{"id":79391,"date":"2020-07-20T17:05:51","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T15:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=79391"},"modified":"2020-07-11T08:44:34","modified_gmt":"2020-07-11T06:44:34","slug":"12-05-54","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=79391","title":{"rendered":"The Rebirth of the Left-Conservative Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"center alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/assets\/images\/tablet-logo.svg\" alt=\"\" width=\"30%\"><\/a><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color: #000080;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/rebirth-left-conservative-tradition\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Rebirth of the Left-Conservative Tradition<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>ERIC KAUFMANN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\">\n<h4 style=\"text-align: left;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/sanity-14b55.kxcdn.com\/images\/z2aip6ei\/production\/4f8b6931b3535708478837f7322d3e5e239ac6e2-3315x3116.png?w=1250&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" width=\"50%\">A blend of left-wing policies\u2014like support for Social Security and infrastructure spending\u2014with favored conservative ideas, like nationalism and immigration reform, is finding its voice<\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">A new intellectual force is emerging in the West: left-conservatism. This belief system combines a conservative view on cultural questions like national identity and immigration with left-wing positions on economic issues like public services. A major force at the turn of the 20th century, it emerged from the mid-1960s as a small, mainly Jewish, intellectual tradition.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Intellectually, left-conservatism has two wellsprings\u2014one Protestant, one largely Jewish. Its Protestant roots lie in the Populist and Progressive era from the mid-1880s through the New Deal. During this period, a laissez-faire Protestant theology which believed that government should not intervene in God\u2019s plan for America gave way to a more reformist, interventionist, and this-worldly Social Gospel ethos. Social Christian reformers, and the wider Populist and Progressive movements, worried about social problems stemming from industrialization and immigration that were transforming a formerly rural and Protestant society into an ethnically diverse, unequal, and urban country. They championed a suite of measures including government regulation of industry, immigration restriction, temperance, Americanization, worker\u2019s rights, and women\u2019s suffrage. This left-conservative combination is incomprehensible today, when cultural conservatism and economic libertarianism are presumed to form the \u201cconservative\u201d package while left-liberalism makes up the \u201cliberal\u201d bundle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The largely Jewish \u201cNew York Intellectuals\u201d who contributed some of the leading thinkers of left-progressivism consisted mainly of American-born children of East European Jewish immigrants who arrived at the turn of the century. The first generation, coalescing around journals like&nbsp;<em>Partisan Review<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Menorah Journal<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>The New Masses<\/em>&nbsp;in the 1930s, were left-liberals like Philip Rahv or Lionel Trilling who rejected communism following the Stalinist purges, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and Soviet restrictions on modern art. Their anti-communist socialism was a flexible seedbed from which both the cosmopolitan left and various strands of conservatism would emerge.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Where the first generation of New York Intellectuals were in the forefront of anti-nationalism and the rejection of tradition in art, the second generation, coming of age mainly after the war, began to question what they saw as anti-traditionalist overreach. Writing in&nbsp;<em>Commentary<\/em>&nbsp;and the&nbsp;<em>Public Interest<\/em>, this group included Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a power couple who became major influences in the Republican Party and the neoconservative movement. But it also encompassed more centrist writers like Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The critical juncture was the wave of student protest which rose in the 1960s. Many New York Intellectuals had become academics in the first wave of university expansion in that decade. They were sympathetic to leftist student concerns insofar as these involved questions such as civil rights and the right to freely protest the Vietnam War. Though supporting many of the radicals\u2019 ends, they came to disapprove of its means, especially the way it substituted slogans and violent tactics for rational analysis. As Nathan Glazer&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/1969\/07\/student-politics-and-the-university\/303378\/\">recalled<\/a><\/strong><\/span>:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>When I came to Berkeley in 1963, I still thought of myself as a man of the left, and for the first few months of the free speech issue, I was on the side of the free speech people &#8230; The key issue that labelled me a conservative, labelled a number of us as conservative, were the student unrest issues post-\u201964.