Thread by @eigenrobot

various thoughts about the Actual Right in no particular order after listening to a bunch of @kaschuta podcasts. off the cuff and its late so i cant promise quality

1. im not part of the right. probably goes without saying

2. im not part of the right partly bc i am basically liberal in temperament and partly bc im deeply skeptical of joining anything. there are other reasons as well

3. liberals should consider open critiques of liberalism

4. more specifically i think liberalism is not doing super hot right now and it behooves everyone to really consider how the most successful governing framework in history has stumbled, how to get righted, and how to avoid fucking up again

5. generally i find more useful critiques coming from the right than from the left. apologies to my actual left followers

6. i don't see a ton of actual policy proposals coming from the right apart from "stop doing stuff you're doing" which probably makes it more tolerable to me

7. an example. a synthetic critique that is older than the contemporary right but that i imagine some would agree with is "a nations social substrate is an important determinant of what sort of government might work for that country, universalism often fails for this reason"

8. implications of this critique might include "what did you really think was gonna happen in Afghanistan" and "ok so what made liberalism work so well in england and america and is its current social substrate undermining that, and if so what is to be done about this?"

9. such critiques probably had to come from the right. i struggle to imagine the left delivering them

10. because they are coming from the right theyre often bound up with right wing concerns (eg "what about Jews") that i see as distracting, often weird and freely ignore

11. i don't expect any alternatives to liberalism in a broad sense for maintaining a functioning system of global trade. to the extent we don't want to RETVRN to substance farming or mad max raiding its gonna be markets, and from and with markets liberalism

12. to the extent some reforms are needed to make this possible its probably in the interest of liberals to identify "correct" critiques of the status quo and take the initiative in designing and implementing solutions

the alternative is probably "let others do your reforms for you when you are in a position of relative weakness as a consequence of having let your system become decrepit and dysfunctional while you were in power and you have ended up getting caught dick in hand"

thats most of my thoughts

overall the right seems like its still more interesting a discourse space than liberal spaces (mostly moribund and/or skinsuited by wokeism) or left spaces (same, and i mean also good god also stop pretending to have read marx)

i guess one way forward would be a sort of metaliberalism with greater tolerance for actual internal diversity of lifestyle and social structure at varying levels of government

basically less social norm imperialism internationally and domestically

domestically there's a lot of room for this within our current system via federalism and there would also perhaps be a lot of room for this internationally by simply letting bad things happen sometimes

both feel like major framing shifts for the role of the US national government but probably we're moving in this direction anyway and id rather this transition be handled deliberately than us stumbling into it blind and drunk

anyway thats what im turning over tonight, please dont put too much weight on any of this. its a weird completely unexplored space intersecting with other weird trends and im not speaking confidently here

much thanks to @kaschuta for her fine hosting.