>As an aside, it’s fascinating, and I am not unique in pointing this out, to see the elements of communist influence in the history of conservatism. There were lots of important hard left to hard right defectors, including Meyer, Burnham and Chambers.
While not part of the American Conservative Movement, Hans-Hermann Hoppe went from Marxism to Rothbardism to half-monarchism, simply because he wanted an intellectually rigorous system. Burnham was I think the same - he really did not like "the professors of the cocktail parties" whose opinions were more fashion and gossip and less precise analysis.
I dunno. In hindsight, the professors of the cocktail parties were kind of right? While a half-socialist, half-libertarian kind of stance, a welfare state without serious socialism does not make a lot of intellectual sense, the world does not always conform to the rigid ideologies of intellectuals. It seems it was pragmatic enough. Like how it was said the British Empire was made in a fit of absence of the mind, something similar can be said about the Western welfare state, there was no deep plan to rebuild society from the ground up, rather, just randomly addressing whichever problems seemed the most dire.
In a certain sense, that was conservative. In the Michael Oakeshott sense, perhaps Edmund Burke sense. If you would tell those guys you want more equality, they warn you against the dangers of ideology. But if you just want a social housing project to those particular people here, or banning the discrimination of that particular people there, they would be a lot more understanding.
Yeah, you see that basic assumption in Kirk, for example: The left is fundamentally motivated by a levelling ideology. When in reality I think it’s closer to what you describe in the political tradition of the Anglosphere countries at least.
Not only politicized evangelical groups, but the US Catholic hierarchy, as well. As far as I understand, Catholic teaching rejects much of the conservative movement, especially on economic matters and immigration. Catholic popular opinion is fairly closely aligned with general US popular opinion. But much of the US hierarchy has jumped the shark for the movement's priorities. They're not quite anti-immigration or pro-neoliberalism--they just a perfunctory emphasis their teachings in this area.
>As an aside, it’s fascinating, and I am not unique in pointing this out, to see the elements of communist influence in the history of conservatism. There were lots of important hard left to hard right defectors, including Meyer, Burnham and Chambers.
While not part of the American Conservative Movement, Hans-Hermann Hoppe went from Marxism to Rothbardism to half-monarchism, simply because he wanted an intellectually rigorous system. Burnham was I think the same - he really did not like "the professors of the cocktail parties" whose opinions were more fashion and gossip and less precise analysis.
I dunno. In hindsight, the professors of the cocktail parties were kind of right? While a half-socialist, half-libertarian kind of stance, a welfare state without serious socialism does not make a lot of intellectual sense, the world does not always conform to the rigid ideologies of intellectuals. It seems it was pragmatic enough. Like how it was said the British Empire was made in a fit of absence of the mind, something similar can be said about the Western welfare state, there was no deep plan to rebuild society from the ground up, rather, just randomly addressing whichever problems seemed the most dire.
In a certain sense, that was conservative. In the Michael Oakeshott sense, perhaps Edmund Burke sense. If you would tell those guys you want more equality, they warn you against the dangers of ideology. But if you just want a social housing project to those particular people here, or banning the discrimination of that particular people there, they would be a lot more understanding.
Yeah, you see that basic assumption in Kirk, for example: The left is fundamentally motivated by a levelling ideology. When in reality I think it’s closer to what you describe in the political tradition of the Anglosphere countries at least.
Not only politicized evangelical groups, but the US Catholic hierarchy, as well. As far as I understand, Catholic teaching rejects much of the conservative movement, especially on economic matters and immigration. Catholic popular opinion is fairly closely aligned with general US popular opinion. But much of the US hierarchy has jumped the shark for the movement's priorities. They're not quite anti-immigration or pro-neoliberalism--they just a perfunctory emphasis their teachings in this area.