Conservatives claim to be in a culture war but I still cannot find any conservative culture, anywhere. Fox News and Prager U aren’t culture, they’re whining and criticism masquerading as culture. Conservatives could win people over to traditional values if they bothered to make cultural products with the slightest bit of competency.
What the Amish call Rumspringa, or what Hoppe calls Physical Removal is essential - The exodus of people who disagree with the regime, reinforcing the regime by evaporative cooling. The berlin wall etc probably hastened the fall of the USSR by keeping all the dissidents in the place where they can do the most damage. If Iran wants a stable regime it should assist the emigration of all of its dissidents. Then there's no need to oppress anybody -- people just vote with their feet and go live under whichever regime they want.
What successful traditionalist communities within modern societies seem to all have in common is a low barrier to exit. The people who don't like these communities are continually boiling off and the people who stay are increasingly genetically and culturally predisposed to like it. The people in these communities are mostly born and raised there, chose not to leave, and have the genetics of parents who also chose not to leave. This leads to strong community norms without forceful oppression and without needing to wait centuries for genetics to change.
I feel like there's an elephant in the room with both this essay and the one it uses as a starting point: if we're acknowledging that conservative values were built for a different world, and that technology has rendered these values at least partially obsolete, then what is the point of conservatism at all? I think a fair definition of social conservatism is just the belief that traditional behaviors and institutions have sustained our culture, and therefore they have some innate value and ought to be preserved absent some compelling reason to abandon them. But acknowledging that they are incompatible with a modern, urbanized environment seems like a compelling enough reason; it effectively abandons the notion that we somehow need conservative values to sustain us into the future.
Ultimately, I think this all comes down to aesthetics: conservatives just think that spending Sunday in church is better than spending it at drag time story hour, for completely subjective reasons. And that's fine, but this essay seems to acknowledge that the whole thing is a purely aesthetic debate.
Great essay. But why no mention of Afghanistan? They had 20 years to adopt liberal democracy and all kinds of incentives to do it, but they didn't (well, their leaders do seem to be a little kinder to the women now so maybe...). Was it because we made things so terrible for them that they had nowhere else to turn but tradition and family?
I agree liberalism is the inevitable consequence of material wealth. It's like a drug that everyone wants and promotes even if it makes us sick (lower life satisfaction, lower fertility, increased suicide rates, increased depression...and all seemingly worse effects for women who, paradoxically, stand to "gain" the most from liberalism).
Richard, I agree with you a lot but you are off track.
History is filled with examples of cyclical social liberalism (ironically intertwined with period of decadence) followed by periods of social conservativism.
Augustus himself made the Lex Iulia criminalizing adultery and incest. His daughter, Iulia, was notoriously a slut.
Sticking to Roman history, how could we forget the 14 years old Emperor Elagabalus, who liked to dress up like a woman, and spend his time in debauchery, known for provoking the breaking of sexual taboos and disrespecting Roman traditions, while power was held by his mother, aunt and sister, a literal matriarchy. He ended up being physically removed by the Praetorian Guard.
My point is simple: the upper class has at times regularly been tempted by sexual depravity, while in other times focused on restoring norms as society was collapsing. This is nothing new and Francis Fukuyama is still a charlatan.
To focus on Iran, the sole idea that this is about headscarves or social liberalism quite frankly should be laughed at. This has nothing to do with traditions and everything to do with geopolitics. As we all know, the psychotic regime in Washington is hell bent on trying to remove Putin, install a puppet in Moscow and dismantle the Russian nation, to loot its natural resources and devastate its culture.
To do this, they thought that opening a second front in Armenia, where Russia is the peacekeeper between Armenia and Azeris, would provide for a useful distraction as NATO wages war in Ukraine. Hence they pushed Azerbaijan to attack Armenia, which the Azeris are more than happy to do.
Iran, in turn, threatened to attack Baku (and recently massed troops at the border) if they kept attacking Armenia, which made Azerbaijan back off. As Iran sees an opportunity to thwart the plans of the most evil country in the world, they also provided those annoying drones to Russia, which NATO's super advanced technology has in so far failed to stop.
Hence, Washington retaliated, by doing what they have been doing since the Arab Spring: social media riots. This are as effective as social media are influential in a country. In Belarus for instance, they failed. It is not a secret that the head of the agitators for Iran lives in the US and is paid by the FBI. If a bunch of idiots in Iran want to throw away their lives for the Great Satan, the Revolutionmary Guard of Iran will take care of them.
