Hanania defines enlightened centrism more in terms of epistemological habits and underlying assumptions than in terms of place along a left-right continuum, hence Sailer and Klein both being centrists in his definition. I'd probably define Hanania Thought as simply Goldwater conservatism. Goldwater was a pro-choice, secular, free market ideologue who believed in US imperialism. Hanania is, whether he likes it or not, a rightist.
I think where you and he differ is in his being an ideologue and your being a conservative in the literal Burkean sense. Hanania's ruthlessly committed to laissez-faire ideology in all circumstances on the grounds both that it's more moral and that it's more efficient. He rejects (wrongly in my opinion) the success of Korean industrial policy (and presumably Japanese, Taiwanese, and Singaporean industrial policy) as an explanation of the country's rapid development in favor of muh IQ and claims the country would be more prosperous with US laissez-faire. By contrast, your politics seem adaptive and not ideological. You have a conservative mindset in your recognition of the inevitability of hierarchy and natural differences and your attachment to nation and appear willing to eschew the nominally right-wing position when circumstances are unfavorable.
Ultimately, left and right only make sense in a localized context. What's right-wing in one society may be of the left in another (e.g. free college in US vs ROK), but one-size-fits-all ideologies like socialism or libertarianism are designed to be transplanted everywhere for all time.
Hanania and I are allies because a bunch of moronic populists are in charge, but if Hanania wins I will probably have instances where I want to tone down the libertarianism and globalism.
Incidentally I think hipster Burkeanism led by the Disney parody guy is a hysterically weird idea. But maybe it's just crazy enough to work.
This is an interesting insight that terms such as "left and right" do depend on the context, especially between different jurisdictions... For me personally, this is expressed by myself having opinions that tend to align with the Right-wing in Western Europe, but with the left-wing in the US and Canada for most of the time...
This def earned a subscription… I think I would disagree with you on certain things such as the nature of inceldom (it’s definitely not white collar office professionals who are incels). The office environment in general is beyond repair because many big decision making processes have been outsourced to technology, making the fruits of male competition and aggressiveness irrelevant in a lot of cases. It sucks.
I don’t think a war with China would be good at all, but I LOL at people who think China is this hyper masculine society. I truly think we would win a war with them comfortably. China is a country with 1.4 billion people, a martial arts tradition, and has had a total of 3 boxing world champions. This is in spite the fact that any big time world champion out of China would be a wildly rich celebrity. They sink billions of dollars into developing soccer and basketball programs yet can’t get a star in the European soccer leagues and have had 1 NBA star who was a genetic anomaly.
Japan can’t be far off genetically, yet they’ve had 82 boxing world champions, multiple players in top soccer leagues, beat Germany in the world cut and the US to win the world baseball classic. I honestly think this contrasts demonstrates that China is quite simply not a culture of winners in the way Japan is. And this national temperament matters when it comes to international conflicts.
>The real question is how you handle men between the fiftieth and ninetieth percentiles... I think this is an open question and reasonable people can disagree.
Solid analysis. To the extent that this question has an "objective" answer, I suspect it depends on the still unanswered question of what kind of longterm impact AI will have on the white collar workforce. How many high-IQ and high-agency men will the elites *need* to keep around to maintain economic productivity?
I find it obnoxious when people insist that they are "centrists" out of a need to try and manage their own intellectual image, as if identifying with a particular "side" would make them appear less credible. Almost nobody is actually a "centrist," although you might be closer to the "center" or farther away from it, I suppose. But since politics is a conflict, you are inevitably on one side or the other, even if you don't have the honesty to say it out loud.
Broadly agree with everything in this post. Extra agreement with getting women out of the workplace. It should not be an expected norm that a woman must have a "career" in order to be high-status. From my own observations, even in relatively unchallenging cushy white-collar work-from-home jobs, women waste incredible amounts of time and energy stressing over trivial details and rambling at each other in pointless meetings. I am certain they would be happier if they had more time to spend with their kids or just generally do anything else at all in life, to say nothing of the rest of us in the office with them.
