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Musk representing himself as a powerful man is a break with the conventional institutional 'representatives'
The strength of the 'institutional representation' system is how intangible it is. Lies get woven into 'official' reports that get represented as fact based on 'scientific consensus' by completely replaceable 'spokespeople'. And when someone seeks to fact check these representatives and what they say they are met with the rhetorical equivalent of cold hard brutalist concrete: "Are you saying science is wrong? Do you not believe our intelligence communities? Are you anti-intellectual? Do you not believe in physics?!"
To this extent academia and media are just PR firms that wash dirt off of policy positions for the people in power. Like immigration being fantastic and without any flaws. Or that we can't share one last moment with grandma on the hospital bed due to risk of spreading COVID, but that we can protest against racial inequality by joining a giant street protest, rubbing shoulders with hundreds if not thousands of random people.
So, in fairness to Musk being incorrect sometimes: So to was the prior system sometimes incorrect! And just how incorrect it got and how impossible it was to fact check is practically why we have Musk where he is now.
I'm not sure what Hanania is after here, other than whining about the fact that X doesn't boost his posts when he links to his substack and that he wasn't picked up to be involved with any of Musks projects. Or that mass media has allowed people Hanania considers lesser than himself to reach heights of clout and upvotes he can only dream of... All things directly or indirectly mentioned in the article. To that extent the entire thing is just an embarrassing pout from the author. I mean:
Yeah... At risk of breaking the rules: lol. lmao even.
His rejoinder might be that the prior system is a system. Randoms with social media sites doing it live isn't.
You've noted the downsides to systems but there are benefits.
One can imagine a different academy and press and have a coherent vision of how they might be better, even if it won't/can't happen for structural reasons. Some guy and his cronies just randomly being right continually seems unlikely even in theory. Why did we need institutions in the first place then?
That's not much of a rejoinder when this system of the best and brightest in the richest and most information dense time in known human history can't figure whether men can get pregnant or not.
The argument is not about what system to use. It's about the nature of power and how the people who wield it will push their will through regardless. I prefer to know those people by name. Rather than rolling around in confusion and conspiracy regarding how on earth the American Anthropology Association managed to deduce that biological race is a mostly imaginary social construct cooked up by evil racists in the 1700's.
What are institutions?
The system is perfectly clear that cis men can't get pregnant, and that FtM transsexuals can (but are unlikely to if they are on hormones). The system struggles to say what the modern meaning of the word "men" is, but that is a question about linguistics and not medicine. For the avoidance of doubt, this is pathetic, medical organisations offering muddled views about the meaning of words is bad, and they should either learn linguistics or stick to medicine and leave the meanings of words to dictionary makers.
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You know who is to blame for trans madness by name (off the top of my head Rachel Levine had a pivotal impact on WPATH's removal of age guidelines). You could easily find out who to blame when the American Anthropology Association says something batshit.
What you mean, I think, is that you can't hold them accountable. But that's not just because they're obscure.
It cuts both ways: Elon Musk isn't accountable to you either. The AAA at least has to pretend to hold to some code of conduct because that is what allegedly justifies the outsized power bequeathed to them.
An organization with set of norms, traditions and procedures meant to direct people towards a goal over extended periods of time?
I know what you're getting at. I don't think an accretion of Twitter reposters make a good institution.
Who is to blame for the trans madness took years to get 'unearthed' in a publicly accessible way. Prior to 2016 you could not find any tangible info on what was happening and why beyond /pol/ schizos talking about John Money and what books the Germans had been burning in the 1930's. By the same token you can not easily find out who is to blame for the AAA spiral into insanity. The ousting of Carleton Coon is just the tip of the iceberg and 99.9% of people don't even know who that is.
To the extent the AAA needs to pretend to hold to some sort of code of conduct, so does Elon. People make fun of him online if he doesn't. The H1B/Vivek debacle is a great example. Or when he pretended to be good at video games. Even if that amounts to nothing, it's at least transparent. Elon can be yelled at personally. The AAA presents no such target for the public. It only has to pretend to maintain the disguise of sensibility to the public and to please their 'masters', who are more or less completely hidden. If it is ever attacked by the public it can hide behind the mass of media and academia that are all running the same playbook to please the same 'masters'.
Neither do I. But when the alternative is mind bending insanity from people who have made it a career to look sensible to fool the gullible I choose to pick my own poison and sort my own substack subscriptions based on a more primitive but holistic human approach, rather than pretend that there exists some 'system' of science do gooders that receive grants from heaven and are therefore definitely not in the tank for whatever is funding their existence.
To put it differently: Lift the veil on the 'systems' and it's just the left wing version of cringe permanently online right wingers. But instead of scientific racism, misogyny with anime profile pics you get feel good humanism, misandry and a LinkedIn profile.
