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Will Bishop's avatar

This is a really interesting perspective. I remember a right wing friend of mine using the fact that there is only one Fox News to 10 CNNs as evidence of left wing media bias, I like this conclusion more. Where can a right winger find intellectual, open-minded right wing thinkers now?

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Pete McCutchen's avatar

Maybe this is my "OK Boomer" moment, though I don't think I'm technically a Boomer -- I was born in the mid sixties, so I'm about Kamala's age.

When I was a Young Right-Winger in the 80s, conservatives were, if anything, nerdy and bookish intellectual types, very interested in ideas. College age conservatives actually read books. Things like The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, by Russell Kirk, things by Irving Kristol (who was much smarter than his warmongering son), The Austrians like Hayek and von Mises (yes, I actually read Human Action in college, for fun.). Thomas Sowell, who was already a towering intellectual figure.

As somebody who came to "the Right" via the libertarian route, I literally had copies of Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom" and Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" on the bedside table. To a large extent, the conservative movement in America prior to Trump was kind of the opposite of the online "own the libs" thing we've got going on now. When I engaged and debated my classmates in college and law school, my goal was to persuade them of the rightness of my clearly correct views, not to own or humiliate them.

Of course, when I was younger many on the left were willing to engage in open debate.

I'll add that I just don't get the nice words for Curtis Yarvin. I don't think he should be canceled or exiled or anything, but I do not see the appeal. He takes 1,000 words what could be said in ten, and his main theory -- authoritarian rule dressed up as "monarchy" -- is neither conservative nor particularly likely to succeed in practice. Authoritarian states tend to be neither free nor prosperous, and no, Singapore proves only that you can get lucky, not that authoritarianism is likely to lead to success in the general case.

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