Conservatives are a lot more intellectually adventurous than their opponents these days. On the negative side, this sometimes leads to nuttiness and conspiracy theorizing. On the positive, it creates interesting ideas.
There was a lot of exciting thinking coming from the left until mid 2010s. Zygmunt Bauman wrote his best stuff in the period between 2000 and 2006. Dardot and Laval published The New Way Of The World: On Neoliberal Society in 2013. Sennett’s The Culture of New Capitalism is from 2006. Jim McGuigan came out with Cool Capitalism in 2009. Patricia Ventura published Neoliberal Culture in 2013. César Rendueles’s Sociophobia is also from 2013. But that’s it. 2013 was the last good year for leftist thinkers. Since then, bupkes. There’s such fear to run afoul of the increasingly severe speech codes that nobody is saying anything interesting or insightful at all.
This vacuum created a lot of space for conservative thinkers to come to the fore. Diego Fusaro, Renaud Camus, Jean-Claude Michéa, Patrick Deneen, Byung-Chul Han, Paul Kingsnorth, Curtis Yarvin. There’s a lot of great stuff coming out. All of it points away from liberalism. Ideas are brewing.
I have no idea if the left can come back from its self-imposed terror of words. It would be great if it did. I wouldn’t be anywhere without the philosophers I listed above, and I want people to think and explore in different directions. But the current stage in the evolution of thought is what I described. Great ebullience on the right and complete silence on the left.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s important to note that Fusaro and Michéa, while certainly conservative, are both on the left, even if it is not the current Left.
Still, to any intelligent thinker, that doesn’t matter: it’s the quality of the ideas that counts, not from what end of the political spectrum they come.
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Also worth noting that while I’ve never heard about Byung-Chul Han affiliating himself with any particular political faction, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen his books for sale from Verso (left wing press.) So he has some kind of following there for better or worse.
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It requires an extraordinary amount of courage for a thinker to come out as right-wing. Han, Fusaro, and Michea haven’t done that and won’t do it. This would be an instant pariah status, no more getting published by large publishing houses, complete silencing at best and active persecution at worst. This is one thing we still need to change, that conservative stops being a dirty word.
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By US standards Fusaro already has. Can’t speak to Italian standards.
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This may be selfish of me, but while we have many talented writers of nonfiction on the American right, where is the American Houellebecq? I can’t even think of even a minor US writer like that, let alone one with his immense success. The very online “dissident” right wing literary fiction scene is…not good. Your strategy of finding conservative novels that happen to have been written by bleeding heart liberals is much more fruitful than trying to find something of literary quality from the likes of “Delicious Tacos.”
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Interesting that leftist thought seems to have died just as smartphones became ubiquitous
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the left/liberal/progressive cohort has a high overlap with tech early-adopters. Novelty-seeking correlates with left political orientation. Change for the sake of change.
resisting change-for-the-sake-of-change is a working shorthand definition of conservatism
-ethyl
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True ;-D
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Yes. Nothing breaks the circuit of a liberal’s mind like when you ask why they see change in invariably positive terms. They start spluttering, it’s funny.
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And you can see it in everything. Why is it good to remake boys into girls? Why not leave them as they are? Because change is good.
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Doctrinal Ideology, dogma so strong that it blinds reality. Little Boys tend to turn everything they pick up into a weapon, while little girls turn things into a doll, a baby. Some of that might be learned (nurture), but I suspect that most is instinct (nature).
LOL, I remember planting peas with the sweetie when she was still basically a toddler, explaining how we plant the seeds close together so that the vines would hang on together to climb up the net. She came back and told my wife, “Papa says that peas like to cuddle” ;-D
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This is so cute!
I remember when I bought Klara a light-up sword at the zoo. She was around 3. She immediately named the sword, wrapped it in a blanket, and told us the sword was her baby. That cured me of a lot of gender theory right there. 😆😆😆
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Oh, and when she was even younger, she used to draw humans with one huge eye and one little eye. When I asked why she said that one eye is the mommy and the other is the baby.
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“That cured me of a lot of gender theory right there”
A friend was cured of that in South America watching traffic controllers (mostly city Indians). It was quickly very obvious that men tended to prioritize the passage of vehicles (the bigger the more priority) and the women prioritized pedestrians (esp groups with children). “Boys playing with trucks and girls playing with dolls” was the description.
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😁😁
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Oh wow. I didn’t think of it but it’s true. How fascinating.
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Curtis Yarvin–conservative thinker–LOL. Well, he does have thoughts, so I guess that qualifies him as a “thinker.”
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What have you read by him? Or is this the case of “I didn’t read Pasternak but I condemn him”?
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Lately he’s more interested in writing prompts for Grok which get Grok to tell him he’s a misunderstood genius than he is in thought of any kind. Not that we are missing out on anything by his intellectual retreat. Love Clarissa but Yarvin will always be a major point of disagreement for us.
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