Can you converse in a way that steel mans far right politics and discusses the pro's and cons?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, I can. We can explore far-right political thought by identifying its strongest claims—its internal logic, appeal, and ethical premises—and then reflect on their strengths, limits, and consequences in good faith. This approach doesn’t mean endorsing harmful ideologies but understanding what makes them persuasive, especially to those who feel abandoned, disoriented, or disillusioned by modern political, economic, or cultural systems.

Here's how we might approach it:

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⚙️ Steelmanning Far-Right Politics: Core Claims and Appeal

1. Order over Chaos

Claim: The far right tends to emphasize the importance of social order, stability, and cohesion. It sees liberal pluralism, multiculturalism, and hyper-individualism as producing fragmentation and weakening the shared norms that hold societies together.

Appeal: To those experiencing cultural alienation, economic precarity, or identity loss, this return to “order” feels clarifying and grounding.

Pros:

• Highlights real breakdowns in social trust, communal life, and intergenerational continuity.

• Recognizes that excessive deregulation—whether moral, economic, or technological—can create disorientation and loneliness.

Cons:

• Often scapegoats minorities or outsiders as the source of chaos.

• Tends to enforce rigid hierarchies (gendered, racial, national) as “natural” order, which excludes and dehumanizes.

• Risks suppressing legitimate dissent or pluralistic voices.

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2. Cultural Continuity and Tradition

Claim: Far-right politics valorizes heritage, tradition, and cultural rootedness, arguing that modern liberalism is corrosive to a meaningful way of life.

Appeal: For those who feel that modernization has hollowed out religion, family, ritual, and locality, the emphasis on tradition provides a sense of home and belonging.

Pros:

• Critiques the flattening effect of globalization and the alienation of hypermodernity.

• Elevates the importance of shared narratives, memory, and communal meaning.

Cons:

• Selectively idealizes a past that was often exclusionary or unjust.

• Turns culture into a fortress rather than a living, evolving process.

• Can be weaponized to resist necessary change (e.g., civil rights, gender equality).

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3. Skepticism of Elites

Claim: Far-right populism often denounces technocratic, corporate, or liberal elite classes as detached from ordinary people’s concerns.

Appeal: In a time of deep inequality and opaque governance, this critique resonates. It channels anger at those who hold power without accountability.

Pros:

• Highlights real failures of elite institutions (e.g., the 2008 financial crisis, pandemic management, corporate lobbying).

• Affirms that democratic legitimacy requires responsiveness to the people.

Cons:

• Often replaces elite critique with demagoguery, consolidating power in charismatic strongmen.

• Can morph into conspiracy thinking or anti-intellectualism.

• Targets the wrong elites—focusing on academics, artists, or immigrants rather than corporate or financial power.

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4. Ethno-Nationalism and Homogeneity

Claim: Some far-right ideologies explicitly argue that ethnic or national homogeneity creates stronger, more unified societies.

Appeal: Taps into fear of demographic change, identity loss, or perceived cultural dilution.

Pros:

• Raises uncomfortable but real questions about belonging, sovereignty, and the limits of integration in multicultural societies.

• Forces liberalism to confront its assumption that diversity is always and automatically good.

Cons:

• Fundamentally contradicts universal human dignity and pluralism.

• Leads historically to exclusion, persecution, and often genocide.

• Ignores the richness of cultural synthesis and the violence embedded in national myths themselves.

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🧭 The Meta-Critique

Many far-right ideas arise as reactive formations—responses to modernity’s failures: globalization, dislocation, digital alienation, and moral flattening. They do point to some of liberalism’s blind spots: its inability to offer deep meaning, its failure to create economic security, and its tendency to ignore the affective dimension of belonging.

But far-right politics tends to answer these crises with closed systems—rooted in nostalgia, fear, and purity. The question is whether we can retrieve the insights—about meaning, order, community—without inheriting the cruelty.

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Would you like to explore a specific thinker, movement, or topic within far-right politics? (e.g., Carl Schmitt, Viktor Orbán, American Christian nationalism, anti-globalist populism, etc.)

You said:

The question is whether we can **retrieve the insights**—about meaning, order, community—**without inheriting the cruelty**.

Who has achieved this?

ChatGPT said:

Ah, yes—the question of whether anyone has successfully retrieved the insights of far-right or traditionalist critiques (order, rootedness, meaning) without inheriting their cruelty. That’s a tall order, and most efforts either collapse into reactionary nostalgia or dissolve into the very liberal abstractions they sought to resist. Still, there are partial and provocative attempts. Here are a few figures or movements that might be read as trying—however imperfectly—to walk that line:

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🐚 Ivan Illich

• Attempt: Critiqued modern institutions (education, medicine, development) for becoming counterproductive and alienating. Argued for conviviality—a society built on tools and structures that enhance autonomy and relationship rather than domination.

• Retrieves: Deep sense of tradition, local knowledge, community-scale meaning.

• Avoids: Ethno-nationalism or essentialism.

• Why it matters: Illich retrieves order and meaning through limits and scale—not purity or force.

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🐾 Simone Weil

• Attempt: Critiqued both liberal modernity and fascism; emphasized rootedness ("enracinement") as essential to the soul.

• Retrieves: A spiritual sense of obligation, community, and belonging without exclusionary nationalism.

• Avoids: Romanticizing the nation; instead promotes a sacrificial ethics of attention and responsibility.

• Why it matters: She models how to speak to the hunger for belonging without closing the gates.

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📚 Christopher Lasch

• Attempt: Critiqued the culture of narcissism, consumerism, and liberal detachment. Sought to reclaim family, memory, and responsibility.

• Retrieves: The moral seriousness of community and tradition.

• Avoids: Reactionary politics, though some accuse him of romanticizing the past.

• Why it matters: Offers a left-communitarian vision, grounded in realism and moral ecology.

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🏡 Certain strands of Communitarianism (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel)

• Attempt: Reassert the importance of shared moral traditions and narratives.

• Retrieves: The role of community in shaping the self.

• Avoids: Explicit exclusion or essentialist identity.

• Why it matters: Offers a moral argument for tradition without mythic nationalism.

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🌿 Indigenous Epistemologies and Land-Based Movements

• Attempt: Emphasize relationality, memory, and tradition—often in sharp critique of both capitalism and the state.

• Retrieves: A non-modern sense of order, orientation, obligation to others (human and non-human).

• Avoids: Western purity logics, fascist aesthetics, and settler individualism.

• Why it matters: These are non-cruel traditions that were never abstracted from the land.

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🚧 Why It’s So Hard

Most attempts either:

• Veer back into cruelty (e.g., traditionalists who want order but end up policing bodies, borders, and belonging).

• Or lack the spine to offer meaning beyond critique (liberal left that names problems but cannot orient).

To retrieve the insights without the cruelty means developing a thick ethical framework that takes belonging and responsibility seriously, while being radically anti-purist—a rare combination.