I know Lemmy isn’t normally the best place to search for this, but are there any high-quality right-wing explainers, or modern books, or media outlets?
I myself am ultra-left (quite literally communist, to the dictionary sense of the word), but I’d like to quit the bubble that inevitably forms around and look at good arguments of the opposing side, if there are any.
Is there anything in there beyond temporarily embarrassed millionaires and fears that trans people will destroy humanity? Is there rational analysis, something closer to academic research, behind modern ideas of laissez-faire capitalism and/or political conservatism?
I’ve tried outlets like PragerU, but they are so basic they seem to target a very uncritical audience.
I’d like to see the world in the eyes of an enlightened right-winger, and see where they possibly fail (or if suddenly they have valid arguments).
Yes! I’ve been on this journey!
Thomas Sowell’s bibliography is easily the best starting place. Just pick something and have at it. As a prominent conservative economist, his books actually make good arguments. It takes actual effort to deconstruct his arguments and identify where he’s wrong. He’s widely and highly respected in conservative communities and tackles a lot of the common cultural war issues.
Then there’s granddaddies Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. Also economists, they were directly impacted by the Cold War, and make intellectual cases that capitalism is the only economic system that leads to real individual freedom. And they also try to prove why the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and every lesser species of it undermines liberty. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom are staples.
Castigated by modern conservatives because they’re not serious about anything, sociology’s Emile Durkheim is a cornerstone of the discipline. I’ve never read it, but his book *Suicide *concerns individuals within community and the institutions of it. He talks about a type of suicide derived from moral disorder and lack of clarity, anomic suicide.
One book that I found incredibly insightful was Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. This book is genuinely fair to both sides, and it shows the historical roots of conservatism and its relation to the French Revolution, when the right and the left as political stances first became a thing.
OP, this guy has given you an honest answer that is actually good material.
Seconding these recommendations.
iirc Friedman changed his mind about the welfare state later in life
Thomas Sowell is an american pseudo intelectual…
A lot of his analysis doesn’t hold any water if reviewed in context of the world.
He is essentially doing the bidding for the regime which I guess what “conservatives” do but he is disingenius IMHO sort of Ben Shapiro type of lapdog telling working peasants sucks to suck, git gud.
A lot of the academics associated (formerly or currently) with Chicago Booth are highly respected as economists but highly conservative. As influential and famous they may be, their personal blogs and twitter account are yikes.
E.g. Harald Uhlig, Joch H Cochrane
Thanks! If I’m not mistaken, Thomas Sowell, who is often cited under the post, changed to the right-wing after discussions with Chicago students - must be quite solid.
So I’m going to interpret your request broadly and recommend a couple podcasts. They aren’t necessarily right-wing (honestly, probably center left to center right), but they’re probably outside of what you’d normally consume and may challenge or intrigue you.
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The New Liberal Podcast New liberalism is a rebranding of neoliberalism. I’d start by listening to a couple mailbag episodes and his past best books of the year episodes.
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Conversations with Tyler Tyler Cowen is a conservative economist at the University of Chicago, but you don’t actually hear his opinions that often on his podcast which consists of interviews with an eclectic variety of folks from a homeless man to a Calvinist theologian, from music producer Rick Rubin to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. He has a unique interviewing style that consists of a series of disjointed questions. He often poses challenging questions, but he gives them plenty of space to answer and doesn’t debate. I would suggest skipping interviews with people you know you’re going to hate (e.g., Peter Thiel), but instead look for interviews that pique your interest.
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Frankly, anything explicitly marketed to American conservatives these days is mostly ragebait for stupid people and I doubt you’ll find any of it the least bit convincing. As other have mentioned, Thomas Sowell is a great place to start if you want something serious but modern and clearly written. Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose or Capitalism and Freedom are both widely recommended classics. If you managed to read Marx without dying of boredom you should also be able to get through Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action or Socialism.
Thomas Sowell is a great place to start
My man was churning out ragebait before ragebait was cool.
Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose or Capitalism and Freedom are both widely recommended classics.
Mr. Pencil Man, the guy who was convinced a command economy couldn’t churn out writing implements because they had too many parts.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
Is one of my favorite Friedmanisms. My guy simply could not conceive of a central authority doing anything right (unless that thing was standing up military juntas in formerly democratic Latin American and Middle Eastern states).
If you managed to read Marx without dying of boredom you should also be able to get through Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action or Socialism.
He’s got some bangers.
Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.
Others have weighed in on the academic, but a lot of the American conservative braintrust is (literally) in think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, John Birch Society, etc. These organizations vary from “pretty right wing” Heritage to “nearly literally fascist” John Birch Society, and they put out a LOT of papers and material they use to…I’ll generously say “inform” the public discourse.
There’s an episode of Behind the Bastards touching on the subject - “How Conservatism Won”. Not a right-wing resource at all, obviously, but that’s where a lot of the money goes indeed.
I don’t know if you like podcasts, but Know Your Enemy is a take on the right from two leftists who used to be conservatives who approach it from an intellectual POV.
I linked to the political magazine that helps support them since it gives some rundowns of their topics that might give you some of the sources that can be read instead of listening to their podcast, if you’d prefer.
Here’s an audio copy of Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State. Murray is basically the father of “right wing” libertarianism (insofar as right v left is individualism v collectivism, not “right=racism is good,”) he seems to fit the description you seek. Not saying you’ll agree or love him, but he isn’t some “lets kill the gays” nonsense.
Also try Milton Friedman, and Lysander Spooner. They’re more “anarchism” or “libertarianism” as well, from that same individualist, rather than collectivist, standpoint.