Again, really fascinating stuff. I couldn't have put it better myself.
At the event I was at yesterday I was explaining the fundamental difference between 'left' and 'right' with your exact framing. Some idiot was stuck in a Cold War Boomer mindset when he thought 'left' was collectivism and 'right' was individualism.
I’ve been thinking about what you said. I think I might be ‘alt-centre-right’ as I think formalism and meritocracy are centre-right principles. Whereas the most right-wing would be like God King feudalism and a hereditary caste system.
I do believe power should be accountable, and whilst elites are inevitable, that doesn’t mean they’re all as bad as each other, or that the people should be ignored completely.
I agree with you if we're comparing all ideologies in human history like in Civilization
But in practice formalism and meritocracy as delineated above are the hard right of any practically achievable overton window outside a lunatic asylum lol
I suspect that nobody to the right of me is ever going to achieve power in America or Europe ever again, so calling myself center right seems kind of limp, ya know?
I think we’d all be centrists in an Overton Window of our choosing. So yes, I’m more right-wing than most people today, but still, in a grand scheme of things, my views are those of the centre-right. Meritocracy, representative and constitutional government, rule of law… such values would have been recognisably centre-right even in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Montesquieu, David Hume, John Adams, Edmund Burke… these were figures of the centre-right even in their day. And I still hold to their principles (except maybe Burke, agh but I see as too conservative in an age with little to conserve, though I do like his critique of natural rights.’
I agree with aspects of your take, and even the main thrusts of your larger points. You can clearly see some of today's social problems, but you don't seem to have a great answers for what would help our society function well. I definitely agree with you though that hierarchy is inevitable and can be good, we need to learn to embrace struggle and not escape to addictions, we need to de-feminize our social spaces, and we need to accept and adhere to strict gender norms. But I would suggest that your read Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, De Tocqueville, Feser, Deneen, Vermuele, etc. if you want a better grasp of what makes a society just, orderly, stable, and good.
A few minor quibbles:
- Today, the economic world is not "show up and you will do well." That's completely out of touch.
- Our times, while being soft in one sense, are increasingly hard on our spirits. Most people feel alienated and alone, unable to find meaningful relationships and start families. That is why we fall into addictions. We aren't "happy" because we get dopamine hits, we are miserable because of it, and we try to replace addiction with more addiction, which is never ending. It's unfortunate that you would fight me for trying to eliminate some of those vicious activities that keep you debased.
- Aristotle harshly criticized the Spartans because their entire society relied on war (i.e., external threats). What do they do in peace times? A good society can answer that question. A flawed society relies on external strife.
- You can't ignore half of society's men unless you want major social strife. You can't reduce chivalry to eroticism. And you can't ignore the bonding between mother and child when a mother raises that child instead of working at something she finds more "fun and feminine."
"- You can't ignore half of society's men unless you want major social strife. You can't reduce chivalry to eroticism. And you can't ignore the bonding between mother and child when a mother raises that child instead of working at something she finds more "fun and feminine.""
A lot of people I wouldn't characterize as right-wing per se have these characteristics- which may be an error in my classification. My interest is mostly in whether you wish to promote your worldview by imposing it on others, banning alternative lifestyles, etc., or whether you wish to go the marketplace of ideas route and, if you win, create not an authoritarian regime, but a dominant paradigm which individuals may leave if it does not suit them. I suspect many others agree.
Maybe a better means of phrasing: Is your political goal to have people acknowledge the natural hierarchies you describe, or to artificially enhance them? You seem to be tending more towards the former in this post, for example in your statement that while workplace norms should be masculine and oriented towards excellence, women who are highly ambitious and motivated should be able to use these qualities to succeed in elite careers, if they so desire and can keep up.
