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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 farming.
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