The rise and fall and rise (and fall?) of writer Wesley Yang, plus an unrelated discussion about the rising influence of humanities PhD on the broader discourse.
Thought this was a really great conversation, as someone who once spent an unpleasant amount of time thinking about Norman Podhoretz for a thesis I enjoyed and found the comparison to Yang particularly interesting, especially the parallel of eventually getting very invested in anti-lgbtq stuff. It's funny, I read his book not terribly long ago and thought that for the most part there was very little that indicated he'd ever collapse so completely into 2+2=4 type thinking.
I too spent an unpleasant amount of time thinking about Norman Podhoretz! I don't feel like I have a good bead on where Yang will end up. I think his trans stuff is not, as it would be for Podhoretz, a visceral disgust with trans people or the "lifestyle." I don't think he's temperamentally uptight in that way. But I do worry there's been a fair amount of audience capture with him, though.
I’ll have to read your book! And yeah I don’t think I do either. I haven’t consumed much of his antitrans content (just don’t need that stuff in my life) but I get roughly the same sense- I think he sees us as the primary symptom of cultural developments that he sees as existentially threatening.
Loved this. Can't read anything by Yang anymore bc everything he tweets is so anti-trans, but remember loving his early work. Also really like what you say about the para-academic. I was trying to explain to someone recently the concept of the intelligentsia, as distinct from academia (am writing a book about the Great Books and was explaining that the Great Books have a much more active life in the intelligentsia than in academia), and it didn't necessarily make sense to them--I realized that the two worlds are really getting closer and closer. You don't necessarily have a lot of Richard Wrights or James Baldwins or Ernest Hemingways who don't have a strong relationship to the academy . I still think the academia / intelligentsia distinction is meaningful, bc the lack of institutional commitments that the intelligentsia has is meaningful by itself, but it's perhaps less meaningful than it's been.
I've had a version of that same discussion with friends before, and always somewhat struggled to explain the distinction, though it seems very clear in my mind. But you're right, there seems to be a lot more overlap than there used to be. I still think the median academic is pretty far from the intellectuals/intelligentsia as I understand it, but there seems to be a greater minority of academics who move pretty comfortably across the borders.
And yeah, Yang is a bit of a tragic case, brilliant at his best but monomaniacal and rather nasty at his worst. Oh well. Best minds of my generation and all that. So many people have lost their moorings in the last decade.
Really looking forward to people becoming saner with the collapse of Twitter.
Agreed. Most academics are really not members of the intelligentsia. It's like when I was explaining the Great Books concept to a professor at UW and they were just confused. I was like, you know, the books that are really old and people think they're important. And she was like, so "Early modern period?" Or the way someone academics will talk, rather amusingly, about "lay reading"
I think you really have to be in the intelligentsia to get it. The concept also probably made much more sense in the early 20th century and 19th century Russia, where most of the nobility were so poorly educated and uninterested in St. Petersburg life, so if you in any way cared about ideas, you stood out. In modern American life, "being interested in ideas" covers a lot of ground--and yet there is a tiny minority of each professional and social group that does in some way participate in a broader conversation and constitute a broader network.
I don't know if this helps, but in that lecture by Darren Staloff I mentioned—I'll link at the end—he distinguishes between intellectuals and intelligentsia: the former generate expertise and the latter implement it, as in theologian vs. priest, medical researcher vs. doctor, academic literary theorist vs. high-school English teacher, political theorist vs. party leader, etc. But the wandering academic or independent writer disrupts that binary. In general this might be a case where "classes" in the US are, unless we're strictly talking about income, too porous and heterogeneous to draw that kind of fine distinction.
That's an interesting distinction. Maybe useful if we could say something meaningful about, say, the politics or culture of the intelligentsia vs the politics of the intellectual. One of the ideas that I considered and then discarded, for this podcast, was to do something on class in America, which I think could be super interesting but would be super hard to elucidate.
one question I've had, vis a vis this podcast, is how I plug into that tiny minority constituting the discourse in those realms where I'm pretty ignorant. Like what's the ideas discourse among sports intellectuals, or among bass fishing intellectuals, etc. Not every subculture has a coherent and actually interesting discourse at that level, but plenty do, and I only know about the ones I know about.