That’s a decent list. I’m so used to economic focus from the intellectual right, that I do not often see solid cultural arguments.
I disagree with you on the explicit patriarchy, but completely support a meritocracy, and you should consider advocating for a meritocracy as well. The main advantage of asking for a meritocracy is if you are right on gender, those will be identical anyways. But if you are wrong, a meritocracy will allow us to have some great woman leaders as well as men. It’s also a much easier sell to most people. You can certainly still argue that sex differences in a meritocracy are caused by biological factors, not sexism, but I would advise you to avoid having bringing back the patriarchy as an explicit goal.
"The rightist view is that all power structures necessarily create elites, but any egalitarian state leveling action can only create a “shadow elite” of bureaucrats, DEI apparatchiks, academics, journalists, “fact checkers,” and “mental health experts.”"
Do you really believe this? I would believe you if you said "one hallmark of right-wing thought across political contexts is that the balance of hierarchy-equality should be shifted towards hierarchy and I believe this about our society, so in our context I'm right-wing." But as you alluded to earlier, political contexts vary. The rule-of-law + free market + free speech/association society that most American pro-market right-wingers want still contains a bunch of provisions that would seem laughably pie-in-the-sky egalitarian to basically any society 500 years ago, such as the fact that our legal code makes no distinction between crimes against elites (aristocrats) and crimes against proles (peasants).
So in reality, right-wingers in the American context still want a bunch of "egalitarian state leveling action" and support a lot more of the constraining of the "natural" elites than was ever done in any large-scale society prior to, say, 1800. The difference between right-wingers and left-wingers on this issue is a matter of degree, not kind, with the crux of the issue being whether the *current* balance is too egalitarian or too hierarchical.
It's true that online right-wingers have gotten really dumb, but this is an inevitable symptom of success. Any ideology that is popular will necessarily be absorbed and parroted by a lot of stupid people, because most of the population in general is quite stupid, at least compared to the sorts who actually bother reading this long-form content on Substack. You didn't have a bunch of mouth-breathers spouting "CHRIST IS KING" 8 years ago because right-wing thought was still genuinely unpopular back then. The fact that we have those guys now is a sign of how much the Overton window has shifted since then.
Greg Clark on surnames is a useful piece of evidence for the inevitability of hierarchy. Even Swedish social democracy and Mao's Cultural Revolution can't really extinguish the "moxie" that elites pass on to their kids.
Every rightist should at least be familiar with the basics of conservatism as summarized by Russell Kirk, even if disagreeing or rejecting it. There is a lot of "reinventing the wheel" on the right, simply because the feminized educational system never shared the right-wing wisdom of the past with each new generation of the youth:
Ed West argues that crime and criminals have a twisted appeal at least to leftists, in spite of the superficially repulsive aspect of bottom quintile males - maybe some evo psych logic going on.
Good collection of links. Haven't read Russell Kirk and seems like a deficit of mine..
>Ed West argues that crime and criminals have a twisted appeal at least to leftists, in spite of the superficially repulsive aspect of bottom quintile males - maybe some evo psych logic going on.
I have a suspicion that this tendency is what distinguishes those who are leftists at their very psychological core from people who might just happen to vote for them. The latter group can generally be persuaded to abandon the left at times, but the former cannot, at least not without shaking up all their beliefs to their very core.
Second the recommendation of Russell Kirk, the best American expositor of Burkean conservatism. I'm not a "conservative" in this sense, but you're right that he should be near the top of any serious right-winger's reading list -- and of ANY reading list which is serious about covering the whole scope (i.e., not just the left) of American political thought.
West may make this point behind the paywall, but I think a lot of the left-wing admiration for criminals is about oversocialized university products (Uncle Ted got this one right) living vicariously through other people's violence and impulsiveness.