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">For Glazer, as for Bell and other New York Intellectuals who came to be known as neoconservatives\u2014not to be confused with the neoconservatives of the 2000s\u2014the students\u2019 anarchic desires for revolutionary change posed a threat to the fragile institutions of liberal democracy. Glazer remarked that in 1964, there was uncertainty as to whether the radicals threatened liberalism since their ends had merit and they were not communist-aligned. By 1969, <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/1969\/07\/student-politics-and-the-university\/303378\/\">citing<\/a><\/strong><\/span>&nbsp;\u201cfour and a half years of increasing escalation\u201d and persistent threats to \u201cfree speech, free research and free teaching,\u201d Glazer felt that his band of skeptics had been vindicated. He criticized the tepid response of liberals within the university to the antics of the radicals. Instead of standing up for bourgeois liberal democracy, they caved in to authoritarian demands to control the curriculum.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The challenge to free speech, liberal institutions, and reason affected Glazer and Bell deeply. But they also realized this was not just a question of liberty but of tradition: No one had thought about how to define and defend what the radicals were trying to overthrow. Instead of simply championing freedom and reason, the neoconservatives developed a countervailing appreciation of Western tradition and hierarchies of excellence.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">What began as concern for the Western Enlightenment and classical inheritance expanded into an appreciation, for Bell, of Jewish tradition and religion more generally. This is not to say Bell was a believer. What he valued, in a Durkheimian sense, was the meaning that intragenerational solidarity and sense of continuity religious tradition provided. Thus he could criticize both detraditionalized Christian fundamentalism and secular hedonism. Bell came to formulate his position as a \u201csocialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.\u201d \u201cSocialist\u201d referred to Bell\u2019s willingness to use evidence-based social policy to address problems of deprivation and inequality. This social democratic approach was married to political liberalism\u2014hostility to communist authoritarianism and anarchist mob tyranny\u2014and a cultural outlook which valued religious and ethnic tradition alongside intergenerational communities of meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The neoconservatives were alarmed at what they saw as the counterculture\u2019s colonization of the American upper middle class. \u201cViolence is extolled in the&nbsp;<em>New York Review of Books<\/em>, which began with only literary ambitions,\u201d wrote Glazer. \u201cTom Hayden, who urges his audiences to kill policemen, is treated as a hero by&nbsp;<em>Esquire<\/em>; Eldridge Cleaver merits an adulatory&nbsp;<em>Playboy<\/em>&nbsp;interview.\u201d Meanwhile, the older elite conservatism of&nbsp;<em>National Review<\/em>&nbsp;had little to say, having become deeply unfashionable and moribund.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Bell located the sources of the \u201cadversary culture\u201d in the antinomian modernism that began in the arts in the late 19th century.&nbsp;<em>Modernism<\/em>, for Bell, was a cultural sensibility, a repudiation of tradition. In the early 20th century, Christian, classical, and national motifs were replaced by the shock of the new: abstraction, surrealism, and Dada. This outlook was typically the preserve of small groups of bohemian intellectuals like the Greenwich Village \u201cYoung Intellectuals\u201d of 1912-17 or early New York Intellectuals, who championed modern art against the neotraditionalism of American Scene Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton. This \u201clyrical left\u201d tended to deride bourgeois morality and ethnic majority traditions as stifling and uninteresting. In 1916, Randolph Bourne dubbed his own ethnic group\u2014Anglo-Protestant Americans\u2014narrow and provincial, urging them to embrace cosmopolitanism. In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken referred to Anglo-Americans as second-rate, unexpressive ignoramuses whose religion resembled voodoo. #Cancelwhitepeople was born from these Protestant anti-WASP loins.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Bell saw that the fight against fascism had discredited the right in Europe and America. Conservative intellectuals like the Southern Agrarians or Ezra Pound fell out of favor while intellectual life in the 1950s came to consist of an internecine struggle between the Marxist left and the modernist left. After McCarthyism, it was the latter that emerged the winner and rode a wave of structural change to victory.