Triumph of the dumb-arses: "The Right returned culturally, but with an intellectual vacuum at its centre"

“This ... has come to define much of the New Right across the West. And ultimately, it is a problem of ideas. The return of the Right in 2016 and again in 2024 was not an intellectual revival. It was not driven by theory or political philosophy, but by visibility and reach: Jordan Peterson debating feminists, Charlie Kirk confronting campus socialists, Donald Trump dominating the podcast circuit. The Right returned culturally, but with an intellectual vacuum at its centre: most notably, a lack of serious economics.

For classical liberals looking back decades from now, this revival of the Right is unlikely to inspire them in the way Thatcher and Reagan still do today. The politicians of the 1980s were what George Will called ‘conviction politicians’: figures who entered politics with a coherent social creed. Politics for them was not merely about remaining in power, but about pursuing a broader mission of prosperity. That mission was not to control the economy toward a collective goal, but to empower individuals to make their own decisions.

Today’s Right, by contrast, is dominated by political entrepreneurs: figures highly skilled at attracting attention and mobilising voters. By nature, they are populists, and populism is the direct translation of public emotion into government policy. Without intellectual grounding, politics becomes purely oppositional. Today, lacking any clear sense of direction in economics, the Right is often effective at identifying problems but incapable of solving them.”

~ Mani Basharzad from his article 'Has the Right given up on economics?' [hat tip Samizdata]

More than a covid's-worth of fiscal incontinence

"[W]hen the pandemic hit Ardern and Robertson had a decision to make. Respond in a fiscally prudent manner or borrow seventy billion, at least thirty of this was spent on non-pandemic frippery, and wrap themselves in a cloak of virtue while leaving an economic calamity to a future set of politicians. ...

"Ardern and Robertson used the pandemic to advance their own agenda ... [John] Key saw a crisis and, lacking an economic agenda or political philosophy, ran to the international money men to maintain the status quo rather than attempt meaningful reform.

"Given the content of the Covid Report the current government is right to highlight Robertson’s fiscal incontinence; pointing to the 70.4 billion total spend as a contrast with their own rectitude.

"Except. Well. ... [Nicola] Willis, who has managed to add over twenty billion new debt in her first two years in office, is projected to increase sovereign debt by more than Robertson achieved over the next five years.

"And this is without a pandemic, major earthquake or outbreak of foot and mouth. ...

"Imagine a company director who has seen revenue fall but maintains payroll by borrowing. Eventually the line of credit ends, staff lose their employment and the director is forced to sell the family home.

"That is our economic policy in one paragraph."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'John Key and Jacinda Ardern both turned to debt when disaster hit'

MAGA: "Empathy is out. Assholery is in."

How do you describe the rise of a creature like Trump. Jeffrey Tucker, Robert Bidinotto and Robert Tracinski tracked his early ascent— along with the parallel rise of the alt-right, which simply took the unthinking opposite side, however horrendous, of mainstream issues, without abandoning the collectivism that underpinned them. And the mainstream is still trying to explain MAGAts sufficiently deranged by Trump to follow him so blindly. Doug Muder identifies several "rifts" in American culture that he's lucked into exploiting.

Donald Trump, in my opinion, is not some history-altering mutant, like the Mule in Asimov’s 'Foundation' trilogy. I think of him as an opportunist who exploited rifts in American society and weak spots in American culture. He did not create those rifts and weak spots, and ... they will still be there waiting for their next exploiter. ...

The first rift he identifies is The Rift Between Working and Professional Classes, i.e., between "the people who shower after work and the people who shower before work."

All through Elon Musk’s political ascendancy, I kept wondering: How can working people possibly believe that the richest man in the world is on their side? Similarly, how can people who unload trucks or operate cash registers imagine that Donald Trump, who was born rich and probably never did a day of physical labor in his life, is their voice in government?

The answer to that question is simple: The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on “the educated elite” seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do — people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.

Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it’s hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree — you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it’s in that parent-to-child you-don’t-really-understand tone of voice. And let’s not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can’t even explain why without using long words you’ve never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you’re supposed to be the one who has “privilege”.

The tension has been building for a long time, but it really boiled over for you during the pandemic. You couldn’t go to work, your kids couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t go to football games or even to church — and why exactly? Because “experts” like Anthony Fauci were “protecting” you from viruses too small to see. (They could see them, but you couldn’t. Nothing you could see interested anybody.) Then there were masks you had to wear and shots you had to get, but nobody could explain exactly what they did. Would they keep you from getting the disease or transmitting it to other people? Not exactly. If you questioned why you had to do all this, all they could do was trot out statistics and point to numbers. And if you’ve learned anything from your lifetime of experience dealing with educated people, it’s that they can make numbers say whatever they want. The “experts” speak maths and you don’t, so you just have to do what they say.

