Damon Linker: The Self-Radicalizing Logic of Conservative Intellectuals

Damon Linker has an interesting new piece on the growing confidence of the New Right by which he means the First Things set who are ready to board the plane to the post-liberal future.

The Week:

“Much has been written about the transformation of the GOP over the past several years from the party of Ronald Reagan to the party of Donald Trump and his populist imitators. But at the same time a parallel change has been taking place among conservative intellectuals.

This evolution of ideas and temperament has been catalyzed by the political shift to Trumpian politics, but it isn’t reducible to that change. Ideas, like psychological dispositions, shift according to their own logic. What we have been witnessing among growing numbers of conservative thinkers is a process of self-radicalization driven by the interaction of political events with prior ideological assumptions and moods.

The most pessimistic and culturally alienated thinkers on the American right have been given hope — and that distinctive mixture is an ideal fuel for political extremism. …

This was the idea Trump’s electoral success inspired: He (or a populist successor) could at long last give conservatives their chance — not by slowing an inevitable march to the secular left but by razing the liberal edifice altogether, making it possible to found society anew on properly conservative foundations. …”

I have mixed views on the “New Right.”

For one, the integralists are Northern and Catholic and tend to be urbanites while I am Southern and Protestant and come from a rural background, which gives me a different perspective. These people are also allergic to White identity and candidly discussing the Jewish Question.

At the same, we share a lot of the same gripes about America’s seemingly inexorable cultural degeneration. We’re also Christians. We share a similar view of conservative liberalism. We were also ridiculing David French as a cuckservative years before everyone else was doing it. Many of the points that the “New Right” makes about the “dead consensus” are things that we were saying for 15 years before Trump was elected president. Rusty Reno wrote an essay for that famous “Against Trump” issue in National Review and Josh Hammer was a huge Evan McMullin supporter in 2016.

Generally speaking, we are radicals who share the same goal. There is a class of people who live on the coasts and who have modernist values and professional class jobs and who dominate all of our institutions and we are sick and tired of these people dominating American culture. They wield wildly disproportionate power to their actual numbers. While some of the worst offenders and ringleaders are Jewish, they really come from all racial and ethnic backgrounds and have the same worldview and values and the same accent. They have been called PMCs and “Smart America” and woke professionals and BoBos.

A picture is worth a thousand words … it is these people:

We live in a country where Lil Nas X performing “Montero” is on YouTube, but where anyone who harshly criticizes him is censored and labeled a “domestic extremist” by the government!

The same people who are behind this filth are behind all the anti-white garbage which Tucker covered on his show last night. It is another one of their projects that creates massive resentment.

As they say over at Know Your Enemy, we haven’t been fighting the culture war hard enough. We should be inciting the country into a cultural revolution against these people. We should at least be as ruthless toward these people on the coasts as they have been toward us. No more pulling punches!