>I guess when Doug says that we should take
>the right wing seriously, he thinking back to
>his days at Yale when he and fellow members
>of the Party of the Right, would sit around reading
>the collected works of Bill Buckley and Russell Kirk,
>and ponder the relationship of conservatism to
>the libertarian thought of people like Hayek
>or Rand. The problem is that all that has only
>a tangential relationship with actually existing
>right wing politics in the US today. To understand
>that, one is better off looking at Rush Limbaugh
>and Ann Coulter. Not very appetizing IMO.
There's a lot of stuff between Coulter and Kirk - e.g., the contents of National Review and The Weekly Standard. Sure the Coulter stuff reflects a lot of the right's popular appeal - I happened to catch a bit of Michael Savage's radio show in a cab the other day, an appalling blast of pure hate - but the more polite stuff has an appeal too. And when I say we should take the right more seriously I'm saying that we should try to understand the appeal of the ideas (whether Coulter or Kirk), the various sects and schisms on the right, the sociology of the production and reception of the ideas, etc. A lot of people on the left just dismiss it all as stupidity and bigotry; sure, there's a lot of that, but it's worth understanding the content of stupidity & bigotry, no?
Doug