>On Sun, 21 Aug 2005 13:08:29 -0600 Michael Pugliese
><michael.098762001 at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>
>>
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>> http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_08_29/cover.html
>> Defining Conservatism Down
>>
>> As the Right’s popularity has grown, its intellectual
>> challenge
>> to the Left has diminished.
>> by Austin Bramwell
>
>A not uninteresting piece. Certainly, American conservatism
>was intellectually at its most vigorous state back in
>the 1950s and 1960s when people like William F. Buckley,
>James Burnham, Max Eastman, Russell Kirk, Milton
>Friedman etc. were waging a fullscale assault on
>the then prevailing New Deal consensus.
Yup, that is a good piece. Bramwell says that today, people join the right because their parents and grandparents were conservatives - there's no intellectual conversion experience, as there was in the 70s. I can testify that that's true - it was Buckley, Burnham, Kirk, Friedman, and Kendall who won me over. Bramwell's conclusion that the real intellectual energy on the right today is among extreme elitists (e.g., the masses are stupid, so democratic government is inevitably stupid, therefore we must have limited government) is pretty intriguing - and puts the tone of the Party of the Right's 50th-anniversary banquet <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20030217&s=henwood> in a new light. Many of the PORsters were deeply antidemocratic - the ceremonies opened with a recitation of Charles I's execution speech ("a subject and a sovereign are clean different things") - and one toaster expressed regret that conservatism had lost its edge with success.
Funny how Bramwell, like many rightists, takes the cap-L Left so seriously. We may feel marginal, but the right always seems to see us as a real threat, and in many cases, more intellectually formidable. It's like that great quote that Corey Robin elicited from Irving Kristol in Lingua Franca: "American conservatism lacks for political imagination. It's so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left....If you read Marx, you'd learn what a political imagination could do."
Doug