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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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