What Conservative Canon?

The American Thinker ^ | 10 Aug 2018 | Paul Gottfried

[oblomov]

In 2012, I came across a scholarly article in a journal on rhetoric on "The Conservative Canon and Its Uses." The author, Michael J. Lee, undertook to explain why the American conservative movement had put together a "secular canon" featuring its leading thinkers. According to Lee, this selection of books and seminal authors has been designed to forge a "spiritual bond" among groups that otherwise have exhibited sharp disagreement. Conventional libertarians, social traditionalists, and anarcho-capitalists, to name just three such groups, have been able to cooperate on common purposes because a canon has been created that embraces figures from all of these traditions. Certain rhetorical phrases, moreover, have been repeatedly identified with this shared heritage, including references to "permanent things" and "values."

This canon has been periodically updated, and with the ascendancy of the neoconservatives and Straussians in the 1980s, certain golden oldies, like the works of Russell Kirk and the Southern Agrarians, lost their place in the conservative canon. This did not come about without protest, and I recall receiving angry notes from members of the Old Right complaining about how their favorites in the canon had been replaced by such relative newcomers as Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, and Irving Kristol. In 2001, Jonah Goldberg wrote a commentary in National Review in response to his devotees who asked him to name the authors whom he would place in the "conservative canon." Goldberg proposed figures he identified with National Review. He then almost sheepishly explained that he should probably add to his list Bloom's Closing of the American Mind but couldn't quite make it through Bloom's exposition of the dangers of the "Nietzscheanization of the Left." As a scholar of German intellectual history, I would note that Jonah was missing very little.

[oblomov]

There was never really a canon, and those who tried to enforce one did so out of political expediency. But is this tactic still relevant and useful?

[Oklahoma]

You would expect a diverse coalition of political thinkers to agree on at least a few core principles. You would also expect that on the issues where there are disagreements that the various factions would at least respect that the other factions may not agree. That would mean not destroying the coalition based on the areas of non-agreement.

[IronJack]

There IS a canon, albeit not as formalized as the Manifesto held as scripture by the Left.

Russell Kirk, Murray Rothbard, William Buckley, David Horowitz, William Bennet, and, digging further back, the likes of Winston Churchill and Edmund Burke — all are political theorists who see the world “rightly.”

And that doesn’t even touch the economic body of work from men like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith, et. al..

[AndyJackson]

He then almost sheepishly explained that he should probably add to his list Bloom's Closing of the American Mind but couldn't quite make it through Bloom's exposition of the dangers of the "Nietzscheanization of the Left." As a scholar of German intellectual history, I would note that Jonah was missing very little.

He is not much of a scholar. Bloom explained very clearly how the left's use, in English, of bizarre and meaningless abstractions to sound hypersophisticated, derives from German scholarship. Anyone familiar with German compount nouns would get the point and anyone familiar with the left's use of language to deconstruct received wisdom and turn it on it's head would also get the point.

So I cannot understand how this scholar missed the point.

There is this gem in the article with the ascendancy of the neoconservatives and Straussians in the 1980s...

Well this is to confound things. For instance the great Harry Jaffa, may he RIP, or Alan Bloom were both students of Strauss and therefore "Straussians." Neither was a neoconservative. That some students of Strauss - Wolfowitz appears to be the prominent if not singular example - became neocons is to damn the teacher for sins of a student who wasn't a very good student at all.

I have known a number of Straussians who are not neocons and despise the neocons as much as we do.

[Architect of Avalon]

The Republican Party has no core good positions that its politicians stick to.

The Democratic Party does have core bad positions that its politicians stick to.

That is a problem.

[central_va]

The only “core” values the GOPe consistently back are open borders, cheap labor human trafficking and one side rape ( stupid ) trade.

[Architect of Avalon]

Thankfully, Trump opposes all of that, and so the GOPe hates him.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Here's your conservative canon.

[iowamark]

Whittaker Chambers' Witness remains required reading.