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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