An Open Letter to Mark Lilla: Yes, We Should Take the Right Seriously

"The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead." So argued Mark Lilla, author of The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West and several other highly regarded books. A professor at Columbia University and a former editor of The Public Interest, Lilla's ideas demand respect. And in an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal just days after the 2008 presidential election, Lilla lamented the rise of Sarah Palin-style "populism" (as he described it), the complicity of conservative intellectuals in Palin's elevation to the national stage, and he celebrated her return then to Alaska. It should be noted, however, that Palin's anti-elite style embodied a particular form of nationalism that abjured both cosmopolitan elites and the more darkly hued "undeserving" poor. It is precisely this type of nationalism that animates Tea Party activism today.

Now, in an article written for The Chronicle of Higher Education's September 11 edition, Lilla alternately ridicules a newly-created Center for the Comparative Study of Right Wing Movements and gives it his blessing. He wonders if an institution situated at the University of California at Berkeley can do justice to that (now dead?) intellectual tradition mentioned above. He seems to ignore the center's actual purpose, stated in its name: to study right wing movements -- and not necessarily only those ideas of the conservative elites. He imagines the mistakes the newly formed center might make, such as comparing conservatism to violent right-wing movements. Along the way, Lilla makes several significant mistakes of his own.

He writes: "mainstream American conservatism, which pretty much is all there is to the American right, shares nothing meaningful with proto-fascist figures." Leaving aside for the moment the question of sharing with proto-fascists, let us examine Lilla's first point, that mainstream conservatism is all there is to the American right, pretty much.

Well, he has already told us that the conservative intellectual tradition, as he understood it, had been replaced by a rousing anti-elitism. More, he would have us ignore precisely those elements of contemporary conservatism that David Frum examined in his 1994 book, Dead Right: the nationalism of the Buchananites and the Religious Right. Certainly, those nationalists have appropriated the conservative intellectual tradition for their own purposes. Consider in this regard, the 1993 edition of The Conservative Movement written by Paul Gottfried, a Humanities Professor at Elizabethtown College. There is more that can be said about where the right's center of gravity is, but for the moment Lilla might check again his statement about the various elements constituting the American right.

He might also re-examine the issue of whether or not the right shares anything meaningful with proto-fascism. Now I must note here that fascism is not a word of much use in the American context. A highly centralized, totalizing national state is one of the hallmarks of fascism. Most of the conservative right and the far right oppose any centralizing tendencies in the federal government. And among the old-line white supremacists and the 21st Century white nationalists, only the national socialists propose a fascist state as part of their program. By contrast, there is a volkish nationalism that is very alive today. And it is precisely on this point that a remark Gottfried made at a small symposium in the Cooper Union dominated by Rockford Institute intellectuals becomes relevant. "We are all Schmittians now," Gottfried said.

He was referring to Carl Schmitt, a now deceased German political philosopher who joined the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) in 1933, helped formulate the legal foundations of Hitler's führer-state, but was ex-communicated from the Nazi elite before the death camps and the invasion of Poland.

Perhaps we should not make too much of Gottfried's association with Carl Schmitt, after all a host of other intellectuals including Jacques Derrida have dipped in the Schmittian waters. Nevertheless, there is much that mainstream conservatism has shared with white nationalism, including, for example, Pat Buchanan. And if Lilla wants more information on that subject, I will be happy to provide it.

In the spirit of full disclosure I must say that I am not an innocent bystander in this discussion. I come from the left, and lack the formal certificates of higher education. After decades spent studying right-wing social movements, my book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in May. (That book notes that after William Buckley had declared that Pat Buchanan could not be defended from the charge of anti-Semitism in 1992, the National Review endorsed Buchanan's candidacy for president in the New Hampshire primaries.) And I will be speaking at a Center for the Comparative Study of Right Wing Movements forum in Berkeley on October 8.

