The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity w/ Matt McManus

On this edition of Parallax Views, Matt McManus, a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism, joins the show to discuss his new book The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity. Matt gives a sweeping history of the political right that tries to grapple, from a left social democratic perspective, with conservative thought since the French Revolution. In doing so Matt gets beyond the talking heads on FOX News or flamboyant characters like Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson, instead focusing on the most serious intellectual elements of the political right and how the left should/can respond to those elements. Moreover, Matt discusses the most reactionary segments of the political right in this conversation and their beliefs.

Among the topics discussed in this conversation:

- Aristotle and the Aristotelian universe in the political right; order and hierarchy in the thinking of the political right; modernity and the radical break from antiquity

- Conservatism's relationship with liberals; conservative discomfort with liberalism

- English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton's unpacking of liberalism; Roger Scruton and "The Unthinking Man"; agency and critical thinking as an entitlement of the higher orders of society (within the thought of the political right);

- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, the sublime quality of the "Sun King", and monarchy

- The thought of uber-reactionary Joseph de Maistre and his response to the events of the French Revolution

- F.A. Hegel as conservative? and right-wing Hegelianism

- Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his turn from Christian socialism to conservatism, his critique of socialism and liberalism in books like Demons, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky Contra Leo Tolstoy

- Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Dostoyevsky's critique of scientifically-oriented material ontologies and utilitarianism; psychological reactions to ontological materialism

- Utopianism vs. Anti-utopianism, hierarchy and social order/organization, and strawman arguments

- The political right in the 20th century and particularly after WWII

- The far-right and the transition to fascism from its antecedents on the right; anti-democratic thought amongst elements of the political right; blood and soil ideology

- Nietzsche and the political right

- Edifying myths, charismatic cults of personality, and fascism; brief discussion about Mussolini

- Right-wing anti-capitalism; right-wing rejections of economistic worldviews

- Noblesse oblige and the political right; an exploration of the emergent postliberal right

- The New American Right of the 1950s; the three-legged stool of American conservatism: muscular anti-New Deal free market capitalism, anticommunist foreign policy hawks, and social conservatives (specifically white evangelical Christian social conservatives); American right-wing opposition to Civil Rights; the breaking down of the three-legged stool after the end of the Cold War and fall of the Soviet Union

- The new formation of the American political right: National Conservatism, Postliberalism, and the Eugenicons or Nietzschean Right

- The Peter Thiel/Curtis Yarvin segment of the 21st century American Right and Richard Hanania; Hayek's anti-conservatism, the political right, and neoliberalism; Ayn Rand

- Ideological diversity of the 21st century right-wing

- Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Michael Lind, and postliberal oppositions to figures like Bronze Age Pervert and white nationalist/eugenicist segments of the right

- The possibility of a multiracial political right?

- The thought of Russian philosopher/geopolitical thinker Aleksandr Dugin and the far-right