Can we say we haven't seen that same thing here? 

In his 2012 book 'The Twilight of the Elites,' Chris Hayes outlined the ways that the expert class has become self-serving. In theory, the expert class is comprised of winners in a competitive meritocracy. But in practice, educated professionals have found ways to tip the balance in their children’s favor. Also, the experts did not do a good job running the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and they failed to foresee the economic crisis of 2008. When they did notice it, they responded badly: Bankers got bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes. ... 

On the public-trust side, people have been too willing to believe conspiracy theories about perfectly legitimate things like the Covid vaccine [and to applaud the appointment of an anti-vaccine loony to the job of Health Secretary]. Trump’s slashing of funding for science and research is a long-term disaster for America, and his war against top universities like Harvard and Columbia destroys one of the major advantages the US has on the rest of the world. But many cheer when revenge is taken on the so-called experts they think look down on them.

There are many genuine reasons to mistrust the people we see so frequently wheeled out by media and government as so-called experts. But you'd be a fool to abandon trust in genuine expertise—or to place that trust instead in know-nothing figureheads like a Trump or a Bannon or (closer to home) to a Winston, Tamaki or the like. 

The next rift he identifies however opens up in this era of Post-Truth Politics. Muder calls it Truth Decay, that realisation that in the marketplace of ideas, truth no longer matters. Post-modernism has won. The mainstream media's peddling opinion has betrayed their prior responsibility to just report the facts — both science and media have been corrupted by government money — and now reality is biting back in the form of a loss of public trust.

And now too many public figures neither know nor care. About anything. And certainly not about facts. Only a short while ago a Libertarian presidential candidate with unusually decent momentum was drummed out of the campaign by not knowing "What's Aleppo?" No, a Republican senator can confuse “gazpacho” with “Gestapo” and no-one blinks an eye.

Along with the lost of trust in experts and the inability of American society to agree on a basic set of facts, we are plagued by a loss of depth in our public discussions. It’s not just that Americans don’t know or understand things, it’s that they’ve lost the sense that there are things to know or understand. College professors report that students don’t know how to read entire books any more. And we all have run into people who think they are experts on a complex subject (like climate change or MRNA vaccines) because they watched a YouTube video.

Levels of superficiality that once would have gotten someone drummed out of politics — [like a Defence Secretary's inability to answer a straight question, or the Attorney General's ignorance of the separation of powers, or the president's complete incomprehension of the Constitution he had sworn only weeks before to defend and protect] — are now everyday events.

So the MAGAts have captured the low ground. For now. They've become the swamp. But in the absence of any coherent programme, all they have is pissing off their opponents. Making liberals cry. Essentially, at the end of the rot, what we are left with is this: Empathy is out. Assholery is in. Basically, when the rubber of MAGAt policies hit the road, they're intended to hit someone. "The cruelty is the point. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. If people you don’t like are made poorer, weaker, or sicker — well, good! Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears."

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

And that was all just Trump's first term! It's already got much worse.

It’s hard to look at any list of recent Trump administration actions without concluding that these people are trying to be assholes. It’s not an accident. It’s not a side effect of something else. The assholery is the point.

In the absence of anything else of positive substance, that's really all there is.

The tribalism of the new Right contrarians

"The new Right’s absurd positions [on Ukraine, on Putin, on Milei, on vaccines, on immigration, you name it] cannot be explained by their adherence to any coherent ideology, but only by their tribal view of the world.
    "To get a better grip on how these people think, we need to understand what the new Right is. By 'the new Right' I mean a loose network that emerged in the last decade and is active in the culture wars. It includes social and alternative media influencers (like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Jack Posobiec) and politicians (like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy). And it includes their numerous followers and the segment of Donald Trump supporters who are fanatical. Uniting this loose network is their opposition to both the liberal-leftist ideology and what they see as establishment conservatism. The new Right should not be understood as a coherent political ideology, but as a political tribe.
    "There are two ways a tribalist makes up his mind on an issue. The first is by following the line of his group. This is, after all, the essence of tribalism: making sense of one’s self, of others, and of the world through the prism of the group. These days though, we can see another kind of tribalist who follows another guide: first he observes what the other group, the enemy tribe, stands for, and then he supports the opposite position. Whatever the enemy believes and supports, this is the bad; whatever they oppose, the good. Thus, the enemy, the other, becomes the standard of true and false, the yardstick of right and wrong. This mode of thinking is still tribalism: the standard of truth is still other people and opposition to what they believe. ...
    "[Why do m]any who think that the election of 2020 was rigged also tend to believe that the vaccines made young people 'drop like flies'? ... because they formed their views on those topics [by opposing the consensus of the liberals/progressives/globalists,” i.e. the 'current thing.' .... Why do new Right culture warriors oppose the struggle of a nation to maintain its freedom against an aggressor? Because Ukraine and Zelensky also became 'the current thing.' ...

