XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   From: MeanDog@Menace.dot   
      
   There's No Such Thing As A Conservative Intellectual — Only Apologists For   
   Right-wing Power   
   From Burke To Buckley To Patrick Deneen, We've Seen A 200-year History Of   
   Defending The Indefensible   
      
      
   By Mike Lofgren   
      
      
   In 1950, author and critic Lionel Trilling wrote:   
      
       In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant   
   but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that   
   nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general   
   circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to   
   conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong,   
   perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse   
   and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some   
   ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action   
   or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.   
      
   Three-quarters of a century later, Trilling's statement remains broadly   
   true, as a glance at conservative books will attest. The hundreds of   
   conservative book titles that have geysered out of Regnery, Broadside and   
   other right-wing imprints in recent years are almost invariably   
   distinguished by their numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt   
   for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm,   
   and a recipe for salvation cribbed from Republican National Committee   
   talking points and Heritage Foundation issue briefs. The fact that they   
   sometimes hit the bestseller list is principally due to the well-funded   
   conservative media-entertainment complex's bulk-purchase scam.   
      
   The vast majority of these efforts are the products of political   
   operatives, talk-show entertainers and the ghostwriters for hack   
   politicians eyeing a presidential run. What is chiefly distinguishable   
   about the output of self-styled conservative intellectuals is that their   
   academic credentials and scholarly pretensions often gain them reviews in   
   the prestige media, presumably on the basis of their importance. This   
   month, the New York Times reviewed "Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal   
   Future," by Patrick J. Deneen, a lecturer at Notre Dame.   
      
   Related   
   The party of pollution, disease and death: When Republicans tell you who   
   they are, believe them   
      
   Before even attempting to evaluate the book in the context of present-day   
   issues, we'd better be clear on what American conservatism is, where it   
   came from, who the people are who purport to be conservative intellectuals,   
   and what their game is.   
      
   In Europe and America, conservatism as we now know it grew out of the   
   reaction to the French Revolution. The Anglo-Irish 18th-century statesman   
   Edmund Burke is typically held up as the spokesman for the enduring   
   conservative sensibility, and such prominent postwar American conservatives   
   as William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk and George Will have made much of   
   Burke's purported moderation and good sense.   
      
   Conservative "bestsellers" are almost invariably distinguished by their   
   numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone   
   that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm.   
      
   Among Burke's epigrams are such copybook maxims as "The only thing   
   necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Uplifting   
   stuff. But political theorist Corey Robin, in "The Reactionary Mind,"   
   thinks these words from the younger Burke do not represent what he was to   
   become. Robin sees darker currents in a Burke who understood Jacobin   
   violence as implicit in every attempt at political reform. Toward the end   
   of his life, Burke harped on the "subordination" of the masses to the   
   classes as imperative for any sort of political order.   
      
   On the other side of the English Channel, the reaction against the French   
   Revolution packed a lot more blood and thunder. Joseph de Maistre, a   
   diplomat from the Duchy of Savoy, did not trim his sails. He considered the   
   executioner to be the indispensable backstop of civilization, the better to   
   save wayward souls: "Man cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil   
   without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished   
   without being guilty. In short ... there is nothing so intrinsically   
   plausible as the theory of original sin."   
      
   Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre "a fierce   
   absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a   
   monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere   
   the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a   
   dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor,   
   part executioner." And something of a sadist, to read his musings.   
      
   Maistre, though lesser known than Burke, embodies the essential points of   
   the present conservative mind at a deeper level than taxes, spending or   
   size of government. Isaiah Berlin, the great historian of western ideas,   
   considered Maistre the true father of reactionary western conservatism,   
   and, indeed, a precursor to the past century's fascist movements.   
      
   However much modern theorists have elaborated upon the ideas inherent in   
   conservatism during the two centuries since Maistre, they all seem to me to   
   boil down to three simple points:   
      
       A desire for hierarchy and human inequality. This belief derives from   
   the medieval religious notion of the Great Chain of Being, whereby there is   
   a place for everybody and everybody must know his place. It justifies   
   economic exploitation and denial of political rights. Conservative writers   
   propagandize on its behalf with a straw-man argument: Any gain in equality   
   costs society an equal or greater loss in freedom; egalitarianism is the   
   mere soulless equality of the gulag, where we cannot own property and must   
   share toothbrushes. This sentiment pops up consistently in the works of   
   American conservative theorists, from Buckley's "Unless you have freedom to   
   be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom," to David Brooks' hankering   
   for rule by a wise elite. American-style laissez-faire economics and   
   libertarianism are largely based on this idea.   
       The only acceptable society is based on Christianity. Never mind the   
   establishment clause of the First Amendment; conservatives will forever try   
   to smuggle in more and more official endorsement of religion until the   
   United States is effectively a theocracy. The rationale is that some sort   
   of divine or transcendental dispensation is the sole basis for a just   
   temporal order. Translated into the bumper-sticker mentality of American   
   Christian fundamentalism, that means that if people don't believe in God,   
   there's nothing to stop them from running amok and killing people. This   
   thesis would have been news to medieval crusaders, the Holy Inquisition,   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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