Every country has deranged liberals. Even Russia does. It is up to institutions to deal with them. Just like liberals deal with conservatives when they capture institutions.
Sorry, but Fukuyama is still wrong. From Elagabalus to Weimar, liberals corrupted societies before and run them into the ground, just for conservatives to rebuild them.
1. Perhaps the way in which the right-wing government behaves has a lot to do with how things play out. The protests in Iran were apparently sparked because the police murdered a young woman for failing to wear her hijab properly. As awful and evil as the regime here is, it hasn't stooped so low as to outright murder someone for misgendering a trans person, or some such. And people here already really really hate the current regime. So imagine how much stronger that backlash could become if a comparable incident occurred in our own nation.
Enforcement of values, as we have observed from our own rulers, does not require violence of this sort. People here stay in line out of fear that they will be canceled socially, not because a goon squad might literally murder them. This situation occurs because the ruling class and its associates--media, academia, education, government, etc.--have all adopted the same leftist ideology. If these people could somehow be replaced by conservatives, one has to wonder if we might see something different in our culture.
2. Perhaps the rest of the world matters. The United States and its "Western" cousins exert tremendous cultural influence on the rest of the globe. I think it would not be unreasonable to posit that we are the world's top exporter of culture, especially in terms of political ideas and movements, always trying to make the rest of the world "democratic" like we are. This might matter for young people in places like Iran, who absorb those ideas and wish for a better "democratic" future in their own country. I believe Yarvin has written quite well about the regime's soft power and its influence abroad, though I can't find the article off the top of my head.
3. I can think of a couple counter-examples. What about Hungary? This nation's regime seems quite firm in its power, with no mass protests or killing of improper hijab wearers, and last I checked they were busy banning gender studies and the like. Likewise, what of Afghanistan? The Taliban also seems quite comfortable in its power there, although the nation may be much more miserable as a result. Perhaps the fact that the United States tried to impose its agenda on that nation by force (as opposed to letting soft power subvert it from within) matters.
1. Yarvin isn't a social conservative so it's far easier for him to keep the elites in check.
2. Why Conservatism Failed blatantly plagiarizes the Unabomber manifesto so the author is not a very insightful or bright individual but a plagiarist and thus should be ignored. The ideas are relevant but you need to source Uncle Ted instead.
The title is a little misleading. Social conservatism as a top end down, government imposed set of policies appears not to be viable, and the Iranian case seems to be illustrative of that. But you close with the correct case that socially conservative communities seem to be viable, and certainly outbreed the competition! Socially conservative, particularly religiously Conservative, communities may win the long game. Modern and post modern cultural values do not make people happy, and they seem to prevent people from reproducing, not a prescription for long-term success. Also, focusing on bottom up cultural change is the way to go anyway. Opposing specific policies at the government level that are hostile to these communities and these cultural and religious norms is the way to go. But don’t expect too much from government. Good article.
Richard Hanania is definitely moving up the charts on my mental list of interesting writers. Here he is suggesting that cultural evolution follows a path that ultimately is not controllable by deliberate government policy. But it took me a while to understand this, because he starts with "secularization and cultural liberalism are inevitable" in the subtitle, which he contradicts when he ends with "in the long run, it will be secular elites who find it impossible to mold human nature to their preferred specifications."
I don't think Iran is a great example because it's 'outside in the cold' of the US order and has not been thriving in the last few years, and is at the extreme end of social conservatism. Therefore its socially conservative order is seen as failing, and it's preventing urban elites from living how they want to live.
India is a more representative example of the rising non-Western world, when it comes to nationalism and ethno-religious identity the government is very conservative and incredibly popular. Sure it has become somewhat more 'liberal' in some ways e.g. dropping birthrates, but the fundamental 'national ethos' is something that hasn't been seen in the West since WW2 - and it is thriving.
Activism is needed but has to be well-placed, focused, and considerate of multiple variables. Think about the decline of horse-drawn carriages and beasts or burden: it wasn't due to the efforts of animal rights activists of the 1880s but rather the innovation of automobiles right around the chronological corner. Therefore, traditionalists should embrace non-traditional technologies and systems (e.g., remote/hybrid work) to be one step ahead in terms of incentives and influence.
It calls to mind for me what Yarvin once said about “Provincial strongmen” and how they must govern with an iron fist since the relevant institutions are out of their reach.
Such as how Orban can ban Soros from Hungary but he can’t shut down the OSF (or at least strip it of any power).
My big takeaway was that for social conservatism to work it has to reach the metropole, i.e the US and W.Europe, so the best people are attracted to those institutions.