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In the 1960s, the GI Bill paid many ex-servicemen to attend college The share of 18- to 24-year-olds at university jumped from 15% in 1950 to 33% in 1970, as university sinecures opened up for many formerly impecunious bohemians. Meanwhile television, which only reached 9% of American households in 1950, spread to 93% by 1965, allowing for the swift diffusion of the modernist sensibility from nodes in Washington, New York, and Hollywood. As Bell remarked in the&nbsp;<em>Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism<\/em> (1976), \u201cThe life-style once practiced by a small c\u00e9nacle &#8230; is now copied by many &#8230; [and] this change of scale gave the culture of the 1960s its special surge, coupled with the fact that a bohemian lifestyle once limited to a tiny elite is now acted out on the giant screen of the mass media.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The culture-quake of the 1960s was less a qualitative change of ideas than a quantitative takeoff in the reach of the adversary culture. The decade was not entirely bereft of ideological innovation though: The cross-fertilization of the Frankfurt School\u2019s Marxist cultural criticism with new Third Worldist and black liberationist currents transposed the Marxist framework from class to identity. This new identity politics left merged with the older bohemian left to produce what I term \u201cleft-modernism\u201d\u2014the dominant ideology of our time. Shorn of overt Marxism, it served as the cultural sensibility of the rising knowledge class in large corporations, media, and government that the neoconservatives dubbed the New Class.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">As early as 1965, New York Intellectual Lionel Trilling had marveled at the way the adversary culture \u201ccaptivated\u201d the middle class. In 1979, Bell produced the diagram in figure 1, showing how a new liberal-conservative cultural line bisected the old left-right economic divide. Where once the workers and urban intellectuals shared a common leftist cause against the free market managers and \u201cold capitalist\u201d small businessmen, things were now changing. Modernist intellectuals transmitted their adversary culture to the knowledge class of managers\u2014as shown by the horizontal arrow\u2014drawing these two groups closer together while alienating the traditional working class, who now found themselves having more in common with small businesspeople. Meanwhile, rising education and the growth of the tertiary sector in major metro areas reduced the clout of traditional America, as shown by the down arrow indicating an expansion of the liberal demographic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/sanity-14b55.kxcdn.com\/images\/z2aip6ei\/production\/ee14b0f35f00e0f3b9766931ab27d88b0ad17edf-604x340.png\" width=\"100%\"><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em style=\"color: #808080; text-align: center;\"><span class=\"InsetImg__caption color-gray-darkest text-article-details-xs font-300\">Figure 1<\/span><span class=\"InsetImg__credit ml_5 color-gray text-article-details-xxs font-300 uppercase\">DANIEL BELL, \u2018THE WINDING&nbsp;<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Since the 1980s, Alan Abramowitz shows that conservative voters have increasingly voted Republican while liberals align with the Democrats. Suburban whites with degrees are moving Democratic while noncollege whites, often from exurban or rural areas, vote for Donald Trump. In Britain, there is currently no class difference between left and right parties, but a massive, Brexit-driven divide in cultural outlook rooted in immigration attitudes. Attitudes to race, gender, and sexuality now underpin the partisan hatreds that are intensifying polarization in America and fueling populism in western Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/sanity-14b55.kxcdn.com\/images\/z2aip6ei\/production\/a2be699687d4a3e93c1224a3dd404fb3a025be5b-604x599.png\" width=\"100%\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>Figure 2LEE DRUTMAN, \u2018POLITICAL DIVISIONS IN 2016 AND BEYOND,\u2019 VOTER STUDY GROUP, JUNE 2017<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">This new terrain renders the pro-market \u201ccountry club\u201d think tank establishment increasingly irrelevant. For, as figure 2 shows, few of Trump\u2019s voters are liberal on both cultural and economic questions. They\u2019re conservative on culture, clustering toward the top, but are centrist on economics, with most in the top-middle rather than top-right quadrant. Democrats are more clustered in the bottom-left quadrant, where they are left on both economics and culture.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The adversary culture poses two broad threats to the communal solidarity that left-conservatives hold dear. First, it erodes the bonds of family and religious morality, or what Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam calls \u201cbonding social capital\u201d\u2014the bonds within communities. Second, the radical egalitarianism and expressive individualism of the adversary culture eviscerates collective tradition, memory and nationhood, thus undercutting what Putnam calls \u201cbridging social capital\u201d\u2014the bonds uniting communities into a commonweal. Bonding problems are evident in the rising rate of white working-class illegitimacy and opioid addiction documented in Charles Murray\u2019s&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/119020\/coming-apart-by-charles-murray\/\"><em>Coming Apart<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span>. These issues engage religious and pro-family conservatives. Bridging problems bulk larger for national conservatives, who decry the influence of mass immigration, multiculturalism and attempts to deconstruct national histories and demonize white majorities.