If youre being honest, then youre going to need to look at historical material like Locke & Hobbes to get a foundation.
Modern conserativism… aggitation… can bw traced through Gingrich in the House in the early 90s, I cant think of the book off the top of my head but theres a pretty decent record of how he did manipulative things with unmanned cspan cameras at the time.
If I recall from the Alt-Right Playbook’s Origins of Conservatism video, some of the early founders of conservative thought you might want to read include:
- Edmund Burke
- Thomas Hobbes
- Joseph DeMaistre
Going to Lemmy and asking this is like going to Truth.Social and asking about resources for helping trans teens.
No… Around here people will actually talk shop on doctrine…
Truth social is where red blooded strong american men jerk each others dicks to maintain hi T levels.
We are not the same,jpeg
Maybe read something from Jordan Peterson? He’s conservative, against gender politics or modern life. Sells ‘simple truths’ that look well reasoned if you’re not too intelligent (or don’t believe in equality…) I think he wrote several books and has lots of YouTube videos available.
Peterson seemed more pretentious than competent to me.
As you well said, “look well-reasoned if you’re not too intelligent”
But thanks!
Mein Kampf
Would unironically take a read someday, though it shouldn’t be considered mainline right-wing despite Trump debacle.
It’s actually a really shit book
I’m from Austria and in my early youth I wanted to work though the history of my family and country, especially because nobody wanted to really talk about it.
‘Mein Kampf’ really really disappointed me. It reads like a whiny, misunderstood dude thinks he got cheated and looks for someone at fault - and obviously it would be best, if everything would follow his ideas, because then he would never feel rejected/disappointed anymore.
Of course this is a more than subjective, and quite polemic, view on this book, but although I’ve always identified much more with anarchism, I really wanted to get what’s so intriguing about this book and its ideas.
But it was just a series of whining autobiographic stories and some blaming for just someone to be at fault for his suffering.I’ve found the more common books during the period of the Nazi regiment much more interesting.
There are quite some books about how girls should fulfill their role as a mother, when they are reaching adolescent.Pretty much the same for boys who get indoctrinated into being some kind of selfless knight - but always with the motivation of social admiration
Every form of self fulfillment always needs to be for the good of the empire (read: in line with the Führer’s will/ideology/order)
I can completely understand how a young person would join a moment with such promises and I think it’s very dangerous to just ban those books.
Instead they should be part of the educational curriculum, so the actual problems and weakness (to put it lightly) of such systems can be discussed and understood early.Moving to simple solutions in times of crisis seems to be part of human nature. So we have to take care, that we don’t do stupid things in challenging situations
Thanks for your opinion!
Any other Nazi books you’d recommend?
(Gosh, I never thought I’d say something like this)
Was more than 25 years ago, when I looked into books of that time. Mostly found it on such used book markets.
Can’t remember any titels, sorry
But it also gets old really fast. It’s always the same thing and ideal picture they want the world to be
I see. Thank you anyway!
Ayn Rand is where modern right wing ideology started. You really don’t need to read a whole book, she beats you over the head with the message repeatedly.
Fast forward to the Rush Limbaugh talk show and listen to some of his monologues.
Then jump back to Mein Kampf to see the future of the right wing.
It’s all bullshit, and it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of right wing talking points. Ask critical questions like what happens to the most vulnerable populations under that system and you realize quickly that it’s Sparta all over again and they will be actively killed because they believe in eugenics.
Hard disagree with Rand, thats just a libertarian circle jerk.
Better would be anything from Jefferson. If you really want to get into the weeds, the Anti-Federalists from the 1790’s opposing the Constitution in favor of keeping the original Articles of Confederation that governed the US right after independence.
Jefferson sounds like a barely relevant choice from a very distant time, something that an average libertarianist will shove in people’s faces without telling it fails to describe shortcomings of capitalism highlighted by later thinkers.
But as a starting point, I see how that may be useful. Thank you!
If you’re looking for credible conservatives who actually confront the shortcomings of capitalism, I can’t think of any. But these early writings were pretty well-thought out and are foundational to later ideas, so I think they’re worth reading.
I thought your review of conservatism was very fair and balanced. I give it a perfect 5/7.
It partly depends on whether you want to understand pre-9/11 “reasonable” conservatism or the more recent Tea Party and Trump conservative populism.
Ayn Rand expresses the fairy tale version of romantic, rugged individualism, which is pretty important to understanding modern right-wing politics, especially in North America. I think the main idea conservatives take from her work, directly or indirectly, is that progress is driven by individual work and achievement, and that any kind of forced wealth re-distribution (through social programs, for example) is effectively theft, and therefore immoral.
The modern populist right-wing movement was originally driven and disseminated by right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. So, listening to right-wing talk radio or podcasts is also a good window into the modern movement. It puts on full display the resentment felt by modern right-wingers.
If you would rather not experience right-wing media directly, but would rather read rational analysis about it, then one good choice is David Frumm. He is an old school Reagan/Bush conservative, and has lived through the transition of the Repubs to populism. He is very critical of Trumpism, like most people, but he comes from the perspective of a reasonable and well-informed conservative insider.
Fareed Zakaria has a new book called Age of Revolutions, which views modern conservative populism as a very significant political re-alignment with similarities to various revolutions of the past, both successful and unsuccessful. Fareed talks about the conditions that lead to populism. In that sense, he treats Trump’s popularity as a symptom and outcome of specific underlying societal problems.
Foundations of geopolitics by Aleksander Dugan. This is the basis of modern European, conservative actions and the Russian playbook for the last 30 years.
