So I gather, anyhow, from The New Leviathan: The State Versus the Individual in the 21st Century and Future Tense: The Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval, two compilations of jeremiads by the conservatives’ intellectual crème de la froth. Individually published in pamphlet form over the past three years by Encounter Books honcho Roger Kimball, the essays of The New Leviathan aim to bring, he says, “an 18th-century sense of political urgency and rhetorical wit” to the modern age.Bring back the rhetorical wit & politics of 1720!
These now-bookified pamphlets feature many regular NRO contributors; where else to go for hateful idiocy w/ a fine patina of pretension & psuedo-intellect? Lines are drawn, however; this shit is serious, & no Jonahs need apply:
It’s worth remembering that Kimball’s contributors represent the respectable—indeed, in their own minds, the high-minded—face of conservative thinking. (Pimples on the body politic’s rump like, say, Jonah Goldberg are blessedly MIA, although it may go without saying that the heterodox likes of David Frum are too.) Yet with few exceptions, Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” is in full cry. Never particularized as to personnel but clearly meaning us no good, shadowy entities like “globalists” and “the international Left” flit malignantly through essay after essay, like the Comintern trying out a casual-Fridays look.Further proof about Charles Murray:
Then somebody parodying Charles Murray—apparently with Murray’s permission, since his byline isn’t in quotes—applies “historiometric methods” to determine the preconditions for a great culture. Anyone capable of claiming that “artistic elites have been conspicuously nihilist for the last century” is destined to sound brainy only on Twitter, but Murray futzes around a good deal before his roundhouse punch: “Religiosity is indispensable to a major stream of artistic accomplishment.”Enough w/ the reiteration already; read it yourself.
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