The Dissident Right Should Engage with the Substance of Ideas

Richard Hanania's Newsletter

An article from last week by Dave Greene places me in a group of thinkers who, in addition to being careerists – which is funny because I don’t have a job and am not looking for one – show a “refusal to examine deeper cultural issues” regarding the supposed failures of liberalism. I’m going to use this article as a kind of stand in to explain what I find so annoying and off-putting about what’s often called the “dissident right,” its epistemological style, and its ways of interacting with ideas, while addressing some of the few substantive criticisms in the piece I could find.

First, there’s a tendency among dissident right types to see every disagreement as really about others engaging in status seeking and trying to impress elites. They of course are doing no such thing when they post all day about how brave they are in the face of so much oppression. As someone whose favorite politician is Mitt Romney and who posts defenses of Jeffrey Epstein and infanticide, you would think I would be the one individual immune to such charges, but those who spend a lot of time thinking about the motivations of others tend to be really bad at understanding them, as they’re more interested in interpersonal drama than truth. To take one example, I’ve heard many people say that I am pro-immigration because it makes me more respectable. One would think then that I would drop the talk about race and IQ, or race and crime. Every Republican politician in the country promises to get tough on the border and the case for immigration restrictionism was recently made by a staff writer at the New York Times. Meanwhile, not even the most hardcore MAGA politicians will utter the phrase “black crime.” I don’t adopt my positions to be acceptable to the mainstream, nor to proudly declare myself a dissident. But if I was shaping my positions around the purpose of seeking respectability, all of this is a very odd way to do it. One thing dissident right types have a hard time swallowing is that to the extent that I’m accepted by the mainstream, it’s because even those who disagree with my politics and aesthetic sense find me too smart and interesting to ignore. These are often the same people who are mad about “Jewish influence,” and seek nefarious explanations of why they are overrepresented among American elites, when that group’s combination of intelligence and interest in politics is enough to solve the apparent mystery.

Another problem with many dissident right thinkers is they fail to clearly distinguish between questions of empirics, normative beliefs, and metapolitics. Take this paragraph as an example.

So, in comes a moderated acceptance of "Human Bio-Diversity" paired with half-hearted assurances that it won't disrupt our sacred post-civil rights liberal order. Out goes the promotion of traditional religious and sexual morals, not quite compatible with elite sensibilities. Calls for order and a solution to urban decay are prominent, whereas criticism of our financialized economy and mass immigration are pushed to the background.

It’s true that I call for tough on crime policies, but am not interested in criticizing a “financialized economy” or mass immigration. The simple reason I don’t criticize these things is that I don’t think they’re bad. Yet the implication of this passage is that I actually do understand Wall Street and immigration are major problems but don’t say so in order to kiss up to elites. Again, this is very dumb considering how many positions I hold that are a lot more controversial than being skeptical of bankers. Or am I just a fool for not seeing the dangers of financialization? Ok, that could be an article I guess, but the writer has an obligation to make clear exactly what he’s arguing and why.

I think this is what happens when people are in a bubble. I was once an anonymous online writer. When you have a very small audience and they all share the same ideology, they tend to agree so much that you don’t have to work too hard to make yourself understood. So you can just say a word like “financialization” and everyone knows what you’re talking about, and exactly why you think it’s an important issue, and these things are so obvious that even someone outside the circle like me must know all that too, which makes it suspicious that I never talk about this problem that we all know actually exists. If you think financialization is bad, write an article about this and maybe it’ll convince someone. And if you think I already understand what you think and secretly agree with you, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and should focus on ideas instead of unmasking ulterior motives.

My policy when it comes to comments on this Substack is that you can criticize whatever ideas you want, but if you want to question my motivations you can go do that somewhere else. I generally ignore writers who behave this way too, but since Greene wants to engage, he and others who have a similar style might be able to use this advice on how to talk to people outside the world of self-declared dissidents.

Sometimes it does make sense to discuss metapolitics, but you have to agree on the substance of politics first. The question of whether a group of people should talk about stopping mass immigration presupposes that they share the same opinion on the subject. There’s no point in a pro-life Christian debating the metapolitics of abortion with someone like me or Anatoly Karlin. A person on the dissident right might as well go talk about strategies for saving DEI with Ibram Kendi. To criticize someone for not advancing a position they don’t hold is nonsensical. But the dissident right seems to have a deep faith in its own ability to discern when people’s actual beliefs are inconsistent with what they say.

Finally, among online right types there is a habit of relying on general terms to hide empirical and normative differences. As Green explains in a Notes discussion, from his perspective, his main substantive disagreement with me is that he believes people should care about things like “trust, virtue, and collective health.”

I’m pro-virtue, pro-trust when people are trustworthy, and don’t know what “collective health” is, though hopefully Ozempic will help with that in the coming years.

Talking like this obfuscates differences, when the goal should be to clarify them if one wants to have a substantive discussion. Many postliberal types talk about the “collective good,” usually when criticizing rightists who are more libertarian leaning. Yet every libertarian I’ve ever met has thought that their economic views if adopted would make society better off. Nobody says that they are for the common bad. Postliberals seek to skip over empirical questions regarding who is correct on economics and make the debate over who is the most patriotic or cares more about the working class or some other such nonsense.

Very few writers are pure utilitarians who have no goal other than maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. I’m certainly not. All day, I’m going on about how cowardly academics and journalists are for not standing up to woke, what wimps right-wingers are for giving the stupid people and conspiracy theorists on their own side a pass, why freedom is more important than human life, etc.

When you hear someone on the right talk about the common good, you know they oppose free trade and are sympathetic to labor unions, even though whether such positions are actually good for society is open to debate. Likewise, when someone brings up the need for virtue in politics, it usually means that they favor immigration restriction and take socially conservative positions on issues like gay marriage, euthanasia, and abortion.

The underlying disagreements then between Greene and those he criticizes aren’t over whether virtue is good, but about conflicting moralities and empirical beliefs. Take the issue of immigration. I think it increases GDP and makes people wealthier. But I also believe it’s immoral to favor a lazy slob over a hardworking new arrival just because they were born on different sides of a border. On abortion, I don’t only think that it should be legal, but in cases of extreme disability a woman has a moral obligation to terminate a pregnancy. I think holding to a traditional religious faith is cowardly, but I’ll admit that I usually don’t say that because I don’t want to needlessly alienate people who might agree with me on other things. Your idea of virtue may be something else, but instead of debating these questions directly, dissident rightists conflate the entire concept of virtue with nationalism and religiosity.

Regarding my views on whether people need meaning and what role politics should play in providing it to them, I refer the reader to a previous article I wrote on the subject. I think the best thing that the average person can hope for is to find meaning in the ordinary business of everyday life, which in practice means busying themselves so much with work, family, and hobbies that they don’t bother thinking too much about philosophical or political issues, which most people are terrible at. As for the higher type of man, the most important thing he needs to reach his full potential is freedom, which liberalism has historically proved the best system for delivering.

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