How to Write About the Right

Leftists will always characterize and attack the new populist-nationalist right as racist and xenophobic. That's a given. It's political correctness on steroids and the left's given assumption is one of the very fault-lines of the new politics of identity across the world.

For me, when someone calls me racist I blow it off and throw it back in their faces. Play by the left's rules. They hate that and it confounds and flusters them.

In any case, Professor Mark Lilla had a nice piece at the New York Review in December, "Two Roads for the New French Right." It elicited the typical Pavlovian attacks from the left. See, "How to Write About the Right: An Exchange."

Two Roads for the New French Right | by Mark Lilla | The New York Review of Books https://t.co/fIXJZ1mL1x

— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) December 20, 2018

Mark Lilla: the Left is always accusing the Right, and their defenders (including me), of being nativist, and they are totally wrong. Now let me tell you about The Great Replacement that is going on in Europe. https://t.co/sbgn6Djaee

— Cas Mudde 📢 (@CasMudde) January 4, 2019

And Lilla's response:

Writing about the political right has never been harder. Different kinds of right-wing ideologies and political formations are proliferating and shaking liberal governments around the world, as Greil Marcus points out. This makes it difficult to keep track of all the developments, distinguish them, and establish the connections between them. At the same time, liberal and left forces that want to resist these developments are increasingly hostile to learning anything that does not conform to their settled ideas about the right. A misplaced wokeness works like Ambien, dulling our curiosity and willingness to engage, and thrusting us into an intellectual twilight where the only thing we see is the familiar specter of white supremacy...

Keep reading.