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David Sessions's avatar

I must not have read all the way to the end, because I didn’t see the bit about Hanania until after I wrote my post. I’ll have to think about “post-right” as a parallel to the post-left. But I think where he is now is a fairly broad-based tendency among “rationalist” types who, along with a good part of certain scientistic social sciences, take the biological human differences stuff as gospel. I don’t think that is *necessarily* reactionary (the Ezra Klein, Yglesias cohort of the 2010s was in an earlier version of this universe, and they have always rubbed shoulders with the center-right libertarian version.) That universe has become much more right-coded in its opposition to wokeness, feminism, and everything it perceives to involve “science-denying” blank-statism in the 2010s, and in its resistance to social critique (which Klein, by contrast, has gotten more open to in the past 15 years).

I’m curious why you think it’s a bad thing if those types move back to the center or center-left out of disgust with the right. Wouldn’t that be better than flirting with a right that’s worse than they are?

Good post; “Aristotle or John C. Calhoun,” lol.

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Jessica's avatar

Hanania isn't that shocking, racial crank thought of the bell curve type can sit very well with beliefs in free markets and sexual practice outside the heterosexual nuclear family. If you're conservative-ish (especially in money matters) but find Trump and co. tacky, that's the tendency for you. And besides, who doesn't want to be told they're Elite Human Capital?

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