One data point contra a premise presented against you - I'm a Democrat and man of the left and have influence within the party and its policies in my state. My connections and influence are concrete. I hold fundraisers and raise money for Democrats seeking statewide office and in state congressional races, in addition to offering intangible support. Consequently, I know well most of the party leadership and major elected and appointed office holders - I had the cell phone number of the last governor and his chief of staff as I was one of his earliest supporters when he first sought election, and I maintain various levels of contact and ongoing correspondence about various matters of policy and public import with others in the party.
All that was to establish my bona fides for this factual point - that I am a Dem and leftist, and your arguments have influenced and continue to influence me on a number of topics. Concretely, I have joined the consensus that my fellow travelers went off the rails or overshot on a number of issues in 2020 and risks continuing to do so - not just politically or electorally but substantively, so to everyone's detriment even if it has not cost us at the ballot box yet.
I doubt I'd have reached that conclusion as quickly or firmly without your contributions. I certainly would not think of them as manifestations of possibly more fundamental issues with certain positions my party and I have long taken, or even of achievements I've always credited my party with.
I also doubt I'd be as open to your arguments and willing to engage in self-reflection based on them if you only attacked my side, if you did not frequently gleefully roast ideas on your side that deserve it - and assure me that, if you're really coming after something I support, you're doing so in intellectual good faith based on arguments I need to take seriously and contend with.
Honest question, how do you consider yourself a "man of the Left"? I understand not liking the right-wing or even being a democrat (opens a lot of career opportunities), but otherwise being an (I assume) white male and earnestly adopting leftwing ideology?
>When I hear arguments not to “punch right,” I interpret that as a call for everyone to become an apologist for stupidity, corruption, and weakness.
It's true that retards use the phrase this way, but it is *incredibly vital* that we keep to the original meaning of the slogan, which was about not participating in a "cordon sanitaire" against people to the right of ourselves simply to win approval from leftists.
Trads like Dave Greene, moderate identitarians like me and Jared, and extreme libertarians like yourself all need to close ranks metapolitically against any attempt by the left to designate our ideas as "unacceptable" or outside the Overton Window. That doesn't mean you are obligated to take any stances you don't actually hold or platform people you strongly disagree with, but if we break ranks when it matters that gives them a foothold in repressing rightist ideas, and in the end that will ultimately come back to bite all of us in the ass. On some level we need a united front against liberal concern trolls who try to police conversations etc.
Obviously you are currently doing everything it makes sense for you to do along these lines (going to bat for Jared, platforming me, actively engaging with Dave) given your own ideological commitments, and anyone sensible in the DR respects you for all you've done. I just hope you maintain that impulse going forward as your star continues to rise.
The phrase was always dumb. You can have enemies you don't form a cordon sanitaire against. Nobody has any obligation to close ranks with you either. Chris Rufo is right: good coalitions can gain from expelling those who drag everyone else down. One of the problems with labor unions is that they make it difficult to fire such people, and lots of progressive organizations melted down in recent years because they fill up with people who make it impossible to actually accomplish anything.
This would, ironically, be more true if we didn't live in a system that explicitly gives every person a single vote. Being a good person doesn't get you more votes and being a bad person doesn't get you less, at least up until you are convicted of a felony. You need the hordes of retards to side with you in order to win elections.
Most voters don't have much political involvement otherwise. And kicking the deadweight out of a group doesn't stop them from voting, so what's being lost?
Richard, I want to give a big thank you for the response. The debate between NRX types and the more centralist right wing is fascinating to me. Like I said before, there are a lot of reasons to dislike NRX, and I feel like you brought out a lot of those criticism's out constructively in this post.
I certainty appreciated it, as I feel like when I see these exchanges, they often times feel like two people talking past one another, and the antagonism makes it feel more zero sum, leaving both sides worse off. But the internet seems to do that to everything.
In an attempt to prod the discourse along further, from my exposure to Dave's content, I would probably tweak the 1-3 assumptions you mentioned as follows:
1. "There will one day be a time when the American right or left achieves complete victory."
My understanding of NRX/dissident material has always been they share the belief the American left has already achieved something akin to complete victory, and they feel corresponding resentment at the conservative/republican infrastructure that they believe allowed it to happen, or is a participant in its continuation.
2. "The left cannot influence the right or viceversa. All each side can do is hope to beat the other in a zero-sum contest."
Again, my understanding of NRX/dissident viewpoints is that because they believe the left has achieved something approaching complete victory, the left is in a unique position to influence the population through its institutional capture, and the right is largely disempowered. This is a problem for right-wing activists, since they operate within a leftwing value framework.
In effect, it's a kind of critical theory/structural power argument, where the right's attempt at influence is just constantly subverted or perverted by leftwing institutional influence, and the right itself becomes a participant in its own demise. This is why they tend to track you as an "aspirational member of the ruling class" and roll their eyes at you when you punch right in an attempt to set "dumb rightwing" people straight.
The bigger criticism though is that if we acknowledge zero sum contests are generally not productive by nature, punching right itself seems to be a kind of zero-sum contest--which must be non-productive for the reasons already established. Why not then start in discourse?
3. "“Right” and “left” have consistent natures, so much so that I don’t have to worry about what these terms will mean in 30 years."
For NRX/dissidents, my understanding has always been their position is "Cthulhu always swims left" so they don't seem to disagree with you that these natures aren't a constant--rather everything trends more and more left. This is Yarvin's argument that if you go back over the centuries, each wave of conservatives is less conservative than the conservatives that preceded them, and this gives way to his long analysis about the wigs and contemporary leftism as a kind of mutated Protestantism built into the American project's DNA. Again, a rightwing version of structural/institutional systems of power.
NRX/DR seems to draw more i.m.o from the postmodern/existentialist parts of academia that has been so persuasive on leftwing thought for the last century but uses it to revitalize traditional right-wing thought in an unusual way.
But anyways, cheers, and thank you for the serious and well thought out response.
