Conservatives claim to be in a culture war but I still cannot find any conservative culture, anywhere. Fox News and Prager U aren’t culture, they’re whining and criticism masquerading as culture. Conservatives could win people over to traditional values if they bothered to make cultural products with the slightest bit of competency.
It's everywhere you look. You just don't think of these elements as "conservative" because the Left hasn't yet marked them as targets. Think celebrating Christmas, July 4th, Thanksgiving, classical European forms of music, dance, and art, overt expressions of patriotism e.g. displaying the flag, continuing to display statues, portraits, monuments, etc. of the Founding Fathers, or really any glorification of America's frontier-settler past.
In fact, the initial probing attacks have actually already begun in recent years against "white" ballet, classical music, Columbus and Thomas Jefferson. There was that poster produced by the Smithsonian listing various aspects of White culture such as arriving on time, rugged individualism, and rationalist thought, which we are supposed to deconstruct. There were the Twitter skirmishes over '2+2=4' being a form of colonialist White oppression. Some of the mud they tossed on the wall in 2020 didn't stick, but a great deal of it did, and these things take time.
If I don’t notice it, then no one else does either. We live in a media culture and if your ideas have no presence in the media, they may as well not exist. When was the last time you saw a ballet? Or watched a high-quality Netflix show about the Founding Fathers? Probably never. That’s my point. All conservatives do is whine, illustrated by the entire “right wing media” and by the second half of your comment.
Tbf, dailywire is trying to do something along those lines. Top Gun 2 was a huge hit. BYU tv has some interesting content. Given the decline in product quality coming from Hollywood, conservative type culture might be able to compete. We'll see.
Most of the content that successfully competes with Woke Hollywood probably won't be socially conservative. It will just be something more like the old left-of-center sort of stuff that places business far ahead of politics. It won't encourage family values, it will just show ordinary attractive people having heterosexual sex instead of fat "nonbinary" people having sex, and men will sometimes get to be men instead of being nothing but whiny lapdogs to strong, independent women.
If you read between the lines at the changes that Warner's new CEO is trying to make, a lot of it seems to be in this direction. HBO under previous management had created a ton of pointlessly Woke content. Like, there was an Ellen DeGeneres gay cartoon aimed at young children, appealing to almost no one. The guy is surely a Democrat but he has inherited a large debt load and is trying to toss out everything that doesn't sell (while the creative types kick and scream all the way).
From a business standpoint, the ideal media company CEO is probably someone like that -- enough of a leftist that he can communicate and empathize with the creative types, but enough of a coldhearted pragmatist that he knows when to tell them to pound sand. I think Disney's CEO is too soft and weak and that's why his company is going to hell.
That seems fair and accurate. Most socially conservative boomers like my parents were fine with old school heteronormative content. Whereas my own millenial parenting is much more selective regarding what my kids are allowed to view. "Oh but you're sheltering them and they'll go crazy when they leave the home at 18." Whatever, their brains are still developing so I can and should control what shapes them. And I'll introduce them to the dominant cultural BS and malign it as fake and stupid and lame (cuz it is) rather than some seductive wonderful thing I'm holding them back from enjoying.
Honestly I think this is the profile of most successful Hollywood directors/producers/executives since at least the 1970s. A left-leaning heart that is subservient to an utterly pragmatic brain, with good instincts for what sells and what doesn't.
Correct. People follow the strong horse. Very few conservatives are actually interested in having parallel institutions, or parallel arts and letters. They pretend they do, but in reality they look longingly at Hollywood for validation. Such parallel institutions as do exist are usually (but not always) a bit janky and low budget. "We have culture at home" kind of thing.
I find it strange that conservatives have a double standard for religion - the "ideal type" of introspective belief with no evidence, boatloads of counter-evidence. I have a hard time taking seriously conservative pushback to woke nonsense when they turn around and think "Personal relationship with Jesus" beliefs should get special exemption from evidence, special access to policy, and protection from ridicule (or else you are "oppressing me"). I think about this especially in the context of gender identity beliefs because the religious demand exactly what trans activists demand - not just civil rights, but playing along with beliefs. I think gender identity beliefs should be treated specifically like religious beliefs in how we adjudicate the conflict between civil rights for believers vs being require to open-endedly play along with the beliefs or letting them make policy. In some cases scoffing at the beliefs (say in the workplace) are indeed civil rights violations. But in other cases certainly not.
Its not a double standard, its completely in line with the conservation of traditional values. Its definitionally conservatism. If the gender identity religion survives a thousand plus years then maybe the conservatives of that time will be defending it against whatever the current thing is.
PragerU never struck me as whiny. Their five-minute videos on a variety of topics are some of the most sober displays of conservative perspective out there, much more sober than anything from MSNBC. They also have programs for children that are pretty good. And Prager himself wrote a Bible commentary aimed at secular people that is pretty thought-out.
As to the rest of the culture, much of what we consider plain out liberal is actually more conservative than it is given credit for. The capital of US entertainment, Hollywood, is far from homogeneous. Its movies are rife with conservative messaging, particularly around issues of personal responsibility (as opposed to social). When you strip away the glamorous actors and cool music, the main message of the median movie is clear: Live a responsible, bourgeois life, or you will soon be severely punished, and society is unlikely to bail you out.
This is most apparent in crime films. The lead characters do a lot of stupid stuff. And by the time the movie ends, almost all of the criminal elements have been shot, stabbed, beaten, imprisoned, or ostracized, often by their own, and in pretty creative ways. Similarly, the women who consort with the shady characters often catch hell. Don Corleone treats his wife with Old-World gentility, but she still lives to see her eldest son full of lead. On the TV side, "Dexter" is basically a tacit endorsement of the death penalty for murderers, even through vigilantism.
Action movies are another genre with conservative tendencies: Self-reliant men opt to supersede ineffective government agencies to, instead, solve their own problems by utilizing their ingenuinity and martial/shooting skills.
Same for romantic comedies, even the less traditional ones. "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is a dumb-guy comedy that's explicitly pro-marriage. "Knocked Up", which can't even bring itself to say the word "abortion", basically endorses two-parent households. Even the nominally-transgressive "Trainwreck" ends up with its heroine choosing monogamy over her prior lifestyle.
Again, cheesy, bourgeois, "you better be a good boy", Beaver-Cleaver stuff.
What else?
Religion? The main character/family are almost always Christian. God is often mentioned in glowy terms, and I've never seen religion openly derided. Never seen an openly-atheist lead either. Or a Muslim or Jewish lead, for that matter. "Oh, thank Allah I avoided this calamity!" And in the rare times a Jew is on the forefront (like the main guy in "Casino", his Jewishness is all but nominal, i.e. the only time you can tell he's a Jew is when Joe Pesci calls him a "Jew moth-----" in the desert.
Race? The hierarchy isn't just pro-white but nordicist. Like two-thirds of the time, the lead is all-too-typically blonde and/or blue-eyed. And the blacks are mainly in supporting roles. Not only that, but all of the lead characters have WASPy names. Here are the main characters in the 2000 movie "Final Destination": Alex Browning, Clear Rivers, Carter Horton, Valerie Lewton. It's only after you go down the supporting roles that you start to find "Waggner" and "Weine" and "Dreyer". There's no lead character named "Weissmueller" or "DiAntoni". Meet our hero, Schwartz Helmutmeister!