Another exhilarating read, I thank you! Ever since watching this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-icAjJQjWc&t=455s&pp=ygUjY2FsbG1lZXpla2llbCBsaWJlcnRhcmlhbmlzbSBwYXJ0IDM%3D), I've considered myself to be on the right because the conception of right as being hierarchical and left as being egalitarian just makes a lot more sense to me. That said, I'm still a libertarian because I relate more to the Rothbardian/Hoppean type of libertarianism, which I also think is just more sensible and in line with "human nature" (lefty anthropologists can bite me). Basically, the lowlifes of society will still be allowed to wither away, but this will only be after those safety nets of family, community, and charity fail to catch and redirect them. "Second" chances when given excessively and without restriction (e.g., "he's a good boy on the inside") can absolutely be negative, but when dispatched strategically and with limits is supposed to be a part of meritocracy. We should be standard bearers for the view that it is completely morally permissible for those unwilling to contribute to languish in poverty and destitution, but we also don't want to lose productive people because of mistakes made earlier in life if earnestly recovered from. That said, the shrinking of the middle class is not because people are getting poorer; rather, both the middle and lower classes have been consistently shrinking over the past few decades while the upper class has been growing (adjusted or inflation). In short, more people are becoming wealthy by escaping the lower and middle classes as time has gone one. What to attribute this too is a thornier problem that I won't get into, but the Austrian and Chicago economists are pretty resolute in their defense of global free trade, and I personally think worries about globalization are based on economic fallacies and emotional reasoning.
And while I may admit to being on the right, my views take more the tact that hierarchy/competition/gender roles are natural and have a purpose without taking the position that they are "good" — as that usually entails steps to facilitate the "good" without the wisdom to understand that moderation is required. Much of my issue with modernity is how artificial it is, including a squashing of natural mechanisms and relations that made life more bountiful and exciting. The issue I see the left and right making is pushing for their respective ideals, to the point of artificially flattening out inequality and exacerbating it, respectively. People unsurprisingly take umbrage with the artificial picking of winners and losers, most of which is only made possible as an outgrowth of the monopoly the state retains, and the pendulum swings yet again.
That said, I vigorously agree that there should be more pain and struggle in life. I don't know how familiar with Charles Murray, but a significant component of what he considers to be the good life is being able to look back on your life with pride at the things you've accomplished and overcome. But without an actual abyss you're at risk of falling into, the highs will be blunted. As for women wanting to submit, I'd say that is definitely more often true than not. And before people tar me as sexist or something, the same can often be seen in gay men. The prevalence of our desire to have a sugar daddy or to be "owned" by another man is quite high relative to straight men, which makes sense when you consider that gay men's brains are partially feminized relative to straight men.
But perhaps my final and disagreement has to do with what the natural grouping should be for groups. You're concerned with the cohesion of America, but I'm happy to let it disintegrate into more decentralized governance structures. This is not because I hate America, just that I understand that competition can enliven those services typically administered by the state just as it injects dynamism into nearly every other facet of human life. Plus it's hard to dispute that there are distinct cultures within the different regions of America, and it just doesn't make sense for all of them to be considered one-and-the-same with each other. The beautiful thing about trade is that it's able to convert violent, destructive conflict into peaceful, constructive competition. This can act as a harmonizing principle between the various separate groups. There would still be cities (imagining Earth 2099) which would draw elites for particular trades, but you could also have all manner of smaller intentional communities centered around certain trades or lifestyles as long as they can remain solvent. Diversity, aside from our intellect, is likely humanity's strongest asset, but homogenizing it all into a melting pot dulls the uniqueness, vitality, and strengths of them all just for the sake of short term novelty.
Hanania defines enlightened centrism more in terms of epistemological habits and underlying assumptions than in terms of place along a left-right continuum, hence Sailer and Klein both being centrists in his definition. I'd probably define Hanania Thought as simply Goldwater conservatism. Goldwater was a pro-choice, secular, free market ideologue who believed in US imperialism. Hanania is, whether he likes it or not, a rightist.
