The Problem of the New Right

Metadata

• Author: [[T. Greer]]
• Full Title: The Problem of the New Right
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-problem-of-new-right.html

Highlights

• The New Right’s primary war is one against ideas.
• The neoconservatives burdened the conservative political movement (to say nothing of the American people) with the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan. So disastrous were these wars that this faction has lost all credibility with the right, and many of its leaders now march with the left.
• The libertarian dogmas of Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek have handicapped conservativism. Libertarian ideals—which champion the sovereign individual unfettered by community, tradition, or obligation—are sugar coated poison pills. They promise to beat back a grasping federal government, but attempt to achieve this aim by sacralizing the same fatal lie that makes progressivism possible in the first place. There is no notion of common good, goes the lie, that can ever justify violating your right to individual self-realization.
• He expressed regret over the role that the American Revolution plays in American political theology, a “ghost” he wished Americans could “exorcise.” As long as we associate revolution with foundation, he told me, it is difficult to have any kind of “pro-society worldview.”
• Fischer defines these folkways as the “values, customs, and meanings” that exist beneath high politics and intellectual life, yet carve the channels through which both must flow.[3]
• In the United States liberalism is the constraining custom. The folkways that comprise America’s liberal regime are centuries older than America’s liberal constitution. It is not clear to me that commercialism, individualism, and so forth can be excised from the American mind. Short of a massive social engineering project, by what means could this be accomplished?
• His central thesis is that America is, and always has been, a pastiche of nations. Four very separate cultures, with distinct and separate folkways, settled in America.