I've long made the argument Jim makes and cites Judis as making about Buckley's failed attempt at the synthesis of the economic and cultural right, but... well, the more I teach this stuff, the more I can't help but stress the class-bound romanticism of traditional conservatism and the historical fantasies of populist neoconservatism. I guess the synthesis is the success of utilitarian and libertarian political economies generate processes of differentiation and homogenization that produce romanticism and fantasicism on the cultural right.
Any thoughts?
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Cox responds:
There is a problem in defining "traditional conservatism," which itself, from its rise in the early 18th-c to its demise in the early 19th=c was somewhat of a jumble. (Included in that jumble, incidentally, were elements M&E were later to categorize as "Aristocratic Socialism." Also, one of the versions of 20-th-c "traditional conservatism," the bunh of literary critics who published"Where I Stand" back in the early '40s, was poisoned from the beginning by a large dose of really nasty racism. What did the KKK have in common with the Samuel Johnson (a real Tory) who made a toast to the next slave insurrection in the West Indie and opposed independeence for the American colonies on the grounds that slavedrivers didn't deserve to be free themselves.
In fact, U.S. conservatives (or perhaps we should say "conservatives") have obscurely recognized from the beginning that the only way conservaatives couold win elections was by tapping the white-supremacy vote. That was even more poisonous than the need to incorporate rampant capitalism in their old bottles.
But this is merely of academic interest. The interest that "leftists" take in "the right" is a diversion from serious politcs, a fairly serius diversion. I would agree with Chip Berlet that a right centered in evangelical religion (that's shorthand: his analysis is much more nuanced) could at some time become a real menace, embodying the popular base for some kind of American fascism. But NOT NOW. "The Rightr" is an utterly insignificant force in contemprary politics and a focus on it, like a focus on the "prrogressive" wing of the real enemy, the DP, functions as a substitute for radical thinking and analysis, an almost insuperable barrier to taking seriusly the question WITBD?
Psychologically, though I don't believe in psychological analyses :, it answers to a rather stupid worry about current "poularity" of left causes. That lack of popularity is simply irrelevant, because radicals are such aninbsignifcant force at present that nothing they do or don't do now can make the least difference to anyone or anything.
The only way current left thought can contribute to the future is through analysis of what can be done now that will be of use when the God of Contingency suddenly and unexpectedly creates an opening for a real mass movement. Only left thought which looks back on the present from that hypothetical future can even potentially have a hand in changing the world.
Which is why currently I am paying far more attention to a couple literary lists I am on than to LBO-Talk. If I'm going to think about non-political topics, Milton is a hell of a lot more entertaining than any Fox reporter.
Carrol