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Hanania is basically a Gen Z David French. His ecological niche is writing things that flatter progressive sensibilities while ostensibly writing from the outside. In this case "look at how stupid and out-of-touch the Tea-Party/MAGA right is. Elon Musk does not trust 'the experts' do not be like Elon."
We have this same discussion about Richard Spencer.
When you add stuff to your platform that didn't used to be there, some of the people who liked the old platform will decide they don't like the new platform and depart.
Not being a Hanania follower, I don't really know what you are referring to here.
All the criticisms I've seen of him recently is of him staking out what I consider to be incoherent positions and/or fearmongering about right wing developments that would take 20 years of progression to get us to sanity, minimum, then another 20 years of continuing to get us to the "other end of the pendulum" wherein the right was as powerful and crazy as the left was in 2022 on whatever point he is droning on about. In other words, when I see him being talked about now, he generally just seems wrong and/or stupid.
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It's more that Elon Musk is always tweeting blatantly false stuff like that 4% approval rating stat.
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I think the cancellation attempt right as his book was coming out damaged him more than it appeared at the time.
He can't become a "serious" right wing intellectual, either by gaining a patron in the Trump admin or being welcomed unto the Ezra Klein show and other such places when they need a steelman of what the Republicans are doing (by his own account the GOP is now too dumb to support them on its own - I suppose his behavior is congruent with his claims there).
So he's trapped in the Twitter/Substack attention economy and so has to find a niche. The current one works for him since he just seems to be of a disagreeable and trollish nature in general, and there is a lot in Trumpism to disagree with.
Who are the serious right wing intellectuals at the moment, in your view? Hanania talks a lot about the right lacking human capital, and in this very post argues that it's less and less tenable to be an intelligent person on the right. Who would some counter-examples be?
There are few, but they exist. But there are also few on the left (none really that I can recall). You have Douglas Murray, Charles Murray (coincidence?), Victor Davis Hanson, and Niall Ferguson who all talk about modern issues from mostly right of center perspectives.
Then there are also some of the more pragmatic (some will be controversial and/or considered evil by many here I think) ones like John Yoo who is a very good SCOTUS prognosticator and pontificates on legal issues from a right of center perspective, in that vein we also have Steven Miller on immigration, Molly Hemingway on media corruption, Bjorn Lomborg on climate change, and some others.
Who on the left could get invited plausibly to a DNC event that talks about any major issue of the day honestly and frankly? It is hard to say. Which, again, is why it is hard for me to take Hanania and others talking about this sort of topic seriously. If "intellectual" is just code for "politely repeats left wing propaganda" then it has no real persuasive power to me.
I suppose we should define 'serious', in a sense.
I think it's pretty clear that academics or intellectuals occupy a different place in the ecosystem of the right to that of the left. There is no right wing equivalent of, say, Judith Butler or Ibram Kendi. However pseudointellectual those people might be, they are seriously involved in shaping left-wing discourse and setting left-wing priorities. Intellectuals don't get to occupy the driver's seat on the right. My theory would be that left-wing domination of academia has made the right in general sufficiently paranoid about academia that they on principle refuse to follow academic theories if they can't see where they're going.
But if by 'serious' we mean something like 'of genuine original intellectual output', then there are no doubt some on the right, though I don't think I buy all of your examples. Mollie Hemingway, for instance, is not an academic. She may be a fantastic journalist, pundit, and media commentator, but I wouldn't describe her as a member of the intellectual class. Bjorn Lomborg is an intellectual, but wouldn't consider him a conservative or right-wing thinker - he's just a global warming skeptic.
If you are certifying Ibrim Kendi there is no bar to clear. He's literally just a random guy who wrote a bunch of unsupported nonsense that supports left wing politics.
I'm certainly not asserting any quality or intellectual rigour to his works - I just called him a pseudointellectual! I'm asserting, rather, that he is a professional academic whose ideas have had a significant impact on the course of left-wing politics.
Mediocre as he may be, he is a university professor whose thought has been influential in shaping politics. I don't think that's the case for right-wing academics. If you want to look for right-wing thinkers with similar impacts, you shouldn't go to university, but rather to think tanks. The people working at Claremont or wherever are less central examples of academics than professors, and I think they have less influence over the political tribe as a whole.
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My read of Lomborg is that he isn't even a skeptic - he is someone who is willing to spin the scientific consensus (as found in places like the technical bits of IPCC reports that activists don't read) in an anti-alarmist way. There is an obvious market for this, but it is pretty small compared to the market for mouth-frothing rants about scientific fraud by Commie conspiracies - in fact it appears to be small enough that Lomborg alone creates a supply of moderate anti-alarmist takes that exceeds the demand.
