When my stomach can take it, which is rarely, I take a look at
Marginal Revolution. Tuning in today, I see Cowen predicting that the intellectual right will become much more open to deviations in the future -- as long as all agree in being anti-leftist. And the latter involves, of course, the condemnation ad nauseam of "Cancel Culture." Look I don't like this retail stuff they go on about either, but isn't it rich to hear the GMU crowd, using Koch money and the influence it buys to keep the groves of their Academy quite free of any left-wing ideas --
wholesale Cancel culture, that --making the case!
Cowen predicting that the intellectual right will become much more open to deviations in the future -- as long as all agree in being anti-leftist....
ReplyDelete[ Perfect portrait; always creepy. ]
Cowen predicting that the intellectual right will become much more open to deviations in the future -- as long as all agree in being anti-leftist....
ReplyDelete[ A precise reference is needed, and I should have asked for one immediately.
Please set down a precise reference. ]
Cowen predicting that the intellectual right will become much more open to deviations in the future -- as long as all agree in being anti-leftist....
ReplyDelete[ There must be a precise reference. I regret commenting with no such reference, and should never have accepted this comment.
A precise reference is necessary, or this comment must be considered mistaken. ]
Cowen predicting that the intellectual right will become much more open to deviations in the future -- as long as all agree in being anti-leftist....
ReplyDelete[ Since there is no reference, I will assume this is false. I deeply regret thinking for a few moments that this was a true statement.
A shockingly un-referenced post.
Yuck. ]
I deeply apologize to Tyler Cowen.
ReplyDeleteWell, just to try to set the record straight, what Cowen wrote he noted was a prediction, not a "normative" statement. So it was not a "we should all be anti-leftists noe." It was that he forecasts that in the future the political right will have as one of its three main strands, indeed, the most important one, anti-leftism. The other two strands are supposedly going to be anti-China and pro-internet, the latter to offset the supposedly leftist orientation of the MSM.
ReplyDeleteHe quoted Bryan Caplan from a few years ago as saying "The left is anti-market while the right is anti-left," this supposedly a support for his argument. I hope this clears the air some.
Chill Anonymous!! Here is what prompted my post: On the MR blog, titled:
ReplyDeleteThe Future of the Intellectual Right
"That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. I suggest it will take three major forms, namely anti-China, pro-internet as a communications medium (as an offset to left-wing media), and dislike of the Left, most of all the latter. Note these are predictions rather than normative claims about what should happen. Here is one excerpt:
Last and perhaps most significant, the intellectual right will dislike the left. It pretty much does already, but the antagonism will grow. Opposition to political correctness and cancel culture, at least in their left-wing versions, will become the most important defining view. As my colleague Bryan Caplan succinctly put it four years ago: “Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist.”
The intensity of this dislike will mean that, within right-wing circles, free speech will prosper. As long as you take care to signal your dislike of the left, you will be allowed to hold many other heterodox views without being purged or penalized.
If you are on the Left, note that it does not suffice to dislike the Right, you have to dislike most parts of the Left as well (why is that? Can you model this?).
I also consider social conservatism, libertarianism, communitarianism, and Sam’s Club Republicanism as possible alternative directions for the intellectual Right. The entire column repays careful study."
Barkley: Yes, it can be read as a simple prediction. But it is coming from someone who clearly sees himself as a leading light on "The Intellectual Right" and someone who will help to make that future.
ReplyDeleteIt's always a matter of ox ownership when an ox gets gored.
ReplyDeleteCowen predicting that the intellectual right will become much more open to deviations in the future -- as long as all agree in being anti-leftist....
ReplyDelete[ There was no reference link, which is intolerable, and this was not what Tyler Cowen wrote. I should have immediately dismissed this deceptive post, and hope to never make such a mistake in judgement again. ]
Tyler Cowen, by the way, is for me a self-styled intellectual I have long made a point of paying no attention to. I will continue paying no attention. Criticizing Cowen on a specific interpretation I had no way of judging, was wrong.
ReplyDeleteWhat the Post-Trump Right Will Look Like
ReplyDeletevia @Bloomberg Opinon
Conservative intellectuals will end up focusing on China, the internet and the left.
Tyler Cowen:
ReplyDeleteThe upcoming U.S. election raises a question also asked the last time around: What will the intellectual right look like a few years from now? Even if President Donald Trump wins re-election, the jockeying for 2024 will begin almost immediately — and the smartest and best-informed thinkers on the right will have to decide which views and attitudes to emphasize.
Here are a few predictions about what might happen, as distinct from claims about what should happen.
One principle will be to view China as a major threat not only to global liberty but also to long-term U.S. interests. When I speak to younger people on the right, I am struck by how many of them report “becoming a China hawk” as a formative intellectual experience. If you are in your early 20s, your China news feed has been disturbing for some time: the Xinjiang camps, the full takeover of Hong Kong, saber-rattling with Taiwan, the spread of the coronavirus. The thrill of China’s liberalization, and the prospect of its further opening to the world, was not something you experienced or expected.
Yet I do not see people converging on any particular solutions to the China problem. It will suffice to say, “Something must be done.”
Contrast this burgeoning hawkish view of China with more left-wing attitudes, which see the American state and American heritage itself as more significant threats to liberty, most of all to American Blacks. By focusing on China as a threat, the new American right is downgrading these domestic worries, implicitly or explicitly, and making a broader statement that America still exemplifies the ideals of liberty.
