This month the University of California at Berkeley opened a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. ... Needless to say, the center is not promoting conservatism...
But isn't he {Leo Strauss} a conservative?" In a certain way he was, I said...
(Now, answer honestly, dear reader of The Chronicle Review: How many of these authors have you yourself read? ...
...who knows, maybe Berkeley will even begin hiring conservative professors...''
Mark Lilla
---------
(John Norem, how come you posted this shit? It's provocation for a rant... Just read Andie Nach. Better summary, but I am going to still post what follows.)
Why do I get the idea Lilla is a neoconservative? I haven't read a thing by him. So somebody on the list please set me straight. I have a long screed below, which could make me fool for the day. Well, whatever. Here goes anyway.
Dear Mark Lilla, does the name John Yoo mean anything to you? He teaches constitutional law, of all things at UCB Boalt Law School. There's a student movement to get rid of him. I don't support them. I think he should be indicted at the Hague and keep his teaching job. I like the irony.
As for your reading list, yes I've read them all but Chambers and Viereck, because most the others are in Struts and Crapsy's textbook, (excuse me, that's Strauss and Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy)
I read something of Ann Ryan in high school, suggested by a closet homosexual right wing weirdo friend I protected from the wrath of his family when he was caught with his dog by his equally rightwing sister who I dated for a brief few months ... never got anything. Her vision of this incident was immediately broadcast on the phone to her girlfriend network to rat out her brother.... Shit like this explains Columbine.
I heard all about the dog and B in the lunch area twelve hours after he couldn't sleep in my bedroom, weeping. God that's another sicko story in San Fernando Valley lore back when Leave it Beaver was a new show on tv. Beaver's father was our high school boys vice principle... believe it or not. The kid in question was smart, went to Berkeley then UCLA for law school and joined the LA district attorney's office to clean up corruption and drugs in the darky neighborhoods of LA. Fuck if I know what he did during Watts and the general kill the darkies politics of LA. He's probably fat retired to the desert playing with the cute tails of California young antelop. (You probably think I am making this stuff up...no dear reader this is god's Los Angeles as close as I can tell it.)
Doug wants to know what it is with the right and sex? All I got are animal stories. You tell me. I won't distance myself. After all B was in my bedroom scared out of his sixteen year old mind and I was the only embrace left to him?
I am probably going to have to buy one of Lilla's books unless someone can sketch his take on Isaah Berlin. At a guess it's Lilla's attempt to capture Berlin for the neo-con dog fuckers of AmeriKKKa, along similar lines to pull the overly manly Arendt into their fold. Andie Nach comments on this?
Strauss wasn't kind of conservative. Strauss was a German rightwing reactionary who hated the Weimar Republic and would have liked to be part of the Third Reich, except he was Jewish .. oh, bummer. Strauss grew up around farm animals so who knows. Maybe the sheep got to him.
Conservatism is a deeply American pathology, and a deeply European pathology, dripping with the bloody tradition of racism, authoritarianism, social and class war, imperialism and various other counter-enlightenment and marxist crimes on both continents.
The real trouble is we have to retell all US history from before the beginning. It's also a history that conservative historians and essayists have been revising along with sins of omission for a very long time. Lilla's rejection of Emerson is particularly interesting. Too bad Carl Remick isn't with us to explain that. I miss Carl in these moments.
How to tell US history from the leftcoast empirical point of view for a change, and in sympathy for animal lovers everywhere. Sorry Ravi, but we lucky suburban white boys had to fuck animals because of the great pussy draught of the 1950s.
I'd put selections from Chip Berlet's book on Populism as the first item, because it traces conservative american politics back to the colonials, white populism, the war of independence and the founding fathers.
We'd have to linger in the colonial period and its background, the enlightenment, the counter-enlightenment, leading up to the french revolution, its anti-clerical, anti-nobility roots, the english reactions (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Burke et al) and the impact of all that on the rise of the early American elites. I have to admit I don't know that much about the various federalists and their political spectrum. I remember preferring Jefferson and Madison over Hamilton and Adams, but it gets fuzzy after that.
For Americans there are various un-noticed linkages and themes with platonism, justifications for slavery, planation mentality...
As suggested I'd have to give some background of european intellectual history, but I would put more emphasis on the continentals like Spinoza, Liebniz, Kant, Hegel, Marx of course. They would be important for later, when various waves of Euros got here and changed US intellectuals, the academy and political movements with influences from the Germans and Austrians.
After the Enlightenment and colonial stuff, we'd get into the political economy of slavery and the early industrial revolution, and the lead up to the Civil War, noting the war was partly funded by English and French capital as part of their geo-political imperialism in the Americas. Then something else on Reconstruction, Jim Crow which were mostly public accomodation laws, railroads, more white populism, telegraph roles of technology into the Twenties---diverging long enough to explain Leland Stanford and the western railroad-bank crowd (timed to correspond to the Cal v. Stanford game...message hate Stanford, Hoover institute, etc) and the importation of Chinese to replace the Irish---who were starting to talk union.
