I used to think of fascism as lurking in the most marginalized classes, but today in the US it seems just as likely to come from parts of the middle class -- what William Grieder calls the "leave me alone" new Republicans.
BobW
My first and last encounter with American conservatism in the flesh --- cgrimes at rawbw.com wrote:
> ``Rothbard argues that the American Old Right could
> not be considered
> conservative in the European sense. Quite the
> contrary, it opposed
> traditional conservatism as an enemy of liberty.
> Rothbard states his
> view with characteristic force. He refers to `the
> philosophy that has
> marked genuinely conservative thought, regardless of
> label, since the
> ancient days of Oriental despotism: an
> all-encompassing reverence for
> 'Throne-and-Altar,' for whatever divinely sanctioned
> State apparatus
> happened to be in existence.'...''
>
> ----------
>
> BobW wrote, offlist about my post on Strauss in
> `book chat':
>
> ``...I have dabbled in some of the contemporary
> conservative writers,
> and they do seem to have that yearning for a pure
> identity you
> describe. Devotion to classical literature, and
> Christianity, always
> seems to be the core of it, plus of course fear of
> the mob. Ortega y
> Gasset, whom I read in college, is the best
> expression of this
> cultural aspect of conservatism...''
>
> This reminded me this morning to look up Ortega y
> Gasset. I have his
> Historical Reason sitting over on some bookshelf,
> but haven't read him
> in years. Thanks to BobW for reminding me.
>
> Most of my thoughts on Strauss's elitism come from
> celebrations of
> tradition coupled with a distain for the `mob' that
> Thomas Mann wrote
> about in `Notes of a Non-Political Man', a
> collection of essays
> written during WWI. I think Mann's essays were
> probably a very
> accurate representation of what the conservative
> minded and
> established intellectuals in Germany thought at the
> time. They were
> horrified at the rise to power of the industrial
> masses who were
> brought into public political life, first by
> numerous communist and
> socialist organizing parties, but most effectively
> because of their
> forced induction into the military. The process of
> the war itself
> brought them to a promenence of power they never had
> before and it
> frightened the elites of all orders. A very similar
> process took place
> all over Europe and was echoed in the US.
>
> Unfortunately, Notes from a Non-Political Man is
> almost never read so
> the ideas and the direct feeling for the tone of the
> time are not well
> understood. (It is very reactionary and elitist
> stuff. Although Mann
> changed his mind and effectivedly re-constructed
> himself during Weimar
> becoming of a political liberal, he never publically
> disowned these
> essays.)
>
> On the other hand Ortega y Gassett qis read more
> often and
> he is better known as a representative of this kind
> of reactionary
> elitism---meaning that Ortega makes for a better
> known source than
> early Mann, or the more opaque Heidegger. In other
> words he was a
> better political writer than either one. In his
> early years Ortega
> moved from Spain to Germany before WWI and studied
> philosophy under
> Herman Cohen at Marburg. This gave him a perfect
> opportunity to see
> and get a feel for the more conservative wing of the
> German academic
> elite and its reactions to the rise of mass-man.
> Here is a sample:
>
> ...Is it not a sign of immense progress that the
> masses should have
> "ideas," that is to say, should be cultured? By no
> means. The "ideas"
> of the average man are not genuine ideas, nor is
> their possession
> culture. Whoever wishes to have ideas must first
> prepare himself to
> desire truth and to accept the rules of the game
> imposed by it. It is
> no use speaking of ideas when there is no acceptance
> of a higher
> authority to regulate them, a series of standards to
> which it is
> possible to appeal in a discussion. These standards
> are the principles
> on which culture rests. I am not concerned with the
> form they
> take. What I affirm is that there is no culture
> where there are no
> standards to which our fellow-man can have recourse.
> There is no
> culture where there are no principles of legality to
> which to
> appeal. There is no culture where there is no
> acceptance of certain
> final intellectual positions to which a dispute may
> be referred. There
> is no culture where economic relations are not
> subject to a regulating
> principle to protect interests involved. There is no
> culture where
> aesthetic controversy does not recognize the
> necessity of justifying
> the work of art.
>
> When all these things are lacking there is no
> culture; there is in the
> strictest sense of the word, barbarism. And let us
> not deceive
> ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in
> Europe under the
> progressive rebellion of the masses. The traveler
> knows that in the
> territory there are no ruling principles to which it
> is possible to
> appeal. Properly speaking, there are no barbarian
> standards. Barbarism
> is the absence of standards to which appeal can be
> made.
>
> Under Fascism there appears for the first time in
> Europe a type of man
> who does not want to give reasons or to be right,
> but simply shows
> himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the
> new thing: the
> right not to be reasonable, the "reason of
> unreason." Here I see the
> most palpable manifestation of the new mentality of
> the masses, due to
> their having decided to rule society without the
> capacity for doing
> so. In their political conduct the structure of the
> new mentality is
> revealed in the rawest, most convincing manner. The
> average man finds
> himself with "ideas" in his head, but he lacks the
> faculty of
> ideation. He has no conception even of the rare
> atmosphere in which
> ideals live. He wishes to have opinions, but is
> unwilling to accept
> the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all
> opinion. Hence
> his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites
> in words...''
> (Revolt of the Masses, 1930) from:
>
> http://www.historyguide.org/europe/gasset.html
>
> I quoted the above to give the list a taste of what
> an old European
> conservative sounded like. It is interesting to
> compare this sort of
> elitism with the US neocons, high powered economists
> and other
> techocrats, business leaders, and the old ivy league
> snots like
> Buckley or whatever slime has taken his place. None
> of it worships the
> Throne or the Altar and fits right into US
> conservativism. Nobody is
> talking about liberity, since they've all enjoyed
> plenty of it. What
> they didn't like about liberity was when most of a
> well educated mass
> of a younger generation took the liberity of
> throwing shit on their
> parade---yeah like me and a lot of others.
>
> In any event, I remeber dimmly reading Ortega in
> college for something
> or other. At first I went along with the elitism
> because of its
>
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