This analysis is true of literally any mass-political movement. The Bolsheviks didn’t appeal to Russian peasants with endless and intricate discussion of dialectical materialism, they said “we promise: land and bread!” Modern Dem voters know nothing of John Rawls, but they know quite a bit about dem programz.
That you imply American conservative intellectuals are uniquely or even especially guilty of navel-gazing is, I submit, a species of inferiority complex.
Aside: The Bolsheviks actually hated the Russian peasants and primarily relied on the urban working class to gain power.
There is always a divergence between intellectuals and the masses in politics. But even Marxists could claim the two groups have the same interests while expressed differently. Same with American liberals. It's more common for American conservative intellectuals to have a completely different outlook from the masses they claim to represent.
You interpreted this article as saying conservative intellectuals merely express their ideas in a different way from the masses. That's not the argument here
The mass movement character of early 20th-century socialism had an extremely strong social component (the actual European industrial proletariat). Naturally, there were discontinuities between the proletariat and the party intellectual, but the Left was largely embodied by proletarians or workers, and the continuities between the two were more or less real (and this includes the larger Left, both social democrats and radicals).
Currently, the situation between conservative intellectuals and the relation the Bolsheviks had with the proletariat (or the middle class with “bourgeois” liberal/conservative parties) is not at all comparable. Perhaps you could make that claim with the Soviet intelligentsia after Stalinism, which was always more progressive than the actually existing reality of the situation. But then the Soviet Union lost its mass character, and the intelligentsia was largely subsumed into bureaucracy (much like the US today) and thus neutralized in that way. May ’68 in France might have been the exception, where intellectuals were, to a certain degree, in deep collaboration with leftist labor unions. People are generally wrong about May ’68: the Left’s turn toward progressivism was mostly because of the influence of the American Left; Stonewall was more influential for the “wokist” strategy than May ’68.
In any case, conservatives (besides Scott Greer), if they actually engaged genuinely with really existing America, would need to grapple with the fact that America is a post-historical nation, that White™ is a post-European identity (which required a strong propositional vision of the nation), and that the US is perhaps one of the most mercurial countries in history in terms of identity. Appeals to “heritage Americans” are, for the most part, an empirical absurdity. The fact that Catholics represent a large number of the thought leaders of American conservatism, even among the dissident right, shows precisely my point. American Traditional Catholics, because they were actually honest, tended to be quite historically anti-American (and even Hispanophile). Orestes Brownson, who began American Catholic revisionism (the attempt to make Catholicism compatible with America), ended up at the end of his life recognizing that “in Americanizing we Protestantize.”
Basically, what I am trying to say is that if the dissident right and conservatives were actually serious about anything, they would quickly recognize how difficult it is to hold their beliefs. Greer is more realistic about almost everything. He genuinely defends kitsch White™ identity and its interests without making exaggerated claims about absolutely everything. The scope is small, but it is a sociologically real scope.
This reminds me of the point Paul Gottfried keeps on making, with good reason. Conservatism, no matter it's virtues (and it had many) is no longer viable and hasn't been for a long time. Most of what was called conservatism after WWII was (actually classical) classical Liberalism, eventually replaced by neoconservatives, who pretended to be classical liberals but were basically progressives going the speed limit. I would say the antebellum south was one of the last places where a conservative order actually stood. Along with many countries that were destroyed in world war 1. By 1918 classical conservatism was over.
Broke: Tweedy intellectuals
Woke: Used car salesmen
Bespoke: Tweedy intellectual used car salesmen
This analysis is true of literally any mass-political movement. The Bolsheviks didn’t appeal to Russian peasants with endless and intricate discussion of dialectical materialism, they said “we promise: land and bread!” Modern Dem voters know nothing of John Rawls, but they know quite a bit about dem programz.
That you imply American conservative intellectuals are uniquely or even especially guilty of navel-gazing is, I submit, a species of inferiority complex.
Aside: The Bolsheviks actually hated the Russian peasants and primarily relied on the urban working class to gain power.
There is always a divergence between intellectuals and the masses in politics. But even Marxists could claim the two groups have the same interests while expressed differently. Same with American liberals. It's more common for American conservative intellectuals to have a completely different outlook from the masses they claim to represent.
You interpreted this article as saying conservative intellectuals merely express their ideas in a different way from the masses. That's not the argument here
The mass movement character of early 20th-century socialism had an extremely strong social component (the actual European industrial proletariat). Naturally, there were discontinuities between the proletariat and the party intellectual, but the Left was largely embodied by proletarians or workers, and the continuities between the two were more or less real (and this includes the larger Left, both social democrats and radicals).
Currently, the situation between conservative intellectuals and the relation the Bolsheviks had with the proletariat (or the middle class with “bourgeois” liberal/conservative parties) is not at all comparable. Perhaps you could make that claim with the Soviet intelligentsia after Stalinism, which was always more progressive than the actually existing reality of the situation. But then the Soviet Union lost its mass character, and the intelligentsia was largely subsumed into bureaucracy (much like the US today) and thus neutralized in that way. May ’68 in France might have been the exception, where intellectuals were, to a certain degree, in deep collaboration with leftist labor unions. People are generally wrong about May ’68: the Left’s turn toward progressivism was mostly because of the influence of the American Left; Stonewall was more influential for the “wokist” strategy than May ’68.
In any case, conservatives (besides Scott Greer), if they actually engaged genuinely with really existing America, would need to grapple with the fact that America is a post-historical nation, that White™ is a post-European identity (which required a strong propositional vision of the nation), and that the US is perhaps one of the most mercurial countries in history in terms of identity. Appeals to “heritage Americans” are, for the most part, an empirical absurdity. The fact that Catholics represent a large number of the thought leaders of American conservatism, even among the dissident right, shows precisely my point. American Traditional Catholics, because they were actually honest, tended to be quite historically anti-American (and even Hispanophile). Orestes Brownson, who began American Catholic revisionism (the attempt to make Catholicism compatible with America), ended up at the end of his life recognizing that “in Americanizing we Protestantize.”
Basically, what I am trying to say is that if the dissident right and conservatives were actually serious about anything, they would quickly recognize how difficult it is to hold their beliefs. Greer is more realistic about almost everything. He genuinely defends kitsch White™ identity and its interests without making exaggerated claims about absolutely everything. The scope is small, but it is a sociologically real scope.
This reminds me of the point Paul Gottfried keeps on making, with good reason. Conservatism, no matter it's virtues (and it had many) is no longer viable and hasn't been for a long time. Most of what was called conservatism after WWII was (actually classical) classical Liberalism, eventually replaced by neoconservatives, who pretended to be classical liberals but were basically progressives going the speed limit. I would say the antebellum south was one of the last places where a conservative order actually stood. Along with many countries that were destroyed in world war 1. By 1918 classical conservatism was over.
thank you for reminding me just how vulgar everything is