Many complain that whites are often portrayed as villains. Sure, but they're also the heroes that save the day. They're the everything that matters. Blacks are given cool and dignified characters, but it's mostly some funky roles on the side. They're rarely dominant.
Gender? Men are almost always in the lead and doing the big things. Duh. And when women are, it's either in a "girls movie" like "Mean Girls" or in something meant to be comical like that last "Ghostbusters". Though I'll concede that has somewhat changed lately, to varying degrees of success.
Sexual orientation? Ninety-nine percent of the stories involve heterosexuals. Even though same-sex marriage has been law of the land for a while and even half the Republicans are fine with it, I have yet to see a gay, married couple being the main story in any mainstream movie, especially gay and male.
By the way, anything I say about Hollywood goes double for those gooey ABC/Fox type shows. I watched a couple of episodes from that "Ben and Kate" and could barely finish them from the amount of syrup in the end.
In such big-network TV shows, family members tend to stick for each other even when they don't like each other, rural life is depicted as rosier than it actually is, the notion of America is often celebrated, I have NEVER seen a character on food stamps or government assistance, and blacks, more often than not, both speak and act white—and kind of know their place, enough never to go around smooching white women. If that's not traditional social hierarchy and conservative view of society, I don't know what is.
It seems to me like you're reading a landscape from at lesst a decade or so ago. If you look at the shows put out for the teen demographic today (which I'd consider vital in terms of future opinion-making), a show like the original CW Gossip Girl fits your criteria (all but one of the leads is white) but the modern reboot changes that so the main character is black. Now only three main characters are white, and one of those is bisexual.
Similarly, try to pay attention to what's aimed at your children and you'll find that Mattel has introduced a they/them doll ready for this Christmas season in their 'Monster High' product line. A similar thing has happened in a recent Disney kid's TV movie, and the Disney Channel just introduced tgeir first ever 'transgender' character (you know, for kids).
Mega budget movies still need to make money, which is why change is slow, but the radical elements are trickling in.
I didn't include kids' shows, just the mainstream Hollywood movies and big-network TV shows. Regarding kids, I mentioned Prager and Daily Wire seems to want to join in as well to providing an alternative to Disney.
"Three main characters white and one bisexual" is pretty much within the norm I was referring to. It's not that it's all-white, just that heterosexuals, whites, and men are dominant. Though "all-white" (or almost) is still alive and well. I recently watched The Ranch (a Netflix show), and it's about a rural white family doing rural white family stuff, with a Republican father.
And yes, I did mention some of the more recent changes in racial and gender makeup of the leads. But seeing all the recent flops (latest remake of Quantum Leap, that black woman queen movie, "Bros", that latest Disney, etc.), it's not at all certain they'll double down on that. Meanwhile, the latest Tom Cruise, "Murica, Yeah!" movie was a hit.
Is it just me or did the iteration of the 'culture war' you're talking about not refer to a reaction by mild liberals to the increasingly blatant political messaging in mass entertainment c. 2015? It's more of an argument over how left wing the cultural programming should be - making it right wing was never really an option. The problem is once Hollywood took the sweetener out of the medicine everybody has realized that it tastes horrible.
What the Amish call Rumspringa, or what Hoppe calls Physical Removal is essential - The exodus of people who disagree with the regime, reinforcing the regime by evaporative cooling. The berlin wall etc probably hastened the fall of the USSR by keeping all the dissidents in the place where they can do the most damage. If Iran wants a stable regime it should assist the emigration of all of its dissidents. Then there's no need to oppress anybody -- people just vote with their feet and go live under whichever regime they want.
What successful traditionalist communities within modern societies seem to all have in common is a low barrier to exit. The people who don't like these communities are continually boiling off and the people who stay are increasingly genetically and culturally predisposed to like it. The people in these communities are mostly born and raised there, chose not to leave, and have the genetics of parents who also chose not to leave. This leads to strong community norms without forceful oppression and without needing to wait centuries for genetics to change.
This is about right. The problem is that most "dissidents" aren't modern-day Beat Poets, they're just young, ambitious, intelligent people with no job respects commensurate with their abilities. If you just let them all leave, you end up with a country full of old pensioners and unambitious, unintelligent youth.
A problem like this is kind of what the former Communist EU states are dealing with now. In retrospect, they shouldn't have permitted free movement for perhaps 20 years, to give their economies time to catch up to Western Europe. Now all of the best and brightest have just moved west.
I read something indicating that Transnistria is the absolute worst in this regard. The median age there is very old -- over 60 I think. It's just a patch of ground with no current economic value, full of pensioners being paid for by Russia as the price of controlling that ground. I have to wonder if much of Ukraine will look like this before long.
I feel like there's an elephant in the room with both this essay and the one it uses as a starting point: if we're acknowledging that conservative values were built for a different world, and that technology has rendered these values at least partially obsolete, then what is the point of conservatism at all? I think a fair definition of social conservatism is just the belief that traditional behaviors and institutions have sustained our culture, and therefore they have some innate value and ought to be preserved absent some compelling reason to abandon them. But acknowledging that they are incompatible with a modern, urbanized environment seems like a compelling enough reason; it effectively abandons the notion that we somehow need conservative values to sustain us into the future.
Ultimately, I think this all comes down to aesthetics: conservatives just think that spending Sunday in church is better than spending it at drag time story hour, for completely subjective reasons. And that's fine, but this essay seems to acknowledge that the whole thing is a purely aesthetic debate.
This is a good point, but I think most people will find say a committed relationship and having children more fulfilling in the long run than getting drunk every night at a bar. Social liberalism seems to be correlated with misery. But people need to be convinced of that, I don’t think government can be expected to build healthy communities and understand what forms they should take.
I would agree that a committed relationship and a family will be more fulfilling for the vast majority of people than getting drunk in a bar with strangers every night, but I think this is a strawmanning of what liberalism offers with respect to conservatism. While you might believe that social liberalism is correlated with misery, the fact that it is so attractive to young women in Iran seems to suggest otherwise; problems with modernity notwithstanding, most people would rather not return to the early 1950s cultural norms. I was recently reading Charles Murray's Coming Apart, and interestingly, after outlining a number of depressing facts of modern life, Murray asks 'but would I get in a time machine and return to the 1950s if I had the option? of course not!' And this is Charles Murray we're talking about. And of course, in a phenomenon that I imagine you're aware of, highly educated liberals tend to produce more stable and happy relationships with fewer divorces than conservatives do. On the other hand, what conservatives are offering is not necessarily stable, fulfilling relationships but enforced cultural norms; marriage was more stable in the past at least in part because women had fewer options and there was no no-fault divorce, not because everyone liked the institution so much. I think a fair way of summing it up is: liberal modernity is attractive but produces certain problems; elite liberals have generally figured out how to resolve these problems and inject liberal values like women's liberation into traditional institutions like marriage, while conservatives are left complaining about how liberals ruined these institutions for them.