The fact that Lomborg is mostly correct makes his relative obscurity compared to the alarmist crazies and the conspiracist crazies a somewhat embarrassing failure on the part of humanity.
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I'm blanking too tbh. The Trump administration is doing things suggested by many right wing policy wonks but there doesn't seem to be a central court philosopher . Someone like Patrick Deneen seems welcome in the Ezra Klein bubble last I checked but I don't think he has much say in the party and seems better as a critic than someone actually charting a path conservatives listen to. Other members of the DR right with their own ideas like MacIntyre are in the same Twitter economy grinding for likes.
Maybe Yarvin? He has pull with Silicon Valley types right?
I think the issue is that we're looking for public intellectuals. It's possible to name individuals who are intellectuals and happen to be more-or-less on the right, but I take my own challenge here as being about intellectuals who intelligently comment on public, political matters from a conservative perspective.
My first thought was the late Roger Scruton, but we are feeling his absence; and I think he was definitely of a different generation to the current crop.
There are a number of intellectuals I think of as significant who might lean right-ish on a few issues - think of people like Michael Walzer or Jonathan Haidt - but who probably wouldn't identify as conservative in a general sense, and at any rate are totally divorced from the Trumpist right. I don't think the latter has to be fatal; Trumpism is a pretty nakedly anti-intellectual movement, so you don't find many intellectuals aligned with it. However, I do think some kind of positive identification with conservative or right-wing thought is a requirement.
I suppose someone like Patrick Deneen is in fact the closest to what I'm looking for, but I feel like Deneen's output has declined sharply since he went from analysing problems to proposing solutions. Aristopopulism is a bad joke. I don't rate Yarvin as a serious thinker. Yoram Hazony doesn't impress me much but he is at least attempting some kind of intellectual thesis.
You see why I'm coming up short!
Haidt is a leftist who opposes wokestupid insanity. He is about as conservative as Matthew Yglesias or Ezra Klein.
That's the definitional issue again - see the discussion we had of Lomborg.
I have heard the argument that at present the right includes you if you hold a single right-wing position, and the left excludes you if you deny a single left-wing position, and that's a standard that puts people like Haidt or Lomborg on the right. But that doesn't seem to hold up well in practice, and the right has gotten increasingly exclusive - people with conservative credentials as impeccable as David French or Jonah Goldberg are cast out, for instance, while people as obviously and deeply liberal as, say, Bari Weiss get accepted. The tribes are not ideologically consistent and often seem to just operate directionally, to me. French started conservative and is drifting, if slowly, in a leftwards direction; Weiss started liberal and is drifting, if slowly, in a rightwards direction. Even though from an objective point of view French is still way more right-wing than Weiss, the only thing people care about is the direction of travel.
Haidt was, in my sense, a fairly straight-down-the-line liberal up until his work in moral psychology, leading up to Moral Foundations Theory and The Righteous Mind, caused him to develop more appreciation for tradition and custom. I read Haidt as then moving into a centrist space overall, but avoiding being pigeonholed in any one category. Since then, unfortunately, Haidt has gotten much more focused on a kind of activism, this time around social media, mental health, and parenting, and on his pet issue he's... probably slightly on the right? The whole 'free range kids' agenda doesn't neatly map on to left or right, but if you put a gun to my head I'd say it's a bit closer to the right.
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Yeah, and Yarvin's best work is in the past.
There's plenty of people offering interesting commentary, but it's all spread over sub-50K-subscriber influencers all over the social media. Just another effect (or sign) of the decline of our institutions.
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I'm going to turn that question on you and ask who are the serious intellectuals of any kind at the moment, in your view. Who is the elite human capital I should be jealous of, and thinking "I wish this guy was on my side"?
You're mistaking Hanania's marketing schtick for an interesting claim about reality. He's not offering a diagnosis, he's trying to gatekeep wrongthink.
In the political sphere specifically?
I admit I'm blanking.
I'd go for any examples that aren't from hard sciences.
Scott Sumner and Kevin Erdmann on housing economics, and macro more broadly.
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That would be plausible if not for Hanania's open belief in HBD. Not all of Hanania's positions make sense to me, but I think he genuinely tells the truth as he sees it.
You can be a conservative pundit with a big red tribe audience while having a low opinion of blacks, patronizing ideas about women, hostility to non-christian religions, and anti-LGBT attitudes. You cannot hold a red tribe audience while naming the Jew, talking about Hispanic racial inferiority, etc. I'm deeply unsurprised that an outsider wouldn't just know the distinction.
I'm definitely an outsider, but surely the whole point with Hanania is that he's not pitching to a red tribe audience?
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I think he partakes in engagement farming. I would point to the Sexy women stuff as strong evidence which leads me to highly suspect some of his takes are trolling for engagement.
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