Richard, your thesis seems to be that modern, wealthy societies naturally have a libertarian cultural bias, and any government that tries to bend in another direction is doomed to fail. But as another commenter points out, culture can change over time, from fundamentalist to libertine and back. And despots are always looking for ways to control and mold the culture. While murdering a few hundred dissidents every few years may be ineffective and passe, new methods are always being developed. That’s the fault in Fukuyama-ism - the blindness to the fact that the human urge to rule over others is not going to be extinguished by the beneficence of Western liberal governance.
Excellent piece. If people of faith want to have an influence in the modern world, it must come through voluntary means. Religious people have something deeply valuable to offer (meaning, purpose, community, transcendent values), but many organized religions have chosen the route of force rather than persuasion. It will be interesting to see how well they can make their case when they lack institutional power.
I have always shared this same irritation with social conservatives who trot out the "brainwashed by hippies" hypothesis for all the things they see as social ills. How different is this from progressive social constructionism? If I scoff at the idea that "the patriarchy" or "white supremacy" brain washed people into believing things, why would I be any more amenable to the idea that an evil cabal of hippies convinced people to get on welfare, delay marriage, have more and more varied sex, etc. Both sides in this seem to be social constuctionist and think culture is a thing you engineer rather than something that arises via tradeoffs between mutually compelling, but competing, moral goods and those tradeoff structures can shift. Maybe traditional values just stopped doing what they used to do, in terms of providing social goods for more people so people could indulge more individualism without losing anything they hadn't already lost? Any lingering appearance of trad con efficacy is certainly just selection bias for the ever fewer people for whom no tradeoff exists.
I think its important to distinguish between the lower-L liberalism of secularization, casual sex, public acceptance of freaks, caring little for drug usage, and demanding some say in government (et cetera), and the “actually-existing” Liberalism of the Democratic Party and whatever Freedom House preaches.
The first seems unavoidable. The second does not. Leftism as the default cultural setting seems a much more brittle result of American neuroticism being exported overseas.
Whenever urban, well-educated youths in other countries look for a model of liberalism to champion, they look at the US, and, as you’ve shown, the strongest version of wokeness heavily depends on completely avoidable developments in US domestic policy.
Conservatives claim to be in a culture war but I still cannot find any conservative culture, anywhere. Fox News and Prager U aren’t culture, they’re whining and criticism masquerading as culture. Conservatives could win people over to traditional values if they bothered to make cultural products with the slightest bit of competency.
What the Amish call Rumspringa, or what Hoppe calls Physical Removal is essential - The exodus of people who disagree with the regime, reinforcing the regime by evaporative cooling. The berlin wall etc probably hastened the fall of the USSR by keeping all the dissidents in the place where they can do the most damage. If Iran wants a stable regime it should assist the emigration of all of its dissidents. Then there's no need to oppress anybody -- people just vote with their feet and go live under whichever regime they want.
What successful traditionalist communities within modern societies seem to all have in common is a low barrier to exit. The people who don't like these communities are continually boiling off and the people who stay are increasingly genetically and culturally predisposed to like it. The people in these communities are mostly born and raised there, chose not to leave, and have the genetics of parents who also chose not to leave. This leads to strong community norms without forceful oppression and without needing to wait centuries for genetics to change.
I feel like there's an elephant in the room with both this essay and the one it uses as a starting point: if we're acknowledging that conservative values were built for a different world, and that technology has rendered these values at least partially obsolete, then what is the point of conservatism at all? I think a fair definition of social conservatism is just the belief that traditional behaviors and institutions have sustained our culture, and therefore they have some innate value and ought to be preserved absent some compelling reason to abandon them. But acknowledging that they are incompatible with a modern, urbanized environment seems like a compelling enough reason; it effectively abandons the notion that we somehow need conservative values to sustain us into the future.
Ultimately, I think this all comes down to aesthetics: conservatives just think that spending Sunday in church is better than spending it at drag time story hour, for completely subjective reasons. And that's fine, but this essay seems to acknowledge that the whole thing is a purely aesthetic debate.
Great essay. But why no mention of Afghanistan? They had 20 years to adopt liberal democracy and all kinds of incentives to do it, but they didn't (well, their leaders do seem to be a little kinder to the women now so maybe...). Was it because we made things so terrible for them that they had nowhere else to turn but tradition and family?
