“Is America Unconservative?”
from Taki’s Magazine, June 2, 2009
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In a contribution to Takimag from last summer, Austin Bramwell asked “Why are movement conservative intellectuals so obsessed with refuting positions (e.g., that the United States is an inherently “liberal” regime) that nobody has actually believed in fifty years?” Those few, we band of brothers, who read the piece sighed and muttered to ourselves, “Well, because so many people keep on asserting that the United States is an inherently liberal regime.” It is the standard excuse for ignoring traditionalist viewpoints in academia and the media, and it turns up again in Kevin Gutzman’s recent post, “There is no Authentic American Right—and a Good Thing, Too.”
Gutzman is a libertarian Bourbon, who has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” For him “Louis Hartz posited long ago . . . that America is dominated by a broad Lockean consensus . . . Hartz was right: there’s one wing in American politics. The question is almost always what kind of Left it will be.”
Gutzman, of course, is right about one thing. As conservatives and right-wingers like Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Whittaker Chambers and many others have pointed out for over a century, free marketeers (19th century liberals or modern libertarians) differ from Marxists and democratic socialists (20th century liberals) only superficially, while sharing fundamental traits that range from a commitment to economic reductionism (what Albert Jay Nock and Wilhelm Röpke called “economism”) to a pervasive obsession with globalism. Gutzman is right about himself and his fellow libertarians. They are left-wingers and do not differ in fundamentals from other left-wingers.
Gutzman is wrong, however, about the United States and the people who created this nation. . . . More