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Bell\u2019s critique of hedonism laments its impact on bonding capital. In the 1970s and \u201980s, Bell was accompanied by writers in the Protestant Populist-Progressive tradition like James Lincoln Collier and Wilson Carey McWilliams, as well as by Christopher Lasch and his coruscating attacks on American\u2019s narcissistic individualism. These Protestant writers lionized the American Victorian-Protestant tradition of family, religion, and restraint over expressive individualism. They also rejected consumerism and economic inequality, embodying the same left-conservative mix as their Populist-Progressive forbears.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">While their religious conservatism proved influential in the Republican Party from the 1980s, the leftist elements of their thought were jettisoned in favor of tax cuts and monetarism. Kevin Phillips is an important figure here. A middle-class New York WASP, he admired the New Deal and identified with \u201cIdaho loggers, Carolina farmers, and ethnic steelworkers\u201d against elite Northeastern liberals. He initially poured his energies into organizing the religious right, but, as John Judis&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/carnegieendowment.org\/2006\/05\/22\/kevin-phillips-ex-populist-elite-model-pub-18360\">notes<\/a>,<\/strong><\/span> was repelled by its fundamentalism and pro-market creed. Phillips\u2019 sense of tradition was as much national as religious, decrying elite detachment from the working class. Likewise, in his last book,&nbsp;<em>The Revolt of the Elites<\/em>&nbsp;(1994), Lasch castigated America\u2019s elites for their post-national detachment from popular national identity, a theme echoed in Samuel Huntington\u2019s final book,&nbsp;<em>Who Are We<\/em>&nbsp;(2004).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The American mainstream right chose to prioritize religious conservatism between the \u201980s and 2000s, in part because talk of immigration and nationhood would challenge the modernist left\u2019s most sacred value of race and would therefore be painted as racist. Very few left-conservative writers were willing to directly address bridging capital problems, especially if this involved questioning the rapid immigration and associated ethnic changes associated with amnesties, lax border enforcement, and bipartisan support for low-cost immigrant labor. In 1992 and 1996, Pat Buchanan\u2019s Republican primary bid revealed the potency of these neglected issues.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">At this time, Michael Lind and John Judis addressed questions of social cohesion from a left-conservative standpoint. Both blended influences from the Jewish neoconservative circles in which they operated with the Protestant Populist traditions they cherished. Lind\u2019s landmark&nbsp;<em>Next American Nation<\/em>&nbsp;(1995) decried the effects of mass immigration on the American worker\u2019s income and national attachments. In a hard-hitting piece, \u201c<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/104783\/new-nationalism\">For a New Nationalism<\/a>,<\/strong><\/span>\u201d in the&nbsp;<em>New Republic<\/em>&nbsp;that year, Lind and Judis rejected \u201cthe conception of the United States as a multinational democracy, epitomized by the multiculturalist movement.\u201d They opposed affirmative action, endorsing the idea of the United States as \u201ca nation-state with a common culture.\u201d For them, \u201cthe backlash against escalating levels of Third World immigration reflects not just racism but genuine concerns about the displacement of the native-born working poor.\u201d While others, such as Francis Fukuyama or Arthur Schlesinger, were willing to criticize multiculturalism, Judis and Lind\u2019s critique of immigration and embrace of state redistribution set them apart.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">This new atmosphere rendered Nathan Glazer\u2019s concerns more relevant than Bell\u2019s. Indeed, Bell related to me a few years before his death that he didn\u2019t relate to \u201cnational identity\u201d but rather to his ethnic tradition. Glazer\u2019s conservatism had always been more national than Bell\u2019s. Though mindful of the immigrant experience and nativism, he was concerned with the fraying of the country\u2019s bridging social capital. With regard to immigration, he wrote in 1995 that: \u201cI think one of the great yearnings of Americans today is for more stability. One thing that immigration inevitably brings is a lack of stability.