Okay, I have several objections to that whole thing.
First, the idea that Trump represents a huge rightward shift, when on pretty much any policy except globalization and immigration, he's to the left (or at least not to the right) of previous republican presidents. As other thinkers, comparing political trends in America to similar trends in Europe, have noted, one can describe the West as undergoing a broad political realignment, whereby the primary axis of opposition in the space of political positions is that of "globalism" versus "nationalism", that is, between cosmopolitan urban technocrats and localist rural populists. She does sort of touch on the end that conventional analyses tend to miss this axis, but gives it short shrift.
Secondly, I very much have to object to the loaded, biased language of referring to the left versus right axis as being between "reason" and "unreason". As an opposition between the so-called "Enlightenment" and "tradition" is a bit more neutral, and a pretty good one (though I prefer to view the left-right axis as primarily equality-versus-hierarchy). I will, though, defend "tradition", and outside of the natural/"hard" sciences and technology, pretty much reject the entire "Enlightenment" and it's supposed "reason." I could write entire essays on the topics involved, but let me start by pointing to James C. Scott's
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (review by "Scott Alexander" of Slate Star Codex
here), or the 3rd century BC Confucian philosopher
Xúnzi. Traditions are generally the products of an evolutionary process; they represent the accumulated experience of successive generations. (Consider the Smithsonian articles on traditional Peruvian farming
here and
here. Expecting your average human being in each generation to use "reason" to essentially re-derive these hard-won principles from scratch is too much. (I can point to plenty of studies in the social sciences that go through a lot of work to find a result that turns out to be nothing more than well-worn conventional knowledge.) Yes, sometimes tradition needs to change because the environment or circumstances have changed, but that's where "Chesterton's fence" comes in. The classic conservative principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a good one, and if you don't know what something's purpose is or was, how do you know it's "broke"?
And as for the "rationalization" of society and government, Max Weber (considered by some the father of modern sociology) was the one who pretty much defined the concept, along with other well-known ideas and terms like "bureaucratization," the "Protestant work ethic," the "disenchantment (
Entzauberung) of the world," the modern definition of "charisma," and a number of other important concepts in the analysis of "Modernity" and the "Enlightenment." And while he saw that "rationalization" as a core and inevitable trend of modernity, he also described it as trapping us in a "steel-hard shell" (
Stahlhartes Gehäuse, more commonly translated as the less literal "iron cage", though the more literal form better fits the metaphor of the original context, in my opinion), and leading society into "the polar night of icy darkness." (See also the "Irrationality of Rationality" in George Ritzer's "
McDonaldization.")
I would agree that in terms of the legacy of the French Revolution, both American parties have been in the liberal tradition. And that "conservatism" in a democracy is, as Dr. Antonova says, "already a centrist, not right, position on this spectrum." It's why I object everytime I see or hear the term "Burkean conservative"; Edmund Burke was a Whig, a liberal, like she notes. And like many in my part of the political space, I must again point out that American "conservatism" hasn't really
conserved anything, save perhaps the "gains" made by the previous generation's left-wing. Which is one reason we reject the whole "American project."
And while I hadn't read Pobedonostsev before, I've read plenty of others who've made the same critiques of democracy, and more, from Hans-Hermann Hoppe's "libertarian monarchy" to Ilya Somin and other "public choice theory" thinkers' criticisms of electoral democracy, to Arrow's Impossibility theorem, to folks like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land.
Furthermore, I also have to object to the whole "There is no gene for German – ethnicity is as constructed as language" nonsense; tell that to the people at 23andMe or AncestryDNA. Consider one's family tree; far enough back, one must find the same individual ancestors filling multiple "slots", because the basic math demands it; and furthermore, those ancestors will not be a random sampling of the globe, but likely from a few particular locations. Because of barriers, physical and cultural, to gene flow. Human DNA, like that of many species, "clusters", primarily along geographic lines. It's not about a single gene for "German" or "Italian", it's about the correlations of a whole bunch of genes (the same is true for dog breeds; there is no single "beagle" or "dalmation" or "collie" or so on gene, but instead trends and correlations between lots of different genes). Two average Germans, if not descended from recent immigrants, are more likely closer related to each other than either is to a random Dane, and they are likely closer genetically to that Dane than they are to, say, a Russian or other East Slavic individual, who are in turn closer to the German than a random Iranian, and the German, Dane, Russian, and Iranian are likely much more genetically similar to each other than any of them are to someone of sub-Saharan African ancestry. (This is pretty much uncontroversial modern evolutionary biology when applied to any species other than humanity.)
