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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31849 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does.

I do not think this is true at all. The right is very good at producing knowledge, it is just unevenly distributed. If you spend any time reading Supreme Court briefs, you'll see rightie knowledge production in action, as this is an area where the right has (very successfully!) focused much of their energy and attention.

I think that the right-wing intellectual capital is considerably better than that on the left, if considerably smaller. Conservative or conservative-friendly educational institutions I think can be very good, just dwarfed in number by default-left-wing ones. (Some of this depends on what counts as "right" and "left" of course.)

There is also a structural reason for lack of conservative intellectual output. Conservatives like old ideas. There are only so many publishable takes on Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant, or why Shakespeare was pretty dope.

New ideas are the domain of reformers, who are definitionally not conservative. The main issue is that most new ideas are extremely likely to be less practical than old ideas. There are an infinite number of ways to explore why bread is racist, actually.

But there aren't many institutions teaching the old ideas either. And the ones that do are mostly Catholic, not core Red.

Serious religious Catholics mostly are red tribe, although aside from Cajuns they're often not-stereotypical red tribers.

I dunno. It seems to me that lefties live in the shadow of Marx much more so than the right lives in the shadow of, say, Aquinas.

You're not exactly wrong about conservatives definitionally (although consider conservative hero Edmund Burke - not exactly a hidebound anti-reformer), but righties per se have no problem with new and innovative ideas. Look at science fiction (which is very forward-looking) - is it more "conservative" or "rightie" than other areas of literature? Or less? Now look at mainstream film, media, literature, etc. Is it eaten up with retreads, remakes, retellings of fairy-tales and people reliving their childhoods? Where is the innovation truly?

Or look at politics - is there really more innovation in the Democratic national platform than "we should make Greenland a US territory?"

There is a De Maistre shaped hole on the motte. I'm Hlynkaposting I know.

Conservatism has come full circle- la contrerevolution nest pas la revolution contraire mais le contraire de la revolution. Building something that functions by the old rules until it grows and overtakes is the conservative project and it is the work of generations. Building off of the foundations of the old rules. Building a functional society. The counterrevolution is long but it is utterly predictable.

I for one like the Hlynkaposting.

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