One of the features of progressive thought, apparent since its inception during the French Revolution, is a pervasive paranoia about a particular bogeyman: the conservative intellectual.
This figure, as constructed in the mind of the progressive thinker, is admittedly something of an oxymoron. Conservatism is supposed to be anti-intellectual and, frankly, stupid. So the conservative ‘intellectual’ is generally always suspected only be masquerading as such. Deep down inside, he is merely a buffoon – with a good dictionary.
And yet, at the same time, conservative intellectuals seem to be glimpsed behind the scenes wherever power accumulates – clutching levers, pressing buttons, twisting moustaches, whispering in ears. For all that conservatism can only be attributable to a lack of genuine insight, intellectual conservatives themselves purportedly possess vast cunning and profound, malevolent influence. This combination of sinister competence and political ruthlessness appears wherever progressives turn their gaze to the right.
An interesting example of the mood of paranoia which permeates progressive writing on this subject came across my inbox last week through Niccolo Soldo’s newsletter. In the article in question, a person called Katherine Stewart identifies in the Claremont Institute (an American think-tank nowadays vaguely associated with the ‘new’ or ‘dissident’ Right) the seeds of – yes, you guessed it – incipient fascism. She informs us, semi-coherently, that:
Most of us are familiar with the theocrats of the religious Right and the anti-government extremists, groups that overlap a bit but remain distinct. The Claremont Institute folks aren’t quite either of those things, and yet they’re both and more.
No, I don’t really know what it means to not quite be something, and yet at the same time to be it and more, either. But it is clear at least that there is sinister portent here. The Claremont Institute, we are told, embodies a “nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity” and is an “indispensable part of Right-wing American’s evolution towards authoritarianism”. It is “openly contemptuous of democracy”, imbued with “paranoid ideas” and “rabid misogyny”. It hates the idea of there being a “more just society”. And it “want[s] to blow the whole place up”.
Moreover it is close, very close, to having its way. Its pockets are lined with cash donated by “the ultrawealthy”, Stewart tells us – “the result of massive investment that conservative money made over the past 50-plus years in polluting American political discourse with its massive complex of ideological factories”. Claremont is using this cash to promote an American brand of Caesarism that apparently gives intellectual succour to the likes of J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis and (naturally) Donald Trump. The implication is that one more election could usher “the Claremonsters” to political supremacy. But even if this isn’t achievable, they’ve already managing to spread enough “unreasonable ideas” to get an “unreasonable society”. In short: there’s a Right-wing think tank out there and it’s working in cahoots with populists to destroy modernity. (Towards the end of the piece it even turns out that Claremont is “literally Hitler“. Literally.)
This is obvious nonsense – the type of thing that, if it was written about a Left-wing think tank, would instantly be dismissed as conspiracy theory. But Stewart’s piece, breathless and credulous as it is, is strongly reminiscent of a much calmer and more discerning article the famous Marxist historian Perry Anderson wrote for the London Review of Books back in the early 1990s, titled ‘The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century’. Written on the occasion of the death of Michael Oakeshott, it surveys the commonalities between four thinkers who Anderson calls “the outstanding European theorists of the intransigent Right” – Oakeshott himself, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt and Friedrich von Hayek. (For some reason he did not include Martin Heidegger; I find this inexplicable, except perhaps for the fact that Heidegger’s work defies blithe summary in an LRB article.)
Whatever opinion one might hold about the ideas of these thinkers, Anderson tells us (his own views are obvious), they continue to “shape… a large pail of the mental world of end-of-the-century Western politics”. Partly because of their admittedly “remarkable gifts”, and partly because they “went with the grain of the social order”, they were “heard in the chancelleries” for all that they were deemed by fellow academics to be somewhat eccentric. The conclusion is clear: however little influence Right-wing intellectuals wield in the academy, they matter politically, and in a deeply sinister way.
Anderson is a heavyweight who actually reads and understands things. And he is therefore much less hysterical than Stewart. There is no stuff and nonsense about “polluting… political discourse with [a] massive complex of ideological factories” here. But the basic point is the same. Oakeshott, Strauss, Schmitt and Hayek, for all their formidable erudition, stood for one thing only: “hold[ing] popular sovereignty at bay”. They wanted to “restrain” democracy. And they exerted vastly disproportionate influence in doing so:
Schmitt counselled Papen and received Kiesinger; Straussians thronged the National Security Council under Reagan, and surround Quayle; Hayek earned formal homage from Thatcher on the floor of the Commons; and Oakeshott, as we shall see, is an increasing inspiration in the penumbra of the styleless Major. Even arcane teaching can reach gentlemen. They are the heirs.
