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View submission: A New Fusionism - First Things
Interesting window into this frame of mind.
I did find this to be a strawman argument undermining a lot of the opinion voiced after:
“At this level, the right-wing progressive and old-style conservative share a common outlook. “To be right-wing is to especially value hierarchy,” says Lyons. This commitment does not mean favoring aristocracy and monarchy. Rather, endorsing hierarchy means “to be able and willing to recognize that A is better than B in some way, and to therefore place A ahead of B and call this a proper and just ordering of things.” Lyons notes that “even science (real science) is arguably a right-wing pursuit, because scientists cannot be egalitarian over the facts.” This interpretation of the data is better than that interpretation.
A left-wing progressive rebels against hierarchy and insists that, when it comes to human beings, any better than judgment is based on convention, prejudice, or some other distortion of our consciousness, which must be corrected to reflect the ideals of equality. All the children in the race need to get ribbons. Yes, the fastest runner came in first, but this fact is of no special consequence. Criminals are not morally worse than the law-abiding; they suffer from bad social conditions. We need to honor indigenous traditions of knowing, instead of “privileging” Western science.”
I find this to be dishonestly reducing the actual left-wing stance to its caricature.
Furthermore, equating fact-based reasoning with“hierarchy” and this therefore is inherently ‘right-wing’ is deeply flawed in my opinion. It also ignores the fact that A can be better than B under conditions X, but not under conditions Y -and more importantly how this impacts hierarchy (which apparently “left-wing progressive [blanket] rebels against”). By the authors reasoning, a liberal would reject mathematics.
There's nothing here!