If someone’s ideal is the social and political systems we had in the Middle Ages maybe they can be upset by all that has happened over the last few centuries. But I’m not one of those people.
It absolutely improved my understanding and appreciation for your work.
I hope you keep on engaging with the NRX stuff—while I feel like its broad criticism of the mechanisms of society as a whole has some merit, the philosophy it draws from always seems to lead to a kind of gloomy, pessimism about the world.
It does absolutely needs a foil, and your article was a great constructive example of that. I only hope your work continues to be refined and improve.
>My understanding of NRX/dissident material has always been they share the belief the American left has already achieved something akin to complete victory, and they feel corresponding resentment at the conservative/republican infrastructure that they believe allowed it to happen, or is a participant in its continuation.<
I generally sympathize with this viewpoint. I don't think you can say the left has achieved a total victory, because my idea of a total victory is one in which my ideas are so overpowering that elections feel pointless, consensus is so strong that there is barely any disagreement for people to bother voting over. We've never had that for either side and the evidence is that democracies can very rarely, if ever, reach that degree of conformity. If they can, it probably has to be a very small and homogeneous population, not a continent-spanning territory like the US.
However, there is still a ton of wiggle room in between that absolute ideal of "total victory" and the status quo as it stands. I know total victory is impossible because the world isn't perfect, but what about getting halfway to a total victory? A quarter of the way? Even one tenth? Even one tenth seems like it would be a pretty serious improvement. And we really have no idea how much is possible unless people actually try and push, and see what happens. Every big social upheaval in history would've seemed impossible if you described it to the generation that came before it.
For example, at one point in the not too distant past the United States actually was a quasi-one-party state in the sense that the Congress was reliably controlled by Democrats and there was no real expectation that it was up for grabs. Democrats sat in control of Congress almost continuously from the end of WW2 into the 90s. I would like to see that situation reversed such that Republicans enjoy that kind of control *and* that Republicans control the White House with the same degree of consistency.
From my standpoint, even that historically unprecedented degree of long-term victory feels like a compromise, because the other party would still *exist*. My true preference, if I could get it, would be that Democrats and leftists no longer exist, in the sense that there are zero people who accept any of those ideas or give them any credence. I would prefer to see those ideologies consigned to history. So no, while I don't sit around believing that total victory of my side is really possible, there is still huge amounts of room for improvement before ever getting anywhere near a "total victory" scenario, and enormous uncertainty about how much of that improvement is actually possible.
To claim that the right can't make any more progress against the left at all would be just as foolish as to claim that one day the right will be able to totally eliminate the left. Thus, it's silly to dismiss people pushing for their interests just because "well, you're never going to get total victory." You can never get total victory, but you can always change the status quo.
I used to be a proponent of virtue ethics who believed that Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed was broadly correct. I was never really dissident right or committed to postliberalism because I never saw a path to different system that 1) made any sense whatsoever or 2) had any plan for how to get there that wasn't "murder all the bad people until we magically get the system we like."
I've since realized that maybe 98% of political ideologies have human nature wrong. They don't understand what humans are. They don't understand what humans want. They don't understand how humans behave.
Humans are vaguely sophisticated tribal monkeys who want to attain an acceptable level of status and material prosperity with the least effort possible and then guard what they have gotten like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold. Some people are better at this than others because they are smarter or luckier or more conscientious or more charismatic or whatever. Some people have a higher idea of what "acceptable" means than others. There are some nuerodivergent weirdos for whom this formula breaks down such as with the autistic dude who just wants to make things out of legos all day. But at core this is what people are.
95%+ of humans want autonomy, status, safety, and ease. These are not virtues. They are more like Darwinian principles. They are the things that let vaguely sophisticated tribal monkeys replicate their genes. And they disappoint pretty much anybody who wishes humans preferred something else (fairness, excellence, freedom, solidarity, truth, etc.) instead. The core question is how much you should try to get people to go against their own natures and in what direction this should go. The dissident right is correct about how stuff that ignores human nature tends to break down on the rocks of reality. They just also have an almost entirely wrong model of what human nature is and would fair no better if they were in charge.
*Edit*
For people saying most extreme Darwinians are in the dissident right, this is true, but also met with the reality that periods when humans were led by some kind of genetically entrenched elite tend to be periods of pronounced stagnation where the overwhelming bulk of people did not have autonomy, status, safety, or ease and also were no more virtuous by more traditional definitions of virtue. And divested of even these rudimentary "virtues" frankly what the hell is the point of favoring this system? That it's "natural?" Anybody who favors anything even anemically resembling virtue should find this system near the rock bottom of "good" systems.
One thing I always marvel at among my lefty tribe who can't tolerate reading or listening to anything on the other side is they somehow think conservatism is a disorder or something having gone wrong when it is sort of the default state of people who tradeoffs between mutually competing individual vs group goods are difficult. As if half the population is just crazy or something. But then I read conservatives who use this same dopey rhetoric - that liberalism is like some sort of evil and only intentionally malign people or idiots would have those instincts. Seems natural to me that humans have a suite of moral instincts that might conflict with each other and where we have to choose which can be indulged situationally with balanced cost to other intuitions. And that some people and some times/places reach different tradeoffs. And both sides also mistake in-group signaling rhetoric meant for the in-group as policy announcements for the outgroup. I am constantly torn between individualist and collectivist instincts (and both can have conservative or liberal valence) given that collectivism in some senses underwrites our individual freedom but it can also curtail it in ways that pays no downstream benefits. Only idiots join teams. If you identify too much with a political in-group, you aren't really interested in knowing anything.
What a stupid moronic thing to say. I’m referring to your last sentence. While reading your response, I’m thinking, well to each his own. Upon finishing, I’m thinking, is he an absolutist? And then, concrete bubble comes to mind. Apparently the reality of what’s going on around you hasn’t set in quite yet. And yes, they can reach conformity, it’s called Tyranny.