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Long a critic of affirmative action and multiculturalism, in 1998, Glazer wrote in the&nbsp;<em>National Interest<\/em>&nbsp;that the epic of westward European settlement and freedom that defined the country had been challenged. While sympathetic to the need to include those who felt excluded from this national tradition, he remarked that the&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalaffairs.com\/public_interest\/detail\/american-epic-then-and-now\">national epic<\/a><\/strong><\/span>&nbsp;had become fragmented and doubted whether the \u201cimproving of group relations can replace the conquest of a continent as a subject of an epic.\u201d Glazer examined my doctoral dissertation at the London School of Economics (LSE) that year, relating that he thought American national identity had historically always blended civic and ethnic elements.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Up to that point, I had not realized that Glazer and my supervisor, Anthony D. Smith, knew each other. This was also brought home to me by a note from Glazer to Smith in a copy of Glazer\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Affirmative Discrimination<\/em>&nbsp;(1975) in Smith\u2019s office. Smith, whom I first encountered by accident during my time at LSE, was an apolitical scholar, but his work is a vital piece in the story of national conservatism. As an observant English Jew, Smith had a very different view of Zionism and Jewish tradition than his co-ethnics: LSE supervisor Ernest Gellner or neo-Marxist historian of nationalism Eric Hobsbawm. Where Gellner and Hobsbawm viewed nations as the functional or instrumental inventions of state elites, Smith took the deeply unfashionable position, also taken by Orwell, that they represented cultural traditions which were reproduced by romantic intellectuals and the mass public, who were emotionally attached to them. Artificial nations like many postcolonial states or Yugoslavia, as with modern technocratic constructs like the European Union, did not succeed because they failed to \u201cresonate\u201d with existing popular myths and symbols.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Smith defended the cultural value of national traditions, and his work influenced fellow academic Steven Grosby, who was a regular at LSE conferences on nationalism, engaging in a heated exchange with Hobsbawm on one memorable occasion. Grosby in turn influenced Yoram Hazony, the godfather of national conservatism and author of&nbsp;<em>The Virtue of Nationalism<\/em>, and Rich Lowry of&nbsp;<em>National Review<\/em>, whose&nbsp;<em>The Case for Nationalism<\/em>&nbsp;also draws on Smith\u2019s insights.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Why is left-conservatism rising now? First, there is the exhaustion of neoconservatism, as distinct from the small-n neoconservatism of Glazer and Bell. The neocons propounded a right-wing form of liberal universalism that sought to make peace with the modernist left by pursuing issues that avoided confronting the left\u2019s sacrilization of race. It sounded a pro-immigration note, and soft-pedaled resistance to affirmative action and multicultural education in favor of tax cuts and a muscular foreign policy. But the Cold War ended in 1989 while the bloody Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts ran into the sand, consuming ideological capital.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Meanwhile the 2007-08 financial crisis and rising inequality shook people\u2019s faith in the doctrine of free market globalization. On the left, degree-holding metropolitan liberals became more dominant in the Democratic Party, and cast aspersions on white working-class traditions. All the while, what Thomas Piketty&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980822\">calls<\/a><\/strong><\/span>&nbsp;the \u201cBrahmin Left\u201d captured and staffed unions and left-wing parties as their mass memberships dwindled. This allowed them to complete the \u201ccultural turn\u201d away from class towards race, gender, and sexual identity politics. In the process, many blue-collar whites fell away.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Soon after, in Europe, there was a significant increase in immigration and unprecedented levels of foreign-born population. This&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1111\/1467-923X.12620\">produced<\/a>&nbsp;a populist upsurge which began with the 2014 European Union elections, continued through the rise of populist right parties in Western Europe in 2015, and culminated in Brexit. Trump\u2019s victory in 2016 was followed, in 2019, by the rise of the anti-immigration Salvini in Italy and Vox in Spain.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>recomended by:<strong> Leon Rozenbaum<\/strong><\/em><\/span><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.reunion68.com\/Biuletyn\/ico\/leon-r.jpg\" width=\"20%\"><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The populist moment, coming after the exhaustion of neoconservatism, upended the world of ideas on the right. Theresa May in Britain, Mark Rutte in the Netherlands, Sebastian Kurz in Austria, and even Emmanuel Macron in France sought to stanch losses to populist parties by adopting tougher positions on immigration and integration. In the United States, Trump\u2019s success influenced Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley, who now speak the language of economic protectionism rather than tax cuts.