Another view that will characterize the right is the idea that the internet as a communications medium is OK, perhaps even a positive force for good. Of course that is what much of the left believed when Barack Obama was president, but many left intellectuals have since turned against social media, most of all Facebook and YouTube.
The calculus here is not hard to understand. Social media helped Trump get elected (to the shock of many), and the most prestigious media outlets, such as the New York Times, stand to the left of the American public. Aside from Twitter, which tends to be left-wing, social media generally represent and amplify a broad cross-section of what the American public believes. So the left will tend to see social media as a corruption of popular opinion, while the right will view it as a corrective to elite opinion.
I don’t think we have quite arrived at this point, as many segments of the right are still suspicious of the high proportion of left-leaning employees at technology companies. But the moment will eventually arrive. The import of this issue will grow as the reach of the internet spreads.
Last and perhaps most significant, the intellectual right will dislike the left. It pretty much does already, but the antagonism will grow. Opposition to political correctness and cancel culture, at least in their left-wing versions, will become the most important defining view. As my colleague Bryan Caplan succinctly put it four years ago: “Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist.” ...
(The rest of the piece.)
ReplyDeleteThe intensity of this dislike will mean that, within right-wing circles, free speech will prosper. As long as you take care to signal your dislike of the left, you will be allowed to hold many other heterodox views without being purged or penalized.
It is striking what does not make my list. Social conservatism animates many voters on the right, but it is less likely to influence the relatively elite right-wing intellectuals.
Libertarian thought was a major influence on the American right starting in the 1970s and running through the Tea Party movement, and there are significant libertarian strands running through the points listed above. But libertarianism as a comprehensive approach to policy faded with the onset of the financial crisis and the pandemic.
I also don’t see “Sam’s Club Republicanism,” the economic populism promoted by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, as being ideologically animating. A future Republican Party may well present and even enact such policies to help working-class voters, and that would count as a significant triumph. But such policies will not define the right or its intellectuals.
Similarly, I don’t see communitarianism coming back as a core right-wing intellectual view, even though Americans will practice community successfully at many levels.
In the coming years, three things will dominate the attention of the intellectual right: the main international rival (China), the main domestic rival (the left), and the main thing they stare at all day long (the internet). That bundle of concerns may not be terribly surprising. All the same, it would represent a true break from the Reaganite and Trumpian ideology of the present and recent past.
Having read the column * by Tyler Cowen, what I find is a terrifying portrayal of supposed intellectual conservatives as racist and war prone. Years ago, the writing of Cowen was highlighted by a prominent University of California economist and what I found then was aggressively prejudiced and only worth turning away from. This new column only shows me tolerance after these years to have been impossible for Cowen.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the reference, however unfortunate the column.
* https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-12/post-trump-right-will-focus-on-china-internet-and-the-left
July 12, 2020
What the Post-Trump Right Will Look Like
Conservative intellectuals will end up focusing on China, the internet and the left.
By Tyler Cowen
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-tyler-cowen-thinks-naomi-klein-believes-her-own-bulls------grasping-reality-with-tractor-beams.html#tpe-action-resize-122
ReplyDeleteOctober 4, 2007
Tyler Cowen Thinks Naomi Klein Believes Her Own Bulls---
He reads her book. He doesn't think it meets minimum intellectual standards. I think he is right: now I can borrow Tyler's ideas and have an informed view...
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-tyler-cowen-thinks-naomi-klein-believes-her-own-bulls------grasping-reality-with-tractor-beams.html
April 8, 2010
Hoisted from the Archives: Tyler Cowen Thinks Naomi Klein Believes Her Own Bulls---
-- Brad DeLong
Fascinating and revealing, the way in which a prominent intellectual, the Gloria Steinem Chair professor at Rutgers University, is portrayed by Tyler Cowen and with a profane echo, twice, by a prominent university of California economist. Such is prejudice.
ReplyDeleteThe Bloomberg column by Cowen shows how profound the prejudice is:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-12/post-trump-right-will-focus-on-china-internet-and-the-left
Kevin Quinn:
ReplyDeleteI appreciate this post and am grateful to you, however a precise immediate reference was completely necessary. The Bloomberg column by Tyler Cowen was terrifying to me.
Well, after reading the column, I now think I may have been unfair to TC. The phrase "at least the left-wing version" modifying cancel culture doesn't really fit with my characterization of his views. I was appalled when it was revealed some time back that GMU took Koch money with strings attached. I suppose I was waiting for someone from GMU to fulminate about the Left's cancel culture so I could make the point I made, but I was too hasty in pinning it on Cowen. Mea Culpa. Anyway, thanks to Anonymous and BR for getting me to look again.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
ReplyDeleteWho is the the "prominent University of California economist" that you have Tyler Cowen supposedly citing or quoting and whom you apparently find objectionable?
Who is the the "prominent University of California economist" that you have Tyler Cowen supposedly citing or quoting and whom you apparently find objectionable?
ReplyDelete[ I was explicit. The prominent University of California economist cited and quoted Tyler Cowen. I set down examples above, with the precise references.
The profane, prejudiced meanness was and is shocking. ]
Ah, Brad DeLong. I have not looked at his blog for some time. He blocks lots of comments there.
ReplyDeleteAh, Brad DeLong. I have not looked at his blog for some time. He blocks lots of comments there.
ReplyDelete[ Perfectly expressed. ]