I agree liberalism is the inevitable consequence of material wealth. It's like a drug that everyone wants and promotes even if it makes us sick (lower life satisfaction, lower fertility, increased suicide rates, increased depression...and all seemingly worse effects for women who, paradoxically, stand to "gain" the most from liberalism).
Richard, I agree with you a lot but you are off track.
History is filled with examples of cyclical social liberalism (ironically intertwined with period of decadence) followed by periods of social conservativism.
Augustus himself made the Lex Iulia criminalizing adultery and incest. His daughter, Iulia, was notoriously a slut.
Sticking to Roman history, how could we forget the 14 years old Emperor Elagabalus, who liked to dress up like a woman, and spend his time in debauchery, known for provoking the breaking of sexual taboos and disrespecting Roman traditions, while power was held by his mother, aunt and sister, a literal matriarchy. He ended up being physically removed by the Praetorian Guard.
My point is simple: the upper class has at times regularly been tempted by sexual depravity, while in other times focused on restoring norms as society was collapsing. This is nothing new and Francis Fukuyama is still a charlatan.
To focus on Iran, the sole idea that this is about headscarves or social liberalism quite frankly should be laughed at. This has nothing to do with traditions and everything to do with geopolitics. As we all know, the psychotic regime in Washington is hell bent on trying to remove Putin, install a puppet in Moscow and dismantle the Russian nation, to loot its natural resources and devastate its culture.
To do this, they thought that opening a second front in Armenia, where Russia is the peacekeeper between Armenia and Azeris, would provide for a useful distraction as NATO wages war in Ukraine. Hence they pushed Azerbaijan to attack Armenia, which the Azeris are more than happy to do.
Iran, in turn, threatened to attack Baku (and recently massed troops at the border) if they kept attacking Armenia, which made Azerbaijan back off. As Iran sees an opportunity to thwart the plans of the most evil country in the world, they also provided those annoying drones to Russia, which NATO's super advanced technology has in so far failed to stop.
Hence, Washington retaliated, by doing what they have been doing since the Arab Spring: social media riots. This are as effective as social media are influential in a country. In Belarus for instance, they failed. It is not a secret that the head of the agitators for Iran lives in the US and is paid by the FBI. If a bunch of idiots in Iran want to throw away their lives for the Great Satan, the Revolutionmary Guard of Iran will take care of them.
Every country has deranged liberals. Even Russia does. It is up to institutions to deal with them. Just like liberals deal with conservatives when they capture institutions.
Sorry, but Fukuyama is still wrong. From Elagabalus to Weimar, liberals corrupted societies before and run them into the ground, just for conservatives to rebuild them.
1. Perhaps the way in which the right-wing government behaves has a lot to do with how things play out. The protests in Iran were apparently sparked because the police murdered a young woman for failing to wear her hijab properly. As awful and evil as the regime here is, it hasn't stooped so low as to outright murder someone for misgendering a trans person, or some such. And people here already really really hate the current regime. So imagine how much stronger that backlash could become if a comparable incident occurred in our own nation.
Enforcement of values, as we have observed from our own rulers, does not require violence of this sort. People here stay in line out of fear that they will be canceled socially, not because a goon squad might literally murder them. This situation occurs because the ruling class and its associates--media, academia, education, government, etc.--have all adopted the same leftist ideology. If these people could somehow be replaced by conservatives, one has to wonder if we might see something different in our culture.
2. Perhaps the rest of the world matters. The United States and its "Western" cousins exert tremendous cultural influence on the rest of the globe. I think it would not be unreasonable to posit that we are the world's top exporter of culture, especially in terms of political ideas and movements, always trying to make the rest of the world "democratic" like we are. This might matter for young people in places like Iran, who absorb those ideas and wish for a better "democratic" future in their own country. I believe Yarvin has written quite well about the regime's soft power and its influence abroad, though I can't find the article off the top of my head.
3. I can think of a couple counter-examples. What about Hungary? This nation's regime seems quite firm in its power, with no mass protests or killing of improper hijab wearers, and last I checked they were busy banning gender studies and the like. Likewise, what of Afghanistan? The Taliban also seems quite comfortable in its power there, although the nation may be much more miserable as a result. Perhaps the fact that the United States tried to impose its agenda on that nation by force (as opposed to letting soft power subvert it from within) matters.
1. Yarvin isn't a social conservative so it's far easier for him to keep the elites in check.
2. Why Conservatism Failed blatantly plagiarizes the Unabomber manifesto so the author is not a very insightful or bright individual but a plagiarist and thus should be ignored. The ideas are relevant but you need to source Uncle Ted instead.