But I think the main point you make here and in the essay is a good one: conservatives have to actually convince people that their values will solve anything, whereas the approach of the new right is basically the Iranian revolution approach- seize institutions and create some sort of morality police to dictate how you want people to behave. It speaks to a point I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is that liberal attempts to centrally plan the economy are effectively mirrored by social conservative attempts to centrally plan the social order: they are both based on the assumption that if you demand people do something, they will actually do it in the way that you envision. But social controls are about as effective as price controls.
1. You conflate current Iranian society with 1950s America (which itself wasn't traditional in any principled sense).
2. You compare relationships created between liberals and conservatives and claim the former are more stable, without consider confounders, or the general fact that liberal societies have atrocious fertility and marriage-making. This is particularly strange because you later talk about what liberal elites have "figured out" how to do.
3. Charles Murray isn't particularly traditional or right-wing.
4. You don't seem to know what centrally-planned economies are.
The fundamental point Hanania made about modern urban environments is fine, but then extrapolating from it as you do is nothing more than restating your priors. Don't hide behind imprecision and scatterbrained ping-ponging behind ideas when you have nothing to say.
I assume you're probably already familiar with Scott Alexander's 'How The West Was Won' - https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/ - but in case not, he seems to be coming at the same sort of idea from a different angle, albeit with a more positive spin: that for contemporary multicultural industrial / post-industrial societies, liberalism is simply the social arrangement that outcompetes the alternatives because it's "(in a certain specific sense) what everybody would select if given a free choice".
Great essay. But why no mention of Afghanistan? They had 20 years to adopt liberal democracy and all kinds of incentives to do it, but they didn't (well, their leaders do seem to be a little kinder to the women now so maybe...). Was it because we made things so terrible for them that they had nowhere else to turn but tradition and family?
I agree liberalism is the inevitable consequence of material wealth. It's like a drug that everyone wants and promotes even if it makes us sick (lower life satisfaction, lower fertility, increased suicide rates, increased depression...and all seemingly worse effects for women who, paradoxically, stand to "gain" the most from liberalism).
Check out the link I sent in another comment. The cultural thresher of modernity comes for us all. Even now, there are literate female college students in Kabul going on TikTok and reading the New York Times. Today, they are few in number, suppressed dissidents powerless in the face of the Taliban. Tomorrow, they will be a self-conscious class of urban professionals capable of influencing state policy. The American effort in Afghanistan didn’t succeed in building a liberal democratic nation. But it also wasn’t an abject failure because we did successfully create a cohort of Afghans who will not forget the legacy of our presence and the path we left to follow.
Richard, I agree with you a lot but you are off track.
History is filled with examples of cyclical social liberalism (ironically intertwined with period of decadence) followed by periods of social conservativism.
Augustus himself made the Lex Iulia criminalizing adultery and incest. His daughter, Iulia, was notoriously a slut.
Sticking to Roman history, how could we forget the 14 years old Emperor Elagabalus, who liked to dress up like a woman, and spend his time in debauchery, known for provoking the breaking of sexual taboos and disrespecting Roman traditions, while power was held by his mother, aunt and sister, a literal matriarchy. He ended up being physically removed by the Praetorian Guard.
My point is simple: the upper class has at times regularly been tempted by sexual depravity, while in other times focused on restoring norms as society was collapsing. This is nothing new and Francis Fukuyama is still a charlatan.
To focus on Iran, the sole idea that this is about headscarves or social liberalism quite frankly should be laughed at. This has nothing to do with traditions and everything to do with geopolitics. As we all know, the psychotic regime in Washington is hell bent on trying to remove Putin, install a puppet in Moscow and dismantle the Russian nation, to loot its natural resources and devastate its culture.
To do this, they thought that opening a second front in Armenia, where Russia is the peacekeeper between Armenia and Azeris, would provide for a useful distraction as NATO wages war in Ukraine. Hence they pushed Azerbaijan to attack Armenia, which the Azeris are more than happy to do.
Iran, in turn, threatened to attack Baku (and recently massed troops at the border) if they kept attacking Armenia, which made Azerbaijan back off. As Iran sees an opportunity to thwart the plans of the most evil country in the world, they also provided those annoying drones to Russia, which NATO's super advanced technology has in so far failed to stop.
Hence, Washington retaliated, by doing what they have been doing since the Arab Spring: social media riots. This are as effective as social media are influential in a country. In Belarus for instance, they failed. It is not a secret that the head of the agitators for Iran lives in the US and is paid by the FBI. If a bunch of idiots in Iran want to throw away their lives for the Great Satan, the Revolutionmary Guard of Iran will take care of them.
Every country has deranged liberals. Even Russia does. It is up to institutions to deal with them. Just like liberals deal with conservatives when they capture institutions.
Sorry, but Fukuyama is still wrong. From Elagabalus to Weimar, liberals corrupted societies before and run them into the ground, just for conservatives to rebuild them.
One thing that historic parallels miss is that there has been a permanent, technology-driven change in the economic value and self-sufficiency of women, who are a lot more useful as cogs in a managerial machine than they were as farmers or hunters in temperate or sub-arctic regions.
In fact, this has a historic (or prehistoric) parallel to matrilocal societies in places like tropical Africa, where far less effort was needed for cultivation than the plow-driven agriculture in Europe. Such societies survived for a long time with a lot more sexual depravity and weaker family units than what was possible in places where food production depended upon hard male labor.
Patriarchy can be imposed and maintained in places where the median woman has the ability to be economically self-sufficient, but it is far more stable in places where, due to technology and environment, it is nearly impossible for her to feed herself and her children.
What's women's oldest job? The prostitute. Technological progress and sexual freedom result in women whoring themselves online, starting from instagram and ending up on OnlyFans. So much for the self-sufficiency. All the rights, the marches, the social media have yet again proven one thing, women are valued primarily by their sexual appeal. Nothing has changed.
Just like highly depraved societies fail to preserve and replicate themselves in the long term. They are errors that will fix themselves. Liberalism at the end of the day is just a highly elaborated Satanic temptation.
1. Perhaps the way in which the right-wing government behaves has a lot to do with how things play out. The protests in Iran were apparently sparked because the police murdered a young woman for failing to wear her hijab properly. As awful and evil as the regime here is, it hasn't stooped so low as to outright murder someone for misgendering a trans person, or some such. And people here already really really hate the current regime. So imagine how much stronger that backlash could become if a comparable incident occurred in our own nation.
Enforcement of values, as we have observed from our own rulers, does not require violence of this sort. People here stay in line out of fear that they will be canceled socially, not because a goon squad might literally murder them. This situation occurs because the ruling class and its associates--media, academia, education, government, etc.--have all adopted the same leftist ideology. If these people could somehow be replaced by conservatives, one has to wonder if we might see something different in our culture.
