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Whither The Right?
American Rattlesnake ^ | June 11, 2016 | Gerard Perry

Posted on 06/11/2016 9:31:08 AM PDT by OddLane

One of the benefits of the Trump campaign, regardless of one’s thoughts on the merits of a Trump presidency, is its exposure of the conservative establishment. The irony of an undisciplined and at times extremely uncouth candidate, whose grasp of policy is tenuous, to say the least, obliterating the intellectual veneer of a movement with hundreds of millions of dollars in endowments and countless scholars at its disposal is one which will be endlessly analyzed in the years to come.

Professor George Hawley’s book, Right-Wing Critics Of American Conservatism, does not seek to analyze or deconstruct the Trump phenomenon, but it does hold some clues as to why Donald Trump has succeeded in dismantling a political infrastructure which has dominated the Republican Party for over half a century.

This book is a marvelous discovery for a number of reasons, not least because it provides a coherent, internally consistent definition of conservatism, as well as its ideological antipode, contemporary liberalism. After examining and rejecting several philosophical distinctions between the right and the left-including Thomas Sowell’s assertion that this divide reflects a difference in beliefs about the innate malleability of human nature-Hawley arrives at an intelligible cleavage between these two very broad political groupings.

He asserts that the left/modern liberalism is an ideology which extols equality as the primary virtue above all others when considering how our society should be structured, whereas the right/conservatives view equality as a subsidiary or ancillary value within our society.

(Excerpt) Read more at american-rattlesnake.org ...


TOPICS: Government; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: americanrattlesnake; conservatism; donaldtrump; georgehawley

1 posted on 06/11/2016 9:31:09 AM PDT by OddLane
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To: OddLane

“He asserts that the left/modern liberalism is an ideology which extols equality...”

All commissars are equal, but some commissars are a little more equal.


2 posted on 06/11/2016 9:36:40 AM PDT by Jack Hammer
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To: OddLane

Whither, whence, hither, hence ... once we had great pronouns in our language.


3 posted on 06/11/2016 9:38:34 AM PDT by Tax-chick ("The world is a dangerous place whose inhabitation always ends in death."~Theodore Dalrymple)
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To: OddLane

Few are aware of the true philosophical bases of the right and left, or of the essential roles of constitutional government, or of the rising stakes in each successive election cycle going forward.


4 posted on 06/11/2016 9:38:46 AM PDT by lurk (T)
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To: OddLane
To me, the liberal glosses over the fact that individuals are different and possess different productive talents. My objection is the assumption liberals make that all people should be rewarded equally, regardless of their productive contribution to the system. A conservative recognizes this difference, but doesn't see a mandate to take the productive person's income and give it to the less productive (in some cases, non-productive) person.

Liberals concentrate on fixing the income differences via a handout (e.g., free cell phones for deadbeats) while conservatives prefer a handup (e.g., training programs) that allows the individual to rise to the level they want. Fifty years of handouts and with more and more people thinking they "deserve" more handouts has clearly shown this approach solves nothing in terms of income equality. When are the poor going to learn the Democrats don't give a crap about them; only that they vote for them, hence the handouts to keep them in line. Stupid.

5 posted on 06/11/2016 9:48:15 AM PDT by econjack (I'm not bossy...I just know what you should be doing.)
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To: OddLane
He asserts that the left/modern liberalism is an ideology which extols equality as the primary virtue above all others when considering how our society should be structured, whereas the right/conservatives view equality as a subsidiary or ancillary value within our society.

I guess so, but ideologies become tribal. After enough political cycles, whatever the original philosophical difference was, the conflict comes to be more of a raw "us versus them" thing. You can find some very elitist people in the egalitarian camp. They're there because the use of power in the name of equality is in their own group interest, or because at some point something really turned them against the other side.

6 posted on 06/11/2016 10:00:33 AM PDT by x
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To: OddLane

Never has the “battered wife syndrome” analogy fit a situation as well as the marriage of the conservative movement to the GOPe.

There Is no mention of the media so this analysis of the Liberal/Conservative distinction is flawed.


7 posted on 06/11/2016 10:07:16 AM PDT by mrsmith (Dumb sluts: Lifeblood of the Media, Backbone of the Democrat/RINO Party!)
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To: mrsmith
Hawley is focused on the underlying philosophical difference between the (modern) left and the right, so externalities don't really play into his definitions.