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Left-conservatism foregrounds nationalism more than religion. Where the religious right was evangelical and universalist, thus dovetailing nicely with neoconservatism\u2019s missionary liberalism, national conservatism is traditionalist, particularist, and isolationist. National conservatives endorse left-wing policies such as protectionism, infrastructure spending, and support for welfare programs like Social Security alongside conservative ideas such as immigration restriction and nationalism. In Europe, the mix is similar, albeit with a stronger focus on taxing the rich.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In the mid-2010s, British \u201cpost-liberalism\u201d has come to coalesce around the online magazine&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/unherd.com\/\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Unherd<\/strong><\/span><\/a>. One of its leading avatars is David Goodhart, who founded the center-left periodical&nbsp;<em>Prospect<\/em>&nbsp;in 1995. Influenced by Lind, Goodhart wrote a controversial article in&nbsp;<em>Prospect<\/em>&nbsp;in 2004 titled \u201c<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prospectmagazine.co.uk\/magazine\/too-diverse-david-goodhart-multiculturalism-britain-immigration-globalisation\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Is Britain Too Diverse<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u201d arguing that diversity and solidarity existing in tension, and that high levels of the former were incompatible with the desire to protect the welfare state. His&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.penguin.co.uk\/books\/307\/307644\/the-road-to-somewhere\/9780141986975.html\"><em>Road to Somewhere<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span>&nbsp;(2017) juxtaposed socially mobile \u201cAnywheres\u201d who attach primarily to credentials rather than the nation with rooted \u201cSomewheres\u201d who lack degrees, live near their place of birth and cherish national traditions. The new Social Democratic Party (SDP) of William Clouston, fireman-intellectual Paul Embery, and the patriotic Blue Labour wing of the Labour Party share similar beliefs and positioning.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Perhaps the essence of left-conservatism is its plea for social cohesion and a concomitant rejection of post-national elites with their one-two punch of economic liberalism and the adversary culture. At root, the New Class\/Anywhere elite is attached to a transnational status culture, much like Europe\u2019s aristocracy prior to the age of nations. Michael Lind captures this milieu well in&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/607661\/the-new-class-war-by-michael-lind\/\"><em>The New Class War<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;<\/strong><\/span>(2020), contrasting those who \u201cderive their personal status from their prestigious occupations, not their local or national communities; abandon their low-status class or ethnic or regional accents in order to succeed in metropolitan careers; and jettison ancestral traditions in favor of ever-changing transnational elite fashions.\u201d After decades in the wilderness under both left- and right-wing governments in the West, left-conservatives are attaining new levels of political power and cultural visibility in the face of a new radicalism that eerily recalls the 1960s.<\/span><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><strong>Eric Kaufmann<\/strong> is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London. His latest book is&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #808080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.penguin.co.uk\/books\/306\/306352\/whiteshift\/9780141986630.html\">Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\">\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"content-alignment\">\n<div id=\"watch-description\" class=\"yt-uix-button-panel\">\n<div id=\"watch-description-text\" style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p><em>Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion&#8217;68,<\/em><em><br \/>\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion&#8217;68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.<br \/>\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:<br \/>\n<\/em><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong><em><a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"mailto:webmaster@reunion68.com\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\">\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Rebirth of the Left-Conservative Tradition ERIC KAUFMANN A blend of left-wing policies\u2014like support for Social Security and infrastructure spending\u2014with favored conservative ideas, like nationalism and immigration reform, is finding its voice A new intellectual force is emerging in the West: left-conservatism. This belief system combines a conservative view on cultural questions like national identity [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79391"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79559,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79391\/revisions\/79559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}