Nevertheless, I hope that my writing here will benefit Lilla's thinking about these matters, including his discussion of anti-communism and its significance on the right. Consider that after World War Two and after the hysteria of McCarthyism had subsided, anti-communism settled in as a staple of American life. Both Cold War liberals and National Review conservatives considered anti-communism a first principle. Southern segregationists covered their racism with anti-communism, describing King and all the civil rights workers as Communists. J. Edgar Hoover's Masters of Deceit was a runaway best seller. I would argue that anti-communism became both the pretext for American imperial designs (Guatemala 1954, etc.) and a core element in the social psyche that produces national identity. And it needs to be noted that whether or not mainstream conservatives felt bound to white supremacists, the vast majority of white supremacists felt bound to conservatives by their shared anti-communism.

After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the re-emergence of ethnic nationalism as a force in both the East and West, the conservative movement split apart. Pat Buchanan became a spokesman in opposition to the first Persian Gulf War. The very type of overseas military intervention he had once supported under the rubric of fighting communism became anathema to him, as he adopted the mantle of the Old Right and America first nationalism.

There is much more to that part of the story, also. I invite Lilla to read Blood and Politics, and then add again to the discussion at hand.

 

 

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Comments

[msbadger]

The last three paragraphs say it all. I have always thought that was the case. Well done, Mr. Zeskind.

[HANNIBAL1066]

From about 1998 to 2005, the Council of Conservative Citizens, the Ku Klux Klan, and neo-Nazis worked in cooperation with John Tanton in opposition to immigration. In 2005, Tanton played a significant role in creating first the Minuteman Project and then the "war of attrition" against immigrants pursued by Minutemen and anti-immigration groups, including John Tanton's network. The Minutemen groups allowed the neo-Nazis and Klan to further mainstream themselves. The Minutemen Civil Defense Corps was controlled by Alan Keyes and his Declaration Alliance. Keyes is one of the key figures in "the birther" myth. Jerome Corsi, at TheVanguard.org is also a big "birther" conspiracy proponent. The Tea Party movement now brings the Minutemen types, neo-Nazis, and Klan, gun rights advocates, sovereign citizens and taxpayer protesters, further into the mainstream. In addition to the "war of attrition," Tanton's network and elements of the Christian Right have led the assault on the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, there is considerable empirical evidence that before the Tea Party movement emerged there was considerable strategic and tactical cooperation between the Tanton network, white supremacists, and elements of the Christian Right. There is evidence that not only does the Tea Party movement spring from the Council for National Policy, but that the Constitution Party, TheVanguard.org, Richard Viguerie, and FreedomWorks all play a role. Zeskind and others are absolutely right that the current iteration of the Christian Right and Radical Right are a danger to democracy. PS. I've ordered your book.

[RandomMandarin]

I don't think the assertion that fascism is a very centralizi­ng/statist creed really helps us much. When reading about both Mussolini's Italian Fascism (and Mussolini, after all, is the one who coined the word fascism, so he's an authority on what is and isn't fascism!) and the German variant called National Socialism, I used to wonder why the fascists included so many aristocrats of the old regime. In Hitler's circle we see such names as Baldur von Schirach (von means nobility) and in Mussolini's inner circle we find Count Ciano. If fascism were really a revolutionary 20th Century novelty, why didn't they take these people out and shoot them?

I conclude that fascism, ultimately, is feudalism/monarchy with a fresh coat of paint. It is expanded to include corporate barons along with the old cadre of landed barons, but other than that, it's absolute monarchy. They still want to make the rest of us into peasants, whether on the land or behind a WalMart counter.

Fascists don't dare call themselves fascists, because fascism is a discredited idea just as feudalism is. Usually they call themselves conservatives. But functionally it's all the same. When Hitler said he just wanted to be the new Charlemagne, he wasn't kidding. What he did in the 20th Century wasn't much different from what your average medieval monarch did. What changed is that peasants stopped wanting to be peasants.

[lordmi]

intellectual???
hmmmmmm
who saw any sign (or ahde) of intellect in palin?
Lazy republican's brains can produce just anger.
Agressive anger.
People, be aware