican party, and the list goes on. The thing about fascism is that violence, intimidation, and the spreading of conspiracy theories tend to crowd out the liberal order in favour of more violence, civil war and eventually Gotterdammerung. As for any kind of libertarianism, including Hayek, global warming, increasing inequality and the destructive populism that feeds on it, and the great biodiversity crisis have decisively refuted that train of thought. You don't have to be a Marxist to realize that letting capitalists do their thing without regulating them is driving humanity off a cliff.
This was a great read, but I think it gets the causality wrong. Trump's arrival didn't change anything. I think rather his arrival was the *consequence* of terrible conservative intellectualism as captured by the stool example. The populist crazies of Trump and MAGA were a long time coming.
I.e. "Foreign policy hawks" is not a political position so why would that be a leg of the stool at all? Religious collectivists are on the same side of politics as secular collectivists, like communists. Their disagreements are purely superficial. So why would classic liberal types ally with them? May as well ally with some socialists over other socialists because of this or that technicality. Etc. In short, the conservative movement has been politically illiterate and utterly confused pretty much for decades. I think Trump and MAGA are a consequence of this. Not the cause. Basically, Reagan's three-legged stool was made of different size legs at odd angles and cannot be used for sitting.
Basically, if I was to sum it up: in the 60's conservatives had a clear choice to make: Either side with someone like Rand, advocating reason, individualism and rights-protecting gov OR side with Buckley and religious kooks. Conservatives made their choice and here we are.
Crazed religious and conspiracy crackpots ended the peaceful transition of power and nearly installed Trump as dictator, effectively nearly ending the United States itself.
I think until the conservative movement addressed the fundamental intellectual issues at the root of all this, categorically rejects religion from politics and embraces reason and a proper understanding of political theory, then I think much worse is still to come.
> BAP has gone so far as to compare the anti-male and anti-white rhetoric of the new left to the “extermination”-level anti-Tutsi propaganda that the shorter, phenotypically African Hutus in Rwanda deployed before massacring the more European-featured, taller Tutsis (never mind that the extermination of the Tutsis was possible only because they were a reviled minority
And how do they become a reviled minority? In part, by propaganda. It is much easier to treat other people like garbage if you convince yourself they're not quite people, or that none of their concerns are real and serious. Genocides and other patterns of systematic mistreatment start by and are justified by propaganda.
The woke left doesn't merely use rhetoric, they do practice outright open discrimination, too. In the modern West, if there's a "[demographic X] need not apply sign", it always points in one direction, and objections to said treatment are dismissed as invalid. If anyone did the same to any other demographic all hell would break loose.
Against which people is it permissible to say "X people are born into not being human", or if that's too much for our delicate sensibilities, "X people are born human but abused by their parents into [their skin color]"? There is exactly one acceptable target. The second one comes from an education professor's assigned reading, and if said professor assigned reading that described ANY other demographic in those terms, today's math assignment would be figuring out the arc he flies in as he's booted from his job. As is, he's preached that same shit for close to ten years and has a comfy post teaching our new teachers.
Against which demographic is it okay to say "be less [your skin color]?" Which criminals' skin color is emphasized in reporting, whose hidden, if the crime's reported on at all? Nobody bats an eye at "#killallmen", do the reverse and there'll be hell to pay. We have articles decrying that 1/4 of homeless people are women or that 11% of murdered journalists are women. These get published in all seriousness.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34039063/
Hello, academic journal:
"[Skin color] is a condition one first acquires and then one *has*-a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which "[color]" people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind, and in one's world. Parasitic [Skin color] renders its hosts' appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate."
Yeah, we don't live in an actively racist society, no sir.
Very well said. There is much to admire about each of these factions.
The relationship between integralists and anarcho-bros calls to mind Salazar and Hitler. The former, a devout Catholic, believed the latter was a contemptible pagan - but that he was also preferable to Communism.
This is a great summary - my one minor quibble would be whether those red-pilled anarcho bros are really so anarcho. Yarvin and others seem to lust after a strongman, just one that so happens to agree with their own program for society. They want monarchy or enlightened authority - that's what they think will stop the true anarchists, who are (in the garbled vision of the far right) indistinguishable from the liberal types who run "The Cathedral".
All of these mentioned right-wing collectivist groups and individuals need liberalism because if a time-machine can be innovated as a result of human creativity and progress, they can all travel back to 17th century
People who seek for "a better past" often end up in brutal behaviours and false expectations. Like in ex-Yugoslavia during the 1990s
Too bad none of them include an "old fashioned" rah rah, can-do, "Prometheanism" in Bank Lindsey's conception. Or could that be a fifth kind? Ant-"Progressive" because Progressivism gets in the way of progress.
You left trads
Great article as usual. This 4 legged chair theory is great. I didn’t know that BAP liked using a Tutsi metaphor for USA. I know tucker Carlson has used the idea of Hutu/Tutsi coming to the USA a theme more than once.