I think where you and he differ is in his being an ideologue and your being a conservative in the literal Burkean sense. Hanania's ruthlessly committed to laissez-faire ideology in all circumstances on the grounds both that it's more moral and that it's more efficient. He rejects (wrongly in my opinion) the success of Korean industrial policy (and presumably Japanese, Taiwanese, and Singaporean industrial policy) as an explanation of the country's rapid development in favor of muh IQ and claims the country would be more prosperous with US laissez-faire. By contrast, your politics seem adaptive and not ideological. You have a conservative mindset in your recognition of the inevitability of hierarchy and natural differences and your attachment to nation and appear willing to eschew the nominally right-wing position when circumstances are unfavorable.
Ultimately, left and right only make sense in a localized context. What's right-wing in one society may be of the left in another (e.g. free college in US vs ROK), but one-size-fits-all ideologies like socialism or libertarianism are designed to be transplanted everywhere for all time.
This is correct.
Hanania and I are allies because a bunch of moronic populists are in charge, but if Hanania wins I will probably have instances where I want to tone down the libertarianism and globalism.
Incidentally I think hipster Burkeanism led by the Disney parody guy is a hysterically weird idea. But maybe it's just crazy enough to work.
This is an interesting insight that terms such as "left and right" do depend on the context, especially between different jurisdictions... For me personally, this is expressed by myself having opinions that tend to align with the Right-wing in Western Europe, but with the left-wing in the US and Canada for most of the time...
This def earned a subscription… I think I would disagree with you on certain things such as the nature of inceldom (it’s definitely not white collar office professionals who are incels). The office environment in general is beyond repair because many big decision making processes have been outsourced to technology, making the fruits of male competition and aggressiveness irrelevant in a lot of cases. It sucks.
I don’t think a war with China would be good at all, but I LOL at people who think China is this hyper masculine society. I truly think we would win a war with them comfortably. China is a country with 1.4 billion people, a martial arts tradition, and has had a total of 3 boxing world champions. This is in spite the fact that any big time world champion out of China would be a wildly rich celebrity. They sink billions of dollars into developing soccer and basketball programs yet can’t get a star in the European soccer leagues and have had 1 NBA star who was a genetic anomaly.
Japan can’t be far off genetically, yet they’ve had 82 boxing world champions, multiple players in top soccer leagues, beat Germany in the world cut and the US to win the world baseball classic. I honestly think this contrasts demonstrates that China is quite simply not a culture of winners in the way Japan is. And this national temperament matters when it comes to international conflicts.
>The real question is how you handle men between the fiftieth and ninetieth percentiles... I think this is an open question and reasonable people can disagree.
Solid analysis. To the extent that this question has an "objective" answer, I suspect it depends on the still unanswered question of what kind of longterm impact AI will have on the white collar workforce. How many high-IQ and high-agency men will the elites *need* to keep around to maintain economic productivity?
I find it obnoxious when people insist that they are "centrists" out of a need to try and manage their own intellectual image, as if identifying with a particular "side" would make them appear less credible. Almost nobody is actually a "centrist," although you might be closer to the "center" or farther away from it, I suppose. But since politics is a conflict, you are inevitably on one side or the other, even if you don't have the honesty to say it out loud.
Broadly agree with everything in this post. Extra agreement with getting women out of the workplace. It should not be an expected norm that a woman must have a "career" in order to be high-status. From my own observations, even in relatively unchallenging cushy white-collar work-from-home jobs, women waste incredible amounts of time and energy stressing over trivial details and rambling at each other in pointless meetings. I am certain they would be happier if they had more time to spend with their kids or just generally do anything else at all in life, to say nothing of the rest of us in the office with them.
Again, really fascinating stuff. I couldn't have put it better myself.
At the event I was at yesterday I was explaining the fundamental difference between 'left' and 'right' with your exact framing. Some idiot was stuck in a Cold War Boomer mindset when he thought 'left' was collectivism and 'right' was individualism.