I will call this subcategory of tribalism contrarianism. Interestingly, the contrarian thinks he is the opposite of a tribalist. He makes fun of the masses, calling them victims of groupthink or 'NPCs' (the Non-Player Characters of video games who lack agency). In the contrarian’s mind, he is above any such brainwashing and claims to do 'his own research.' Yet if he simply adjusts his thinking about all major topics by picking whatever is the opposite of the dominant opinion, he’s not really thinking. ...
    "Understanding the character of the new Right contrarians should give us insight into how to oppose their tribalism and nihilism. They are collectivists, in thought and in action. Their existential compass is the group. The opposite of collectivism is individualism, and the opposite of tribalism is independent thinking — taking the responsibility to make sense of the world on one’s own. Independent thinking is difficult, and in no way infallible. Yet, it is our only navigating instrument towards the truth. There is no substitute for the responsibility to think. ...

"That the tribalists of the new Right promise to make America great again is an outrageous farce. The people who made America great were the opposite of tribalists. They had the self-esteem to see the world through their own judgment and to put no tribal allegiance or dogma above it. It can only be independent thinkers that can appreciate and pursue the positive values that have made America a country worth loving and fighting for: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
    "To be an American patriot, one must first reject tribalism."

~ Nikos Sotirakopoulos, from his post 'Contrarians of the New Right'

Paranoid politics is not going away.

 

It's happened here and, as commentator Robert Tracinski describes below, it's happening over there. 

What do I mean? I mean the morphing of anti-Covid culture warriors into oddly conservative anti-everything zealots.

Tracinski outlines the trajectory.

Moms for Liberty, an activist organisation founded and led by conservative women, has emerged in the last two years to oppose, in the name of “parental rights,” what it sees as leftist indoctrination in public schools.
    There are worthwhile arguments to be had about contemporary gender ideology and about how to respond to the history and legacy of race in America— ... [and] there will be no shortage of controversial examples to be debated.
    But a thoughtful debate is not what Moms for Liberty has offered as its defining contribution. Instead, it has become the driving force behind a sweeping wave of book bans and politicised restrictions on teaching.
    It is a curious outcome for a group with such a libertarian-sounding name. How did Moms for Liberty come to be one of the nation’s chief censors? ...

Turns out it's in much the same way that NZ's 'Voices for Freedom' (anti-'globalist,' anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-trans, anti-science ... ) has always more about freedom from reality than any other kind, and more about keeping their anti-Covid ball rolling: "The origin of Moms for Liberty," explains Tracinski, "was not in the culture wars over race and gender but the Covid culture war." There you go, you see:

It began in Florida as a rebellion against rules requiring masks for public school students. ... It was the pandemic that provided Moms for Liberty with the opportunity to mobilise and radicalise conservative parents. Descovich explained, “If you miss this opportunity, when [parents] are really engaged … it’s going to be hard to engage them in the future.” When the debate shifted from masks to vaccines, Moms for Liberty appealed to anti-vaccine sentiment on the right. ...
    That’s the supposed meaning of “for liberty” in Moms for Liberty: the freedom to ignore mask and vaccine mandates. The group emerged from a combination of dogmatic rejection of any anti-pandemic measures and legitimate frustration with school closures, which in some areas dragged on for a year ...
    The anti-mask cause summoned a great deal of violent fury, but it was perhaps too small and temporary for a national movement that had ambitions to persist beyond the pandemic. Yet this issue established the kind of energy that has characterised Moms for Liberty ever since: an upwelling of anger, a distrust of experts, a volcanic hatred of “the establishment,” and a deep suspicion that the powers that be are out to destroy our way of life.

Sound familiar?

Paranoid politics is not going away.

"A pro-censorship position could now be presented as a matter of national security."

