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Notes -
That’s certainly one way of putting it.
I’ve argued previously that the biggest liability of this New Right is free speech absolutism. So long as they incorporate a subculture which is really loudly invested in, say, using slurs, they will continue to polarize fresh enemies. It may still be strategically wise—the absolutists claim that without them, the New Right loses outright to censorship.
This is the same drawback faced by identity politics. It generates pushback at an astounding rate. Look at how much of the New Right is fixated on calling out woke excesses—how much ammunition has been handed out. “Polarizing” is the intersection of “offensive” and “useful.”
That said: I’m firmly in the short-term camp. The utility of these strategies will hit its limits before the outrage thus generated. Cowen points out some evidence for idpol approaching that point; I read the dissident/alt/New right as following a similar curve. When the seams of angry young men are mined out, when the blue-check well runs dry, mainstream politics will shamble back to the old standbys of economics and social safety nets.
Race realism, killing the civil rights act, and 'tough on crime' without slurs is going to polarize more than that with slurs?
"angry young men" aren't really an independent class and that doesn't describe most of the specific things driving people to the far-right - but taken literally, no they won't, because every year a new 1/100th of the population is born, and a new 1/100th turns 18!
True.
And while I could appeal to the barber-pole theory of fashion, claiming that tomorrow’s young men will view today’s as hidebound reactionaries, I don’t think that’s necessary. These movements’ growth is due to new “markets.” The (social) media landscape of 2015 was so different from 2005 that it exposed a wider population to the alt-right and social justice movements.
As mainstream politics fumbled to tap it, we saw—and are seeing—overcompensation. But there is a feedback system in place, and I expect it to dampen out the initial impulse. There are only so many heathen communities who haven’t heard the Good News, and within an election cycle or two, we’ll be back to limited by the growth rate.
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Is the New Right absolutist on freedom of speech or is it simply defensive about the unpopularity of its own speech? If we're identifying the New Right with people like, e.g., Sohrab Amari, they might use absolutist rhetoric when one of them gets banned from twitter, but then they'll turn around and argue for banning speech they disapprove of (and not in a 'ban from privately owned social media' sense).
This is a sticking point for me with Cowen's overall analysis - I don't think the New Right is rooted in libertarianism/classical liberalism at all. Amari and Dreher are integralists, Yarvin is the neoreactionary, Carlson is a bit of a chimaera but at heart seems to be a paleocon, etc... but the common thread of wanting to use state power to remediate culture war losses puts them quite far from classical liberalism (to say nothing of rising anti-capitalist sentiments).
There’s definitely some odd bedfellows involved.
I don’t read enough of these folks to judge how much they appeal to free speech. When one gets controversial enough to cop a ban, the absolutists are usually vocal among their defenders. Maybe the common thread is HBDers, maybe it’s belief in institutional capture. Cancellation within the left receives little such sympathy.
Cowen thinks that a lot of the New Right would have been libertarians in the 80s. He’s casting a wide net.
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The free speech group has overlap with the right these days out of a common enemy, but I have no illusions that things would change if the right grabbed control of institutions.
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