There is no difference between private (ingroup signaling) and public (outgtoup announcements) on an age of rapid, flattening, and democratized communications technology. The same was true when the printing press was invented. Either, it's a wild free-for-all and everyone has to say precisely what they mean and interpreted charitably as to where they stand. Or else, all coalitions must agree to discipline those who break ranks when disclosing positions and messaging. What we have now is certain coalitions who want the privilege of the former, but their enemies to suffer under the latter. Understandable, given power seeks to consolidate itself and disable its opponents. But then the discourse should be focused on power, not on "truth".
The assumption from your viewpoint that I would question is: The Left and the Right are both good and bad in equal measure, and it does not really matter very much in the long run which one of them has more or less influence.
This probably isn't what you actually believe, but it's how your piece and often your overall attitude comes across, exemplified here:
"Finally, and this is something I think Dissident Right types are temperamentally ill-suited to understand, a zero-sum mentality can make both sides worse off."
Cultural and political influence *is* zero sum. Preferences on these issues must go one way or the other. We will either accept DEI narratives or reject them. We will either accept that abortion is acceptable or that it is not. We will either accept that men can be women or that they cannot. Etc. There is no "everybody wins, rising tide lifts all boats" option on most of these issues, if any.
This is the place where people like Anthony Davis are coming from and it makes perfect sense to me. It also makes sense to me that you do not care about this because, as you say, "My calling is to tell the truth," not to "do politics." It is fair to say that you don't care who wins and you only want to sit back and say whatever you think is true. But winning is unfortunately more important than what is true. The people that win get to override truth and do so on a routine basis. So if your response to people who want to win is that you don't care about winning, it's fair for them to respond that they aren't interested in your tellings of truth. If you tell people to their face that you share no common interest with them, it is natural that many will just tune you out.
Could you perhaps explain that a bit further? If influence is indeed zero sum, that would suggest that some important outcomes in our world are likewise zero sum outcomes. The world overall may not be, but if so, it is because some of these zero sum issues do in fact have correct choices which will make the world better if they are enacted. Improving the kind of world we live in will therefore require, in some instances (in the vast majority of instances, IMO), that the incorrect people lose and the correct people win.
Yes the right people should win and the wrong people should lose. And the good people do not sort themselves completely according to right-left. There are fights that should be within conservatism, within liberalism, and between conservatism and liberalism. That’s the opposite of the no punch right philosophy.
I might argue that influence is negative sum, that removing power from one party and granting it to another party results in the total amount of power held by both parties being lower than the original amount. This is more or less the theory of "checks and balances", and also the theory of groups getting bogged down in communication-related costs.
On the other hand, there is an opposite theory, where no matter how much power is vested in the God-King, he can't exercise it against you, because he only has so many hours in the day and you're not important enough to register. Whereas if he creates a Department of Meddling with outposts in every small town everywhere, the pitiful flunkies who work for it really can exercise the power they borrow from him against you. This would make influence positive sum.
It’s actually even a little bit deeper than that. From my reading of NRX it seems to draw heavily from the postmodern/existential philosophy thats been so persuasive in leftwing academia for the past century , and that claim is that consciousness works in a way where what constitutes “truth” is a byproduct of ones inheritated or chosen value hierachy.
Basically, the world is too complicated for refined expert or empirical analysis to get us to “the truth.”
In NRX thought this takes the form of something like: “if Richard thinks he is stating truth, his issue selection and interpretation of data will only reveal a ‘truth’ influenced within the context of cultural values that are always going left.”
Thats a bit too extreme for me, and it has holes to poke in it, but its interesting because it touches on broader issues about how the left (and increasingly the right it seems) think of truth in the west.
There is an interesting rejection of Richard’s project of just making objective true statements and then establishing policy off of it.
In many ways its the core issue western civilization has been wrestling with. This is why the debate is so interesting to watch play out. I just wish Dave or Yarvin were more articulate: there would be a higher quality back and forth.
>It’s actually even a little bit deeper than that. From my reading of NRX it seems to draw heavily from the postmodern/existential philosophy thats been so persuasive in leftwing academia for the past century , and that claim is that consciousness works in a way where what constitutes “truth” is a byproduct of ones inheritated or chosen value hierachy.
Basically, the world is too complicated for refined expert or empirical analysis to get us to “the truth.
There is an interesting rejection of Richard’s project of just making objective true statements and then establishing policy off of it.<
Well, this attitude is correct when it comes to issues where there are genuine differences in preferences and values, which are increasingly relevant as political discourse focuses on "culture war" narratives. For instance, is it okay or even good for kids to read gay pornography books in their school library? It would be difficult to make an argument about that based on "just making objective true statements," and both sides would claim that to the extent anything about it is objectively true, theirs is the side with the proper claim to that truth.
Abortion is another example of this, possibly the best example since it has a large range of different views inside the right. Richard paywalled his most recent abortion post so I don't know his full position, but IIRC he even believes infanticide is justified in some cases. Obviously some people value human life differently when it comes to abortion. Being pro-life myself, I would, again, claim that to the extent anything about the issue is objective, the pro-life narrative has the best claim to being one that is "objectively true." But it's still not something where you are going to be able to sit down and decide it in the same way that you can show someone 2 + 2 = 4.
For this type of stuff, yeah, at some level there is a degree of postmodernism to it. That is why I openly call myself a right winger and don't pretend that I'm not playing for a team, and I'm always skeptical of people who claim to be fully independent. I think you are correct that the left figured this dynamic out sooner and thus benefited from it earlier, and now the right is catching up.
I've seen an interest lately in this sort of 'right postmodernism', where truth can't be defined, so who cares what it is, so let's say whatever's good for us!
The kind of postmodernism that became popular in uni isn’t so much “truth is whatever you want it to be” its more “you are thrown into a culture, and that culture acts as a pre conscious filter for truth.” Basically you’re born into a cultural meme, and if you want to change the meme, the entire cultural filtering aparatus has to change. This is why with leftwing activists the culture war touches everything—they are competing for the interpretative frame, and policy flows down from it.