The argument is thus essentially the same, and so, of course, is the tin ear. At the time Anderson was writing, it may have been vaguely plausible to imagine that the thought of Right-wing thinkers like Hayek and Strauss were having some impact on practical politics (though the fever dream of a Michael Oakeshott-inspired John Major-headed Government leading the U.K. to a tyrannical future, or even any kind of future at all, is something else entirely). But 30 years later, his depiction of reality looks as though it was scrawled in crayon, and his warnings about the “arcane teaching” of his axis of intellectual evil seem simply outlandish. From the growth in the size of the state to the technocratisation of government, and from the ascendance of ESG and EDI to the cultural dominance of ‘wokeness’, there is barely anything about the world we live in today that suggests that the teachings of any of Anderson’s quartet had the remotest influence on public life, anywhere.
The fantasy that has taken hold of the likes of Anderson and Stewart – the preposterous notion that conservative intellectuals actually have a say in anything much at all – is attributable to a common, but thoroughly misconceived, ideal in which the quality of an idea is what determines its impact, rather than the sheer quantity of people who believe in it. Anderson makes this explicit:
The work of just one theorist, John Rawls, has probably accumulated more scholarly commentary than that of [Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss and Oakeshott] put together. Yet this veritable academic industry has had virtually no impact on the world of Western politics. The reticence of its subject, who has never risked his reputation with express commitments, is no doubt part of the reason. But it is also to do with the distance between a discourse of justice, however olympian, and the realities of a society driven by power and profit. The quartet considered here had the political courage of their conviction. But they also went, more largely, with the grain of the social order. So although they could often appear marginal, even eccentric figures to their colleagues, their voice was heard in the chancelleries.
The idea here is that, while almost nobody teaching at a university really reads the work of conservative thinkers (Anderson is absolutely right about this), the actual substance of their ideas resonated with Right-wing politicians, and hence they managed to wield disproportionate influence. What matters, in other words, in determining whether a given thinker will have impact in the ‘real world’, is the nature of the ideas that are being communicated and whether they find the right audience.
This is the root of the error. The truth is in fact almost the exact opposite. The substance of an idea matters much less than the fact that it is widely believed: in intellectual affairs, Napoleon’s old adage that “quantity has a quality all of its own” holds sway. If lots of people have the same idea, then that idea will tend to have real-world effects regardless of its intrinsic quality. If only a few people share an idea, it is unlikely to go anywhere, not matter how close it gets to the truth.
We see this very clearly in Anderson’s own example of John Rawls. It may be true that Rawls was not invited to dine with Presidents and has never been lauded in the House of Commons. In that sense his ideas had next to no impact. But he is very, very widely cited and read – he must rank in the top five thinkers of the 20th century in these respects – and his influence permeates the academy. Indeed, the academic humanities and social sciences are utterly steeped in the basic Rawlsian notion that: a) it is possible and desirable to think rationally about how society should be arranged; and b) this ought to be done to make it distributively just.
There is barely a university student at a university anywhere in the West who does not encounter this basic idea as the implicit foundation of the intellectual project tout court. And this influence then bleeds out into society, and hence into politics, because so many university students go on to occupy elite positions after graduation. It is diffuse – most of these people could not even name John Rawls, and spent very little time indeed actually studying much at university at all – but this doesn’t matter. They are imbued with the ideas, there are an awful lot of them, and they go on to become teachers, lawyers, civil servants and the like – where they put those ideas, wittingly or otherwise, into effect.
It is not just Rawls, of course, of whom this is true. One could say the same thing about a dozen or so major theorists of the 20th century whose ideas have worked their way into the academic atmosphere so pervasively that university students simply breathe them in as they go about their daily life on campus – admittedly very often in half-baked and poorly understood form. Undergraduates are, in short, presented with a style of thinking which, while not monolithic, is predicated on a broadly accepted conceptual matrix in which university-educated people are supposed to shape society in accordance with their own enlightened views, employing the organs of an enlarged administrative state in order to achieve this. And since students are similarly presented with the set of views which are deemed ‘enlightened’, the result is a regimented orthodoxy which permeates the graduate class and hence finds impact through the types of job – any job, really, having social status and influence – that graduates tend to take.