For linguists, the difference between dialects versus distinct languages is not all that arbitrary, coming down to a (slightly fuzzy) concept called "mutual intelligibility." And even then, where we draw the line may be (somewhat) arbitrary, but the underlying reality is not. Consider a tree, with differing levels of branching. We choose to label the smallest offshoots "twigs", and the largest splits "boughs", with "branches" inbetween. At which size we draw the line between "twig" and "branch" may be somewhat arbitrary, and the same with "branch" versus "bough", but the underlying shape of the tree is still the same. The same with subspecies versus different species versus different genus versus different families and so on in biological taxonomy; where the lines are drawn may come down to the decisions of the taxonomists, but the underlying relatedness of organisms is still there and still quite real (it's also why biologists are increasingly using phylogenetic trees instead). Or consider where on the spectrum of visible light one puts the line between red and orange, or blue and green. The precise location of the line may be "arbitrary", but it doesn't mean that the underlying frequency spread isn't there, that "red", "orange", "green" and "blue" are meaningless, or that there's no such thing as color. Eliezer Yudkowski's
The Cluster Structure of Thingspace is also useful here.
I do have to agree with some of the talk about "capitalism" (the economic system of Modernity) empowering the middle class and increasingly marginalizing the (former, aristocratic) upper classes. And that socialism targeted genuine problems with the "capitalist" system. But I'd say the track record of socialism shows that it fails terribly, whether in "internationalist" or "nationalist" flavors. (I reject her position that socialism is inherently internationalist. Recall Stalin's "communism in one country"; and I've gotten left-leaning people online to agree to a significant fraction of the Nazi Party's early platform by picking the more "socialist" positions.) So if one opposes what the capitalist environment selects for (every environment selects for something), but accepts that we do not have a workable "post-capitalist" system, why not look back to the
pre-capitalist economic system?
And as for the "individualist" versus "collectivist" spectrum, I'd point out that humans are a social species, born embedded in and shaped heavily by a social network of (unchosen) relations to other human beings, that individuals do poorly in isolation, and that being a "rootless modern" is very much a
WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) thing, and most people are not.
Much the last portion is pretty much more smearing of the right as "irrational", and that any attachment to place, people, traditions, religion, etc. makes you an evil, violent fascist to be feared and fought and forced to become either an "Enlightened," "rational," hyper-individualist rootless modern or an "Enlightened," "rational," "community of all mankind" particularism-rejecting, internationalist socialist. Not to mention the usual smear of the GOP as somehow "theocratic." The actual theocrats in America, the likes of Rushdoony and his followers, are very rare (and remember, I'm an atheist saying this).
I do agree that the Cold War is over, and with it, the American right as an alliance of big business, religious traditionalists, and pro-military interventionists, as this was held together by the common enemy of "Godless Soviet Communism." It looks to me like business has gone from culturally signalling right to culturally signalling left allegiance, and the religious traditionalists have long been skeptical of unfettered capitalism (see Chesterton, Carlyle, and the Catholic distributists).
As for foreign interventionism, Walter Russell Mead's "
four archetypes of American foreign policy" is very useful: the Jeffersonians, Wilsonians, Hamiltonians, and Jacksonians. In short, Jeffersonians tend to be pacifist isolationists; Wilsonians see a moral imperative to spread democracy and work toward world peace; and Hamiltonians are about foreign policy working toward the benefit of American commercial interests, which also often overlaps with the Wilsonians' interests in "a rules-based international order, including freedom of the seas and a free flow of money across borders." As for the Jacksonians, as
this article puts it:
Quote:The Jacksonians are most similar to the Jeffersonians. Both oppose big government and support broad democracy. What separates the Jacksonians from the Jeffersonians is the role of national honor. According to the Jacksonians, it is dishonorable to back down from a real threat to American freedom and security.
Jacksonians generally oppose war; however, once war is deemed necessary, the Jacksonians show no quarter. Wars for Jacksonians end with unconditional surrenders by the enemy. Limited wars are of no use. If the government decides to commit itself to a war, then the enemy must be destroyed…
…Jacksonians are probably the least understood of the four archetypes. To some extent, this is due to the lack of an intellectual tradition; the other three archetypes have ideological roots. Hamiltonians developed from the British conservatives. Wilsonians come from the Protestant missionary Social Gospel movement. Jeffersonians have been aligned with Libertarianism. Jacksonians are the closest the U.S. has to a folk movement. Ethnically, the Jacksonian roots spring from the Protestant Scotch-Irish that initially immigrated into the Carolinas and Virginia and spread to West Virginia, Kentucky and parts of Illinois and Indiana. They tended to view themselves as a class. What they want from the government is not ideological. They want government to support their group’s goals—for example, they don’t oppose government spending per se, but want it focused on their needs and wants. In modern terms, they support Social Security, which helps the retirement of the middle class, but oppose welfare as government giveaways for the idle poor. In visceral terms, the themes of country music—honoring America, living the simple life, following the rules—represent the best descriptions of the Jacksonians.
As noted by Mead and others, the Jacksonians are actually the most numerous branch in the American electorate, but have generally had the least representation in national politics… until now. Trump is by far the most Jacksonian president in quite some time.
"If you
wish to converse with me, define your
terms."
--Voltaire
