The political implications of René Girard's work is disputed, but while we're here, why not do a quick, more impressionistic typing of some modern right-wing intellectuals?
Curtis Yarvin — ILI with an accent on LSI
"I distrust all velvet gloves. Take the abstract ideals off and show us government as it really is. Law enforcement is not a bad thing."
The king of neoreaction is best understood as the digital heir of the ILI-style hierarchical reactionary and the satirical ILI, too. One of the most hierarchy-worshipping doctrine on the internet, held by a man with no office, no movement he'd deign to lead, and fairly limited "discussion elitism." He takes the method from the satirical subtype: "Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he only swims left" is the satirical epigram-craft applied to the direction of history itself. The sheer degree of his hierarchical obsession and systematization allows for an LSI accent. His actual political doctrine, as initially elaborated, is passivism: no activism, no power-seeking, become worthy and wait — the ILI's strategic fatalist patience. Even the prescriptions are Gamma-Te flavored where they're concrete at all: the state as joint-stock corporation, good governance as customer satisfaction — the pessimist's diagnosis with a business-mechanism.
Rod Dreher — IEI with a strong rational-moralistic accent on ESI
"To live is to suffer. It is better to choose to know the painful truth rather than settle on a comforting lie."
The most confessional pundit in America is a professional Cassandra with a gentle, melancholy touch evident in his articles, which strike me as "ethical" to quite a high degree — relentlessly introspective, focusing on his own spiritual crises and depressions (which even brought him quite a bit of online mockery). The Benedict Option (the Flood is coming, build arks), Live Not by Lies (persecution approaches, prepare) — Ni in its dark register, broadcast through an emotional overflow. What he has never once done is to actually organize anything. Eventually he relocated himself under the literal patronage of a government he casted as Christendom's shield — the weak-and-valued Se seeking its protector. And his prognostications are never verdict-free: an ESI-ish moralistic accent colors the whole corpus, especially the loyalty-betrayal axis. Solzhenitsyn lent him a title of a book, but Live Not by Lies was a personal protocol for individual refusal. In Dreher's hands it became what his type makes of everything: a premonition, beautifully felt from somewhere safe behind a stronger man's walls.
Richard Hanania — LIE with accents on ILE and ILI
"If you believe that your free speech rights are violated because other people might not like what you say, I really don't have much sympathy."
The semi-repentant Neo-Nazi and general ideological maverick is quite hard to type. The LIE claim is, perhaps, strongest in the values and the enterprise: results-worship across the board — markets, growth, tech, "human capital", elite productivity — argued in the style of merciless cost-benefit, by a man who built a one-man media business out of systematically monetized contrarianism and apostasy. The ILI traits show themselves in that his The Origins of Woke book is an unmasking-genealogy in the Yarvin mold — it derives cultural progressivism from a concealed structural cause (civil-rights law as hidden engine). And the ILE accent is strongest in the general intellectual playfulness and the position-churn (see Talanov's "a new idea in my mind often disproves another one" trait, notably absent in, e.g., Yarvin, although there are also traits of LIE infamous logical flexibility) framed as epistemic virtue, the constitutional inability to stay enlisted in any camp including his own former ones. The only NT type he's quite far away from is LII.
Patrick Deneen — LSI with a strong accent on ESI
"You should engage in sexual activity only when married. Once married, you should stay married. You should have children—generally, lots of them."
The conservative professor's magnum opus, Why Liberalism Failed, convicts it with a stern moral verdict and organized around ethical betrayal — the elites who dissolved the people's inheritance of family, faith, and place. Deneen preaches limits — liberty as location within constraint, the bounded township against the infinite chooser — the anti-Ne closing of horizons offered as the best way forward. "Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends," from Regime Change, described by some more idealistic reviewers as "shocking", is more LSI (the more machiavellian type of the two), the seemingly Delta-ish (ESI is the Gamma type most likely to partially invert its values into Delta) communitarian reaching for Beta tools.
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