Frank wrote on Sep 24
th, 2022 at 9:26am:
After Liberalism… the Deluge
Scott McLemee reports on Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right.“In theory,” he writes, “liberalism protects individuals from unjust authority, allowing them to pursue fulfilling lives apart from government coercion. In reality, it severs deep binds of belonging, leaving isolated individuals exposed to, and dependent on, the power of the state. In theory, liberalism proposes a neutral vision of human nature, cleansed of historical residues and free of ideological distortions. In reality, it promotes a bourgeois view of life, placing a higher value on acquisition than virtue. In theory, liberalism makes politics more peaceful by focusing on the mundane rather than the metaphysical. In reality, it makes political life chaotic by splintering communities into rival factions and parties.”
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/03/18/review-matthew-rose-world-after-... Reading on....
Rose himself sounds deeply sympathetic to this line of critique—and so all the more concerned by how the radical right has assimilated it. Liberalism understands human beings as self-defining “through acts of individual choice and self-expression alone.” But in reality (the counterstatement runs) people are embedded in relationships, communities and traditions, and we require them to flourish. “The essence of our creaturely condition, as well as human happiness,” Rose says, is “that we learn to order these bonds to real human goods, turning the passions that weave the fabric of life into the virtues that clothe it with dignity.”
The author leaves it unclear just what political arrangements are implied by this moral project. But the far-right thinkers he discusses offer alternatives that, if not in perfect alignment with each other, share the mission of tearing up liberalism, of whatever sort, and salting the ground so that it does not return.
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In the Clinton years, when I first read them, Benoist’s articles were sometimes translated for a journal called Chronicles, where the last figure in Rose’s lineup also published his work: the late Samuel Francis. His writings from that era made the emergence of Trump, or someone like him, seem inevitable. Francis did not drink the globalization Kool-Aid:
“What connected the welfare state, feminism, employment protections, school reform, and liberal internationalism?” Rose asks. “Francis’s undeviating answer was that they serve managerial power [exercised by a ‘new class’ of credentialed professionals] through a leveling process of ‘homogenization.’ They ensured that consumers had the same tastes, businesses operated in the same markets, students received the same training, and citizens held the same values.”
Like some of Benoist’s arguments, Francis’s perspective on corporate capitalism (and its handmaid, technocratic liberalism) sound left of center, although he infused them with enough nativism and white supremacy to avoid confusion on that score. “It is imperative,” Francis insisted, “for elites to challenge, discredit, and erode the moral, intellectual, and institutional fabric of traditional society.” And in consequence, deep pools of resentment were accumulating beneath the American political playing field’s well-manicured turf.
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/03/18/review-matthew-rose-world-after-...