2. Perhaps the rest of the world matters. The United States and its "Western" cousins exert tremendous cultural influence on the rest of the globe. I think it would not be unreasonable to posit that we are the world's top exporter of culture, especially in terms of political ideas and movements, always trying to make the rest of the world "democratic" like we are. This might matter for young people in places like Iran, who absorb those ideas and wish for a better "democratic" future in their own country. I believe Yarvin has written quite well about the regime's soft power and its influence abroad, though I can't find the article off the top of my head.
3. I can think of a couple counter-examples. What about Hungary? This nation's regime seems quite firm in its power, with no mass protests or killing of improper hijab wearers, and last I checked they were busy banning gender studies and the like. Likewise, what of Afghanistan? The Taliban also seems quite comfortable in its power there, although the nation may be much more miserable as a result. Perhaps the fact that the United States tried to impose its agenda on that nation by force (as opposed to letting soft power subvert it from within) matters.
Well, the more recent of those weren't outright *murdered*, they were socially and politically unpersoned, which I think is a very important distinction to make. But still, you have a bit of a point with Waco and Ruby Ridge. I wonder if, were those events to take place today, the federal government might be forced to refrain from the outright slaughter that it engaged in back then, as there is today enough "conservative" and "alternative" media who would notice and raise a stink.
And again, if we take people like Kyle Rittenhouse as more recent examples of the US government targeting people for wrongthink (or in his case, wrong-shoot?), that returns us to the question of why the US government seems able to do this without sparking any kind of real mass protests. As far as I can tell, the answer still must lie in the incredible, overwhelming power of the American propaganda machine (media, academia, education, etc.). The control of this machine might not be quite as total as it once was, but it's still pretty impressive, it would seem.
1. Yarvin isn't a social conservative so it's far easier for him to keep the elites in check.
2. Why Conservatism Failed blatantly plagiarizes the Unabomber manifesto so the author is not a very insightful or bright individual but a plagiarist and thus should be ignored. The ideas are relevant but you need to source Uncle Ted instead.
Here's proof of the blatant copying of the manifesto as paragraph 50 below is the author's thesis.
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.
51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.
Unlike Ted, I am a pessimist and have already given up. No point in actual tedposting because we lost the war against the technophiles who will drive humanity extinct. Alignment will never be solved and that won't stop people from working on AGI.
The title is a little misleading. Social conservatism as a top end down, government imposed set of policies appears not to be viable, and the Iranian case seems to be illustrative of that. But you close with the correct case that socially conservative communities seem to be viable, and certainly outbreed the competition! Socially conservative, particularly religiously Conservative, communities may win the long game. Modern and post modern cultural values do not make people happy, and they seem to prevent people from reproducing, not a prescription for long-term success. Also, focusing on bottom up cultural change is the way to go anyway. Opposing specific policies at the government level that are hostile to these communities and these cultural and religious norms is the way to go. But don’t expect too much from government. Good article.
Richard Hanania is definitely moving up the charts on my mental list of interesting writers. Here he is suggesting that cultural evolution follows a path that ultimately is not controllable by deliberate government policy. But it took me a while to understand this, because he starts with "secularization and cultural liberalism are inevitable" in the subtitle, which he contradicts when he ends with "in the long run, it will be secular elites who find it impossible to mold human nature to their preferred specifications."
I don't think Iran is a great example because it's 'outside in the cold' of the US order and has not been thriving in the last few years, and is at the extreme end of social conservatism. Therefore its socially conservative order is seen as failing, and it's preventing urban elites from living how they want to live.
India is a more representative example of the rising non-Western world, when it comes to nationalism and ethno-religious identity the government is very conservative and incredibly popular. Sure it has become somewhat more 'liberal' in some ways e.g. dropping birthrates, but the fundamental 'national ethos' is something that hasn't been seen in the West since WW2 - and it is thriving.
Maybe Gulf states (UAE, Kuwait, etc) are good examples of social conservatism enforced by the government, while also still being rich. Non-Muslims are also left alone to live their lives without integrating.
It almost makes one wonder if India is a “metropole” of sorts - by being a power center it is able to retain its own elites rather than having the US and W. Europe poach them. A minor power center to be sure but one nonetheless.
Well, the US and Europe does poach them, see the tech CEOs or Rishi Sunak, but my impression is that this is seen as positive thing by Indians rather than a loss. I guess they have people to spare, and India clearly reaps benefits from economic integration with the US especially, of which the tech CEOs are a symbol
I have always shared this same irritation with social conservatives who trot out the "brainwashed by hippies" hypothesis for all the things they see as social ills. How different is this from progressive social constructionism? If I scoff at the idea that "the patriarchy" or "white supremacy" brain washed people into believing things, why would I be any more amenable to the idea that an evil cabal of hippies convinced people to get on welfare, delay marriage, have more and more varied sex, etc. Both sides in this seem to be social constuctionist and think culture is a thing you engineer rather than something that arises via tradeoffs between mutually compelling, but competing, moral goods and those tradeoff structures can shift. Maybe traditional values just stopped doing what they used to do, in terms of providing social goods for more people so people could indulge more individualism without losing anything they hadn't already lost? Any lingering appearance of trad con efficacy is certainly just selection bias for the ever fewer people for whom no tradeoff exists.
Activism is needed but has to be well-placed, focused, and considerate of multiple variables. Think about the decline of horse-drawn carriages and beasts or burden: it wasn't due to the efforts of animal rights activists of the 1880s but rather the innovation of automobiles right around the chronological corner. Therefore, traditionalists should embrace non-traditional technologies and systems (e.g., remote/hybrid work) to be one step ahead in terms of incentives and influence.
It calls to mind for me what Yarvin once said about “Provincial strongmen” and how they must govern with an iron fist since the relevant institutions are out of their reach.
Such as how Orban can ban Soros from Hungary but he can’t shut down the OSF (or at least strip it of any power).
My big takeaway was that for social conservatism to work it has to reach the metropole, i.e the US and W.Europe, so the best people are attracted to those institutions.
Richard, your thesis seems to be that modern, wealthy societies naturally have a libertarian cultural bias, and any government that tries to bend in another direction is doomed to fail. But as another commenter points out, culture can change over time, from fundamentalist to libertine and back. And despots are always looking for ways to control and mold the culture. While murdering a few hundred dissidents every few years may be ineffective and passe, new methods are always being developed. That’s the fault in Fukuyama-ism - the blindness to the fact that the human urge to rule over others is not going to be extinguished by the beneficence of Western liberal governance.
Excellent piece. If people of faith want to have an influence in the modern world, it must come through voluntary means. Religious people have something deeply valuable to offer (meaning, purpose, community, transcendent values), but many organized religions have chosen the route of force rather than persuasion. It will be interesting to see how well they can make their case when they lack institutional power.
The focus has to be on allowing social conservatives to have as many children as they want through things like child tax credits and school vouchers. In the medium to long term, political and lifestyle preferences are genetic and those that have more children will have their preferences become what is normal in society.
Conservatives claim to be in a culture war but I still cannot find any conservative culture, anywhere. Fox News and Prager U aren’t culture, they’re whining and criticism masquerading as culture. Conservatives could win people over to traditional values if they bothered to make cultural products with the slightest bit of competency.