That why NRX focuses so much on belief, over policy. Yarvin concluded the West is trapped in a kind of leftwing cultural meme, so if you don’t like that meme, you have to compete at the level of changing that entire interpretative filter people are born into.
As a lib who feels the same way about admonishments not to “punch left”, I appreciate your principled stance and especially your point about how one side behaves affects the other. Real possibility for compromise and learning from each other exists, but the burden is on all of us to build those bridges and resist the natural entropy of partisan warfare
Holy cow you just do not get it. The fact that you couldn’t “discern an argument” in the essay he wrote that eviscerated your meta political assumptions is so unbelievable that I have no choice but to realize you fundamentally don’t understand what time it is.
The decision over WHETHER to have a conversation about something vs the decision to NOT POLITICIZE that conversation are not mutually exclusive at all. One can be a "bold truth-teller" but still choose when to avoid wasting one's time.
American conservatism is filled with grifters, conmen and budding kleptocrats. Our progressive priests of democracy should be supported. Their woke insanity should also be criticised (to an extent they're beginning to moderate) but it's clear that they're still the superior choice to the theocrats and thugs that compose the contemporary GOP. Biden 2024. Starmer 2024. #SupportOurDemocracy
That's fake news and you probably shouldn't spread it. That is, the idea that Trump said that some white nationalists are fine people is false, you can quickly find the transcript of the speech, every journalist who promoted it should hang from a lamp-post, and you should do better too, even when memeing.
He said that some of the people who were marching alongside the white nationalists were fine people. Though this is not the same thing, I don't think the difference is great enough to justify hanging anyone.
I did read it. I don't think it's the "exact opposite". If I say that Larry is a great guy and definitely not a [Nazi/communist/SJW] but lots of his friends are [Nazis/communists/SJWs] and he knows that and chooses to hang out with them anyway, how does a person who opposes [Nazis/communists/SJWs] normally interpret that?
Additionally, punching right is beneficial to get a seat at the table in broader political discourse. The reason Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly can access Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and Jonathan Haidt is that they denounce the people two degrees to their right, which puts distance between them and the hard right and makes them the reasonable and respectable conservatives to the center left.
This is exactly the sort of political posturing that many on the right abhor, and that I personally loathe (and that also happens to directly oppose Walt's comment above). Not that you are endorsing this behavior, rather than just describing it, but this exactly why Daily Wire conservatives are so reviled. The reason to not punch right is to expand the window of acceptable discourse. Not so that any particular individual earns a place at a restricted political table. Which is exactly what Richard is being accused of doing.
I'd actually argue it can work as a sort of pincer movement: we recently saw the NYT admit lax policing killed more black people than it saved. The original discovery was made by Steve Sailer, but the NYT would never admit Steve Sailer told it something. But, you know, David Brooks or Ross Douthat...
Walt Bismarck recently made the counter-argument on his blog: there's a chain of successively less right-wing people who each endorsed the person just one step to the right, refusing to punch right. My question is (and he may have a better sense of this than me): we know the person at x=0 didn't punch the person at x=1, and the person at x=1 didn't punch the person at x=2, but did the person at x=0 punch the person at x=2?
I.E., do you need to keep being able to denounce people to your *far* right (while not doing it to people on your right) to avoid being thought of as far right yourself, and have influence on the center? Even Trump, in his 'very fine people on both sides' comment, did criticize the Nazis:
"You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists."
As my argument suggests I lean to one side of this, but I don't really know the answer.
Poignant. I think for there to be a chain from the mainstream to the fringe idea-makers, people need to avoid punching those one step to the right while making sure to put distance between themselves and those two or three steps to the right. A lot of the ideas and memes that were on the fringe in 2015 only funneled into the mainstream because, for example, Sam Harris could talk to Ben Shapiro who could talk to Crowder who could talk to Lauren Southern who could talk to Gavin McInnes who could talk to the people Shapiro and Crowder wouldn't. Then, the ideas could travel, and the better ones could be rearticulated by people with mainstream credibility, which would get them into the discourse. Another phenomenon is if someone, like Sam Harris, has a mainstream reputation by actively putting distance between himself and the right, he'll have more political capital to platform ideas that would have no respectability if they're associated with someone like Sailer.
Crowder (before their falling out), Tucker (offered to have him on again to hash things out after attacking Ben; no response), Walsh, Knowles, Chen, Pool. Also contrarians like Greenwald and Brand
But actions speak louder than words and when Bidens regime goal is admitting 10 million illegals in 4 years as revenge/MAGA voting cohort negation displays the liberal lefts power and influence when they rule America. And now in the wake of the fallout from the Mexican election result the Democrats can decide to turn the tap to reduce the flow..... a little bit ....for now..
> Going out of your way not to offend members of your own coalition is fine in politics. But for an intellectual to behave the same way is a betrayal of the entire enterprise. If you want to do politics, go do politics. I’ve never begrudged those who do. My calling is to tell the truth.
One data point contra a premise presented against you - I'm a Democrat and man of the left and have influence within the party and its policies in my state. My connections and influence are concrete. I hold fundraisers and raise money for Democrats seeking statewide office and in state congressional races, in addition to offering intangible support. Consequently, I know well most of the party leadership and major elected and appointed office holders - I had the cell phone number of the last governor and his chief of staff as I was one of his earliest supporters when he first sought election, and I maintain various levels of contact and ongoing correspondence about various matters of policy and public import with others in the party.
All that was to establish my bona fides for this factual point - that I am a Dem and leftist, and your arguments have influenced and continue to influence me on a number of topics. Concretely, I have joined the consensus that my fellow travelers went off the rails or overshot on a number of issues in 2020 and risks continuing to do so - not just politically or electorally but substantively, so to everyone's detriment even if it has not cost us at the ballot box yet.