I’ve been thinking about what you said. I think I might be ‘alt-centre-right’ as I think formalism and meritocracy are centre-right principles. Whereas the most right-wing would be like God King feudalism and a hereditary caste system.
I do believe power should be accountable, and whilst elites are inevitable, that doesn’t mean they’re all as bad as each other, or that the people should be ignored completely.
I agree with you if we're comparing all ideologies in human history like in Civilization
But in practice formalism and meritocracy as delineated above are the hard right of any practically achievable overton window outside a lunatic asylum lol
I suspect that nobody to the right of me is ever going to achieve power in America or Europe ever again, so calling myself center right seems kind of limp, ya know?
I think we’d all be centrists in an Overton Window of our choosing. So yes, I’m more right-wing than most people today, but still, in a grand scheme of things, my views are those of the centre-right. Meritocracy, representative and constitutional government, rule of law… such values would have been recognisably centre-right even in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Montesquieu, David Hume, John Adams, Edmund Burke… these were figures of the centre-right even in their day. And I still hold to their principles (except maybe Burke, agh but I see as too conservative in an age with little to conserve, though I do like his critique of natural rights.’
I agree with aspects of your take, and even the main thrusts of your larger points. You can clearly see some of today's social problems, but you don't seem to have a great answers for what would help our society function well. I definitely agree with you though that hierarchy is inevitable and can be good, we need to learn to embrace struggle and not escape to addictions, we need to de-feminize our social spaces, and we need to accept and adhere to strict gender norms. But I would suggest that your read Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, De Tocqueville, Feser, Deneen, Vermuele, etc. if you want a better grasp of what makes a society just, orderly, stable, and good.
A few minor quibbles:
- Today, the economic world is not "show up and you will do well." That's completely out of touch.
- Our times, while being soft in one sense, are increasingly hard on our spirits. Most people feel alienated and alone, unable to find meaningful relationships and start families. That is why we fall into addictions. We aren't "happy" because we get dopamine hits, we are miserable because of it, and we try to replace addiction with more addiction, which is never ending. It's unfortunate that you would fight me for trying to eliminate some of those vicious activities that keep you debased.
- Aristotle harshly criticized the Spartans because their entire society relied on war (i.e., external threats). What do they do in peace times? A good society can answer that question. A flawed society relies on external strife.
- You can't ignore half of society's men unless you want major social strife. You can't reduce chivalry to eroticism. And you can't ignore the bonding between mother and child when a mother raises that child instead of working at something she finds more "fun and feminine."
excellent points
"- You can't ignore half of society's men unless you want major social strife. You can't reduce chivalry to eroticism. And you can't ignore the bonding between mother and child when a mother raises that child instead of working at something she finds more "fun and feminine.""
banger
A lot of people I wouldn't characterize as right-wing per se have these characteristics- which may be an error in my classification. My interest is mostly in whether you wish to promote your worldview by imposing it on others, banning alternative lifestyles, etc., or whether you wish to go the marketplace of ideas route and, if you win, create not an authoritarian regime, but a dominant paradigm which individuals may leave if it does not suit them. I suspect many others agree.
Maybe a better means of phrasing: Is your political goal to have people acknowledge the natural hierarchies you describe, or to artificially enhance them? You seem to be tending more towards the former in this post, for example in your statement that while workplace norms should be masculine and oriented towards excellence, women who are highly ambitious and motivated should be able to use these qualities to succeed in elite careers, if they so desire and can keep up.
That’s a decent list. I’m so used to economic focus from the intellectual right, that I do not often see solid cultural arguments.
I disagree with you on the explicit patriarchy, but completely support a meritocracy, and you should consider advocating for a meritocracy as well. The main advantage of asking for a meritocracy is if you are right on gender, those will be identical anyways. But if you are wrong, a meritocracy will allow us to have some great woman leaders as well as men. It’s also a much easier sell to most people. You can certainly still argue that sex differences in a meritocracy are caused by biological factors, not sexism, but I would advise you to avoid having bringing back the patriarchy as an explicit goal.