It's everywhere you look. You just don't think of these elements as "conservative" because the Left hasn't yet marked them as targets. Think celebrating Christmas, July 4th, Thanksgiving, classical European forms of music, dance, and art, overt expressions of patriotism e.g. displaying the flag, continuing to display statues, portraits, monuments, etc. of the Founding Fathers, or really any glorification of America's frontier-settler past.
In fact, the initial probing attacks have actually already begun in recent years against "white" ballet, classical music, Columbus and Thomas Jefferson. There was that poster produced by the Smithsonian listing various aspects of White culture such as arriving on time, rugged individualism, and rationalist thought, which we are supposed to deconstruct. There were the Twitter skirmishes over '2+2=4' being a form of colonialist White oppression. Some of the mud they tossed on the wall in 2020 didn't stick, but a great deal of it did, and these things take time.
If I don’t notice it, then no one else does either. We live in a media culture and if your ideas have no presence in the media, they may as well not exist. When was the last time you saw a ballet? Or watched a high-quality Netflix show about the Founding Fathers? Probably never. That’s my point. All conservatives do is whine, illustrated by the entire “right wing media” and by the second half of your comment.
Tbf, dailywire is trying to do something along those lines. Top Gun 2 was a huge hit. BYU tv has some interesting content. Given the decline in product quality coming from Hollywood, conservative type culture might be able to compete. We'll see.
Most of the content that successfully competes with Woke Hollywood probably won't be socially conservative. It will just be something more like the old left-of-center sort of stuff that places business far ahead of politics. It won't encourage family values, it will just show ordinary attractive people having heterosexual sex instead of fat "nonbinary" people having sex, and men will sometimes get to be men instead of being nothing but whiny lapdogs to strong, independent women.
If you read between the lines at the changes that Warner's new CEO is trying to make, a lot of it seems to be in this direction. HBO under previous management had created a ton of pointlessly Woke content. Like, there was an Ellen DeGeneres gay cartoon aimed at young children, appealing to almost no one. The guy is surely a Democrat but he has inherited a large debt load and is trying to toss out everything that doesn't sell (while the creative types kick and scream all the way).
From a business standpoint, the ideal media company CEO is probably someone like that -- enough of a leftist that he can communicate and empathize with the creative types, but enough of a coldhearted pragmatist that he knows when to tell them to pound sand. I think Disney's CEO is too soft and weak and that's why his company is going to hell.
That seems fair and accurate. Most socially conservative boomers like my parents were fine with old school heteronormative content. Whereas my own millenial parenting is much more selective regarding what my kids are allowed to view. "Oh but you're sheltering them and they'll go crazy when they leave the home at 18." Whatever, their brains are still developing so I can and should control what shapes them. And I'll introduce them to the dominant cultural BS and malign it as fake and stupid and lame (cuz it is) rather than some seductive wonderful thing I'm holding them back from enjoying.
Honestly I think this is the profile of most successful Hollywood directors/producers/executives since at least the 1970s. A left-leaning heart that is subservient to an utterly pragmatic brain, with good instincts for what sells and what doesn't.
Correct. People follow the strong horse. Very few conservatives are actually interested in having parallel institutions, or parallel arts and letters. They pretend they do, but in reality they look longingly at Hollywood for validation. Such parallel institutions as do exist are usually (but not always) a bit janky and low budget. "We have culture at home" kind of thing.
I try to live like it's 1999 and it makes me a reactionary to the Left and a liberal to the RIght.
A lot in the Center is lost to this dichotomy, I'd argue more and more. Maybe even the plurality.
Conservative culture is religion, multigenerational households, family life, traditions of all kinds, valuing ancestors.
I find it strange that conservatives have a double standard for religion - the "ideal type" of introspective belief with no evidence, boatloads of counter-evidence. I have a hard time taking seriously conservative pushback to woke nonsense when they turn around and think "Personal relationship with Jesus" beliefs should get special exemption from evidence, special access to policy, and protection from ridicule (or else you are "oppressing me"). I think about this especially in the context of gender identity beliefs because the religious demand exactly what trans activists demand - not just civil rights, but playing along with beliefs. I think gender identity beliefs should be treated specifically like religious beliefs in how we adjudicate the conflict between civil rights for believers vs being require to open-endedly play along with the beliefs or letting them make policy. In some cases scoffing at the beliefs (say in the workplace) are indeed civil rights violations. But in other cases certainly not.
Its not a double standard, its completely in line with the conservation of traditional values. Its definitionally conservatism. If the gender identity religion survives a thousand plus years then maybe the conservatives of that time will be defending it against whatever the current thing is.
Ahistorical.
PragerU never struck me as whiny. Their five-minute videos on a variety of topics are some of the most sober displays of conservative perspective out there, much more sober than anything from MSNBC. They also have programs for children that are pretty good. And Prager himself wrote a Bible commentary aimed at secular people that is pretty thought-out.
As to the rest of the culture, much of what we consider plain out liberal is actually more conservative than it is given credit for. The capital of US entertainment, Hollywood, is far from homogeneous. Its movies are rife with conservative messaging, particularly around issues of personal responsibility (as opposed to social). When you strip away the glamorous actors and cool music, the main message of the median movie is clear: Live a responsible, bourgeois life, or you will soon be severely punished, and society is unlikely to bail you out.
This is most apparent in crime films. The lead characters do a lot of stupid stuff. And by the time the movie ends, almost all of the criminal elements have been shot, stabbed, beaten, imprisoned, or ostracized, often by their own, and in pretty creative ways. Similarly, the women who consort with the shady characters often catch hell. Don Corleone treats his wife with Old-World gentility, but she still lives to see her eldest son full of lead. On the TV side, "Dexter" is basically a tacit endorsement of the death penalty for murderers, even through vigilantism.
Action movies are another genre with conservative tendencies: Self-reliant men opt to supersede ineffective government agencies to, instead, solve their own problems by utilizing their ingenuinity and martial/shooting skills.
Same for romantic comedies, even the less traditional ones. "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is a dumb-guy comedy that's explicitly pro-marriage. "Knocked Up", which can't even bring itself to say the word "abortion", basically endorses two-parent households. Even the nominally-transgressive "Trainwreck" ends up with its heroine choosing monogamy over her prior lifestyle.
Again, cheesy, bourgeois, "you better be a good boy", Beaver-Cleaver stuff.
What else?
Religion? The main character/family are almost always Christian. God is often mentioned in glowy terms, and I've never seen religion openly derided. Never seen an openly-atheist lead either. Or a Muslim or Jewish lead, for that matter. "Oh, thank Allah I avoided this calamity!" And in the rare times a Jew is on the forefront (like the main guy in "Casino", his Jewishness is all but nominal, i.e. the only time you can tell he's a Jew is when Joe Pesci calls him a "Jew moth-----" in the desert.