What are these views which they imbibe, and which hence comprise this orthodoxy? Well, given that confessedly Left-wing academics outnumber confessedly Right-wing ones by a factor of between nine and 14 to one in the social sciences and humanities, you can probably do the maths for yourself. I will in a future post explain why the terms ‘Left-wing’ and ‘Right-wing’ have become rather misleading in this context. But in shorthand form, the message is easily read. The vast majority of academics are not conservatives. And thus they are very unlikely to be sympathetic to conservative ideas, to read the work of conservative thinkers and to have their undergraduate students engage with the conservative tradition, either.
We see the consequences everywhere, and these hardly need spelling out. It is not, as conservatives frequently convince themselves, that universities simply fill students’ heads with propaganda. In adopting this criticism they are equally guilty of adopting a paranoiac approach as the opposite ‘side’. The problem is much less sinister: it is simply that the modern undergraduate marinates in an intellectual sauce whose ingredients are almost entirely picked from regions of scholarship that are hostile or dismissive of conservative thought. He or she does not have the faintest clue about what conservative intellectualism even is, let alone reading the work of prominent conservative thinkers. And since the only ideas which he or she is exposed to are essentially anti-conservative, those are the ideas which – perfectly naturally –he or she comes to believe. And given the way the university system works (with 99+% of academics themselves having gone to university as undergraduates) this process simply self-perpetuates and self-reinforces.
The truth, in other words, is that Anderson has it exactly backwards. It matters very much that Right-wing thinkers such as Oakeshott and Hayek are barely read by academics – because this means that they are barely read by students either, and the field is then almost entirely open for intellectualism of different kinds to frolic in as they wish. Conservative ideas are consequently almost entirely absent from the culture, at least in properly explicated form. And the result is an almost total lack of consequence in terms of practical politics or daily life.
The notion that a handful of Right-wing intellectuals or a relatively modestly funded Right-wing think tank would be capable of overturning the monolithic nature of the orthodoxy to which we are now subject is therefore an absurd delusion. This does not mean that the analysis of our predicament offered by conservative intellectuals has nothing to offer – far from it – nor that the rich tradition of conservative thought should be abandoned (indeed, in part two in this series I will explain why it is that a serious project of conservative intellectualism is so desperately needed). It simply means that we need to push past an awful lot of silliness in order to get to the nub of the matter when it comes to the role that conservative thought should play as we enter the middle period of the 21st century.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. This article first appeared on his Substack. You can subscribe here.
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The more that institutions become captured by the ‘woke’ neo-Marxists the less control can be exerted upon them by democratically elected ‘right wing’ politicians.
Blair weaponised state institutions and quangos against any change by stuffing them full of Common Purpose ‘graduates’.
This is why despite 13 years of Conservative government our state apparatus still remains ultra-liberal left leaning.
“We are all Socialists now” —Nancy Pelosi ——–(At least I think it has her). But no matter who said it, that is basically the state of affairs we have now where right wing thought is criminalised. The Liberal Progressive Virus has spread all over the western world and there appears to be no antedote. —————But wait. Look at Poland. Look at Hungary. ——-Maybe it isn’t over until the fat lady sings. Or am I not allowed to say “fat lady”? F..k it I am saying it anyway.
John Major was influenced by evil right-wingers? Lol!
The author elides Conservatives with conservatives so I stopped reading.
Yep. Hole in one.
What no Scruton? I am sure he would be miffed,and smiling wickedly from an elegant armchair dressed in hunting pink.
He knew his Fools,Frauds and Firebrands.
The Straussians themselves didn’t do much but their neocon acolytes have held huge sway over foreign policy for decades. I don’t think the distinction described in this writing makes much sense anymore. If you study neoliberalism you will see that it borrows from fascism, communism and free market economics. Essentially combining the extractive power of all of these and the concommitant control measures needed to ensure the smooth flow of resources upwards. This article might’ve made sense twenty years ago now it sounds more like a cry for help given the true horror of the situation.
But how on earth do we get the West to go un-woke? Is it even possible now? An interesting viewpoint on the woke ideology from a Latin American perspective;
”I would say that woke ideology is the worst threat to Europe in its entire history. It is more dangerous than the Ottoman Empire trying to conquer Europe and more dangerous than Russia was in times of the Iron Curtain.
