The Intellectual and Political History of Conservatism and the New Right

This was a self-directed experience that took place over the summer. I learned A LOT from this PD. The deep dive I took into the intellectual and political history of conservatism and the new right was fascinating. It will certainly inform new readings and unit schemas for both my Incarceration Nation and History of Capitalism courses. I don't know if "inspiring" is quite the right word, but my readings (and I listened to a lot of podcasts too) really made clear how today's new right is composed both of discrete and disparate (and in many ways irreconcilable) tendencies, but that there are also significant places where their political projects align so they can operate as a bloc to, say, dismantle the administrative state. I am better able to identify throughlines in various formations of conservative and reactionary intellectual history, and in particular I can see how and why certain ideas seem to be recurring in the present (e.g., the return to open discourse about eugenics). As with any good dive into the critical literature on a topic, this one raised as many (if not more) questions than it answered. I am excited to continue my studies on this topic over the course of this school year and the years ahead. I have certainly learned things that can be brought back to department meetings, especially with respect to the history of postwar conservatism, but in particular its development since the 1990s and the impact those transformations have had on the present. I imagine this will really be put into action as we begin reimagining the US curriculum in the next year. I also did a bit of a dive into what have been called the TESCREAL bundle (it's an acronym that names the constellation of shared an overlapping ideologies that most players in the AI space subscribe to [i.e., Musk, Altman, Andreesen, Thiel, SBF, etc.]: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) by Timnit Gebru and Emil Torres (Gebru is a Stanford CompSci PhD and former Apple and Google AI engineer who has become an outspoken critic of the ways in which generative AI is being rolled out to the public, Torres is a moral philosopher who studies the history of human ideas about species extinction) and it has provided me with a very interesting perspective about AI that I'm happy to bring to the department meetings. As far as student experiences...in addition to the stuff I already mentioned about readings and unit-level changes that this will bring to my seminars, I am also planning on leading at least two Common Classrooms that come out of this PD. One will be--I think--about the importance of the 1990s to the current moment (not just the baggy pants, but the return of Charles Murray-style IQ politics and the relationship between Pat Buchanan's platform and the MAGA one), and the other will be about how to think about the current intensification of immigration restriction, control, deportation, penal colonization, etc., and the broader carceral landscape.