Conservatism
The Future Right As Anti-Leftist
Muslim reader sees rich immigrants embracing class, race, and anti-religious hatred through progressivism
A reader writes:
I’m a Muslim reader who emailed you a few months ago. I’ve taken a break from reading all news because it’s so damn depressing, but I just read some of your articles about BLM and I’d like to share some stories about my upbringing and privilege.I come from a wealthy Bay Area county with a large East Asian/Indian population involved with the tech industry. Like I said, wealthy. One of the wealthiest places in America. But because they come from immigrant backgrounds, a lot of my high school classmates are somehow convinced that they are persecuted. I once heard an Indian girl complain that “white men” control America and have all the success, and were the bane of her existence, apparently. I probably gave some derisive snort at the time, and got an angry response. Blacks and Latinos suffer gross and unjust discrimination in this country, but she was neither of those things, college-bound, with a bright and affluent career ahead of her, so what did that have to do with her *personally*? Meanwhile, these same people on a regular basis mock whites, Southerners, conservatives, Trump voters, Christians (or any type of religious people, really, remember atheism is chic), people with a fraction of the wealth and access to an education and comforted lifestyle as them.Of course, there is no such thing as an individual anymore in this mode of thinking. You are defined by the amount of ticks you can check off on a list of ‘diverse’ characteristics. I am dark-skinned (check), have a minority religious affiliation (check), male (cross), heterosexual (cross), and have socially conservative views (triple cross). But of course, that’s not who I *am*. I know a man who is white, heterosexual, and has political beliefs that are squarely liberal. Recently, he’s started to get into anti-political correctness/right-wing stuff even though he hates Trump. Why? Because he knows that the Left *hates* people like him simply because of who he is.I am also saddened by how many of my fellow Muslims I see falling into this type of left-wing, neo-Marxist thinking, simply because (on the surface) it seems friendly to us. Like all forms of Marxism, it’s rooted in atheistic materialism and a hostility to religious faith that routed the Muslim world in the 20th century. I’m not on social media anymore, but a friend of mine sent me tweets of Muslims condoning property destruction and looting in the wake of the George Floyd protests (Keep in mind, in Islam to die defending one’s property makes you a martyr).
Conservatives of all kinds are going to need to find allies in not the usual places — including among Muslims. It’s not 2002 anymore. Tyler Cowen, writing about the post-Trump intellectual Right, says:
Last and perhaps most significant, the intellectual right will dislike the left. It pretty much does already, but the antagonism will grow. Opposition to political correctness and cancel culture, at least in their left-wing versions, will become the most important defining view. As my colleague Bryan Caplan succinctly put it four years ago: “Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist.”
The intensity of this dislike will mean that, within right-wing circles, free speech will prosper. As long as you take care to signal your dislike of the left, you will be allowed to hold many other heterodox views without being purged or penalized.
It is striking what does not make my list. Social conservatism animates many voters on the right, but it is less likely to influence the relatively elite right-wing intellectuals.
Read it all. I wish he weren’t correct about social conservatism, but he is. I believe the only viable way to fight for social conservative causes politically is through some form of anti-leftism. Anti-leftism is not the same thing as social conservatism, but the woke left is and is going to be a far greater threat to social and religious conservatives than anything the right is likely to come up with.
To be clear, this will be simply a matter of self-protection. As a social and religious conservative, I don’t believe there will be a meaningful place for people like me in post-Christian American politics. The most important political objective for my dwindling tribe in the years to come is going to be protecting individuals and institutions from the soft totalitarians of the left. (We can and should practice a more positive form of politics at the local level, as I describe in The Benedict Option). It is interesting to read this Muslim reader’s e-mail about how wealthy ethnic and religious minorities in the Bay Area are using leftist themes to practice the politics of class, racial, and religious hatred, while signaling to others and to themselves that they are good progressives.
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