Woke ideology is destroying Europe from within without Europeans even noticing it. They are absorbing this woke ideology without noticing that it is a poison that is killing them. Cultural warfare is very dangerous and very effective. It is the most advanced kind of warfare, and Europeans must find ways to face it, some kind of antidote.
When you have lost a sense of truth, when there is no truth, when you have lost a sense of family, when young people are confused, when they want to undergo surgery to change their sex, when they start asking questions about what sex they are and believe their sex is not determined anymore by nature but by perception, then you have a society so confused and so weak that it can be taken over by other forces.
And this is what is actually happening. Europe is not being conquered with tanks and rifles, but it is being conquered through cultural warfare. European civilization is becoming too weak to resist the different threats it is facing because it is being destroyed from within.
With my latest book being translated into several European languages, I would like to contribute with the experience of a Latin American and Venezuelan to convey this message: that Europeans not only need to answer this threat with a political movement, but they must also build a social, grassroots movement to defend their families against woke ideology.”
https://rmx.news/woke/exclusive-europe-is-not-being-conquered-with-tanks-and-rifles-but-through-cultural-warfare/
Interesting post Mogs.
Especially this:
“Europeans not only need to answer this threat with a political movement, but they must also build a social, grassroots movement to defend their families against woke ideology”
Unfortunately democratic politics in the UK produces parties who all cleave to the same transnational agendas such as DEI and ESG because their central bank bonds have been sold to Blackrock, Vanguard et al.
All political parties who stand a chance of election have all signed up to The UN Paris Agreement which forces increasingly stringent environmental legislation upon us all. Hence no real push back on London’s ULEZ from the Tories.
The Tories stole Farage’s populist thunder and dressed themselves up as the Brexit party simply to thwart the dismantling of the LIBLABCONGREEN consensus. If the Tories were serious about enacting cultural change they would simply force all state funded quangos and civil servants to declare whether they are Common Purpose graduates. If this is found to be the case they should be forced to reapply for their job.
To defend your family against wokery, parents need to remove TikTok from kids phones and schools need to have a proscribed curriculum which covers race relations and sex education in a fair and balanced manner.
Very Good Post ——Have you read “War on the West” by Douglass Murray”? Or how about “While Europe Slept” by Bruce Bauer?
No I haven’t tbh. Thanks for the recommendations though.
Scruton made fun of the notion of ‘neoliberalism’ and in a sense he was right. Because the term doesn’t contain this force very little does. There is a film called The Lady From Shanghai starring Orsen Welles and Rita Hayworth. And he talks to her about the shark feeding frenzy. How they are drawn towards blood and then start eating everything in sight. So frenzied they are that they start to bite each other. And in the end they are so crazed that they bite at their own stomachs til their death.
If you are worried about the health and general survival of your loved ones then you have to be thinking certain thoughts there is no room for deviation. First and foremost you have to be thinking about likeminded people and more importantly networks of survival in your local area. Don’t be scared by numbers if you can then get a group of intelligent people together at this point and share the best of all of your insights it will count for a great deal in the time to come.If you can’t then just do the best you can whilst being informed from the spirit.
Well speaking of intelligent people, this guy is the polar opposite. Imagine if we were surrounded by people like this. Not only is he thick as mince but doubly so because he’s admitting to it live on national TV. But these meat robots walk amongst us undetected, much like the alien imposters in ’80s classic, ‘V’. They look human, they sound human but they definitely do not pass the scratch ‘n sniff test!
https://twitter.com/SKMorefield/status/1696305217770287159
I’d expect him to use a hidden zipper on his back starting just below his shirt collar to get out of his human costume once he’s off stage and shuffle away on all fours as the reptilian he clearly is. I also wouldn’t be overly surprised when these repitilians had four different sexes at various stages of their lives and were highly allergic to carbon dioxide. Would explain a real lot.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that the majority of the population are not conscious beings.
They’re sort-of conscious beings but they only rarely have the time to regain their conscience because they keep being flooded with noise information by TPTB in order to render and keep them intellectually helpless.
But a major part of what the woke cult involves is this ‘guy’ below. I think he’s just one of many of its victims. I genuinely don’t know if this is parody or if he really did go through all of this and is speaking from personal experience. It’s like humour, pathos and regret all mixed into this 3min poetic ditty. Not sure whether to laugh or commiserate..
https://twitter.com/TheOfficial1984/status/1696520163196317906
He comes across to me as a normal male who has possibly observed what has happened to a friend or relative and isn’t happy about it.
