Right Turns

"I have experienced similar reactions throughout my academic career. In the early 1980s, I helped edit the neoconservative public-policy journal The Public Interest, and though I haven't considered myself a conservative for at least two decades, many academics I meet are astonished to learn this little fact. Some are rendered speechless. Others ask, 'Are you still a neoconservative?,' by which they mean, 'Are you still beating your country?'"

Mark Lilla in The Chronicle Review argues that university faculties lack intellectual diversity.


"I will pass over Lilla himself, who I would certainly count as conservative in this sense. Allan Silver, a professor of sociology and a New Deal liberal, is a stalwart defender of the core curriculum, a proponent of returning ROTC to campus, and an uncompromising foe of ethnic, racial, and gender preferences. Alan Brinkley, provost and a professor of history who has written brilliantly about American conservatism, is someone to whom conservative graduate students gravitate. Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist whom I suppose would be considered a liberal, has nevertheless engaged in ferocious debates with his colleagues Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs in defense of globalization, and in my view clearly has the better argument. One can be culturally conservative while being politically liberal. The liberals I mentioned above are the Tories of higher education, defending academe's basic values against the blight of political correctness."

Bruce L.R. Smith and Alan Wolfe respond.


"But this narrative of conservative defeat and retrenchment--tightly focused on backlash politics and movement conservatism--is only one part of the story. The recent turn in scholarship toward economic change offers another way of understanding the fate of the movement. For despite the financial crisis of the past year, the faith in laissez-faire that conservatives promoted throughout the postwar period continues to exercise a deep hold on American politics."

And Kim Phillips-Fein in The Nation provides a historiography.


"This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a 'conservative' media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint."

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker describes where the Right has gone wrong.


"Despite what Sam Tanenhaus says, conservatism is not dead. Rather, it's undead."

And Rod Dreher in The Dallas Morning News denounces the rise of "Zombie conservatives."


"What all of this has in common is a rejection of the mores of American democracy. There were some things that people on the left and right used to agree on. You might not like it if Congress passes the president's agenda, but the law is the law. You might not like the president himself, but you're not going to make a big stink about it when he does things like pardon turkeys on Thanksgiving or tell kids to study hard and stay in school. You might not want to vote for what the president is arguing for, but if you're a member of Congress you don't heckle him like you're a drunken frat boy in a comedy club."

Paul Waldman in The American Prospect describes the threat.


"At the same time, with the implosion of the Christian right's leadership and the last year's cornucopia of GOP sex scandals, the party needed to take a break from incessant moralizing, and required a new ideology to take the place of family values cant. The belief system analysts sometimes call "producerism" served nicely. Producerism sees society as divided between productive workers--laborers, small businessmen and the like--and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy--they are both financiers and welfare bums--and their larceny is enabled by the government they control."

Also in The American Prospect, Michelle Goldberg discusses the return of white racial politics.


"Like many other followers of Rand, John Allison of BB&T has taken to claiming vindication in the convulsive events of the past year. 'Rand predicted what would happen fifty years ago,' he told The New York Times. 'It’s a nightmare for anyone who supports individual rights.' If Rand was truly right, of course, then Allison will flee his home and join his fellow supermen in some distant capitalist nirvana. So perhaps the economic crisis may bring some good after all."

Jonathan Chait in The New Republic uses the publication of two biographies of Ayn Rand to explain her pernicious influence on today's conservatives.


"When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place."

Alexander Zaitchik in Salon profiles Glenn Beck's favorite writer.


"It's difficult enough to write about McCarthyites and Goldwaterites with the proper proportions of imaginative sympathy and moral judgment. But when we're caught in the throes of our own contentious moment, it hardly seems possible to separate the political need to fight irrationalism and zealotry from the psycho-sociological project of distilling the motives of extremists. It's natural, even necessary, to try to make sense of a movement that appears—to many of us, at any rate—delusional. But the most that history, or historians, can do is what Hofstadter did in the first half of the 'Paranoid Style': point to the many antecedents of today's right-wing fantasies and, by putting them in historical context, making them more comprehensible and perhaps less fearsome."

David Greenberg in Slate explains the roots of Richard Hofstadter's investigation of the far right.