I doubt I'd have reached that conclusion as quickly or firmly without your contributions. I certainly would not think of them as manifestations of possibly more fundamental issues with certain positions my party and I have long taken, or even of achievements I've always credited my party with.
I also doubt I'd be as open to your arguments and willing to engage in self-reflection based on them if you only attacked my side, if you did not frequently gleefully roast ideas on your side that deserve it - and assure me that, if you're really coming after something I support, you're doing so in intellectual good faith based on arguments I need to take seriously and contend with.
Thanks for your comment. You never know who you’re reaching and I’m glad to reach some who aren’t part of the conservative coalition.
He's one of the most interesting writers for people like me who don't strongly identify with one side or the other, certainly.
Honest question, how do you consider yourself a "man of the Left"? I understand not liking the right-wing or even being a democrat (opens a lot of career opportunities), but otherwise being an (I assume) white male and earnestly adopting leftwing ideology?
Its a bit curious, thats all.
most people aren't as identitarian as you guys. But maybe I don't "get it" cus I'm not white
Non-whites are very tribalistic, thats well known, yet that is not relevant to my previous question.
>There are several assumptions here worth questioning
The worst assumption he makes is "Critiquing a side only hurts it and can never make it stronger or be constructive"
>When I hear arguments not to “punch right,” I interpret that as a call for everyone to become an apologist for stupidity, corruption, and weakness.
It's true that retards use the phrase this way, but it is *incredibly vital* that we keep to the original meaning of the slogan, which was about not participating in a "cordon sanitaire" against people to the right of ourselves simply to win approval from leftists.
Trads like Dave Greene, moderate identitarians like me and Jared, and extreme libertarians like yourself all need to close ranks metapolitically against any attempt by the left to designate our ideas as "unacceptable" or outside the Overton Window. That doesn't mean you are obligated to take any stances you don't actually hold or platform people you strongly disagree with, but if we break ranks when it matters that gives them a foothold in repressing rightist ideas, and in the end that will ultimately come back to bite all of us in the ass. On some level we need a united front against liberal concern trolls who try to police conversations etc.
Obviously you are currently doing everything it makes sense for you to do along these lines (going to bat for Jared, platforming me, actively engaging with Dave) given your own ideological commitments, and anyone sensible in the DR respects you for all you've done. I just hope you maintain that impulse going forward as your star continues to rise.
The phrase was always dumb. You can have enemies you don't form a cordon sanitaire against. Nobody has any obligation to close ranks with you either. Chris Rufo is right: good coalitions can gain from expelling those who drag everyone else down. One of the problems with labor unions is that they make it difficult to fire such people, and lots of progressive organizations melted down in recent years because they fill up with people who make it impossible to actually accomplish anything.
This would, ironically, be more true if we didn't live in a system that explicitly gives every person a single vote. Being a good person doesn't get you more votes and being a bad person doesn't get you less, at least up until you are convicted of a felony. You need the hordes of retards to side with you in order to win elections.
Most voters don't have much political involvement otherwise. And kicking the deadweight out of a group doesn't stop them from voting, so what's being lost?
If people perceive they've been kicked out of a group as "deadweight," they are probably not going to vote for that side.
Trump passed all of his first term to keep distances between himself and the Alt-Right and he didn't lose a single vote, on the contrary.
I'm skeptical of your amateur psychological insight.
Pro Tip: if you want people to side with you, calling them a member of a “horde of retards” is probably not a good idea.
Richard, I want to give a big thank you for the response. The debate between NRX types and the more centralist right wing is fascinating to me. Like I said before, there are a lot of reasons to dislike NRX, and I feel like you brought out a lot of those criticism's out constructively in this post.
I certainty appreciated it, as I feel like when I see these exchanges, they often times feel like two people talking past one another, and the antagonism makes it feel more zero sum, leaving both sides worse off. But the internet seems to do that to everything.
In an attempt to prod the discourse along further, from my exposure to Dave's content, I would probably tweak the 1-3 assumptions you mentioned as follows:
1. "There will one day be a time when the American right or left achieves complete victory."
My understanding of NRX/dissident material has always been they share the belief the American left has already achieved something akin to complete victory, and they feel corresponding resentment at the conservative/republican infrastructure that they believe allowed it to happen, or is a participant in its continuation.
2. "The left cannot influence the right or viceversa. All each side can do is hope to beat the other in a zero-sum contest."
Again, my understanding of NRX/dissident viewpoints is that because they believe the left has achieved something approaching complete victory, the left is in a unique position to influence the population through its institutional capture, and the right is largely disempowered. This is a problem for right-wing activists, since they operate within a leftwing value framework.
In effect, it's a kind of critical theory/structural power argument, where the right's attempt at influence is just constantly subverted or perverted by leftwing institutional influence, and the right itself becomes a participant in its own demise. This is why they tend to track you as an "aspirational member of the ruling class" and roll their eyes at you when you punch right in an attempt to set "dumb rightwing" people straight.
The bigger criticism though is that if we acknowledge zero sum contests are generally not productive by nature, punching right itself seems to be a kind of zero-sum contest--which must be non-productive for the reasons already established. Why not then start in discourse?
3. "“Right” and “left” have consistent natures, so much so that I don’t have to worry about what these terms will mean in 30 years."
For NRX/dissidents, my understanding has always been their position is "Cthulhu always swims left" so they don't seem to disagree with you that these natures aren't a constant--rather everything trends more and more left. This is Yarvin's argument that if you go back over the centuries, each wave of conservatives is less conservative than the conservatives that preceded them, and this gives way to his long analysis about the wigs and contemporary leftism as a kind of mutated Protestantism built into the American project's DNA. Again, a rightwing version of structural/institutional systems of power.
NRX/DR seems to draw more i.m.o from the postmodern/existentialist parts of academia that has been so persuasive on leftwing thought for the last century but uses it to revitalize traditional right-wing thought in an unusual way.
But anyways, cheers, and thank you for the serious and well thought out response.
I’m glad you’ve benefited from these articles, it reassures me that this is worth it.