As I mentioned in my post, another definition would be Sowell's, i.e. the different approach each has to human nature. The left views it as infinitely malleable, while the right recognizes man's fallibility and the inability to fundamentally alter something ordained by God/created through evolution.

8 posted on 06/11/2016 10:22:36 AM PDT by OddLane
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To: OddLane
While opponents of conservatives have always adhered to a policy of no enemies on the left, movement conservatism has taken precisely the opposite tack, making alliances of convenience with its ostensible enemies whenever popular right wing movements threaten its place within the political firmament.

That's too general and too dogmatic. "Always" doesn't include the 1940s and 1950s when liberals were actually fighting against Communists, and "whenever" doesn't have much to do with the days when National Review was edited by John Sullivan, when they published Sullivan's and Peter Brimelow's criticism of immigration policy. Fringe voices have been excluded from National Review or movement conservatism, but it's easy to forget that exclusion wasn't immediate or automatic. Plenty of dissidents found a home there for longish periods of time.

For example, why did a vociferous defender of Senator Joe McCarthy believe that the anti-Communism of the John Birch Society was beyond the pale? Also, why are the seemingly benign sociological observations of Jason Richwine worse than the anti-civil rights editorials from the early days of National Review?

There were some real snakes that Buckley excluded from his movement, whatever his own past was like. Not everybody who criticizes "movement conservatism" from the right is a good influence. Isn't that clear by now?

National Review movement conservatism is quickly becoming a thing of the past. What you'll see now is people trying to define their own version of "movement conservatism." They'll behave in the same high-handed way as the old NR commissars they criticize and exclude ideological deviants in the same way that they condemn yesterdays' movement poohbahs and panjandrums for doing.

9 posted on 06/11/2016 10:28:16 AM PDT by x
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To: OddLane

, whose grasp of policy is tenuous, to say the least,

Yeah, “policy” is tough to grasp. Got it. By the way, WTF is this policy that a successful, educated 60 something American finds so tough to grasp?


10 posted on 06/11/2016 10:46:53 AM PDT by TalBlack (Evil doesn't have a day job....)
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To: x
Hawley explores this issue in his chapter about paleoconservatives.

You're right about the tolerance-if you could call it that-displayed by magazines like National Review. I think Brimelow was a senior editor at NR until 1998-quickly jettisoned once Lowry was put in charge.

11 posted on 06/11/2016 11:11:50 AM PDT by OddLane
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To: OddLane

Great article, thanks.


12 posted on 06/11/2016 11:33:33 AM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist (MAGA! Make America Great Again)
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To: OddLane

Then too bad for him as ‘modern’ liberalism is solely a justification for Bread and Circus as exemplified by our government subsidized consumer spending, which is done for the benefit of the media that monopolizes control of the ‘public square’.
Liberalism/conservatism is, and will always be, defined by support for “wise” (democratic0 feudalism/ support for divided governance.

A modern philosopher should heed the effect the medium has on the message and consider the ramification of a consolidated national mass media. Ignoring the distortions caused by the surfaces of Plato’s cave (so to speak) yields sterility.


13 posted on 06/11/2016 12:21:13 PM PDT by mrsmith (Dumb sluts: Lifeblood of the Media, Backbone of the Democrat/RINO Party!)
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To: OddLane

undisciplined and at times extremely uncouth candidate, whose grasp of policy is tenuous HAHA was in debt 9.2 BILLION with a B, when the housing market crashed, NOW owns 200 companies, employs thousands, has an IQ of 157, the highest of ANY POTUS in history was in the 130s, has wrietten many best sellers, http://wafaa-sherif.com/new/ar/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/How%20to%20Get%20Rich.pdf


14 posted on 06/11/2016 12:43:45 PM PDT by hawg-farmer - FR..October 1998
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To: OddLane

Let’s get our terminology correct. Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Bill Kristol, Rich Lowry, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, and the rest of the pro-Democrats are NOT and never have been Conservatives. Oh, they talk about it as if they know something; but they don’t.

So, stop with the Conservative label. They are part of the Uniparty and whatever philosophy they espouse at the moment.


15 posted on 06/11/2016 1:12:49 PM PDT by NTHockey (Rules of engagement #1: Take no prisoners. And to the NSA trolls, FU)
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To: Extremely Extreme Extremist

Don’t mention it.


16 posted on 06/11/2016 6:31:15 PM PDT by OddLane
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