----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
Very interesting piece by Corey Robin on U.S. conservatives after the cold war: <http://bostonreview.net/BR29.1/robin.html>.
An excerpt:
Though conservatives are reputed to favor wealth and
>prosperity, law and order, stability and routine-all the comforts of
>bourgeois life-they hated Clinton for his pursuit of these very
>virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society
>that lost its sense of social depth and political meaning. "In that
>age of peace and prosperity," David Brooks would write, "the top
>sitcom was Seinfeld, a show about nothing." Robert Kaplan emitted
>barb after barb in The Coming Anarchy about the "healthy, well-fed"
>denizens of "bourgeois society," too consumed with their own comfort
>and pleasure to lend a hand-or shoulder a gun-to make the world a
>safer place. "Material possessions," he concluded, "encourage
>docility" and a "lack of imagination." In an influential manifesto
>published in 2000, Donald and Frederick Kagan could barely contain
>their hostility for "the happy international situation that emerged
>in 1991," which was "characterized by the spread of democracy, free
>trade, and peace" and was "so congenial to America" with its love of
>"domestic comfort."
[snip]
> Conservatives thrive on a world of
>mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred, where good is always on the
>defensive and time is a precious commodity in the race against
>corruption and decline. Coping with such a world requires pagan
>courage and barbaric virtù, qualities conservatives embrace over the
>more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity.
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Look everybody, it's right-wing miserablism; does it remind you of anything?
Ian