But who knows?
Absolutely shitty parody of the quite nice song we had here not that long ago. Is this really so difficult to recognize? And that’s all these people are capable of. Provided someone else comes up with something, they can make a 2nd rate copy of it where they’re talking at length about the output of their digestive system and about other gay paphernalia. At this point, all the so-called liberals explode with mock laughter and congratulate themselves that they’ve won another round of the so-called culture war with the tried-and-trusted method people will always fall for.
Of course its difficult to recognize, that’s what I posted. And I have no clue which song you’re on about so your reference is obviously lost on me. I literally couldn’t tell if the guy is taking the piss or has really had his penis chopped off and is lamenting his decision.
There was an article here not that long ago about some guitar player/ singer whose song Rich man north of Richmond had become a Twitter-hit. We also immediately had local wisecracks pointing how PRIMITIVE (!!1) this really was. That’s where the chorus with the It’s a damn shame … comes from, only that it’s here accompanied by someone who can really neither sing nor play the guitar (or at least intentionally tries to avoid showing skills at either of both) and with some pretty unappetizing lyrics centered on human excrement and gay this-and-that.
Run-of-the mill Wera indelleggdually so soupirior and suffisicated! parody attempt.
…just my two penneth……I don’t like this ‘parody’ of Anthony Oliver’s Rich guys north of Richmond….
The original, seemed to me to be a genuine song with genuine feelings felt by the singer …. and something people could relate to and get behind.
This parody is at worst some kind of attempt to downgrade or belittle that song and the people who identified with it….or at best a shitty parody….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro
Oliver Anthony!……LOL …..that’s what happens when your name is two Christian names!!!
I agree it’s hard to tell what his point is….but it is a pretty crappy parody of another song…I’ve replied to RW and put the ‘original’ song on….
There has been no substantial left wing in this country since 1990. As for the tradionalist view it was going out of vogue in the mid nineteenth century and the countervailing force has got stronger and stronger. You can see the energy and attraction of the industrial revolution and it was at that point that the force that opposes us made a big move. Not only did it assert itself but it prevented redemptive forces from entering the atmosphere of the earth. This stopped in 2014 and so it might not look like it but in some sense humanity is trying to heal itself and the bright lights are returning.
“There has been no substantial left wing in this country since 1990.”
Which “substantial” wing have we had in this country since 1990? What are your definitions of “left” and “right” wing?
I remember in 1990 people standing out on the streets selling copies of ‘Living Mrxism’. And there was still a sense of an oppositional force. I felt a deep melancholy in 1994 because I read the signs of the previous three years and saw that Bush’s ‘New World Order’ was coming into place. Not only abroad but at home too in the way that this would affect local communities, jobs, working conditions etc. This whole time period makes me feel sad given the potential we had and how we squandered it.
Yeah, we need more “Living Marxism” – it has been a roaring success wherever it has been attempted.
But not in Albba nia.
Boosh, the left wing republican.
Mine – republican and monarchist. Hence the idea of a right wing republican is a nonsense.
Collectivist vs individualist
I am ok with a monarchy, wouldn’t get rid of the institution here, just the current incumbents, but think you can make a success of things without a monarchy
You have to have some balls and some energy. What if you don’t have any and our current situation leaves you cold – this is no good. Just do it anyway even if your balls are shrunken. Because the alternative is a world of shrunken balls forever. Not just yours but everyones. It really is as simple and fundamental as that. Our enemy is very powerful but not very intelligent.
Don’t just fall into their trap. This is part of the trap. I say this now because we are in the easiest time in terms of saying things in the time to come. I know that the West has been essentially an adventure playground for many decades This is changing very quickly. I’m sure regular readers of this page understand the situation.
Just get a sense of reality because no matter what your background this is a different arena.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/is-us-getting-new-covid-vaccine-heres-president-joe-bidens-bold-plan-for-mandatory-immunization/articleshow/103109424.cms
Courtesy Dr Mike Yeadon.
Mandatory “vaccines” anyone?
Somewhat related.
Jordan Peterson lost his appeal against the Ontario College decision, and he now faces ‘re-education’ training of an indeterminate length.
His articulate rage is wonderful to hear. He’ll attend it, and record it, and then publicise it. He’s talking of the supreme court. If he’s going down, he’s going down swinging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_o8goN6FOA
Great article.