The Future of the Right? 1/26
It seems murky
The key to understanding the attitudes of young conservatives is their pervasive sense that the war for the soul of America has already been lost, their belief that progressives have taken control of every efficacious power center in American society
Pointer from Elayne Allen.
As an old conservative who distrusts much of the “new Right,” I share this sense of loss. But I don’t think that political power is the answer. I think we need to raise the status of rigorous thinking and lower the status of conformity to nonsense that travels under the banner of social justice.
Take the issue of teaching CRT in schools. It was not the Democratic Party that instigated teaching CRT. CRT comes from the schools of education. And the CRT in schools of education comes from the CRT in higher education writ large.
If you fight CRT through the political process, you may win a battle. But as long as college education has high status, and as long as CRT has high status within higher education, you will lose the war.
But on electoral politics, Adler-Bell writes,
if you squint, the New Right is advocating a potentially efficacious political program: that combination of economic populism (a.k.a. welfare state liberalism) and cultural conservatism (a.k.a. Christianity and immigration enforcement) that pollsters are always telling us has untapped potential as a majoritarian prospect in U.S. politics.
Adler-Bell in turn links to Matthew Walther, who sees the populist right quite differently.
there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. . . . these are people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever GamerGate was about.
Walther calls these Barstool conservatives.
The Barstool conservative movement will not have institutions in any recognizable sense, certainly not think tanks or highbrow magazines, but it will be larger, more geographically disparate, younger, and probably more male. It will also, I suspect, be more racially diverse, much like the portion of the electorate that gave Trump 74 million votes in 2020.
My sense is that a lot of people want a government that keeps quiet and sticks to doing things it has shown it can do, like collecting Social Security taxes and paying benefits. I think that people expected to get that from Joe Biden. He gave them something else, and the sense of bait-and-switch is what accounts for his poll numbers.
Public service announcement: The comment section is for comments on the post. It is not for comments on comments, or for comments on comments on comments. If commenters engage in extended fights with one another, then I will either have to start suspending people or just quit reading the comments altogether. And once I stop reading, the comment section will turn into a sewer.
I read this comment section (as I used to read the comment section on your Wordpress blog) because it has excellent discussions. It's like a salon or a discussion group. You are the host and have the unquestionable right to do anything you want with it, of course, but I for one feel that a blanket ban on (well-mannered) discussion not directly commenting on the post would detract bigly from the value of this place. I admit it's probably easier to issue such a blanket ban than to squelch fights - easier not so much in terms of effort involved as in terms of avoiding messy personal judgment of what constitutes good manners and whether commenters X and Y are having a bad-mannered fight rather than a well-mannered discussion, as well as subsequent arguments about whether your judgment was correct, whether you are unduly partial to X or Y, and so on. It can get acrimonious and extremely unpleasant for everyone involved and I totally understand wanting to avoid it. But no-one who has a modicum of practical experience says government is easy. It should be obvious that a comment section is a little community and what moderators it has are its government. When its government refuses to govern it, it eventually devolves into lunchroom food fights and monkey feces-slinging and then dies. Examples are legion. The blanket ban is the procedural, bureaucratic way of dealing with problems of this type. Call it bureaucratic nanogovernment. The late Larry Auster and many other bloggers I could name use a different approach, somewhat similar to how militaries deal with such problems, which might be called - for contrast - monarchical nanogovernment. They implicitly or explicitly say, "I'm the host and I define what constitutes good manners in this place. Take it or leave it. I forbid discussion or criticism of how I run this place. If you have earned my respect I may entertain your opinions on that privately." One difference with the military is that the military necessarily has a hierarchy with higher levels delegating governing authority to the lower levels and supervising the use of said authority, whereas blogs are peers and each constitutes an independent realm, free to experiment with whatever type of government they each find congenial, useful etc.
<b>"It was not the Democratic Party that instigated teaching CRT. CRT comes from the schools of education. And the CRT in schools of education comes from the CRT in higher education writ large."</b>
This is horribly naive. Those schools of education are firmly under the control of the people who donate to, vote for, and control the Democratic Party.