"The rightist view is that all power structures necessarily create elites, but any egalitarian state leveling action can only create a “shadow elite” of bureaucrats, DEI apparatchiks, academics, journalists, “fact checkers,” and “mental health experts.”"
Do you really believe this? I would believe you if you said "one hallmark of right-wing thought across political contexts is that the balance of hierarchy-equality should be shifted towards hierarchy and I believe this about our society, so in our context I'm right-wing." But as you alluded to earlier, political contexts vary. The rule-of-law + free market + free speech/association society that most American pro-market right-wingers want still contains a bunch of provisions that would seem laughably pie-in-the-sky egalitarian to basically any society 500 years ago, such as the fact that our legal code makes no distinction between crimes against elites (aristocrats) and crimes against proles (peasants).
So in reality, right-wingers in the American context still want a bunch of "egalitarian state leveling action" and support a lot more of the constraining of the "natural" elites than was ever done in any large-scale society prior to, say, 1800. The difference between right-wingers and left-wingers on this issue is a matter of degree, not kind, with the crux of the issue being whether the *current* balance is too egalitarian or too hierarchical.
Left-wing or right-wing, I'm more inclined to respect someone with a specific and aspirational agenda for the future.
But I see online right-wing discourse stooping to the worst tendencies of the left, rather than vice versa (see: CHRISTISKINGCHRISTISKINGCHRISTISKING)
It's true that online right-wingers have gotten really dumb, but this is an inevitable symptom of success. Any ideology that is popular will necessarily be absorbed and parroted by a lot of stupid people, because most of the population in general is quite stupid, at least compared to the sorts who actually bother reading this long-form content on Substack. You didn't have a bunch of mouth-breathers spouting "CHRIST IS KING" 8 years ago because right-wing thought was still genuinely unpopular back then. The fact that we have those guys now is a sign of how much the Overton window has shifted since then.
Greg Clark on surnames is a useful piece of evidence for the inevitability of hierarchy. Even Swedish social democracy and Mao's Cultural Revolution can't really extinguish the "moxie" that elites pass on to their kids.
https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Sweden%202012%20AUG.pdf
https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Social%20Mobility%20in%20China%2011-7.pdf
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/the-son-also-rises/
https://qz.com/314720/heres-the-surprising-social-trait-that-the-english-and-chinese-have-in-common
Steven Goldberg on patriarchy as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitability_of_Patriarchy
Every rightist should at least be familiar with the basics of conservatism as summarized by Russell Kirk, even if disagreeing or rejecting it. There is a lot of "reinventing the wheel" on the right, simply because the feminized educational system never shared the right-wing wisdom of the past with each new generation of the youth:
https://kirkcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/API-Research-Kirk-The-Conservative-Mind.pdf
Ed West argues that crime and criminals have a twisted appeal at least to leftists, in spite of the superficially repulsive aspect of bottom quintile males - maybe some evo psych logic going on.
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/the-problem-of-crime-stockholm-syndrome
Good collection of links. Haven't read Russell Kirk and seems like a deficit of mine..
>Ed West argues that crime and criminals have a twisted appeal at least to leftists, in spite of the superficially repulsive aspect of bottom quintile males - maybe some evo psych logic going on.
I have a suspicion that this tendency is what distinguishes those who are leftists at their very psychological core from people who might just happen to vote for them. The latter group can generally be persuaded to abandon the left at times, but the former cannot, at least not without shaking up all their beliefs to their very core.
Second the recommendation of Russell Kirk, the best American expositor of Burkean conservatism. I'm not a "conservative" in this sense, but you're right that he should be near the top of any serious right-winger's reading list -- and of ANY reading list which is serious about covering the whole scope (i.e., not just the left) of American political thought.