Race? The hierarchy isn't just pro-white but nordicist. Like two-thirds of the time, the lead is all-too-typically blonde and/or blue-eyed. And the blacks are mainly in supporting roles. Not only that, but all of the lead characters have WASPy names. Here are the main characters in the 2000 movie "Final Destination": Alex Browning, Clear Rivers, Carter Horton, Valerie Lewton. It's only after you go down the supporting roles that you start to find "Waggner" and "Weine" and "Dreyer". There's no lead character named "Weissmueller" or "DiAntoni". Meet our hero, Schwartz Helmutmeister!
Many complain that whites are often portrayed as villains. Sure, but they're also the heroes that save the day. They're the everything that matters. Blacks are given cool and dignified characters, but it's mostly some funky roles on the side. They're rarely dominant.
Gender? Men are almost always in the lead and doing the big things. Duh. And when women are, it's either in a "girls movie" like "Mean Girls" or in something meant to be comical like that last "Ghostbusters". Though I'll concede that has somewhat changed lately, to varying degrees of success.
Sexual orientation? Ninety-nine percent of the stories involve heterosexuals. Even though same-sex marriage has been law of the land for a while and even half the Republicans are fine with it, I have yet to see a gay, married couple being the main story in any mainstream movie, especially gay and male.
By the way, anything I say about Hollywood goes double for those gooey ABC/Fox type shows. I watched a couple of episodes from that "Ben and Kate" and could barely finish them from the amount of syrup in the end.
In such big-network TV shows, family members tend to stick for each other even when they don't like each other, rural life is depicted as rosier than it actually is, the notion of America is often celebrated, I have NEVER seen a character on food stamps or government assistance, and blacks, more often than not, both speak and act white—and kind of know their place, enough never to go around smooching white women. If that's not traditional social hierarchy and conservative view of society, I don't know what is.
It seems to me like you're reading a landscape from at lesst a decade or so ago. If you look at the shows put out for the teen demographic today (which I'd consider vital in terms of future opinion-making), a show like the original CW Gossip Girl fits your criteria (all but one of the leads is white) but the modern reboot changes that so the main character is black. Now only three main characters are white, and one of those is bisexual.
Similarly, try to pay attention to what's aimed at your children and you'll find that Mattel has introduced a they/them doll ready for this Christmas season in their 'Monster High' product line. A similar thing has happened in a recent Disney kid's TV movie, and the Disney Channel just introduced tgeir first ever 'transgender' character (you know, for kids).
Mega budget movies still need to make money, which is why change is slow, but the radical elements are trickling in.
I didn't include kids' shows, just the mainstream Hollywood movies and big-network TV shows. Regarding kids, I mentioned Prager and Daily Wire seems to want to join in as well to providing an alternative to Disney.
"Three main characters white and one bisexual" is pretty much within the norm I was referring to. It's not that it's all-white, just that heterosexuals, whites, and men are dominant. Though "all-white" (or almost) is still alive and well. I recently watched The Ranch (a Netflix show), and it's about a rural white family doing rural white family stuff, with a Republican father.
And yes, I did mention some of the more recent changes in racial and gender makeup of the leads. But seeing all the recent flops (latest remake of Quantum Leap, that black woman queen movie, "Bros", that latest Disney, etc.), it's not at all certain they'll double down on that. Meanwhile, the latest Tom Cruise, "Murica, Yeah!" movie was a hit.
Is it just me or did the iteration of the 'culture war' you're talking about not refer to a reaction by mild liberals to the increasingly blatant political messaging in mass entertainment c. 2015? It's more of an argument over how left wing the cultural programming should be - making it right wing was never really an option. The problem is once Hollywood took the sweetener out of the medicine everybody has realized that it tastes horrible.
On what actual policy or issue is National Review wrong or made to look stupid relative to all the liberal outlets you've named?
Alright, well, you've got a good point on the never trumpers.
What the Amish call Rumspringa, or what Hoppe calls Physical Removal is essential - The exodus of people who disagree with the regime, reinforcing the regime by evaporative cooling. The berlin wall etc probably hastened the fall of the USSR by keeping all the dissidents in the place where they can do the most damage. If Iran wants a stable regime it should assist the emigration of all of its dissidents. Then there's no need to oppress anybody -- people just vote with their feet and go live under whichever regime they want.
What successful traditionalist communities within modern societies seem to all have in common is a low barrier to exit. The people who don't like these communities are continually boiling off and the people who stay are increasingly genetically and culturally predisposed to like it. The people in these communities are mostly born and raised there, chose not to leave, and have the genetics of parents who also chose not to leave. This leads to strong community norms without forceful oppression and without needing to wait centuries for genetics to change.
This is about right. The problem is that most "dissidents" aren't modern-day Beat Poets, they're just young, ambitious, intelligent people with no job respects commensurate with their abilities. If you just let them all leave, you end up with a country full of old pensioners and unambitious, unintelligent youth.
A problem like this is kind of what the former Communist EU states are dealing with now. In retrospect, they shouldn't have permitted free movement for perhaps 20 years, to give their economies time to catch up to Western Europe. Now all of the best and brightest have just moved west.
I read something indicating that Transnistria is the absolute worst in this regard. The median age there is very old -- over 60 I think. It's just a patch of ground with no current economic value, full of pensioners being paid for by Russia as the price of controlling that ground. I have to wonder if much of Ukraine will look like this before long.
I feel like there's an elephant in the room with both this essay and the one it uses as a starting point: if we're acknowledging that conservative values were built for a different world, and that technology has rendered these values at least partially obsolete, then what is the point of conservatism at all? I think a fair definition of social conservatism is just the belief that traditional behaviors and institutions have sustained our culture, and therefore they have some innate value and ought to be preserved absent some compelling reason to abandon them. But acknowledging that they are incompatible with a modern, urbanized environment seems like a compelling enough reason; it effectively abandons the notion that we somehow need conservative values to sustain us into the future.
Ultimately, I think this all comes down to aesthetics: conservatives just think that spending Sunday in church is better than spending it at drag time story hour, for completely subjective reasons. And that's fine, but this essay seems to acknowledge that the whole thing is a purely aesthetic debate.
This is a good point, but I think most people will find say a committed relationship and having children more fulfilling in the long run than getting drunk every night at a bar. Social liberalism seems to be correlated with misery. But people need to be convinced of that, I don’t think government can be expected to build healthy communities and understand what forms they should take.
I would agree that a committed relationship and a family will be more fulfilling for the vast majority of people than getting drunk in a bar with strangers every night, but I think this is a strawmanning of what liberalism offers with respect to conservatism. While you might believe that social liberalism is correlated with misery, the fact that it is so attractive to young women in Iran seems to suggest otherwise; problems with modernity notwithstanding, most people would rather not return to the early 1950s cultural norms. I was recently reading Charles Murray's Coming Apart, and interestingly, after outlining a number of depressing facts of modern life, Murray asks 'but would I get in a time machine and return to the 1950s if I had the option? of course not!' And this is Charles Murray we're talking about. And of course, in a phenomenon that I imagine you're aware of, highly educated liberals tend to produce more stable and happy relationships with fewer divorces than conservatives do. On the other hand, what conservatives are offering is not necessarily stable, fulfilling relationships but enforced cultural norms; marriage was more stable in the past at least in part because women had fewer options and there was no no-fault divorce, not because everyone liked the institution so much. I think a fair way of summing it up is: liberal modernity is attractive but produces certain problems; elite liberals have generally figured out how to resolve these problems and inject liberal values like women's liberation into traditional institutions like marriage, while conservatives are left complaining about how liberals ruined these institutions for them.
