Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carl Remick quoted Joe Conason:
>
> > Maybe someday we’ll see a revival of the
> >kind of conservatism that once valued social solidarity along with
> >enterprise, and demanded responsibility as the price of privilege.
>
Carl, I'm not sure what "conservatism" you are speaking of. Since most of the poets and novelists I studied over the years were conservatives, I'm fairly well acquainted with several conservative traditions. May I say that all of them I know of were red in tooth and claw. They were most responsible for (a) maintaining order and (b) making those over whom they maintained order at least claim they loved it.
Read Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst." A really beautiful poem, in which he claims (lying through his teeth, though he may have believed his own lie)--
An though thy walls be of the countrey stone,
They'are rear'd with no mans ruine, no mans grone,
There's none, that dwell about them, wish them downe;
But all come in, the farmer, and the clowne,
And no one empty-handed, to salute
Thy lord, and lady, though they have no sute.
To appreciate this representative of responsibility and valuing of social solidarity you need to be acquainted with the terror and repression visited on the English rural population during the 16th century.
Once in a while a representative of this responsible conservatism let's the truth sneak out in a terrifying line or two:
Mean while declining from the Noon of Day,
The Sun obliquely shoots his burning Ray;
The hungry judges soon the the Sentence sign,
And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine. . . .
(Rape of the Lock III, 19-22)
The combination of "hanging" with "dining" takes us to the London slaughterhouses where carcasses were hanging. (In 1714 Londoners of all classes would have been more intimately familiar than we are with the processes that brought beef to their tables.)
This whole myth of the responsible conservative flows from primarily 18th century sources. You might also read Raymond Williams, _The Country and the City_. Or, it occurs to me, you can get the (unpleasant) flavor of it all by reading Agatha Christie mysteries. In the 19th & 20th centuries that "responsible conservatism" gets entangled with some really nasty (but oh so genteel) racism. Read Dorothy Sayers. She is just as unpleasant as Christie but writes a hell of a lot better.
Carrol