Am I the only one worried that the right-wing is already taking advantage of the fact that the left has become a vacuum of intellect, and is now re-embracing intellectualism on its own terms?
I’ve seen multiple IG pages recently that talk about the literacy crisis in America; however, a good number of these pages/accounts are made by right-wingers/reactionaries. They use very blatant dogwhistles like “classical education”, “great books”, “virtue of the Ancients”, “glory of Western Civilization”, etc. etc. They talk about getting kids (read: they’re kids, the kids of right-wing elites) to study Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, etc., learn Latin and Ancient Greek at young ages, and pump their heads full of political philosophy. Yeah it’s indoctrination but still.
My assumption here is that the right-wing in America is trying to regroup and reorganize now that MAGA is clearly crashing and burning beyond repair. A lot of the rhetoric they use makes me think this stuff is coming from either the Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, or both.
But I think the deeper issue here is that the left has no way of effectively countering this, assuming this is true. Especially in the past five years or so the American left has almost entirely dismissed intellect and intellectualism in favour of appeals to emotion and petty in-fighting over covid masking, whose identity makes them the most marginalized, and whether or not going to the gym is “fascist”. Hell, someone just posted a screenshot from Reddit arguing that narcissists and psychopaths should be seen as “oppressed”. Why? What’s our antidote to the right when the right uses literacy and philosophy and such as a means of implementing fascism (or fascism-lite)? The American left seems to be taking the view that intellect is either 1. oppressive (because it inevitably creates a culture whereby smart people are upheld over stupid people) and/or 2. useless, because ethics are allegedly already embedded within human genetics and therefore all we need is intuition (Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid book is often invoked here). Why?
So what should we be doing in response?
getting people to read POLITZER'S "ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSPHY" should solve it methinks
>>2932284rightoids and intellectualism are just incompatible full stop
>>2932302They will put up the façade of intellectualism though.
>IG pages recently that talk about the literacy crisis in America; however, a good number of these pages/accounts are made by right-wingers/reactionaries.
They're on instagram, of course they're right wing.
All the leftists concerned with the subject that might've used instagram in the past are either writing articles, made a personal website or moved to a Pixelfed instance.
imagine you are a prolecattle, a right wing chud comes and tells you to read all these classical books, many books, old, weird ancient stuff
now a leftist comes and says: "just read marx bro"
who do you think the prolecattle will follow?
>>2932309prolecattle will go back to scrolling instagram
>>2932309You have to prove that Marx “solved” philosophy though, which leftists don’t do a very good job of showing.
>>2932309Plato is way easier to read than Marx though.
>>2932319>saying “don’t commit incest because the baby might be deformed” is ableist and eugenicist as fuck, you shitlord!Average anarkid.
>>2932309You can’t properly understand Marx with light understanding Hegel, the British economists like Ricardo, and Proudhon.
>>2932314>intellectual rightIf it wasn't Heidegger, Hobbes, Nietzsche and Plato, this would be an oxymoron.
>>2932322To be fair, I’ve seen a tweet saying exactly this.
>>2932303that's been the case for decades
>>2932284the left wing is not a vacuum of intellect. rightoids don't read the classics, they don't read poetry, they don't read literature, they don't read philosophy, they don't raise their kids to do these things and they aren't going to start doing that. Left wing people will do these things at a much higher rate. Even when there are exceptions on the right they invariably wade into these topics to look for blunt instruments wielded in bad faith for their already decided upon notions. They don't dominate this space and they never will, they mostly just try to define that space to be entirely what they think is good and claim everything else doesn't count. Just today I saw a thread on /pol/ where they defend hitler's art vs contemporary artists, and it's like looking at a building development sketch and they think that's better because it accurately represents an image of a building while art that creates and IMPRESSION of something is beyond them, they can't understand the intention or have that evoked from looking at it and have no interest in that in any case.
You are creating a problem entirely out of whole cloth, the space of being well read and versed in culture and history is a space already dominated by the left wing. It's mostly still to this day a field of battle between the left and liberals, the right wing are anti-intellectual and outside of this space. It's like saying a carnivorous ape that bursts through the window and kills everyone else has taken over academia, but there's no academia just a dumb animal and wreckage.
>>2932284>Yeah it’s indoctrination but still.Well they want a cultivate a supposedly superior and aristocratic type of person.
>But I think the deeper issue here is that the left has no way of effectively countering this, assuming this is true.Well first let's look at the contradictions of what they're doing and try to analyze it. I think one of the dangers of this for them is they just get up their own asses too much, get too obsessed with their own abstractions.
>So what should we be doing in response?Idk build fusion reactors or something. I saw some of these trad guys react with some alarm to Mamdani (I know, but still) giving out tens of thousands of free opera tickets. Like that's what conservatives should be doing…? But they're not. They can't really do that and might be disturbed because it's like nyghas are now going to the opera, oh my God. Mommy I'm scared. Because it'd no longer be a superior status thing. See that's another contradiction here because they view what they're doing as cultivating an elite which can put everyone else in their place, while an interesting thing about socialists historically is they often were interested in the classics but they wanted to open that up to the masses as a way of educating people to better think through problems and being better equipped to do stuff. This is why building libraries was so important. You know in Tsarist Russia it was difficult to actually get access to a library and Lenin satirized that while writing with admiration for the New York public library system. This is a very Enlightened sort of idea.
>>2932284So much of this problem stems from the past 50 years of the left embracing postmodernism. PoMo doesn’t tell you the truth, it makes you question what you’ve been told is truth but it doesn’t replace it with anything in return. And it gives you no method for deciphering what is true and what isn’t.
I think a good example of this is when comrades think they can “debunk” something simply by pointing out what power structures it serves, rather than debunking the statement or school of thought or whatever itself. Saying “XYZ is ableist/sexist/racist/colonial/queerphobic” is a good start but not enough; you need to show how the epistemology or methodology is wrong, how the conclusions are wrong, how the “facts” are wrong, and so on. You’re not really finding truth, you’re just moving from one convention to another.
I received a classical education and it's what primed me for marx and communism. Right wingers in America will never embrace intellectualism in any real way because it directly undermines the sort of faith based stupidity that large sections of the conservative coalition rely on and desire.
>>2932384I’d add to this and say that if it’s so easy for them to debunk Marxism why do they want Marxist-oriented literature banned?
>>2932385My flippant, off the cuff answer would be because they can't. Honestly though any time I've read a supposed debunking of Marx or Marxism it's never been Marx or Marxism that they're "debunking," but always some mud pie level shit.
>>2932284>My assumption here is that the right-wing in America is trying to regroup and reorganize now that MAGA is clearly crashing and burning beyond repair.i've seen commentary on social media around right wing coded classical education for like 4 years now and i'm sure it's existed in some way for the past decade when this whole chud shit exploded
just saying it's not new
>>2932404What kinds of tropes have you seen regarding right-coded education, specifically?
>>2932332Gobineau is my favorite kind of right wing schizo. Never satisfied and always picking fights with people.
Blacked.com is more influential to the modern right then any conservative philosopher.
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