Erick Erickson’s new book joins a packed field of conservative just-so intellectual histories of the left. They’re a dime a dozen. But what is the early Christian term “gnostic” doing there? It’s nothing new either.🧵 The term “Gnostic” has favored by American conservative intellectuals since the 1950s. It’s an analytic term, but in their usage it is mainly a pejorative. Woke, but with intellectual pretensions. (Erickson chucks in woke – and Pagan – for good measure!)

Amusing stories of Strauss as a teacher from Edward Banfield's remembrances of him.

1. Banfield as an Aristotelian man of action for taking down a No Smoking sign so Strauss could smoke. 2. Strauss mystifying and terrifying James Q. Wilson as a teacher.

What a post-liberal's favorite authoritarian says about them, a thread: Francisco Franco:
· Unironically refers to “Weimar America”
· “Do you even lift, bro?”
· Attends Mass in Latin, is not baptized

In the 1950s, National Review considered J. Robert Oppenheimer a threat to national security – primarily for his stand against the H-bomb – and a symbol of fellow-traveling snobbery among cultural elites. 1/6 They found his record convincing enough to deny him a clearance, and his personal conduct dishonorable. “Whether he has betrayed his country may always be moot; what appears to be certain is that he has repeatedly abandoned men, and women, who personally depended on him.” 2/6

In the classic Seeing Like a State, James Scott unpacks how states make societies, geographies, and even people legible and therefore malleable (although only so far). He outlines 4 criteria for tragedy: 1. The Administrative ordering of nature and society through abstracting simplifications. He points out though that these are also the basic tools of modern statecraft. Like zip codes or SSNs.

Plenty on the right complain about cancellations and woke mobs. Many profess a deep commitment to freedom of speech. But are conservatives actually committed to free speech? Ideologically speaking, they are not. 🧵 Some of the confusion is due to the right-wing coalition that unites classical liberals with straight-forward conservatives. Plenty of libertarians are free speech absolutists. Some conservatives like David French mistake classical liberalism for the whole of conservatism.

I saw a pseudonymous account today that presented itself as a traditionalist Catholic and neo-Confederate: two traditions American conservatives have seen as bulwarks against modernity. It got me thinking about traditionalism. We are, all of us, inescapably modern. It is a bare fact of life that those of us born in the 20th and 21st century have all engaged with secularism, rationalism, pluralism, science, as well as discourses about identity.

There's a potential divide on the American illiberal right along secular and religious lines. Looking way back it makes me think of the ex-Communist Max Eastman quitting National Review's masthead in 1958. Eastman recognized the pre-liberal elements in National Review editor William F. Buckley's conservatism. Something at odds with his secular libertarianism.

It’s alleged Abstract Expressionism was a CIA tool, a weapon in the cultural Cold War. The history raises complicated questions about art, class, authenticity, freedom and the exercise of power. 1/ For something that became a part of an American soft power project, abstract expressionism was controversial, rejected in the halls of Congress. 2/

I'd go long on the Right being a potent political force over the next 20 years. Aging populations in developed countries are going to face a Gordian knot of either reducing benefits or raising taxes. To counter shrinking economies, immigration will be an economic necessity.

Jonah Goldberg responded in part to my essay on conservatism and democracy and I have a few points in reply. This point misreads me, I think. I don't so much argue conservative anti-democratic discourse is driving present GOP actions so much as it creates a permission structure to justify them. The driving force is deeper, and gets at my larger disagreement with Goldberg.

The strange case of Myrna Bain: National Review's first black staff member. 🧵 The Village Voice profiled her in 1962. She founded a Young Americans for Freedom chapter at Hunter College, worked for William F. Buckley's National Review, and then for the Greenwich Village YAF chapter.

From the annals of conspiracy and the far right: LIFE's coverage of the John Birch Society. 1/ LIFE's feature seems glossily agnostic on the JBS. It's unclear “whether its members are truly constructive American patriots or whether they are people who feel that flag-waving and what their critics call witch-hunting are substitutes for intelligent service to the nation.” 2/

The Claremont Institute's counter-revolutionary right - a drum they've been beating for decades - has eerie parallels with the pre-WWII French right that replaced the Third Republic. 1/ Michael Anton has mastered the genre, but this essay is something else. America is bifurcated: an authentic nation and an illegitimate one. 2/

The twilight of the New Conservatives. Late in 1953 Clinton Rossiter cycled through his rolodex. He was working on a study of conservatism in America, and his contacts were leading practitioners. [Thread] 1/x Debilitatingly moderate, Rossiter found the New Conservatism intriguing. Yet he remained skeptical of its prospects, given the realities of American politics, especially the existing right wedded to rugged individualism.

The 1776 Report seems like the maudlin Americanism and conservative demonology of West Coast Straussianism at its most cartoonish. 1/ West Coast Straussianism, in large part the thought of Harry Jaffa and his students, comes primarily out of the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College, where 1776 Chair Larry Arnn is president. 2/

Harry Jaffa against the gays. Jaffa was responding to a conservative movement activist, Marvin Liebman, coming out as gay. Buckley was Liebman's sponsor into the Catholic Church and let Liebman say his piece. Jaffa sought to rebuke Liebman. Buckley said he agreed with Jaffa, but he lacked charity in his closing.

Revisiting Richard Hofstadter's essay 'The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt' (1955). Here are the highlights of an essay that was in many ways prescient: (thread) Hofstadter sketches out a distinction between restrained conservatism and pseudoconservatives revolting against the present. It's a shame he drew so heavily on Adorno's research, which doesn't offer him much.

I’m seeing the #trumpisnotaconservative floating around. Is this true? I have some thoughts. It’s question begging, assuming that conservatism is easily definable and defined by ideas – usually something like limited government and cultural traditionalism. arcdigital.media/what-is-conser…