Oh, I forgot General John Pershing, the Mexican, Indian, Philippine thing and WWI. Pershing is important to background the whole US WWII military elite from Marshal, Eisenhower and Patton on down. Knowing about Pershing is essential background for the racist military mentality that has so much to do with US imperialism and our fascination with saving the little black, brown and yellow people of the earth. Well there is also the California hacienda stuff and anglo land graps, shooting wars over water for mining and agriculture, getting rid of the last of the local NA tribes....Then the whole anti-progressive movements to keep child labor, unions busted, immigrants and darkies in ghettos or jails or dead, and women with no rights. pretty much the current Conservative agenda.
Let's see then the Red Scare of the Twenties and the Russian Revolution. The US-UK role to sink the Reds and support the Whites. The 20s era of the great Christian revivalists, more white populism, maybe Elmer Gantry as light reading.
The 30s-40 importation of the European Right: Hayet, von Mises, Popper, Strauss et al...and the hard science crowd: Teller, von Braun, the apparently apolitical von Neumann etc. with the story of Hakkon Chevalier and Robert Oppenheimer---because it happened here. Then a little more California history with the Hollywood and San Francisco HUAC hearings and UCB administrations attempts to stop UCB students protesting in the city and then their attempt to crush FSM and commie suspect professors.
Then we would get to the US new wave reactionaries, the whole George Wallace link to Nixon's southern strategy and more white identity politics wrapped up with more populism. But mostly Governor Ronald Reagon taking privilage of place in the lead to crush the US public academy and the working class all at the same time, funded by the LA real estate crowd, Cal Argi-corp, and the rightwing inside the UC Board of Regents---an on going saga ever since. Some stuff from Mike Davis because he's fun to read. I liked Cadillac Desert, but didn't finish it
Let's see there's Mills, Power Elite to explain who rules the US, Domkoff to explain US corp in Latin America....the Cold War...and more US imperialism branching from the Americas to Indochina, Brenten Woods, more post-WWII nasties in western Europe, the Middle East, China, Japan...manipulating African independence movements...links to apartheid SA, fighting Cubans in Angola by proxy...
How we `lost' China under Stillwell is another great story. It's about how the US got in the habit of loving rightwing military dictators like Chian Kai-shek in Formosa and then around the globe. Noting Honduras and the neo-cons love of military juntas---example from two months agp.
Sorry, it just keeps going. There's the whole reaction to the 60s with Bloom's little story of getting run off by black student radicals at Cornell (fear, terror, shivelling white dicks) and how white reaction to the black power movement forms the sub-rosa racism of the whole rightwing, the Dixiecrats...turned respectable, and the current neo-con white identity crop.... blah, blah, blah.
Then I'd pick up Doug's Wall Street, Michael Perlman's Confiscation of American Prosperity because the latter details out the marvelous wedding between the big corporations, big finance, big christians, and big imperialist neo-cons.
Let's see, there's Gingrich. Now there's an great American conservative. I think he's written a US history book, full of revisionist bullshit no doubt. (It would be a nice constrast) ... some policy stuff from the reactionary think tank industry...
Then Scahill's Blackwater and were all this white purity, conservative and neoliberal crap ends up in death squads for hire in the wars to save US empire against the darkie hordes of the planet.
It might be fun to get John Yoo to give a guest lecture on how to fuck the constitution and turn the executive branch into the Machiavellian Prince with the Medici banker-thugs bankrolling the gig.
I am sure David Horwitz would be glad to speak to the class, although he'd have to do it for free... budget crunch from the state's repugnants and all...
Then maybe George Lakoff to explain what Yoo and Horwitz just said. There is probably somebody over in the Near Eastern Studies who can lay out what's going on in Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
You can't cover everything. But that's the highlights that I can remember off the top of my head today.
For background I quickly read a Lilla essay on how small liberal arts colleges should teach a `liberal arts' education and let the public systems crank out the palid shit for the masses. Righto Markie.
That's the ticket. Train the US elite in neo-conservative values and revisionism of US history in over priced little elite colleges so they become the political and economic leaders of tomorrow while the rest of us stupid working slobs get bland, nowhere poli sci 101 with platitudes and statistics engineered by neo-classical economists who prove class war is the only right way to go for us individualists. God I hate this shit.
Sorry buddy. But I prefer the public systems, radical student culture, its reading lists, and off-beat professors where I learned most of the above, while we held the fucking public system at intellectual gun point, once upon a time in Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, LA, San Diego, then there was Eugene, Seattle, Iowa, Ann Arbor ... Even the Cal state college system in San Francisco. LA, Northridge ... down into the community college system in Oakland and probably LA... where hopefully black, latino, and asian american history is still taught. I lost track.
The whole moment of `ethnic studies' and the Third World Strike was to get this US imperialistic racist shit into the public conscieousness...
CG