But I think the main point you make here and in the essay is a good one: conservatives have to actually convince people that their values will solve anything, whereas the approach of the new right is basically the Iranian revolution approach- seize institutions and create some sort of morality police to dictate how you want people to behave. It speaks to a point I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is that liberal attempts to centrally plan the economy are effectively mirrored by social conservative attempts to centrally plan the social order: they are both based on the assumption that if you demand people do something, they will actually do it in the way that you envision. But social controls are about as effective as price controls.
1. You conflate current Iranian society with 1950s America (which itself wasn't traditional in any principled sense).
2. You compare relationships created between liberals and conservatives and claim the former are more stable, without consider confounders, or the general fact that liberal societies have atrocious fertility and marriage-making. This is particularly strange because you later talk about what liberal elites have "figured out" how to do.
3. Charles Murray isn't particularly traditional or right-wing.
4. You don't seem to know what centrally-planned economies are.
The fundamental point Hanania made about modern urban environments is fine, but then extrapolating from it as you do is nothing more than restating your priors. Don't hide behind imprecision and scatterbrained ping-ponging behind ideas when you have nothing to say.
I assume you're probably already familiar with Scott Alexander's 'How The West Was Won' - https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/ - but in case not, he seems to be coming at the same sort of idea from a different angle, albeit with a more positive spin: that for contemporary multicultural industrial / post-industrial societies, liberalism is simply the social arrangement that outcompetes the alternatives because it's "(in a certain specific sense) what everybody would select if given a free choice".
Great essay. But why no mention of Afghanistan? They had 20 years to adopt liberal democracy and all kinds of incentives to do it, but they didn't (well, their leaders do seem to be a little kinder to the women now so maybe...). Was it because we made things so terrible for them that they had nowhere else to turn but tradition and family?
I agree liberalism is the inevitable consequence of material wealth. It's like a drug that everyone wants and promotes even if it makes us sick (lower life satisfaction, lower fertility, increased suicide rates, increased depression...and all seemingly worse effects for women who, paradoxically, stand to "gain" the most from liberalism).
Check out the link I sent in another comment. The cultural thresher of modernity comes for us all. Even now, there are literate female college students in Kabul going on TikTok and reading the New York Times. Today, they are few in number, suppressed dissidents powerless in the face of the Taliban. Tomorrow, they will be a self-conscious class of urban professionals capable of influencing state policy. The American effort in Afghanistan didn’t succeed in building a liberal democratic nation. But it also wasn’t an abject failure because we did successfully create a cohort of Afghans who will not forget the legacy of our presence and the path we left to follow.
https://scholars-stage.org/radical-islamic-terrorism-in-context-pt-i/
Richard, I agree with you a lot but you are off track.
History is filled with examples of cyclical social liberalism (ironically intertwined with period of decadence) followed by periods of social conservativism.
Augustus himself made the Lex Iulia criminalizing adultery and incest. His daughter, Iulia, was notoriously a slut.
Sticking to Roman history, how could we forget the 14 years old Emperor Elagabalus, who liked to dress up like a woman, and spend his time in debauchery, known for provoking the breaking of sexual taboos and disrespecting Roman traditions, while power was held by his mother, aunt and sister, a literal matriarchy. He ended up being physically removed by the Praetorian Guard.
My point is simple: the upper class has at times regularly been tempted by sexual depravity, while in other times focused on restoring norms as society was collapsing. This is nothing new and Francis Fukuyama is still a charlatan.
To focus on Iran, the sole idea that this is about headscarves or social liberalism quite frankly should be laughed at. This has nothing to do with traditions and everything to do with geopolitics. As we all know, the psychotic regime in Washington is hell bent on trying to remove Putin, install a puppet in Moscow and dismantle the Russian nation, to loot its natural resources and devastate its culture.
To do this, they thought that opening a second front in Armenia, where Russia is the peacekeeper between Armenia and Azeris, would provide for a useful distraction as NATO wages war in Ukraine. Hence they pushed Azerbaijan to attack Armenia, which the Azeris are more than happy to do.
Iran, in turn, threatened to attack Baku (and recently massed troops at the border) if they kept attacking Armenia, which made Azerbaijan back off. As Iran sees an opportunity to thwart the plans of the most evil country in the world, they also provided those annoying drones to Russia, which NATO's super advanced technology has in so far failed to stop.
Hence, Washington retaliated, by doing what they have been doing since the Arab Spring: social media riots. This are as effective as social media are influential in a country. In Belarus for instance, they failed. It is not a secret that the head of the agitators for Iran lives in the US and is paid by the FBI. If a bunch of idiots in Iran want to throw away their lives for the Great Satan, the Revolutionmary Guard of Iran will take care of them.
Every country has deranged liberals. Even Russia does. It is up to institutions to deal with them. Just like liberals deal with conservatives when they capture institutions.
Sorry, but Fukuyama is still wrong. From Elagabalus to Weimar, liberals corrupted societies before and run them into the ground, just for conservatives to rebuild them.
One thing that historic parallels miss is that there has been a permanent, technology-driven change in the economic value and self-sufficiency of women, who are a lot more useful as cogs in a managerial machine than they were as farmers or hunters in temperate or sub-arctic regions.
In fact, this has a historic (or prehistoric) parallel to matrilocal societies in places like tropical Africa, where far less effort was needed for cultivation than the plow-driven agriculture in Europe. Such societies survived for a long time with a lot more sexual depravity and weaker family units than what was possible in places where food production depended upon hard male labor.
Patriarchy can be imposed and maintained in places where the median woman has the ability to be economically self-sufficient, but it is far more stable in places where, due to technology and environment, it is nearly impossible for her to feed herself and her children.
What's women's oldest job? The prostitute. Technological progress and sexual freedom result in women whoring themselves online, starting from instagram and ending up on OnlyFans. So much for the self-sufficiency. All the rights, the marches, the social media have yet again proven one thing, women are valued primarily by their sexual appeal. Nothing has changed.
Just like highly depraved societies fail to preserve and replicate themselves in the long term. They are errors that will fix themselves. Liberalism at the end of the day is just a highly elaborated Satanic temptation.
1. Perhaps the way in which the right-wing government behaves has a lot to do with how things play out. The protests in Iran were apparently sparked because the police murdered a young woman for failing to wear her hijab properly. As awful and evil as the regime here is, it hasn't stooped so low as to outright murder someone for misgendering a trans person, or some such. And people here already really really hate the current regime. So imagine how much stronger that backlash could become if a comparable incident occurred in our own nation.
Enforcement of values, as we have observed from our own rulers, does not require violence of this sort. People here stay in line out of fear that they will be canceled socially, not because a goon squad might literally murder them. This situation occurs because the ruling class and its associates--media, academia, education, government, etc.--have all adopted the same leftist ideology. If these people could somehow be replaced by conservatives, one has to wonder if we might see something different in our culture.