I’ve already addressed the idea that conservatives always lose here: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/conservatives-win-all-the-time
If someone’s ideal is the social and political systems we had in the Middle Ages maybe they can be upset by all that has happened over the last few centuries. But I’m not one of those people.
It absolutely improved my understanding and appreciation for your work.
I hope you keep on engaging with the NRX stuff—while I feel like its broad criticism of the mechanisms of society as a whole has some merit, the philosophy it draws from always seems to lead to a kind of gloomy, pessimism about the world.
It does absolutely needs a foil, and your article was a great constructive example of that. I only hope your work continues to be refined and improve.
>My understanding of NRX/dissident material has always been they share the belief the American left has already achieved something akin to complete victory, and they feel corresponding resentment at the conservative/republican infrastructure that they believe allowed it to happen, or is a participant in its continuation.<
I generally sympathize with this viewpoint. I don't think you can say the left has achieved a total victory, because my idea of a total victory is one in which my ideas are so overpowering that elections feel pointless, consensus is so strong that there is barely any disagreement for people to bother voting over. We've never had that for either side and the evidence is that democracies can very rarely, if ever, reach that degree of conformity. If they can, it probably has to be a very small and homogeneous population, not a continent-spanning territory like the US.
However, there is still a ton of wiggle room in between that absolute ideal of "total victory" and the status quo as it stands. I know total victory is impossible because the world isn't perfect, but what about getting halfway to a total victory? A quarter of the way? Even one tenth? Even one tenth seems like it would be a pretty serious improvement. And we really have no idea how much is possible unless people actually try and push, and see what happens. Every big social upheaval in history would've seemed impossible if you described it to the generation that came before it.
For example, at one point in the not too distant past the United States actually was a quasi-one-party state in the sense that the Congress was reliably controlled by Democrats and there was no real expectation that it was up for grabs. Democrats sat in control of Congress almost continuously from the end of WW2 into the 90s. I would like to see that situation reversed such that Republicans enjoy that kind of control *and* that Republicans control the White House with the same degree of consistency.
From my standpoint, even that historically unprecedented degree of long-term victory feels like a compromise, because the other party would still *exist*. My true preference, if I could get it, would be that Democrats and leftists no longer exist, in the sense that there are zero people who accept any of those ideas or give them any credence. I would prefer to see those ideologies consigned to history. So no, while I don't sit around believing that total victory of my side is really possible, there is still huge amounts of room for improvement before ever getting anywhere near a "total victory" scenario, and enormous uncertainty about how much of that improvement is actually possible.
To claim that the right can't make any more progress against the left at all would be just as foolish as to claim that one day the right will be able to totally eliminate the left. Thus, it's silly to dismiss people pushing for their interests just because "well, you're never going to get total victory." You can never get total victory, but you can always change the status quo.
I used to be a proponent of virtue ethics who believed that Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed was broadly correct. I was never really dissident right or committed to postliberalism because I never saw a path to different system that 1) made any sense whatsoever or 2) had any plan for how to get there that wasn't "murder all the bad people until we magically get the system we like."
I've since realized that maybe 98% of political ideologies have human nature wrong. They don't understand what humans are. They don't understand what humans want. They don't understand how humans behave.
Humans are vaguely sophisticated tribal monkeys who want to attain an acceptable level of status and material prosperity with the least effort possible and then guard what they have gotten like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold. Some people are better at this than others because they are smarter or luckier or more conscientious or more charismatic or whatever. Some people have a higher idea of what "acceptable" means than others. There are some nuerodivergent weirdos for whom this formula breaks down such as with the autistic dude who just wants to make things out of legos all day. But at core this is what people are.
95%+ of humans want autonomy, status, safety, and ease. These are not virtues. They are more like Darwinian principles. They are the things that let vaguely sophisticated tribal monkeys replicate their genes. And they disappoint pretty much anybody who wishes humans preferred something else (fairness, excellence, freedom, solidarity, truth, etc.) instead. The core question is how much you should try to get people to go against their own natures and in what direction this should go. The dissident right is correct about how stuff that ignores human nature tends to break down on the rocks of reality. They just also have an almost entirely wrong model of what human nature is and would fair no better if they were in charge.
*Edit*
For people saying most extreme Darwinians are in the dissident right, this is true, but also met with the reality that periods when humans were led by some kind of genetically entrenched elite tend to be periods of pronounced stagnation where the overwhelming bulk of people did not have autonomy, status, safety, or ease and also were no more virtuous by more traditional definitions of virtue. And divested of even these rudimentary "virtues" frankly what the hell is the point of favoring this system? That it's "natural?" Anybody who favors anything even anemically resembling virtue should find this system near the rock bottom of "good" systems.
One thing I always marvel at among my lefty tribe who can't tolerate reading or listening to anything on the other side is they somehow think conservatism is a disorder or something having gone wrong when it is sort of the default state of people who tradeoffs between mutually competing individual vs group goods are difficult. As if half the population is just crazy or something. But then I read conservatives who use this same dopey rhetoric - that liberalism is like some sort of evil and only intentionally malign people or idiots would have those instincts. Seems natural to me that humans have a suite of moral instincts that might conflict with each other and where we have to choose which can be indulged situationally with balanced cost to other intuitions. And that some people and some times/places reach different tradeoffs. And both sides also mistake in-group signaling rhetoric meant for the in-group as policy announcements for the outgroup. I am constantly torn between individualist and collectivist instincts (and both can have conservative or liberal valence) given that collectivism in some senses underwrites our individual freedom but it can also curtail it in ways that pays no downstream benefits. Only idiots join teams. If you identify too much with a political in-group, you aren't really interested in knowing anything.
What a stupid moronic thing to say. I’m referring to your last sentence. While reading your response, I’m thinking, well to each his own. Upon finishing, I’m thinking, is he an absolutist? And then, concrete bubble comes to mind. Apparently the reality of what’s going on around you hasn’t set in quite yet. And yes, they can reach conformity, it’s called Tyranny.
