Ideas Matter: Culture Wars: then and now, episode 8: New Radicals

In 1992, conservative Republican Pat Buchanan declared the launch
of a ‘culture war’ for the heart of the US. In the late 2000s,
following the rise of the Tea Party movement, Andrew Breitbart
suggested that politics is downstream from culture, and his young
protégés like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro created turmoil
in university campuses. Trump rode the bandwagon of conservative
anti-establishment sentiment to the White House, whereas his
opponents linked him to the racism of the Alt-Right. Meanwhile,
figures like Jordan Peterson made popular and edgy ideas around
‘sorting yourself out’ and traditional masculine values. Are
conservative ideas now the ‘counter’ to a ‘progressive’
establishment?


LECTURER Dr Nikos Sotirakopoulos, a lecturer in sociology and
criminology at the University of York and the author of the book
The Rise of Lifestyle Activism: from New Left to Occupy.


TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST • Right wing reactionary movements
have often been, in their essence, counter-cultural. • Lacking a
coherent economic and political plan, modern conservatism has
found a new existential mission in the culture wars • The new
reactionary Right is less a revival of all bigotry and racism, or
a conservative resurgence, and more a product of the current
zeitgeist: obsessed with identity, and seeing humans as
vulnerable subjects conditioned by their environment • Right and
left wing tribalism are both movements opposing the same
Enlightenment values: liberalism, reason, and individual agency.


BIBLIOGRAPHY Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and
Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle, Zero Books,
2017


Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to
Liberal Democracy edited by Mark Sedwick, Oxford University
Press, 2019


The Prehistory of the Alt Right, by Jeffrey Tucker, Foundation
for Economic Education, 2017. See
https://fee.org/articles/the-prehistory-of-the-alt-right/


THE ACADEMY 2019 In the context of today’s instrumental
approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest
attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth
of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the
pursuit of truth.


IDEAS MATTER PODCAST Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the
most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and
intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.


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