Hello, On The Right readers — we’re doing another reading list this week! The last one was a hit, so we’re going to make this a monthly feature.
First, I want to start off with a book I’ve found myself recommending a lot recently: Keidrick Roy’s American Dark Age. Roy, a political theorist at Dartmouth, focuses on the ideas behind the pre-Civil War struggle over slavery — telling a story about 19th century America that’s strikingly similar to that of European democratization.
Southern enslavers, per Roy, self-consciously understood themselves to be building an American version of the European feudal order. Contemporary Black thinkers, like Frederick Douglass, in response, developed a specifically Black American liberalism that painted slavery as hostile to America’s anti-monarchical founding principles. As an analogue, the Civil War was America’s version of the liberal-democratic revolutions that upended Europe’s aristocratic social order.
I just loved American Dark Age. Part of this is confirmation bias; I independently came to similar conclusions about the ideology of the South during that time in The Reactionary Spirit. Part of it is that the book is just good scholarship. It won this year’s Best Book award (theory section) from the American Political Science Association. But even more than those two things, I appreciated Roy’s excavation of the Black liberal tradition in American thought — giving voice to a group whose ideas deserve a renewed look in our own anti-democratic moment.
Next up is a piece from the French newspaper Le Monde on something both foreign and familiar: the rise of the “new right” in South Korea. It’s an intellectual movement focused in large part on historical revisionism — specifically, both defending the country’s pre-1987 dictatorships and downplaying the crimes of Imperial Japan during its occupation of Korea. The ultimate aim is to reorient Korean politics around the threat from the North and Pyongyang’s alleged influence on South Korean progressives, who the new right sees as essentially seditious.
This new right isn’t actually that new; it first emerged in the 2000s. But like the recent American movement of the same name, it has grown in influence — playing an important role in former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s administration, the one that culminated in Yoon’s failed attempt to declare martial law in December. Since then, the new right have been some of Yoon’s most vocal defenders, spreading a mass of conspiracy theories in a strategy that, per Le Monde, was directly inspired by Trump’s approach to the 2020 US election.
Finally, I want to highlight a Substack piece by the political scientist Lindsey Cormack about one of the never-ending controversies in American politics: Is “woke” destroying the Democratic party?
Recently, the center-left think tank Third Way put out a widely discussed memo arguing that Democrats had an elitist, out of touch communications style filled with left-wing jargon. The paper contained a list of said jargon that Democratic politicians should never use, like “heteronormative” and “Latinx.”
Cormack, it so happens, maintains a database of over 208,0000 Congressional newsletters — one of the chief means that members of Congress use to communicate directly with constituents. When she looked at the data, she found that Third Way’s no-no words almost never appeared in Democratic communications. In fact, they were more likely to be found in Republican ones!
“The data show that many of these phrases barely exist in constituent communications, and when they do, Republicans are often the ones writing them either to lampoon Democrats or to spotlight them as proof of ‘wokeness,” she writes.
Her takeaway is that the problem here isn’t how Democrats talk. Rather, it’s that Republicans have very successfully tied Democrats to language used by a certain kind of leftist — but not the mainstream party. I think this is right, and it points to a different (and more difficult) challenge for Democrats: how to distance themselves from views that they have never really agreed with.
