Right-Wing Progressivism

Discussion

N.S. Lyons:

"Who/what is a Right-Wing Progressive (RWP)? Start by picturing a Silicon Valley elite who is by now well-and-truly fed up with the Woke left. But the causes for the RWP’s objection to the Woke mind-virus and its regnant regime differ significantly from those of a traditional conservative. The conservative loathes the Woke for their revolutionary assault on the moral, cultural, and social order, on foundational structures of civilization like the family, and on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful writ large. In contrast, the RWP is likely to consider these things to be at most tangential to his main concern. His anti-Wokeness is motivated mostly by an assessment that the ideology is degrading meritocracy, promoting irrational stupidity, inhibiting scientific innovation, diverting investment into worthless causes, and limiting long-term economic performance – in other words that it is holding back progress.

RWPs are what Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies, approvingly dubbed “dynamists”: individuals whose primary vision for a good society is a state of constant Promethean invention, discovery, growth, and transformation. They see their true enemies as what Postrel labels “stasists”: nostalgia-ridden, backwards-looking brutes who hate change and for some unimaginable reason want to keep everything old and therefore obsolete from being replaced by new and better things. Today, from the RWP’s point of view, the forces of stasism just happen to include the Woke left in addition to conservatives.

Dynamism is for example the obvious motivating philosophy of the world’s most famous RWP, Elon Musk, the Technoking. Elon has, for instance, stated quite clearly that he bought Twitter not out of any desire to aid conservatives, but because he sees robust free speech as a necessary societal mechanism for the knowledge production and innovation needed to achieve his goal of making humanity a star-faring, multi-planetary species. As with all his other companies – such as Neuralink, which aims make us all smarter by putting chips in our brains – Elon’s goal is preserving and accelerating progress. But because he is also anti-Woke, Elon nonetheless makes journalists’ heads continuously short-circuit until they label him a conservative anyway."

(https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-right-wing-progressives?)