That would be interesting. Maybe a more diverse and above-ground version of the renegade academic Justin Murphy's Other Life pod, which was focused for a while exclusively on freelance intellectuals in various often dubious and/or politically questionable domains (cryptocurrency, programming of various sorts, the occult, radical-reactionary micro-publishing, etc.). No bass fishing, though.
Imho the intelligentsia within each field are the ones who glommed on most strongly both to wokeness and anti wokeness, since both ideologies seem to offer tools that can be readily applied to any endeavor. In this way they strongly resemble the Levin from Anna Karenina coming back to his estate and trying to revolutionize how ppl farm using new scientific farming methods
The knitting circle intelligentsia is the person who suddenly starts saying, can we talk about the systemic racism or trans phobia in our hobby. They are tuned in to a broader conversation and are excited that they've found some sort of ideas they can apply to their own thing. That's why it's so hard to find an academic genealogy for wokeness--it's not really something that came from academia, it came from small Fandom and subcultures and then was disseminated from each to each by a few trendy early adopters
Agreed, and I think that also accounts for the sense of betrayal when people who ought to be intellectuals rather than intelligentsia start parroting the simple-minded version.
I've been feeling this sense of betrayal pretty constantly for the last five or ten years. Like - weren't we the ones who were supposed to think things through?!
Looking forward to hearing this! But I have to ask: If you’re going to devote so much time thinking about Wesley Yang, why not, as you did with Corey Robin, just ask him? (Understanding, of course, that taking into account his filibusters it would run about 3 hours.)
I love that Robin piece! I also take it as evidence of what sometimes frustrates me about him, which is that in order to criticize Coates, who I think he basically doesn't love for the reasons that a lot of median anti-woke liberals don't love him, he had to invent a whole new theory that made it clear that he wasn't coming from an anti-woke perspective.
Re: your question, I'd say two answers. I'm trying to mostly have the show be focused on intellectuals talking about other intellectuals, rather than themselves, or as well as themselves. I made an exception for Robin because we were talking about his platform. The second answer is precisely what you said. It would take 3 hours, he wouldn't listen to me very well, and we'd end up talking about the stuff he wanted to talk about rather than the stuff I want to talk about. I've interviewed him before. It's rewarding in the sense that watching his mind at work is pretty fascinating, but I don't think it's great podcasting. Could be wrong, though. If he reaches out to me (which he won't), I'll have him on.
Coincidentally, I found your page due to a Yang tweet, haha. I don't always check his tweets but they are entertaining from time to time. I enjoyed the convo, but I don't think you two gave enough consideration to the origins of "successor ideology" in critical theory/postmodernism. It's probably Marxism too - probably a mix of several intellectual trends - but the "woke" use terms that draw directly from critical theory textbooks, from gender and race being social constructs to a rejection of individual rights. They also tend to be unsophisticated relativists, just as early critics of critical theory said (like Noam Chomsky). It's hard not to trace at least one major root of their thinking to those traditions.
One more thought is that you guys spend quite a bit of time ripping on Wesley for being too simplistic about his "reality" point, 2+2=4 etc. I agree with you that what external reality is beyond our minds (if anything) is a difficult, deep question. But if I'm charitable to Yang, it may be that he's employing a technique similar to what Buddhists call "upaya" or skillful means. That is, it may be that he thinks the 2+2=5 folks are unsophisticated relativists (which they tend to be), so the only way to counter that is unsophisticated realism.
