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?
Thanks! I guess I view their worldview as symptomatic of a psychic mechanization which I think is deeply harmful and would rather not be any more influential than it already is.
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?
It's very interesting catching up with discussion like this on Substack now after approaching the politics from different, less-public-oriented directions for the past several years. I had mostly stopped thinking in terms of left and right by the end of 2019, paying more attention to concrete-person-centered institutional and factional structures instead of abstract-idea-centered or broad-value-centered structures. Now getting back in touch with how others are using left and right has been as awkward as finding sea legs.
In 2019, when the Epstein news was coming out, I was also in the middle of reading about Chinese internal politics under Mao and Deng, especially the builder/balancer economic debates under Deng, and also experiencing at one degree removed the first crisis of the Zizians with LessWrong. All together, there were so many odd cross-cutting hybridizations of left and right in these events (Landian antihuman accelerationist vegan trans liberationists?) I felt I needed to go back to firmer concretes and ditch the left/right abstractions for a while. That "while" then turned into something just over five years.
All my old confusions about left and right that had been summarized in images like "horseshoe theory" ended up with the left and right sides of the "horseshoe", the fringes, now split into many fingers, becoming a "face hugger theory": several sharply differentiated and mutually hostile extremisms to each of left and right, reaching around so that each left extremism has its own corresponding right extremism or two, the center fat in the middle to project all these fingers, center and fingers all grasping the head of the subjects seeking political understanding to overwhelm and paralyze them and force them to reproduce a next generation of face huggers from their hijacked gut responses. That was a nasty enough new image to keep me going for five years.
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.
Thanks! I guess I view their worldview as symptomatic of a psychic mechanization which I think is deeply harmful and would rather not be any more influential than it already is.
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?
Thanks for this. Being in the midst of shifts increases the dificulty — and importance — of stepping back and working to parse.
It's very interesting catching up with discussion like this on Substack now after approaching the politics from different, less-public-oriented directions for the past several years. I had mostly stopped thinking in terms of left and right by the end of 2019, paying more attention to concrete-person-centered institutional and factional structures instead of abstract-idea-centered or broad-value-centered structures. Now getting back in touch with how others are using left and right has been as awkward as finding sea legs.
That’s very interesting! I would be curious to hear more about that from you
In 2019, when the Epstein news was coming out, I was also in the middle of reading about Chinese internal politics under Mao and Deng, especially the builder/balancer economic debates under Deng, and also experiencing at one degree removed the first crisis of the Zizians with LessWrong. All together, there were so many odd cross-cutting hybridizations of left and right in these events (Landian antihuman accelerationist vegan trans liberationists?) I felt I needed to go back to firmer concretes and ditch the left/right abstractions for a while. That "while" then turned into something just over five years.
All my old confusions about left and right that had been summarized in images like "horseshoe theory" ended up with the left and right sides of the "horseshoe", the fringes, now split into many fingers, becoming a "face hugger theory": several sharply differentiated and mutually hostile extremisms to each of left and right, reaching around so that each left extremism has its own corresponding right extremism or two, the center fat in the middle to project all these fingers, center and fingers all grasping the head of the subjects seeking political understanding to overwhelm and paralyze them and force them to reproduce a next generation of face huggers from their hijacked gut responses. That was a nasty enough new image to keep me going for five years.