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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Somewhat related, it’s lovely to see Chomsky’s reputation being dragged in the mud over his epstein ties. Fucking mossad snake.
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There is zero reason to think Chomsky belonged to Mossad. Epstein cultivated ties with him because he was an elite American intellectual, not because he was a fellow covert operative.
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I’m exaggerating the mossad part but he was absolutely an asset for israel. A twitter comment:
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In the way of historical information, I offer two links:
https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/42599
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/4/9/qa-noam-chomsky-on-palestine-israel-and-the-state-of-the-world
The first is an interview from around 2009, and covers how Zionism (and later, Israel itself) were viewed in Chomsky’s family circles, from the 1930s through to the 1950s, and how 1967 was a turning point in American Jewish support for Israel.
The second interview can be viewed as an appendix to the first interview, in that it covers developments in the 2010s and early 2020s, prior to the current Gaza war and the Epstein affair. He dates a huge leap in support for Palestinians among the young left to 2014, the previous largest Israeli operation in Gaza.
Nowadays things have changed again, in that the left-wing position now seems to just be “Jews out of Palestine entirely” (these are the people who regard Chomsky as a gatekeeper rather than a subversive), while on much of the right, the idea of a “Zionist Occupied Government” in America itself seems to have been mainstreamed.
In the first interview, Chomsky does address the thesis of Zionist control of America, by responding to Walt and Mearsheimer’s account of the Israeli lobby. Basically he says that lobby is microscopic compared to the military-industrial complex, and when there’s a conflict of interest, the latter wins.
It could be that Chomsky wasn’t quite keeping up. Many of Bush’s neoconservatives were famously Jewish ex-Trotskyists I think. On the other hand, when we get to Obama, his legacy was to wokify the military; and now Trump spends a lot of time conferring directly with Netanyahu. I think Chomskyan ideas about Israel are probably mainstream among America’s remaining liberals, while the actual socialists have moved on to thirdworldist anti-imperialism, and on the other hand the Israeli right-wing has enormous direct influence over Trump’s quasi-autocratic rule, at least when it comes to Middle East policy.
Returning to Epstein, politically he’s actually a kind of liberal. His salad days were probably the neoliberal 1990s. Thus you see him hanging out with Ehud Barak in the era of Netanyahu, Barak being from the side of Israeli politics which, like Chomsky, talked about “two-state solutions”, while in terms of the second interview above, Netanyahu stands for “Greater Israel”.
Sorry if this is confusing, I’m trying to put the pieces together myself. But one thing we can say is that politics, both in the West and in the Middle East, changes enormously from generation to generation and even from decade to decade. The idea of Chomsky as having been a gatekeeper to prevent more radical opposition to Israel taking hold on the western left, I think is anachronistic because there was no serious movement in that direction (in the West) after 1948. As far as I know, Soviet anti-Zionism never found much of an audience in the West.
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Every Jewish academic I know is extremely leftist. And extremely Pro-Palestinian. It’s simply a fact.
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Chomsky was a left-wing Jew and hated Israel, like they all do.
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Wrong. They hate the israeli government, not israel.
He misled generations of leftists by promoting a complete falsehood that israel is an outpost of an evil american empire acting at washington’s behest. When in reality, this is a near-total inversion of the truth that american policy has long been shaped to serve israel’s interests, not the other way around. Fuck him.
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Chomsky was pro-Soviet. The Soviet policy until 1949 was pro-Israel and anti-Israel and pro-Arab after that. He was simply faithful to the original inspiration for his politics even if its expression as a formal state was long gone.
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Gender differences regarding justice are truly troubling but may help understand some current societal problems:
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