That all makes sense. As I said above, I don't feel like I have quite a handle on the full genealogy of it. I found John's argument compelling because what has seemed clear to me, as someone who's written about the left of the 1930s, is that what we're seeing now is very reminiscent of that period, so it can't quite be right that the basic template emerged after the war. But I would think that John can be right that Marx is the real founding father (or maybe Hegel) and you can also be right that later movements had a pretty significant influence on what we're seeing now, and this could be true even if John is right that the post-structuralists were philosophical critics of precisely the currents in Marxism that laid the foundation for wokeness/identity politics.
Regarding your point about Yang and 2+2=4, I guess my answer would be that sure we could read him charitably in that way, and I have no doubt, given his incredibly cognitive firepower, that the interior of his mind is filled with all sorts of subtleties and clever stratagems. The problem is that as long as all he's doing is tweeting, and not writing substantively, then it feels too charitable to me. Once he starts writing, and exhibiting that kind of subtlety, I'll immediately revise my critique. Did you see his tweet about our podcast, in which he said that he would be wholly vindicated in the course of time? I hope he is. I really do. I loved reading his Meme Wars essays. I don't think there's anyone better over the past decade at explaining what's going on. I just don't think we owe him much anticipatory deference.
And just to refine my argument a bit now that I've thought about it more: I'd say "Hegel" is the source if we're thinking in terms of intellectual history, but in terms of social-political history it's probably the French Revolution—some interpreters of Hegel, like my own grad school Marxist prof Timothy Brennan, read Hegel as essentially philosophizing the revolution. Then, re: French Theory's resistance to revolutionary/statist leftism, Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition warns that the great modern "grand narratives" led to "Terror." He obviously has the French Rev in mind and posits postmodernism as a solution to its excesses; he furthermore names Hegel as an exemplary modern whose terror postmodernism will challenge. For him this would involve what we'd call "multiculturalism" or "diversity," but he imagined it happening in an anarchic self-directed way due to new technology—every type of person from every race and culture having equal access to the information economy or something—not under the aegis of the interventionist state. Sorry if this seems pedantic, but wanted to add a bit more context in case people think I was being too general on the pod.
Thanks for the replies guys. Daniel, yes it's a good point that Wesley needs to do more careful long form writing to clarify some of his thinking, maybe I'm being too charitable. I've actually been waiting for him to do an essay or book outlining the parameters of the successor ideology. He has done a couple of very long interviews (only available on his substack) that are more careful and subtle.
John, I get what you're saying, but I think it's important to note that many of the followers of "woke" ideology aren't careful and aren't necessarily aware of the historical trends. Even if postmodernists in their own writings were critical of Hegel it doesn't mean the woke don't borrow from both the Hegelian tradition AND the postmodernist one, even if unknowingly. It's a bit like the way Christians (and even some Christian scholars) can glom onto a Christian worldview and reject a reason-centered view while simultaneously being unaware of the influence of the Aristotelian tradition on Christianity.
Once he publishes a book or some long form essays, I'm happy to totally reverse my assessment. I don't pay for his substack anymore, because I paid for a year and there was so little content from him. Wish he would make those longer interviews public (or you can forward them to me at djopps@gmail.com).
As someone with an English degree (not a PhD though) that has written for Tablet, The Free Press, and UnHerd, I really was hoping for more discussion on the phenomenon you describe in this podcast. Especially the fact that people like me are far in the minority when it comes to the humanities, which is overwhelmingly Left. I’ve heard people call us “dissidents”, which is an apt word.
Coincidence—I just read and enjoyed your review of Yellowface yesterday!
I'm probably not the best spokesman for the topic. I don't really pitch my work anymore. I've published in right and center venues because I've been invited to. I would also publish in left venues if they invited me—this pod might be an example, as I appeared shortly after Corey Robin. I'll speak to pretty much any audience. I often argue for the right of artists and thinkers to be apolitical or politically opaque or politically unpredictable. It seems that at least the center right currently has more tolerance for such an argument than the left, though this wasn't always true (e.g. the years after 9/11), and sometimes that kind of argument cuts against the right and center, as in what I was saying about Yang on the pod.
