The Fault in the Right: Why Worthy Ideals Lead to Bad Politics

The devil is in the detail, or more accurately, in the incentive structure

Welcome to The Fault in the Right, a new series where I will examine where I think the faults lie within the contemporary Western political right, from the perspective of someone who agrees with the arguments of the right, or at least the premise of some of those arguments, at least some of the time. I think this kind of perspective is sorely needed in the media: while there is plenty of criticism of the left from people who are themselves liberals or leftists, most of the criticism of the right out there is from people who vehemently disagree with the worldview of the right, in a fundamental way. A lot of it is therefore either ideological disagreement, or bad faith attacks. Also, while there are some 'Never Trump conservatives' who critique Trump and the MAGA movement, their focus is on the particular differences between Trumpism and the previous iteration of the Republican Party, and they never seem to critique long-standing problems within the right that have also plagued the old establishment. In summary, the left critiques the right as a whole, but in a 'burn it all down' way, while Never Trumpers critique only Trumpism, but avoid talking about problems that plague the rest of the right too. There is a clear gap here that needs to be filled, with something akin to liberal anti-wokeism, but for the right.

On the surface, different iterations of the right have championed different ideals, that I could get on board with on the surface. The right of the 1990s and the 2000s, when I was growing up, championed family values, a healthier media and culture, and a culture of personal responsibility. I could certainly get behind these ideals. However, in practice, it was all about government control and authoritarian measures, which I just couldn't accept. By the time I was in college, the right had descended into championing the Iraq War, the wider 'War on Terror', restricting civil liberties, and banning gay marriage everywhere. Their authoritarian tendencies were on full display. Later on, during the Tea Party era, libertarian ideas became more popular, which I found very encouraging, but then, they had to share a platform with conspiracy theories, which I found very frustrating. Still later on, Trump, for all his faults, did appear to move the right away from both religious authoritarianism and the forever wars, thus resolving the two biggest issues I had with the right a decade earlier. However, the religious right came back with a vengeance soon after, and nowadays Trump himself is saying that we need a religious revival, while all the LGBT outreach that characterized his previous two campaigns seem to have disappeared quietly. It appears that the religious right has won out again under Trump's leadership, and they are even openly demanding that he embrace a national abortion ban. Even in the UK, where under the leadership of former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron it looked like there was a chance that a new, forward-looking conservatism could take hold, things rapidly turned reactionary after Brexit, and now there are concerns that Nigel Farage and his far-right Reform Party could outperform the Tories and effectively become the biggest opposition to the new Labour government. In short, the right has championed many worthy ideals that the left just won't talk about, but it all seems to end with reactionism and authoritarianism.

Not only is right-wing politics like this, right-wing influencers and public figures also bring this kind of disappointment about in the cultural sphere, because politics is downstream from culture, and they desperately want to influence the culture. I have previously talked a lot about the hijacking of the anti-woke discourse by a small number of well organized and very well-paid influencers. (Judging by their employment in right-wing think tanks and media organizations and/or their Patreon earnings, all of them are definitely much richer than myself). Their coordinated promotion of one-sided, biased narratives have taken anti-wokeism from a very libertarian initial position (most anti-wokeists were free speech activists and/or atheists in the beginning) to a much more reactionary and authoritarian place, over the short space of a few years. This was basically the reason why the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), which showed so much promise initially, ultimately fell apart within less than three years.

The point is, I don't disagree with what the right is saying, overall, on a broad ideals basis. I do believe that society needs more individual freedom, that a free market economy is the best model for the West, that families are the fundamental building blocks of society, that radical change based on abstract ideas is not a good idea, and that an ordered liberty is the best guarantee of freedom, because when order breaks down, nobody actually has any freedom. However, the devil is in the detail, and in the execution, many right-wing policies are unfair, ineffective, or even downright harmful, in that they make people less happy unnecessarily, or that they lead to deleterious consequences down the road (particularly in the case of climate change). This is not caused by incompetence, but rather by the structural incentives built into the right's composition. For example, with the religious right accounting for such a big part of the right, in terms of voters, politicians and money alike, there is very little room to treat LGBT issues fairly, or to respect the pro-choice argument from a genuine pro-freedom point of view. Also, with the fossil fuel lobby being such a vested interest within the right, there is no room for pro-climate policies. The disconnect between the right's stated ideals and its actual policies give rise to the need for bad faith arguments, like how most LGBT people are 'woke activists' and thus the right's enemy (clearly untrue and unfair), or how climate change is a hoax or at least scientifically unproven (even more untrue). This is why there is a whole industry of right-aligned spin doctors out there. It is also why Millennials, my generation, have grown up with a strong distrust of the right generally, and are not moving right at the same rate as previous generations in our 30s and 40s. Those who want to believe it's only about home ownership are just not willing to face the truth.

I believe the aforementioned problem can only be exposed by someone who is sort of sympathetic to the right's stated aims in many areas, but see through the mismatch between those stated aims and the actual policies embraced by the right. In particular, we need to pick apart the words of the spin doctors who attempt to paper over this mismatch, in the service of vested interests. Just like the anti-woke movement exposed the left's unsound ideological obsessions, we need to expose the right's distorted incentive structure, and the distorted results it produces. And just like with wokeness, only those who actually share some common ground with the right in the first place would be well positioned to expose its faults.