Hyperbole of course.
There is no difference between private (ingroup signaling) and public (outgtoup announcements) on an age of rapid, flattening, and democratized communications technology. The same was true when the printing press was invented. Either, it's a wild free-for-all and everyone has to say precisely what they mean and interpreted charitably as to where they stand. Or else, all coalitions must agree to discipline those who break ranks when disclosing positions and messaging. What we have now is certain coalitions who want the privilege of the former, but their enemies to suffer under the latter. Understandable, given power seeks to consolidate itself and disable its opponents. But then the discourse should be focused on power, not on "truth".
The assumption from your viewpoint that I would question is: The Left and the Right are both good and bad in equal measure, and it does not really matter very much in the long run which one of them has more or less influence.
This probably isn't what you actually believe, but it's how your piece and often your overall attitude comes across, exemplified here:
"Finally, and this is something I think Dissident Right types are temperamentally ill-suited to understand, a zero-sum mentality can make both sides worse off."
Cultural and political influence *is* zero sum. Preferences on these issues must go one way or the other. We will either accept DEI narratives or reject them. We will either accept that abortion is acceptable or that it is not. We will either accept that men can be women or that they cannot. Etc. There is no "everybody wins, rising tide lifts all boats" option on most of these issues, if any.
This is the place where people like Anthony Davis are coming from and it makes perfect sense to me. It also makes sense to me that you do not care about this because, as you say, "My calling is to tell the truth," not to "do politics." It is fair to say that you don't care who wins and you only want to sit back and say whatever you think is true. But winning is unfortunately more important than what is true. The people that win get to override truth and do so on a routine basis. So if your response to people who want to win is that you don't care about winning, it's fair for them to respond that they aren't interested in your tellings of truth. If you tell people to their face that you share no common interest with them, it is natural that many will just tune you out.
Influence is zero sum, what kind of world we live in is not.
Could you perhaps explain that a bit further? If influence is indeed zero sum, that would suggest that some important outcomes in our world are likewise zero sum outcomes. The world overall may not be, but if so, it is because some of these zero sum issues do in fact have correct choices which will make the world better if they are enacted. Improving the kind of world we live in will therefore require, in some instances (in the vast majority of instances, IMO), that the incorrect people lose and the correct people win.
Yes the right people should win and the wrong people should lose. And the good people do not sort themselves completely according to right-left. There are fights that should be within conservatism, within liberalism, and between conservatism and liberalism. That’s the opposite of the no punch right philosophy.
I might argue that influence is negative sum, that removing power from one party and granting it to another party results in the total amount of power held by both parties being lower than the original amount. This is more or less the theory of "checks and balances", and also the theory of groups getting bogged down in communication-related costs.
On the other hand, there is an opposite theory, where no matter how much power is vested in the God-King, he can't exercise it against you, because he only has so many hours in the day and you're not important enough to register. Whereas if he creates a Department of Meddling with outposts in every small town everywhere, the pitiful flunkies who work for it really can exercise the power they borrow from him against you. This would make influence positive sum.
It’s actually even a little bit deeper than that. From my reading of NRX it seems to draw heavily from the postmodern/existential philosophy thats been so persuasive in leftwing academia for the past century , and that claim is that consciousness works in a way where what constitutes “truth” is a byproduct of ones inheritated or chosen value hierachy.
Basically, the world is too complicated for refined expert or empirical analysis to get us to “the truth.”
In NRX thought this takes the form of something like: “if Richard thinks he is stating truth, his issue selection and interpretation of data will only reveal a ‘truth’ influenced within the context of cultural values that are always going left.”
Thats a bit too extreme for me, and it has holes to poke in it, but its interesting because it touches on broader issues about how the left (and increasingly the right it seems) think of truth in the west.
There is an interesting rejection of Richard’s project of just making objective true statements and then establishing policy off of it.
In many ways its the core issue western civilization has been wrestling with. This is why the debate is so interesting to watch play out. I just wish Dave or Yarvin were more articulate: there would be a higher quality back and forth.
>It’s actually even a little bit deeper than that. From my reading of NRX it seems to draw heavily from the postmodern/existential philosophy thats been so persuasive in leftwing academia for the past century , and that claim is that consciousness works in a way where what constitutes “truth” is a byproduct of ones inheritated or chosen value hierachy.
Basically, the world is too complicated for refined expert or empirical analysis to get us to “the truth.
There is an interesting rejection of Richard’s project of just making objective true statements and then establishing policy off of it.<
Well, this attitude is correct when it comes to issues where there are genuine differences in preferences and values, which are increasingly relevant as political discourse focuses on "culture war" narratives. For instance, is it okay or even good for kids to read gay pornography books in their school library? It would be difficult to make an argument about that based on "just making objective true statements," and both sides would claim that to the extent anything about it is objectively true, theirs is the side with the proper claim to that truth.
Abortion is another example of this, possibly the best example since it has a large range of different views inside the right. Richard paywalled his most recent abortion post so I don't know his full position, but IIRC he even believes infanticide is justified in some cases. Obviously some people value human life differently when it comes to abortion. Being pro-life myself, I would, again, claim that to the extent anything about the issue is objective, the pro-life narrative has the best claim to being one that is "objectively true." But it's still not something where you are going to be able to sit down and decide it in the same way that you can show someone 2 + 2 = 4.
For this type of stuff, yeah, at some level there is a degree of postmodernism to it. That is why I openly call myself a right winger and don't pretend that I'm not playing for a team, and I'm always skeptical of people who claim to be fully independent. I think you are correct that the left figured this dynamic out sooner and thus benefited from it earlier, and now the right is catching up.
I've seen an interest lately in this sort of 'right postmodernism', where truth can't be defined, so who cares what it is, so let's say whatever's good for us!
This is much older than postmodernism, of course.