Re: academia, almost no one's ever complained about what I've written outside the classroom or even said in the classroom—and I'm fairly candid in the classroom as you can see if you look up my pandemic-era lectures on YouTube for a class on multicultural literature—though once my adjunct contract wasn't renewed because, among other reasons, there wasn't enough "diversity" in the adjunct cohort. So a mixed record there!
Fair request. I think if I'd done a whole show on the topic, rather than just half of one, I might have gotten more into the actual beliefs of this cohort i'm postulating. I do think there's certainly a really strong strand of dissent in the sense that you're using it, or reaction to the left-wing orthodoxies.
One thing that I think is interesting about some of these ex-academic or semi-academic dissident humanities PhDs is that their center-right profile, if in fact that's what it is, is radically different from the classic right-wing humanities profile, which is more Straussian or great powers/classics/virtue-ish. The new folks are much more likely to take their cues from Foucault, or (as in John's case) someone like Camille Paglia. It's a very different vibe.
Not fully theorized yet, though. Open to suggestions. What are your reference points, Sheluyang?
What I've noticed about this new scene is how much of the conservatism is on the social rather than economic side. Publications like American Affairs or Compact are openly hostile to free-market capitalism, which marks a break from the Buckley fusionism that's gripped the Right for decades.
I'm not sure about Foucault, but Paglia definitely is one of the major thinkers. There's a lot of "post-liberal" talk that is divided into Christian integralist/nationalist and Nietzschean camps. The Christian camp is people like Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and can trace their roots to famous Christian apologists (Aquinas, Chesterton, etc.) The other camp explicitly rejects that and is heavily based around "RW Twitter anons" like Bronze Age Pervert, and endorses a pre-Constantinian Western moral foundation with a worldview heavily derived from evolutionary psychology.
I'd say I'm quite syncretic when it comes to my beliefs. A little from column A, a little from column B. I'm trying to develop my own unique school of thought.
Thought this was a really great conversation, as someone who once spent an unpleasant amount of time thinking about Norman Podhoretz for a thesis I enjoyed and found the comparison to Yang particularly interesting, especially the parallel of eventually getting very invested in anti-lgbtq stuff. It's funny, I read his book not terribly long ago and thought that for the most part there was very little that indicated he'd ever collapse so completely into 2+2=4 type thinking.
I too spent an unpleasant amount of time thinking about Norman Podhoretz! I don't feel like I have a good bead on where Yang will end up. I think his trans stuff is not, as it would be for Podhoretz, a visceral disgust with trans people or the "lifestyle." I don't think he's temperamentally uptight in that way. But I do worry there's been a fair amount of audience capture with him, though.
I’ll have to read your book! And yeah I don’t think I do either. I haven’t consumed much of his antitrans content (just don’t need that stuff in my life) but I get roughly the same sense- I think he sees us as the primary symptom of cultural developments that he sees as existentially threatening.
Loved this. Can't read anything by Yang anymore bc everything he tweets is so anti-trans, but remember loving his early work. Also really like what you say about the para-academic. I was trying to explain to someone recently the concept of the intelligentsia, as distinct from academia (am writing a book about the Great Books and was explaining that the Great Books have a much more active life in the intelligentsia than in academia), and it didn't necessarily make sense to them--I realized that the two worlds are really getting closer and closer. You don't necessarily have a lot of Richard Wrights or James Baldwins or Ernest Hemingways who don't have a strong relationship to the academy . I still think the academia / intelligentsia distinction is meaningful, bc the lack of institutional commitments that the intelligentsia has is meaningful by itself, but it's perhaps less meaningful than it's been.
I've had a version of that same discussion with friends before, and always somewhat struggled to explain the distinction, though it seems very clear in my mind. But you're right, there seems to be a lot more overlap than there used to be. I still think the median academic is pretty far from the intellectuals/intelligentsia as I understand it, but there seems to be a greater minority of academics who move pretty comfortably across the borders.
