Nathan Robinson has "destroyed" the arguments of the right in a new book, but there's not a single aesthetic issue in the book (which, of course, is no surprise)

It’s not a surprise that Nathan Robinson regards conservatives as anti-intellectual even when conservatives are intellectuals.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/11/why-conservative-intellectuals-are-anti-intellectual

Nor is it particularly surprising Robinson regards intellectual consensus as valuable while urging us to have a particular value for intellectual diversity (don’t give people with bad ideas tenured positions in education).

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/06/what-is-the-value-of-intellectual-diversity

That said, however briefly, it doesn’t seem Robinson has destroyed all of the right-wing arguments at once, his self-advertising of his book withstanding.

 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/02/i-have-now-destroyed-all-of-the-right-wing-arguments-at-once

 

Go through all twenty-five of those arguments from the right that Robinson says he demolished and see if you can spot any realms of thought that are missing. To give the game away, no aesthetic issues are in that list of 25.

variations on a theme at Current Affairs, populism is terrible if it isn't left populism

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/01/why-conservatism-can-never-be-populist

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/06/isnt-right-wing-populism-just-fascism

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/11/huey-long-and-the-power-of-populism

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/01/the-falls-mark-e-smith-was-a-cipher-for-modern-populism

You might get the idea that if any kind of populism is even good, it's one kind.  It is, after all, Current Affairs. 

Freddie deBoer and Nathan Robinson suggest we need a reinvigorated skeptic movement--sure, skeptic movement, yes, New Atheism played itself out as Gulf War 2 cheerleading from jump

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/we-could-use-a-reinvigorated-skeptic

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/why-we-still-need-atheism

Robinson makes a useful distinction I think is worth repeating, that there is a dispositional and philosophical distinction to be made between atheist and anti-theist stances, a distinction John Gray articulated pretty clearly in Seven Types of Atheism a few years back. Gray's contention was that the New Atheists had views that were parasitically dependent on the liberal Protestant ideals formulated by Schleiermacher and that in philosophy they brought nothing new to the table and in geopolitical terms all they contributed was support for two of the more hotly contested United States imperial gambits of the last twenty years. 

2 thoughts Nathan Robinson on rightwing conspiracy--even if progressive/liberals have their version of conspiracy agitprop (Randall Balmer), Doug Wilson single-handedly proves Robinson's point has some merit

Recently at Current Affairs Nathan Robinson wrote up a piece about how conservatives have been manufacturing scares to protect monied interests and stoke fear for generations. He has also argued that such paranoia-selling has not been characteristic of the left. 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/11/how-conservatives-manufacture-ghost-stories-to-protect-the-powerful 

theme with variations: 1-6-2021 and would-be spectrum-spanning survey on social media tech oligarchy being how much of what happened has been mediated to us

Because I think the United States is past its shelf life as a viable global hyper-power I am probably not the person to ask whether or not something like this is over the top because I think Americans are generally incurably over-the-top and because we have been so, basically, since the start.

https://noahhorwitz.wordpress.com/2021/01/10/treason/

I am reminded of something that John Murray wrote in The Imputation of Adam's Sin about how many modern Westerners who claim they don't get how "we" could be held responsible at a symbolic or also meaningful level for the sins of one person.  Murrays' rejoinder was to point out that imputing comprehensive guilt to nations and political parties happens in American politics all the time and no one bats an eyelash about it but if it's a theme transposed into systematic theology then, well, suddenly people raise objections.  

It's easy for me to remember that certain people have been bloviating bullhorns no matter what side of the blue or red they're on, such as Frank Schaeffer's gently nuanced and subtle  "AS A FORMER EVANGELICAL LEADER I BLAME THE WHITE EVANGELICAL VOTER FOR EVERY SINGLE MASS SHOOTING"  

some back and forth stuff between Fredrik deBoer and Nathan Robinson's shifting take on The Cult of Smart, with an Alan Jacobs interlude

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/09/20/here-is-an-email-nathan-robinson-once-wrote-about-my-book/

 Robinson's review of The Cult of Smart is over here and, even for Robinson, it's rather long-winded, even bloviating:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/09/we-dont-know-our-potential/