West may make this point behind the paywall, but I think a lot of the left-wing admiration for criminals is about oversocialized university products (Uncle Ted got this one right) living vicariously through other people's violence and impulsiveness.
Though I never met him, I feel as if I just read a common sense dissertation from my grandfather.
Another exhilarating read, I thank you! Ever since watching this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-icAjJQjWc&t=455s&pp=ygUjY2FsbG1lZXpla2llbCBsaWJlcnRhcmlhbmlzbSBwYXJ0IDM%3D), I've considered myself to be on the right because the conception of right as being hierarchical and left as being egalitarian just makes a lot more sense to me. That said, I'm still a libertarian because I relate more to the Rothbardian/Hoppean type of libertarianism, which I also think is just more sensible and in line with "human nature" (lefty anthropologists can bite me). Basically, the lowlifes of society will still be allowed to wither away, but this will only be after those safety nets of family, community, and charity fail to catch and redirect them. "Second" chances when given excessively and without restriction (e.g., "he's a good boy on the inside") can absolutely be negative, but when dispatched strategically and with limits is supposed to be a part of meritocracy. We should be standard bearers for the view that it is completely morally permissible for those unwilling to contribute to languish in poverty and destitution, but we also don't want to lose productive people because of mistakes made earlier in life if earnestly recovered from. That said, the shrinking of the middle class is not because people are getting poorer; rather, both the middle and lower classes have been consistently shrinking over the past few decades while the upper class has been growing (adjusted or inflation). In short, more people are becoming wealthy by escaping the lower and middle classes as time has gone one. What to attribute this too is a thornier problem that I won't get into, but the Austrian and Chicago economists are pretty resolute in their defense of global free trade, and I personally think worries about globalization are based on economic fallacies and emotional reasoning.
And while I may admit to being on the right, my views take more the tact that hierarchy/competition/gender roles are natural and have a purpose without taking the position that they are "good" — as that usually entails steps to facilitate the "good" without the wisdom to understand that moderation is required. Much of my issue with modernity is how artificial it is, including a squashing of natural mechanisms and relations that made life more bountiful and exciting. The issue I see the left and right making is pushing for their respective ideals, to the point of artificially flattening out inequality and exacerbating it, respectively. People unsurprisingly take umbrage with the artificial picking of winners and losers, most of which is only made possible as an outgrowth of the monopoly the state retains, and the pendulum swings yet again.
That said, I vigorously agree that there should be more pain and struggle in life. I don't know how familiar with Charles Murray, but a significant component of what he considers to be the good life is being able to look back on your life with pride at the things you've accomplished and overcome. But without an actual abyss you're at risk of falling into, the highs will be blunted. As for women wanting to submit, I'd say that is definitely more often true than not. And before people tar me as sexist or something, the same can often be seen in gay men. The prevalence of our desire to have a sugar daddy or to be "owned" by another man is quite high relative to straight men, which makes sense when you consider that gay men's brains are partially feminized relative to straight men.
But perhaps my final and disagreement has to do with what the natural grouping should be for groups. You're concerned with the cohesion of America, but I'm happy to let it disintegrate into more decentralized governance structures. This is not because I hate America, just that I understand that competition can enliven those services typically administered by the state just as it injects dynamism into nearly every other facet of human life. Plus it's hard to dispute that there are distinct cultures within the different regions of America, and it just doesn't make sense for all of them to be considered one-and-the-same with each other. The beautiful thing about trade is that it's able to convert violent, destructive conflict into peaceful, constructive competition. This can act as a harmonizing principle between the various separate groups. There would still be cities (imagining Earth 2099) which would draw elites for particular trades, but you could also have all manner of smaller intentional communities centered around certain trades or lifestyles as long as they can remain solvent. Diversity, aside from our intellect, is likely humanity's strongest asset, but homogenizing it all into a melting pot dulls the uniqueness, vitality, and strengths of them all just for the sake of short term novelty.