And yeah, Yang is a bit of a tragic case, brilliant at his best but monomaniacal and rather nasty at his worst. Oh well. Best minds of my generation and all that. So many people have lost their moorings in the last decade.
Really looking forward to people becoming saner with the collapse of Twitter.
Agreed. Most academics are really not members of the intelligentsia. It's like when I was explaining the Great Books concept to a professor at UW and they were just confused. I was like, you know, the books that are really old and people think they're important. And she was like, so "Early modern period?" Or the way someone academics will talk, rather amusingly, about "lay reading"
I think you really have to be in the intelligentsia to get it. The concept also probably made much more sense in the early 20th century and 19th century Russia, where most of the nobility were so poorly educated and uninterested in St. Petersburg life, so if you in any way cared about ideas, you stood out. In modern American life, "being interested in ideas" covers a lot of ground--and yet there is a tiny minority of each professional and social group that does in some way participate in a broader conversation and constitute a broader network.
I don't know if this helps, but in that lecture by Darren Staloff I mentioned—I'll link at the end—he distinguishes between intellectuals and intelligentsia: the former generate expertise and the latter implement it, as in theologian vs. priest, medical researcher vs. doctor, academic literary theorist vs. high-school English teacher, political theorist vs. party leader, etc. But the wandering academic or independent writer disrupts that binary. In general this might be a case where "classes" in the US are, unless we're strictly talking about income, too porous and heterogeneous to draw that kind of fine distinction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MKSPk5AL-A&ab_channel=MichaelSugrue
That's an interesting distinction. Maybe useful if we could say something meaningful about, say, the politics or culture of the intelligentsia vs the politics of the intellectual. One of the ideas that I considered and then discarded, for this podcast, was to do something on class in America, which I think could be super interesting but would be super hard to elucidate.
one question I've had, vis a vis this podcast, is how I plug into that tiny minority constituting the discourse in those realms where I'm pretty ignorant. Like what's the ideas discourse among sports intellectuals, or among bass fishing intellectuals, etc. Not every subculture has a coherent and actually interesting discourse at that level, but plenty do, and I only know about the ones I know about.
That would be interesting. Maybe a more diverse and above-ground version of the renegade academic Justin Murphy's Other Life pod, which was focused for a while exclusively on freelance intellectuals in various often dubious and/or politically questionable domains (cryptocurrency, programming of various sorts, the occult, radical-reactionary micro-publishing, etc.). No bass fishing, though.
Imho the intelligentsia within each field are the ones who glommed on most strongly both to wokeness and anti wokeness, since both ideologies seem to offer tools that can be readily applied to any endeavor. In this way they strongly resemble the Levin from Anna Karenina coming back to his estate and trying to revolutionize how ppl farm using new scientific farming methods
The knitting circle intelligentsia is the person who suddenly starts saying, can we talk about the systemic racism or trans phobia in our hobby. They are tuned in to a broader conversation and are excited that they've found some sort of ideas they can apply to their own thing. That's why it's so hard to find an academic genealogy for wokeness--it's not really something that came from academia, it came from small Fandom and subcultures and then was disseminated from each to each by a few trendy early adopters
Agreed, and I think that also accounts for the sense of betrayal when people who ought to be intellectuals rather than intelligentsia start parroting the simple-minded version.
I've been feeling this sense of betrayal pretty constantly for the last five or ten years. Like - weren't we the ones who were supposed to think things through?!
Looking forward to hearing this! But I have to ask: If you’re going to devote so much time thinking about Wesley Yang, why not, as you did with Corey Robin, just ask him? (Understanding, of course, that taking into account his filibusters it would run about 3 hours.)
Speaking of Robin, the two of you touched lightly on the topic of academics writing for the public, and I liked this piece of his on the topic: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-intellectuals-create-a-public/
I love that Robin piece! I also take it as evidence of what sometimes frustrates me about him, which is that in order to criticize Coates, who I think he basically doesn't love for the reasons that a lot of median anti-woke liberals don't love him, he had to invent a whole new theory that made it clear that he wasn't coming from an anti-woke perspective.
