Jacobin: Steve Sailer is the enemy of religion

I like this article in the leftist magazine.

I quite like this article in Jacobin. The leftist magazine doesn’t pay its writers enough:

The Right Without Wrong

By Dustin Guastella

For decades, liberals have hoped for the de-Christianization of the American Right. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

… For secular liberals who have made “believing science” their own kind of religion, the possible waning of Christian conservatism may seem like a blessing long overdue. What if it isn’t? …

In fact, in some ways, the rise of the nonreligious right is the story of the Trump coalition. According to the conservative columnist Timothy Carney, in the 2016 Republican primary Trump “got an easy majority (55 percent) of those Republicans who ‘seldom’ attend [church services], and a full 62 percent of those who never attend.” Political scientist Geoffrey Layman points out that even among Trump’s supposed evangelical base, he did best among those who don’t actually go to church. Carney concludes, “Every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support.” …

Trump, as much a reflection of his movement as the leader of it, has taken surprising steps to moderate the Republican platform on key moral issues. The emphasis on abortion has been greatly downgraded, to the alarm of conservative pro-lifers. Gay marriage hardly figures in the 2024 platform. And while it would be hypocritical for Trump to complain about no-fault divorce (once a hobbyhorse of the religious right), the much more important fact is that it would be totally uninspiring for his base.

In fact, today’s Right, far from being censorious scolds, embodies a kind of effervescent transgression. “Triggering the libs” has now firmly established itself as a pastime of right-wingers. This is not just so in the United States but also abroad, especially where secularization has gone furthest. In Germany, where 27% of the country is nonreligious, it is the Alternative für Deutschland that comes off as the party of TikTok transgression. While in France, where “nones” make up 40% of the country, the massive social media wing of Rassemblement National is driven by young influencers willing to skewer liberalism’s sacred cows. Outrage politics, once the province of the culturally disobedient New Left, has migrated to the “dissident right.” …

This is concerning. The youthful, exuberant, and forward-looking conservatives of tomorrow have cranked up the zealotry while abandoning even a nominal Christian commitment to compassion and love of the victim, the neighbor, the immigrant, and the poor. As Ross Douthat ominously warned in 2016, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” …

Three of the most viral anti-Christian rightists — Curtis Yarvin, Richard Hanania, and Costin Alamariu (better known by his pseudonym, Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP) — all evince a disdain for the Christian emphasis on care for the weak, universalism, and equality. …

These are not marginal figures.

Well, no, actually Curtis, Richard, and BAP, are pretty marginal, except among high IQ controversialists, where their obviously extremely high IQs make them stand out.

… Consciously or not, the new thinkers of the dissident right are channeling older anti-egalitarians: obviously Friedrich Nietzsche but also the “superfascist” Julius Evola, German philosopher Oswald Spengler, and, of course, Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, all of whom concluded that any ultrareactionary project ought to be very suspicious of Christianity.

Personally, I never even heard of Schmitt until about the turn of the century, nor Evola until about a decade ago. They, along with Spengler, whom I heard about when young but have never read, continue to seem deeply uncongenial to me. They seem weird to me rather in the way that J. D. Vance strikes our Sorority Sister-in-Chief and Assistant Football Coach-in-Waiting as weird.

I think one of the things that is going on is that the Internet and the increasing global pervasiveness of the English language have introduced American rightist highbrows at impressionable young ages to more Continental intellectuals than in the past. When I was younger, American conservative intellectuals tended toward Anglophilia (or whatever the word is for British Isles appreciation): Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Winston Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, etc.

In contrast, your grand-dad, the Karborundum Kadet, seems alien to me.

Nonetheless, then, Guastella gets to the real marginal figure: me.

Once Christian universalism, egalitarianism, and injunctions to peace and love are thoroughly discredited, the slope gets pretty slippery. If there is no appeal to goodness but instead only the cool, rational appeal to strength, if the pursuit of equality itself is seen as a distortion of human nature, if violence is recognized as the natural order of things, and if tribal nationalism supersedes the embrace of a global fraternity, then what? Well, a disturbing emphasis on heredity, genes, and race quickly takes hold.

Today, after a decade of left-wing emphasis on the evils of racism, many on the irreligious right have embraced an inverted racial narrative. For them, whites are the overclass, and that’s fine. In fact, it’s natural. Steve Sailer, a once obscure blogger and data wonk on the fringe of the far right — denounced in the National Review as recently as 2005 for “shockingly racist” missives — is now credited as “the man who invented identity politics for the New Right.” His collection of essays, Noticing, sells in a leather-bound special edition for $395,

But only $29.95 in paperback or just a mere $9.95 on Kindle.

and he recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, now one of the most listened to on Spotify. Sailer coined the term “human biodiversity” as a way of linking heritable traits to myriad forms of inequality. The implication is clear: if the immense degree of inequality we witness in today’s Gilded Age is the result of natural differences in IQ, then there isn’t much to be done about it. Moreover, why should we try?

Without Christianity, ultraconservatism inevitably veers into the darkest corners of violent, naturalistic chauvinism.