The title is a little misleading. Social conservatism as a top end down, government imposed set of policies appears not to be viable, and the Iranian case seems to be illustrative of that. But you close with the correct case that socially conservative communities seem to be viable, and certainly outbreed the competition! Socially conservative, particularly religiously Conservative, communities may win the long game. Modern and post modern cultural values do not make people happy, and they seem to prevent people from reproducing, not a prescription for long-term success. Also, focusing on bottom up cultural change is the way to go anyway. Opposing specific policies at the government level that are hostile to these communities and these cultural and religious norms is the way to go. But don’t expect too much from government. Good article.
Richard Hanania is definitely moving up the charts on my mental list of interesting writers. Here he is suggesting that cultural evolution follows a path that ultimately is not controllable by deliberate government policy. But it took me a while to understand this, because he starts with "secularization and cultural liberalism are inevitable" in the subtitle, which he contradicts when he ends with "in the long run, it will be secular elites who find it impossible to mold human nature to their preferred specifications."
I don't think Iran is a great example because it's 'outside in the cold' of the US order and has not been thriving in the last few years, and is at the extreme end of social conservatism. Therefore its socially conservative order is seen as failing, and it's preventing urban elites from living how they want to live.
India is a more representative example of the rising non-Western world, when it comes to nationalism and ethno-religious identity the government is very conservative and incredibly popular. Sure it has become somewhat more 'liberal' in some ways e.g. dropping birthrates, but the fundamental 'national ethos' is something that hasn't been seen in the West since WW2 - and it is thriving.
Activism is needed but has to be well-placed, focused, and considerate of multiple variables. Think about the decline of horse-drawn carriages and beasts or burden: it wasn't due to the efforts of animal rights activists of the 1880s but rather the innovation of automobiles right around the chronological corner. Therefore, traditionalists should embrace non-traditional technologies and systems (e.g., remote/hybrid work) to be one step ahead in terms of incentives and influence.
It calls to mind for me what Yarvin once said about “Provincial strongmen” and how they must govern with an iron fist since the relevant institutions are out of their reach.
Such as how Orban can ban Soros from Hungary but he can’t shut down the OSF (or at least strip it of any power).
My big takeaway was that for social conservatism to work it has to reach the metropole, i.e the US and W.Europe, so the best people are attracted to those institutions.
Richard, your thesis seems to be that modern, wealthy societies naturally have a libertarian cultural bias, and any government that tries to bend in another direction is doomed to fail. But as another commenter points out, culture can change over time, from fundamentalist to libertine and back. And despots are always looking for ways to control and mold the culture. While murdering a few hundred dissidents every few years may be ineffective and passe, new methods are always being developed. That’s the fault in Fukuyama-ism - the blindness to the fact that the human urge to rule over others is not going to be extinguished by the beneficence of Western liberal governance.
Excellent piece. If people of faith want to have an influence in the modern world, it must come through voluntary means. Religious people have something deeply valuable to offer (meaning, purpose, community, transcendent values), but many organized religions have chosen the route of force rather than persuasion. It will be interesting to see how well they can make their case when they lack institutional power.
I have always shared this same irritation with social conservatives who trot out the "brainwashed by hippies" hypothesis for all the things they see as social ills. How different is this from progressive social constructionism? If I scoff at the idea that "the patriarchy" or "white supremacy" brain washed people into believing things, why would I be any more amenable to the idea that an evil cabal of hippies convinced people to get on welfare, delay marriage, have more and more varied sex, etc. Both sides in this seem to be social constuctionist and think culture is a thing you engineer rather than something that arises via tradeoffs between mutually compelling, but competing, moral goods and those tradeoff structures can shift. Maybe traditional values just stopped doing what they used to do, in terms of providing social goods for more people so people could indulge more individualism without losing anything they hadn't already lost? Any lingering appearance of trad con efficacy is certainly just selection bias for the ever fewer people for whom no tradeoff exists.
I think its important to distinguish between the lower-L liberalism of secularization, casual sex, public acceptance of freaks, caring little for drug usage, and demanding some say in government (et cetera), and the “actually-existing” Liberalism of the Democratic Party and whatever Freedom House preaches.
The first seems unavoidable. The second does not. Leftism as the default cultural setting seems a much more brittle result of American neuroticism being exported overseas.
Whenever urban, well-educated youths in other countries look for a model of liberalism to champion, they look at the US, and, as you’ve shown, the strongest version of wokeness heavily depends on completely avoidable developments in US domestic policy.