Re: your question, I'd say two answers. I'm trying to mostly have the show be focused on intellectuals talking about other intellectuals, rather than themselves, or as well as themselves. I made an exception for Robin because we were talking about his platform. The second answer is precisely what you said. It would take 3 hours, he wouldn't listen to me very well, and we'd end up talking about the stuff he wanted to talk about rather than the stuff I want to talk about. I've interviewed him before. It's rewarding in the sense that watching his mind at work is pretty fascinating, but I don't think it's great podcasting. Could be wrong, though. If he reaches out to me (which he won't), I'll have him on.
Coincidentally, I found your page due to a Yang tweet, haha. I don't always check his tweets but they are entertaining from time to time. I enjoyed the convo, but I don't think you two gave enough consideration to the origins of "successor ideology" in critical theory/postmodernism. It's probably Marxism too - probably a mix of several intellectual trends - but the "woke" use terms that draw directly from critical theory textbooks, from gender and race being social constructs to a rejection of individual rights. They also tend to be unsophisticated relativists, just as early critics of critical theory said (like Noam Chomsky). It's hard not to trace at least one major root of their thinking to those traditions.
One more thought is that you guys spend quite a bit of time ripping on Wesley for being too simplistic about his "reality" point, 2+2=4 etc. I agree with you that what external reality is beyond our minds (if anything) is a difficult, deep question. But if I'm charitable to Yang, it may be that he's employing a technique similar to what Buddhists call "upaya" or skillful means. That is, it may be that he thinks the 2+2=5 folks are unsophisticated relativists (which they tend to be), so the only way to counter that is unsophisticated realism.
That all makes sense. As I said above, I don't feel like I have quite a handle on the full genealogy of it. I found John's argument compelling because what has seemed clear to me, as someone who's written about the left of the 1930s, is that what we're seeing now is very reminiscent of that period, so it can't quite be right that the basic template emerged after the war. But I would think that John can be right that Marx is the real founding father (or maybe Hegel) and you can also be right that later movements had a pretty significant influence on what we're seeing now, and this could be true even if John is right that the post-structuralists were philosophical critics of precisely the currents in Marxism that laid the foundation for wokeness/identity politics.
Regarding your point about Yang and 2+2=4, I guess my answer would be that sure we could read him charitably in that way, and I have no doubt, given his incredibly cognitive firepower, that the interior of his mind is filled with all sorts of subtleties and clever stratagems. The problem is that as long as all he's doing is tweeting, and not writing substantively, then it feels too charitable to me. Once he starts writing, and exhibiting that kind of subtlety, I'll immediately revise my critique. Did you see his tweet about our podcast, in which he said that he would be wholly vindicated in the course of time? I hope he is. I really do. I loved reading his Meme Wars essays. I don't think there's anyone better over the past decade at explaining what's going on. I just don't think we owe him much anticipatory deference.
And just to refine my argument a bit now that I've thought about it more: I'd say "Hegel" is the source if we're thinking in terms of intellectual history, but in terms of social-political history it's probably the French Revolution—some interpreters of Hegel, like my own grad school Marxist prof Timothy Brennan, read Hegel as essentially philosophizing the revolution. Then, re: French Theory's resistance to revolutionary/statist leftism, Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition warns that the great modern "grand narratives" led to "Terror." He obviously has the French Rev in mind and posits postmodernism as a solution to its excesses; he furthermore names Hegel as an exemplary modern whose terror postmodernism will challenge. For him this would involve what we'd call "multiculturalism" or "diversity," but he imagined it happening in an anarchic self-directed way due to new technology—every type of person from every race and culture having equal access to the information economy or something—not under the aegis of the interventionist state. Sorry if this seems pedantic, but wanted to add a bit more context in case people think I was being too general on the pod.
