I subscribed to Lyons’ Substack too (free version not paid) for the same reasons you did. Maybe you found him for the same reason I did: Real Clear Politics featured one of his early essays which I found highly intriguing. As he went on, he became less interesting and more conspiratorial. He made up for thinner and shallower analysis with grandiosity (a common trait on the New Right).
I’m no fan of Charles Kesler. He’s platformed enough Red Caesar weirdos that I seriously question his leadership at Claremont. But I read his essay on the NatCons back in the fall and he was very fair to them, but also tore them apart at an intellectual level, exposing the holes and weaknesses in their thinking, especially Hazony. I haven’t read all of their responses, but it seemed to me that Lyons failed to address the logic of his arguments at all, preferring some version of the “you’re just the establishment and we’re the true right wing” crap. Like many, Lyons overpromised and under-delivered. He is not nearly as smart or insightful as he perceives himself to be, and unfortunately this is true for much of the New Right.
I would be more open to some of their arguments if the nationalists were more straightforward and clear and ditched the sophistry. Some version of, “Traditionalists lost out when combining their forces with libertarians and the right needs a rediscovery of traditionalism-for-traditionalism’s sake,” and “there is a sizable section of voters who are socially conservative and fiscally liberal and we believe this is because these two things go together, so therefore we will offer an alternative to right-left politics based on cultural right-wingery and economical leftism” would have sufficed. I would have disagreed with them, but we could have had a real argument.
Instead we got a bunch of pseudointellectual psychobabble. Every time I try to engage with this stuff with an open mind, I hear or read something that makes me go, “Is this person a fool or have they really not read what they claim to have read or are they lying because they think their audiences won’t know the difference?”
I subscribed to Lyons’ Substack too (free version not paid) for the same reasons you did. Maybe you found him for the same reason I did: Real Clear Politics featured one of his early essays which I found highly intriguing. As he went on, he became less interesting and more conspiratorial. He made up for thinner and shallower analysis with grandiosity (a common trait on the New Right).
I’m no fan of Charles Kesler. He’s platformed enough Red Caesar weirdos that I seriously question his leadership at Claremont. But I read his essay on the NatCons back in the fall and he was very fair to them, but also tore them apart at an intellectual level, exposing the holes and weaknesses in their thinking, especially Hazony. I haven’t read all of their responses, but it seemed to me that Lyons failed to address the logic of his arguments at all, preferring some version of the “you’re just the establishment and we’re the true right wing” crap. Like many, Lyons overpromised and under-delivered. He is not nearly as smart or insightful as he perceives himself to be, and unfortunately this is true for much of the New Right.
I would be more open to some of their arguments if the nationalists were more straightforward and clear and ditched the sophistry. Some version of, “Traditionalists lost out when combining their forces with libertarians and the right needs a rediscovery of traditionalism-for-traditionalism’s sake,” and “there is a sizable section of voters who are socially conservative and fiscally liberal and we believe this is because these two things go together, so therefore we will offer an alternative to right-left politics based on cultural right-wingery and economical leftism” would have sufficed. I would have disagreed with them, but we could have had a real argument.
Instead we got a bunch of pseudointellectual psychobabble. Every time I try to engage with this stuff with an open mind, I hear or read something that makes me go, “Is this person a fool or have they really not read what they claim to have read or are they lying because they think their audiences won’t know the difference?”