Posting the last of the Critic articles I haven’t yet put on substack. Full article is here, first section below:
“Last month, American right-wing libertarian writer Richard Hanania’s past as pseudonymous 2010s alt-righter Richard Hoste was exposed in a hit piece. Hanania responded by disavowing his previous views, chronicling his journey away from the alt-right and towards “small-l liberalism”.
Hanania remains vehemently anti-woke. Key to his current vision is the possibility of some sort of “multicultural based alliance”, where conservative immigrants join forces with conservative white Americans to oppose the woke ideals and policies advocated by white liberals. In a discussion with legal scholar Amy Wax, he argues that rural white Americans hate liberal elites more than they dislike being around immigrants. As immigrants have better (i.e. more socially conservative) values than native-born Americans, they should be encouraged not to assimilate. The right can then appeal to both groups through anti-woke policies, and he has repeatedly excoriated them for failing to do so.
Hanania is presenting one of the oft-asked questions for the right in Western countries: many immigrants and minorities have more conservative moral and economic values than natives, so surely the right should be able to win them over? It is an appealing theory, but so far the evidence for it is thin: that immigrants and minorities tend to vote for the left is a political truism. Black Americans vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats despite holding conservative values; similarly, socially conservative British Muslims vote for Labour. Looking around the Western world, it is rare to find a minority group that breaks this pattern, though that doesn’t stop pundits making exhortations that it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Read the rest there.