Thanks for the replies guys. Daniel, yes it's a good point that Wesley needs to do more careful long form writing to clarify some of his thinking, maybe I'm being too charitable. I've actually been waiting for him to do an essay or book outlining the parameters of the successor ideology. He has done a couple of very long interviews (only available on his substack) that are more careful and subtle.
John, I get what you're saying, but I think it's important to note that many of the followers of "woke" ideology aren't careful and aren't necessarily aware of the historical trends. Even if postmodernists in their own writings were critical of Hegel it doesn't mean the woke don't borrow from both the Hegelian tradition AND the postmodernist one, even if unknowingly. It's a bit like the way Christians (and even some Christian scholars) can glom onto a Christian worldview and reject a reason-centered view while simultaneously being unaware of the influence of the Aristotelian tradition on Christianity.
Once he publishes a book or some long form essays, I'm happy to totally reverse my assessment. I don't pay for his substack anymore, because I paid for a year and there was so little content from him. Wish he would make those longer interviews public (or you can forward them to me at djopps@gmail.com).
As someone with an English degree (not a PhD though) that has written for Tablet, The Free Press, and UnHerd, I really was hoping for more discussion on the phenomenon you describe in this podcast. Especially the fact that people like me are far in the minority when it comes to the humanities, which is overwhelmingly Left. I’ve heard people call us “dissidents”, which is an apt word.
Coincidence—I just read and enjoyed your review of Yellowface yesterday!
I'm probably not the best spokesman for the topic. I don't really pitch my work anymore. I've published in right and center venues because I've been invited to. I would also publish in left venues if they invited me—this pod might be an example, as I appeared shortly after Corey Robin. I'll speak to pretty much any audience. I often argue for the right of artists and thinkers to be apolitical or politically opaque or politically unpredictable. It seems that at least the center right currently has more tolerance for such an argument than the left, though this wasn't always true (e.g. the years after 9/11), and sometimes that kind of argument cuts against the right and center, as in what I was saying about Yang on the pod.
Re: academia, almost no one's ever complained about what I've written outside the classroom or even said in the classroom—and I'm fairly candid in the classroom as you can see if you look up my pandemic-era lectures on YouTube for a class on multicultural literature—though once my adjunct contract wasn't renewed because, among other reasons, there wasn't enough "diversity" in the adjunct cohort. So a mixed record there!
Fair request. I think if I'd done a whole show on the topic, rather than just half of one, I might have gotten more into the actual beliefs of this cohort i'm postulating. I do think there's certainly a really strong strand of dissent in the sense that you're using it, or reaction to the left-wing orthodoxies.
One thing that I think is interesting about some of these ex-academic or semi-academic dissident humanities PhDs is that their center-right profile, if in fact that's what it is, is radically different from the classic right-wing humanities profile, which is more Straussian or great powers/classics/virtue-ish. The new folks are much more likely to take their cues from Foucault, or (as in John's case) someone like Camille Paglia. It's a very different vibe.
Not fully theorized yet, though. Open to suggestions. What are your reference points, Sheluyang?
What I've noticed about this new scene is how much of the conservatism is on the social rather than economic side. Publications like American Affairs or Compact are openly hostile to free-market capitalism, which marks a break from the Buckley fusionism that's gripped the Right for decades.
I'm not sure about Foucault, but Paglia definitely is one of the major thinkers. There's a lot of "post-liberal" talk that is divided into Christian integralist/nationalist and Nietzschean camps. The Christian camp is people like Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and can trace their roots to famous Christian apologists (Aquinas, Chesterton, etc.) The other camp explicitly rejects that and is heavily based around "RW Twitter anons" like Bronze Age Pervert, and endorses a pre-Constantinian Western moral foundation with a worldview heavily derived from evolutionary psychology.
So where are you in this mix? Who are your people?
I'd say I'm quite syncretic when it comes to my beliefs. A little from column A, a little from column B. I'm trying to develop my own unique school of thought.