The kind of postmodernism that became popular in uni isn’t so much “truth is whatever you want it to be” its more “you are thrown into a culture, and that culture acts as a pre conscious filter for truth.” Basically you’re born into a cultural meme, and if you want to change the meme, the entire cultural filtering aparatus has to change. This is why with leftwing activists the culture war touches everything—they are competing for the interpretative frame, and policy flows down from it.
That why NRX focuses so much on belief, over policy. Yarvin concluded the West is trapped in a kind of leftwing cultural meme, so if you don’t like that meme, you have to compete at the level of changing that entire interpretative filter people are born into.
As a lib who feels the same way about admonishments not to “punch left”, I appreciate your principled stance and especially your point about how one side behaves affects the other. Real possibility for compromise and learning from each other exists, but the burden is on all of us to build those bridges and resist the natural entropy of partisan warfare
Holy cow you just do not get it. The fact that you couldn’t “discern an argument” in the essay he wrote that eviscerated your meta political assumptions is so unbelievable that I have no choice but to realize you fundamentally don’t understand what time it is.
“My calling is the tell the truth.” Boom. 🎤
There’s no inconsistency between those two pieces.
The decision over WHETHER to have a conversation about something vs the decision to NOT POLITICIZE that conversation are not mutually exclusive at all. One can be a "bold truth-teller" but still choose when to avoid wasting one's time.
American conservatism is filled with grifters, conmen and budding kleptocrats. Our progressive priests of democracy should be supported. Their woke insanity should also be criticised (to an extent they're beginning to moderate) but it's clear that they're still the superior choice to the theocrats and thugs that compose the contemporary GOP. Biden 2024. Starmer 2024. #SupportOurDemocracy
> There are very fine people on both sides
That's fake news and you probably shouldn't spread it. That is, the idea that Trump said that some white nationalists are fine people is false, you can quickly find the transcript of the speech, every journalist who promoted it should hang from a lamp-post, and you should do better too, even when memeing.
He said that some of the people who were marching alongside the white nationalists were fine people. Though this is not the same thing, I don't think the difference is great enough to justify hanging anyone.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/15/full-text-trump-comments-white-supremacists-alt-left-transcript-241662
"and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally," but also read the rest of the thing.
I think that misrepresenting what he said to be the exact opposite of what he said is pretty bad actually.
I did read it. I don't think it's the "exact opposite". If I say that Larry is a great guy and definitely not a [Nazi/communist/SJW] but lots of his friends are [Nazis/communists/SJWs] and he knows that and chooses to hang out with them anyway, how does a person who opposes [Nazis/communists/SJWs] normally interpret that?
Now Snopes of all things sides with me: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/
Additionally, punching right is beneficial to get a seat at the table in broader political discourse. The reason Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly can access Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and Jonathan Haidt is that they denounce the people two degrees to their right, which puts distance between them and the hard right and makes them the reasonable and respectable conservatives to the center left.
This is exactly the sort of political posturing that many on the right abhor, and that I personally loathe (and that also happens to directly oppose Walt's comment above). Not that you are endorsing this behavior, rather than just describing it, but this exactly why Daily Wire conservatives are so reviled. The reason to not punch right is to expand the window of acceptable discourse. Not so that any particular individual earns a place at a restricted political table. Which is exactly what Richard is being accused of doing.
That's why they're reviled, but is it effective?
I'd actually argue it can work as a sort of pincer movement: we recently saw the NYT admit lax policing killed more black people than it saved. The original discovery was made by Steve Sailer, but the NYT would never admit Steve Sailer told it something. But, you know, David Brooks or Ross Douthat...
Walt Bismarck recently made the counter-argument on his blog: there's a chain of successively less right-wing people who each endorsed the person just one step to the right, refusing to punch right. My question is (and he may have a better sense of this than me): we know the person at x=0 didn't punch the person at x=1, and the person at x=1 didn't punch the person at x=2, but did the person at x=0 punch the person at x=2?
I.E., do you need to keep being able to denounce people to your *far* right (while not doing it to people on your right) to avoid being thought of as far right yourself, and have influence on the center? Even Trump, in his 'very fine people on both sides' comment, did criticize the Nazis:
"You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists."
As my argument suggests I lean to one side of this, but I don't really know the answer.
Poignant. I think for there to be a chain from the mainstream to the fringe idea-makers, people need to avoid punching those one step to the right while making sure to put distance between themselves and those two or three steps to the right. A lot of the ideas and memes that were on the fringe in 2015 only funneled into the mainstream because, for example, Sam Harris could talk to Ben Shapiro who could talk to Crowder who could talk to Lauren Southern who could talk to Gavin McInnes who could talk to the people Shapiro and Crowder wouldn't. Then, the ideas could travel, and the better ones could be rearticulated by people with mainstream credibility, which would get them into the discourse. Another phenomenon is if someone, like Sam Harris, has a mainstream reputation by actively putting distance between himself and the right, he'll have more political capital to platform ideas that would have no respectability if they're associated with someone like Sailer.
Clueless
He formed a link in the chain connecting the center left and IDW types to the right
He platformed people to his right who platformed people to their right and so on. This funneled a lot of people to the rabbit hole
Crowder (before their falling out), Tucker (offered to have him on again to hash things out after attacking Ben; no response), Walsh, Knowles, Chen, Pool. Also contrarians like Greenwald and Brand
But actions speak louder than words and when Bidens regime goal is admitting 10 million illegals in 4 years as revenge/MAGA voting cohort negation displays the liberal lefts power and influence when they rule America. And now in the wake of the fallout from the Mexican election result the Democrats can decide to turn the tap to reduce the flow..... a little bit ....for now..
Paul Ryan? Isn't he pro-life?
> Going out of your way not to offend members of your own coalition is fine in politics. But for an intellectual to behave the same way is a betrayal of the entire enterprise. If you want to do politics, go do politics. I’ve never begrudged those who do. My calling is to tell the truth.
This is an interesting contrast to https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shut-up-about-race-and-iq .