Excellent! I agree with the Lasch/Paglia dyad as a source of intellectual inspiration for a cultural tendency that in my mind was best exemplified by early Red Scare and thinkers like Angela Nagle, which you could call a form of cultural reactionism or even neoconservatism but which I think can more neutrally be called cultural libertarianism (neither racist nor anti-racist, fine with queers but suspicious of queer theory etc.) Unfortunately this does seem to be an uneasy position to maintain, especially as a public intellectual, especially when, in Martin Gurri's clever phrasing, the public is revolting. And although grifting is probably a big part of the common rightward shift, it does seem that the post-left have injected some economic populism on the right (at what cost, though)?
Yes, it was very much them plus the free press/UnHerd crowd I was thinking of! I agree that there are incentives toward grifting, but I think with Anna and Dasha I’d probably does matter that they’re both European immigrants-if only because if you’ll allow me to get a bit woke, the cultural logic of assimilation into America is so tied to opting into anti-blackness. It’s been a long time since I read the Nagle book, I seem to recall a certain “these gender degenerates are why the far right happened” subtext that I may just be maliciously imagining. I’ll have to reread. I’m glad you enjoyed!
Thinking more about the validity of Lasch-inspired criticisms of wokeness, what do you make of the claim by people like Musa al-Gharbi that wokeness is a form of symbolic reparations for historical crimes such as slavery and the subjugation women and, being symbolic, is less threatening to elites than the politics of economic redistribution? I realise that the slippery concept of “elites” is doing a lot of work here, but it seems to me that there is something to it.
I don’t think that criticism is *entirely* off base, see IE; euphemisms like “unhoused” existing synonymously with the proliferation of hostile architecture, but I’d have to be more familiar with him than I am to be comfortable agreeing with it!
Excellent! I agree with the Lasch/Paglia dyad as a source of intellectual inspiration for a cultural tendency that in my mind was best exemplified by early Red Scare and thinkers like Angela Nagle, which you could call a form of cultural reactionism or even neoconservatism but which I think can more neutrally be called cultural libertarianism (neither racist nor anti-racist, fine with queers but suspicious of queer theory etc.) Unfortunately this does seem to be an uneasy position to maintain, especially as a public intellectual, especially when, in Martin Gurri's clever phrasing, the public is revolting. And although grifting is probably a big part of the common rightward shift, it does seem that the post-left have injected some economic populism on the right (at what cost, though)?
Yes, it was very much them plus the free press/UnHerd crowd I was thinking of! I agree that there are incentives toward grifting, but I think with Anna and Dasha I’d probably does matter that they’re both European immigrants-if only because if you’ll allow me to get a bit woke, the cultural logic of assimilation into America is so tied to opting into anti-blackness. It’s been a long time since I read the Nagle book, I seem to recall a certain “these gender degenerates are why the far right happened” subtext that I may just be maliciously imagining. I’ll have to reread. I’m glad you enjoyed!
Thinking more about the validity of Lasch-inspired criticisms of wokeness, what do you make of the claim by people like Musa al-Gharbi that wokeness is a form of symbolic reparations for historical crimes such as slavery and the subjugation women and, being symbolic, is less threatening to elites than the politics of economic redistribution? I realise that the slippery concept of “elites” is doing a lot of work here, but it seems to me that there is something to it.
I don’t think that criticism is *entirely* off base, see IE; euphemisms like “unhoused” existing synonymously with the proliferation of hostile architecture, but I’d have to be more familiar with him than I am to be comfortable agreeing with it!