Further Musings on the Difference Between Conservatism and the Right Wing...

Where to begin our musings on conservatism and right wingers?

Let's start with definitional accuracy.

Those right wingers who call themselves conservatives today are not conservatives. They are laissez-faire liberals. Classic conservatives, of course, reacted against Enlightenment liberalism and "democracy" along with Enlightenment radicalism.

Right wingers have an unfortunate tendency of being unable to distinguish empirical fact from ideologically correct fantasy, descriptive statements from normative demagoguery and delusions. Whether one likes reality or not is immaterial. Racism is real even though the notion of races is a fiction, whether in the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Class inequalities and gender inequalities are real whether one likes it or not. Any approach worth its salt must begin there, with empirical facts. How one responds ethically and morally to these realities is a different matter. 

There have been and are a variety of social ethical approaches to economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic facts There have, of course, been conservative thinkers. Plato, Burke, Comte, and Tolkien come to mind. Conservatives, generally speaking, opposed--I am obviously speaking normatively here--industrialism, capitalism, and democracy. Conservatives, at least those worth their salt, advocated for the rule of the best, whether they regarded those best as philosopher-kings, the English manorial elite, aristocrats, kings, scientists, or a frankly idealised priesthood of old. They did not advocate for the notion that morons like Trump and his nouveau riche ilk were either the best or the brightest. Conservatives treasured and treasure books; I doubt if a know nothing like Trump has ever read one. 

Because of their normative emphasis on looking backward and treasuring aspects of the past conservatives have offered little in the way of social theory on either modernity or postmodernity other than that capitalism, industrialisaton, and "democracy" were negative in their consequences for "tradition". There has been no Marx, Weber, or Durkheim among conservatives. Right wing no nothings probably have never heard of those intellectual giants who attempted to understand modernity other than to demonise them. All this said, conservative Niall Ferguson has explored the coming of modernity and postmodernity but his work is very derivative. Ferguson's interesting documentaries essentially update Marx, Weber, and postmodernist thinkers. Daniel Boorstin's book The Image--Boorstin was a consensus conservative/liberal a la Hofstadter and Bell who was very critical and dismissive of McCarthyist right wingism--did prefigure much postmodernist theory but conservatives have not really pursued it while right wingers either don't know much about it or simply demonise it as if social theory and one's response to it was or should be a low level theological or dogmatic enterprise.

One thing conservatives historically were not was utopian. This, once again, distinguishes them from contemporary right wing faux conservatives who curiously believe, they are laissez-faire liberals after all, that with capitalism the radiant future has arrived, despite or in spite of the empirical realities of poverty and inequality. True conservatives, of course, would and did defend inequality and rule of the best and brightest, however defined or delineated.

The Books of My Life: Historians in Trouble

 

In his Historians in Trouble: Plagiarsm, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivy Tower (New York: New Press, 2005), historian Jon Wiener takes us on an entertaining, enlightening, and depressing journey through the dark side of academia, specifically the history profession, and contemporary American intellectual culture, and the impact of the wider American culture war since the 1960s on both. Wiener, drawing on essays he wrote largely for the Nation over the years, gives us a picture of the problematic relationship between graduate students, faculty members, and star or celebrity professors (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's almost master and slave relationship with those under her). He tales the tale of the potential dangers associated with archival work, the problematic use of sources, and the problems of footnoting, by some intellectuals in the academic profession and outside of it (Allen Weinstein, Michael Bellesiles, David Abraham, Mike Davis, Edward Pearson, and James Lott). He explores the problem of plagiarism in academic and intellectual culture (Doris Kearns Goodwyn and Stephen Ambrose). He takes us into the world of lying and exaggeration in the academy and intellectual culture (Joseph Ellis and Stephen Thernstrom).

Along the way, Wiener asks why some academics have escaped punishment and shame (the academic and intellectual scarlet A) while others have been humiliated and been banished from the academy (the black O). He finds the answer in political culture, interest group politics, and the contemporary American culture war. Fox-Genovese, Weinstein,  Lott, and Thernstrom, Wiener argues, largely escaped any punishment for their sexual harassment, questionable acquisition of and use of data, archival and quantitative, and exaggerations of political correctness, and were rewarded for it, at least in the case of Fox-Genovese, Weinstein, and Lott, by political appointments from a right wing president and, in the case of Lott, a job at a right wing think tank. Others, because of their perceived left wing or liberal politics and theoretical approaches, however, as Wiener notes, were hounded out of academia by interest groups that disagreed with them, in the case of Bellesiles, by academics whose work they challenged, as in the case of Abraham, or run out of Los Angeles by boosterist interests, like Mike Davis, who got a job teaching at SUNY Stony Brook. Still others, like Joseph Ellis, who lied about being in Vietnam and involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement upon his return, was punished by the college at which he worked, Mount Holyoke, but was soon back teaching and writing reviews for the prestigious New York Times, because, Wiener argues, there was no powerful interest group that went after Ellis in the way that the right wing gun lobby went after Bellesiles.

Wiener's book is an interesting and easy read for anyone interested in the academy, ideology, politics, and culture wars. I recommend this documented TMZish excursion through the wonderful world of American academe and intellectual culture. Anyone who has been a graduate student, particularly a graduate student in history, will recognise the world Wiener describes.

The Books of My Life: I Do and I Don't

 

Jeanine Basinger, for my money, is one of the most insightful cultural historians and sociologists writing on Hollywood film these days. In her book I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies (New York: Knopf, 2012), Basinger takes readers on an entertaining and enlightening romp through the history of the Hollywood marriage film mercifully free of the psychoanalytic jargon that so often makes academic books on films far more tedious than the films they are analysing, a remarkable achievement in and of itself.  

In I Do and I Don't Basinger explores the history and culture of the Hollywood marriage movie from the silent era of marriage movies, cautionary tales to be laughed at and be sad about, to the 21st century the post-marriage marriage movie. At the heart of the Hollywood marriage film genre, Basinger argues, is the couple, the men and women who are either getting married, the I dos as Basinger calls them, or getting divorced, the I don'ts, and the dramatic and comedic situations impacting the couple in the Hollywood marriage movie, namely, infidelity, in-laws, children, incompatibility, class, addiction, and murder. Basinger explores how the genre with its couples and its situations changed as a result of the impact of the coming of sound, the impact of World War II with its absent husbands overseas and its home front wives fighting to defeat the Nazis, and the impact of the sexual revolution in the 1950, 1960s and after. Along the way Basinger explores the spectacle and ritual of consumption in Hollywood films,  furniture, furs, and hats that populate classic era Hollywood marriage movies, and she explores the fairy tale have your cake--we will show you society's ideal norms and rules, norms and rules you should live your lives by--and the eat it too--please feel free to live your life momentarily through the characters on screen breaking society's norms and rules even though it won't last and everything will return to normal (pun intended) in the end--nature of the Hollywood marriage movie, both of which had appeal to the audiences who paid to watch the Hollywood marriage movie, a sociological approach to Hollywood film that is far more compelling, at least to me, than the oedipal fantasies of todays almost cultic psychoanalytic critics.

As was the case with Basinger's books on the World War Two genre and the women's film, I found I Do and I Don't one of the best books on Hollywood film I have read. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in media history, film history, Hollywood history, approaches to popular culture, and particularly to those who find the hegemonic mode of film analysis these days not particularly enlightening.