"When people talk about disinformation today, it is almost always from within a left-wing narrative framework. The villains behind the disinformation tsunami allegedly inundating the civilised world are identified as white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes, anti-vaccination zealots, and fundamentalist Christians....
    "In normal circumstances, the pet hates of leftists don’t carry very much weight. Tragically, however, the life of the world stopped being normal in January 2020, as it became clear that a novel coronavirus – Covid-19 – was about to ignite a global pandemic. Fearful that the small but very vocal clusters of anti-vaccination zealots, located in just about all Western nations, would undermine the public health and immunological measures vital to fighting the virus, public servants began establishing anti-disinformation units to identify and counter the lies being spread about Covid-19....
    "[P]oliticians and activists moved swiftly to extend the brief of these disinformation units to encompass just about all of the Left’s pet hates. The situation was not improved by the intervention of national security agencies alarmed at the volume of Russian and Chinese disinformation pouring onto Western social media platforms.
    "From the perspective of the Left, this conflation of Far-Right disinformation with the disinformation emanating from authoritarian nation states would prove to be enormously helpful. A pro-censorship position ... could now be presented as a matter of national security. In New Zealand, willingness to buy into this aspect of the anti-disinformation project was aided by the still raw memories of the Christchurch Mosque Massacres. ...
    "What the New Zealand Left – notoriously ignorant of its own, and the international movement’s history – finds it almost impossible to accept is that disinformation (or, as it was once, more honestly, known: “propaganda”) was, and is, every bit as rampant on the revolutionary left, as it was, and is, on the reactionary right. ... Not that the state-subsidised Disinformation Project would ever acknowledge the fact..."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Disinformation from the Left'

"The anti-vaccine advocates have been proven wrong in every major claim they have made during the pandemic."

"The anti-vaccine advocates have been proven wrong in every major claim they have made during the pandemic. They claimed that the covid vaccines would lead to heart attacks, infertility, birth defects, and mass death. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. But if you spend much time talking to these people online, which I don’t recommend, you will find that they are not merely undeterred but regard themselves as vindicated, and they have moved on to demanding 'accountability' from the 'establishment.'
    "And the 'free thinkers' of the [religious right and alt-right] are increasingly captive to this crackpot caucus... 'open-minded, [only] in the sense of being filled with cobwebs and tumbleweeds and offering no resistance to whatever stray breeze blows through ..."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'The Jerry Springer Debating Society'

"I find the virtual hostility to Zelenskyy incredibly disturbing. It is most pronounced among what we might refer to as the post-Covid right"

Pic by Getty

"Then there’s the other side in the memeification of Zelenskyy. His haters. And man, do they hate him. I find the virtual hostility to Zelenskyy incredibly disturbing. It is most pronounced among what we might refer to as the post-Covid right – that corner of the world wide web where the understandable agitation with lockdown has morphed over time into anti-vax conspiracism, an unhealthy obsession with the World Economic Forum, a distrust of everything and everyone, and a cast-iron conviction that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a puppet of the globalist elites determined to drag us all into World War 3.
    "It’s like a mirror image of the liberal-elite fawning: where that lot dreams Zelenskyy will help to bring about the ‘rebirth of the liberal world order’, the Ukraine cynics think he is the liberal world order. The new world order. A mouthpiece of globalism. Zelensky is ‘working with globalists against the interests of his own people’, says Candace Owens. He’s a ‘globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons’, said Arizona State senator Wendy Rogers. Apparently he’s aligned with those ‘global bankers’ who are ‘shoving godlessness and degeneracy in our face.’ Donald Trump Jnr reckons he’s an ‘international welfare queen’. You don’t have to be a fan of the West’s sending of ever-more weaponry to Ukraine to recognise how infantile it is to describe an invaded nation’s plea for arms as welfare queenery. Talk about globalising the culture war....
    "There’s a very important debate to be had about Russia, Ukraine, the West and war in the modern era. But what we’ve mostly had over the past year is the cheap exploitation of a serious global conflict to score points in petty wars at home. Chaise-longue Churchills on one side, armchair Chamberlains on the other. And they’re all really talking about themselves, not Ukraine. Let’s change the record. Maybe Zelenskyy is neither saint nor sinner. Neither the world’s saviour nor its destroyer. Maybe he’s just a man doing what he thinks is best in the most horrifying and existential of circumstances. Call me a brainless dupe of Davos propaganda, but that’s what I’m going with."

~ Brendan O'Neill, from his op-ed 'The Two Zelenskyys'