Jeet Heer Profile picture
Aug 13, 2019 9 tweets 2 min read Read on X
1. Good thread on Russel Kirk & Jim Crow. The thing to note is that Kirk's 1958 editorial marked a shift in how Northern conservative intellectuals saw South. Kirk was from Michigan & previously not bad on race (he opposed Japanese American internment).
2. We tend to take the alliance of Northern and Southern conservative intellectuals for granted, but it's a product of an ideological shift from 1945-1960, a kind of precursor to the Southern strategy the GOP adopted in 1960s.
3. Prior to 1945, Northern conservative intellectuals & pundits (Mencken, Nock, Pegler) were blistering critics of white south, seeing it as cultural & moral backwater, & supported some measure of civil rights (primarily anti-lynching laws).
4. The primary intellectual form of Southern conservatism tended to be traditionalist anti-capitalist (i.e. the agrarians) which clashed with the pro-business orientation of Northern conservatives. Also, of course, Republican party was minimal in South.
5. The post-1945 reconciliation of the South & North was a product of a variety of factors: the expansion of civil rights movement beyond anti-lynching to democratic rights, anti-communism, and the emergence of Dixiecrats as leading Southern opponents of liberalism
6. William F. Buckley was a big part of this story, for very personal reasons: his mom was Southern and Buckley grew up in South Carolina on one of the biggest former slave plantations in America (originally owned by James Chestnut, who ordered firing on Fort Sumter)
7. Buckley's South Carolina plantation was very old school, complete with black servants. "It was like Gone With The Wind," recalled Garry Wills. This was the emotional roots of Buckley's support for white Southern racism.
8. At National Review, Buckley was in perfectly poised to promote the idea of the white South as a conservative bulwark, aided by writers like Richard Weaver and J.J. Kilpatrick. They created a new synthesis of northern & southern conservatism.
9. All of which is to say that there was nothing inevitable about Northern conservative embrace of racist backlash politics in South. It was a choice. There were other paths open and other parts of their own tradition they could have turned to.

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More from @HeerJeet

Dec 15, 2023
1. "What a minute," yo might ask, "Isn't Milei a self-proclaimed libertarian, even an anarcho-capitalist who who wants to abolish the state? How can he be using police power to repress free speech & protests?" Well, the history of anarcho-capitalism has the answers.
2. The term anarcho-capitalism was coined by Murray Rothbard, this elfin looking guy, tweaking an earlier formulation by his friend Karl Hess (a Goldwater speechwriter turned anti-war activist). Rothbard was a pioneer in coopting language of anarchy for authoritarianism Image
3. Rothbard was politically all over the map, at various points allying himself with Robert Taft, Joseph McCarthy, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley, New Left historical revisionists like William Appleman Williams, the Maoist Peace & Freedom Party, the Koch bros, Pat Buchanan
Read 8 tweets
Nov 2, 2023
1. Fun fact: New Criticism was an outgrowth of a group called The Fugitives or Southern Agrarians. Their governing ideology was a celebration of hierarchical & traditional societies like the pre-Civil War south & pre-industrial Europe. Guess what they thought of Blacks & Jews?
2. This is a complicated story but the New Critics were Southern white reactionaries who idealized pre-industrial life & Christian hegemony, whitewashed slavery, and embraced formalism in criticism as a way of exalting an idealized order untouched by historical change.
3. It's kind of hard to place the New Critics in terms of contemporary politics because they were both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist, seeing industrialization as a falling off. And their critiques of capitalism & industrialization have real force & value.
Read 11 tweets
Aug 6, 2023
I've literally been reading racists right-wingers (notably Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan) since Yglesias was in kindergarten. It's a big part of the work I do. Yet I somehow manage to avoid praising them as interesting parts of the discourse even as analyze their work. Image
The key thing here is that Yglesias thinks of the revanchist & racist right as part of his universe of discourse, people who are wrong on some stuff but worth engaging with. By contrast, for him left & left-liberals beyond the pale.


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"He's clearly quite racist! But...." There's always a but. Image
Read 4 tweets
Jul 27, 2023
1. Oppenheimer, Barbie and the contradictions of German-Jewish whiteness: Notes for an essay. (Jack Kirby will make a cameo here).
2. What's the real thread unifying the Barbenheimer phenomenon besides the coincidence of an opening date. I'd say both films are about the fraught experience of the children of immigrants in putatively melting pot society.
3. J. Robert Oppenheimer: of German-Jewish descent, huge success in his field, brought low by national security establishment. Ruth Handler, creator of Barbie, of Polish-Jewish descent, huge success in her field, brought low by IRS.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 18, 2023
1. While researching Young Americans for Freedom I came across what is, I think I can say this confidently, the worst music every sung by humans: the ersatz folk songs belted out by young rightwingers in 1960s in a desperate attempt to copy the folk revival.
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2. This music is evidence of the strong anxiety created by the rise of the counterculture & New Left, which the right felt had to matched by an counter-attack. Janet Greene, for example, was often touted as the right's answer to Joan Baez.
3. This story has it all: White Christian Nationalism, neo-Nazis, domestic terrorism, the GOP, and a ventriloquist dummy. Hard to imagine any terrorism worse than the music though.
Read 8 tweets
Jul 15, 2023
1. The obvious reason why this strategy of "progressive policy" denuded of class solidarity wont work is that the rich have intense class solidarity, which is why liberal rich are always outgunned in numbers & intensity by right-wing rich. For every Soros there are 100 Kochs.
2. You often hear this in liberal & even left-liberal circles: "why can't liberal billionaires fund X" (X being a left counterpart to Fox News or The Federalist Society or ALEC. The answer is there are very few liberal billionaires & they are generally committed to status quo.
3. There's also this. The rich who involved with center-left politics tend to have agendas that are the opposite of pursuing "progressive politics" (unless you have the most anemic possible progressive agenda).
Read 5 tweets

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