2. Perhaps the rest of the world matters. The United States and its "Western" cousins exert tremendous cultural influence on the rest of the globe. I think it would not be unreasonable to posit that we are the world's top exporter of culture, especially in terms of political ideas and movements, always trying to make the rest of the world "democratic" like we are. This might matter for young people in places like Iran, who absorb those ideas and wish for a better "democratic" future in their own country. I believe Yarvin has written quite well about the regime's soft power and its influence abroad, though I can't find the article off the top of my head.
3. I can think of a couple counter-examples. What about Hungary? This nation's regime seems quite firm in its power, with no mass protests or killing of improper hijab wearers, and last I checked they were busy banning gender studies and the like. Likewise, what of Afghanistan? The Taliban also seems quite comfortable in its power there, although the nation may be much more miserable as a result. Perhaps the fact that the United States tried to impose its agenda on that nation by force (as opposed to letting soft power subvert it from within) matters.
Well, the more recent of those weren't outright *murdered*, they were socially and politically unpersoned, which I think is a very important distinction to make. But still, you have a bit of a point with Waco and Ruby Ridge. I wonder if, were those events to take place today, the federal government might be forced to refrain from the outright slaughter that it engaged in back then, as there is today enough "conservative" and "alternative" media who would notice and raise a stink.
And again, if we take people like Kyle Rittenhouse as more recent examples of the US government targeting people for wrongthink (or in his case, wrong-shoot?), that returns us to the question of why the US government seems able to do this without sparking any kind of real mass protests. As far as I can tell, the answer still must lie in the incredible, overwhelming power of the American propaganda machine (media, academia, education, etc.). The control of this machine might not be quite as total as it once was, but it's still pretty impressive, it would seem.
1. Yarvin isn't a social conservative so it's far easier for him to keep the elites in check.
2. Why Conservatism Failed blatantly plagiarizes the Unabomber manifesto so the author is not a very insightful or bright individual but a plagiarist and thus should be ignored. The ideas are relevant but you need to source Uncle Ted instead.
Here's proof of the blatant copying of the manifesto as paragraph 50 below is the author's thesis.
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.
51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.
Unlike Ted, I am a pessimist and have already given up. No point in actual tedposting because we lost the war against the technophiles who will drive humanity extinct. Alignment will never be solved and that won't stop people from working on AGI.
The title is a little misleading. Social conservatism as a top end down, government imposed set of policies appears not to be viable, and the Iranian case seems to be illustrative of that. But you close with the correct case that socially conservative communities seem to be viable, and certainly outbreed the competition! Socially conservative, particularly religiously Conservative, communities may win the long game. Modern and post modern cultural values do not make people happy, and they seem to prevent people from reproducing, not a prescription for long-term success. Also, focusing on bottom up cultural change is the way to go anyway. Opposing specific policies at the government level that are hostile to these communities and these cultural and religious norms is the way to go. But don’t expect too much from government. Good article.
Richard Hanania is definitely moving up the charts on my mental list of interesting writers. Here he is suggesting that cultural evolution follows a path that ultimately is not controllable by deliberate government policy. But it took me a while to understand this, because he starts with "secularization and cultural liberalism are inevitable" in the subtitle, which he contradicts when he ends with "in the long run, it will be secular elites who find it impossible to mold human nature to their preferred specifications."
I don't think Iran is a great example because it's 'outside in the cold' of the US order and has not been thriving in the last few years, and is at the extreme end of social conservatism. Therefore its socially conservative order is seen as failing, and it's preventing urban elites from living how they want to live.
India is a more representative example of the rising non-Western world, when it comes to nationalism and ethno-religious identity the government is very conservative and incredibly popular. Sure it has become somewhat more 'liberal' in some ways e.g. dropping birthrates, but the fundamental 'national ethos' is something that hasn't been seen in the West since WW2 - and it is thriving.
Maybe Gulf states (UAE, Kuwait, etc) are good examples of social conservatism enforced by the government, while also still being rich. Non-Muslims are also left alone to live their lives without integrating.
It almost makes one wonder if India is a “metropole” of sorts - by being a power center it is able to retain its own elites rather than having the US and W. Europe poach them. A minor power center to be sure but one nonetheless.
Well, the US and Europe does poach them, see the tech CEOs or Rishi Sunak, but my impression is that this is seen as positive thing by Indians rather than a loss. I guess they have people to spare, and India clearly reaps benefits from economic integration with the US especially, of which the tech CEOs are a symbol
I have always shared this same irritation with social conservatives who trot out the "brainwashed by hippies" hypothesis for all the things they see as social ills. How different is this from progressive social constructionism? If I scoff at the idea that "the patriarchy" or "white supremacy" brain washed people into believing things, why would I be any more amenable to the idea that an evil cabal of hippies convinced people to get on welfare, delay marriage, have more and more varied sex, etc. Both sides in this seem to be social constuctionist and think culture is a thing you engineer rather than something that arises via tradeoffs between mutually compelling, but competing, moral goods and those tradeoff structures can shift. Maybe traditional values just stopped doing what they used to do, in terms of providing social goods for more people so people could indulge more individualism without losing anything they hadn't already lost? Any lingering appearance of trad con efficacy is certainly just selection bias for the ever fewer people for whom no tradeoff exists.
Activism is needed but has to be well-placed, focused, and considerate of multiple variables. Think about the decline of horse-drawn carriages and beasts or burden: it wasn't due to the efforts of animal rights activists of the 1880s but rather the innovation of automobiles right around the chronological corner. Therefore, traditionalists should embrace non-traditional technologies and systems (e.g., remote/hybrid work) to be one step ahead in terms of incentives and influence.
It calls to mind for me what Yarvin once said about “Provincial strongmen” and how they must govern with an iron fist since the relevant institutions are out of their reach.
Such as how Orban can ban Soros from Hungary but he can’t shut down the OSF (or at least strip it of any power).
My big takeaway was that for social conservatism to work it has to reach the metropole, i.e the US and W.Europe, so the best people are attracted to those institutions.
Richard, your thesis seems to be that modern, wealthy societies naturally have a libertarian cultural bias, and any government that tries to bend in another direction is doomed to fail. But as another commenter points out, culture can change over time, from fundamentalist to libertine and back. And despots are always looking for ways to control and mold the culture. While murdering a few hundred dissidents every few years may be ineffective and passe, new methods are always being developed. That’s the fault in Fukuyama-ism - the blindness to the fact that the human urge to rule over others is not going to be extinguished by the beneficence of Western liberal governance.
Excellent piece. If people of faith want to have an influence in the modern world, it must come through voluntary means. Religious people have something deeply valuable to offer (meaning, purpose, community, transcendent values), but many organized religions have chosen the route of force rather than persuasion. It will be interesting to see how well they can make their case when they lack institutional power.
The focus has to be on allowing social conservatives to have as many children as they want through things like child tax credits and school vouchers. In the medium to long term, political and lifestyle preferences are genetic and those that have more children will have their preferences become what is normal in society.