The Intransigent Right in the Middle of the Century (Part One)

On progressive fantasies about the 'conservative intellectual'

One of the features of progressive thought, apparent since its inception during the French Revolution, is a pervasive paranoia about a particular bogeyman: the conservative intellectual.

This figure, as constructed in the mind of the progressive thinker, is admittedly something of an oxymoron. Conservatism is supposed to be anti-intellectual and, frankly, stupid. So the conservative ‘intellectual’ is generally always suspected only be masquerading as such. Deep down inside, he is merely a buffoon - with a good dictionary.

And yet, at the same time, conservative intellectuals seem to be glimpsed behind the scenes wherever power accumulates - clutching levers, pressing buttons, twisting moustaches, whispering in ears; for all that conservatism can only be attributable to a lack of genuine insight, intellectual conservatives themselves purportedly possess vast cunning and profound, malevolent influence. This combination of sinister competence and political ruthlessness appears wherever progressives turn their gaze to the right.

An interesting example of the mood of paranoia which permeates progressive writing on this subject came across my inbox last week through Niccolo Soldo’s newsletter. In the article in question, a person called Katherine Stewart identifies in the Claremont Institute (an American think-tank nowadays vaguely associated with the ‘new’ or ‘dissident’ right) the seeds of - yes, you guessed it - incipient fascism. She informs us, semi-coherently, that:

Most of us are familiar with the theocrats of the religious right and the anti-government extremists, groups that overlap a bit but remain distinct. The Claremont Institute folks aren’t quite either of those things, and yet they’re both and more.

No, I don’t really know what it means to not quite be something, and yet at the same time to be it and more, either. But it is clear at least that there is sinister portent, here. The Claremont Institute, we are told, embodies a ‘nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity’ and is an ‘indispensable part of right-wing American’s evolution towards authoritarianism’. It is ‘openly contemptuous of democracy’, imbued with ‘paranoid ideas’ and ‘rabid misogyny’. It hates the idea of there being a ‘more just society’. And it ‘want[s] to blow the whole place up’.

Moreover it is close, very close, to having its way. Its pockets are lined with cash donated by ‘the ultrawealthy’, Stewart tells us - ‘the result of massive investment that conservative money made over the past 50 plus years in polluting American political discourse with its massive complex of ideological factories’. Claremont is using this cash to promote an American brand of caesarism that apparently gives intellectual succour to the likes of JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis and (naturally) Donald Trump. The implication is that one more election could usher ‘the Claremonsters’ to political supremacy; but even if this isn’t achievable, they’ve already managing to spread enough ‘unreasonable ideas’ to get an ‘unreasonable society’. In short: there’s a right-wing think tank out there and it’s working in cahoots with populists to destroy modernity. (Towards the end of the piece it even turns out that Claremont is ‘literally Hitler’. Literally.)

This is obvious nonsense - the type of thing that, if it was written about a left-wing think tank, would instantly be dismissed as conspiracy theory. But Stewart’s piece, breathless and credulous as it is, is strongly reminiscent of a much calmer and more discerning article the famous Marxist historian Perry Anderson wrote for the London Review of Books back in the early 1990s, titled ‘The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century’. Written on the occasion of the death of Michael Oakeshott, it surveys the commonalities between four thinkers who Anderson calls ‘the outstanding European theorists of the intransigent Right’ - Oakeshott himself, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt and Friedrich von Hayek. (For some reason he did not include Martin Heidegger; I find this inexplicable, except perhaps for the fact that Heidegger’s work defies blithe summary in an LRB article.)

Whatever opinion one might hold about the ideas of these thinkers, Anderson tells us (his own views are obvious), they continue to ‘shape..a large pail of the mental world of end-of-the-century Western politics’. Partly because of their admittedly ‘remarkable gifts’, and partly because they ‘went with the grain of the social order’, they were ‘heard in the chancelleries’ for all that they were deemed by fellow academics to be somewhat eccentric. The conclusion is clear: however little influence right-wing intellectuals wield in the academy, they matter politically, and in a deeply sinister way.

Anderson is a heavyweight who actually reads and understands things. And he is therefore much less hysterical than Stewart. There is no stuff and nonsense about ‘polluting…political discourse with [a] massive complex of ideological factories’ here. But the basic point is the same. Oakeshott, Strauss, Schmitt and Hayek, for all their formidable erudition, stood for one thing only: ‘hold[ing] popular sovereignty at bay’. They wanted to ‘restrain’ democracy. And they exerted vastly disproportionate influence in doing so:

Schmitt counselled Papen and received Kiesinger; Straussians thronged the National Security Council under Reagan, and surround Quayle; Hayek earned formal homage from Thatcher on the floor of the Commons; and Oakeshott, as we shall see, is an increasing inspiration in the penumbra of the styleless Major. Even arcane teaching can reach gentlemen. They are the heirs.

The argument is thus essentially the same, and so, of course, is the tin ear. At the time Anderson was writing, it may have been vaguely plausible to imagine that the thought of right wing thinkers like Hayek and Strauss were having some impact on practical politics (though the fever dream of a Michael Oakeshott-inspired John Major-headed government leading the UK to a tyrannical future, or even any kind of future at all, is something else entirely). But thirty years later, his depiction of reality looks as though it was scrawled in crayon, and his warnings about the ‘arcane teaching’ of his axis of intellectual evil seem simply outlandish. From the growth in the size of the state to the technocratisation of government. and from the ascendance of ESG and EDI to the cultural dominance of ‘wokeness’, there is barely anything about the world we live in today that suggests that the teachings of any of Anderson’s quartet had the remotest influence on public life, anywhere.

The fantasy that has taken hold of the likes of Anderson and Stewart - the preposterous notion that conservative intellectuals actually have a say in anything much at all - is attributable to a common, but thoroughly misconceived, ideal in which the quality of an idea is what determines its impact, rather than the sheer quantity of people who believe in it. Anderson makes this explicit:

The work of just one theorist, John Rawls, has probably accumulated more scholarly commentary than that of [Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss and Oakeshott] put together. Yet this veritable academic industry has had virtually no impact on the world of Western politics. The reticence of its subject, who has never risked his reputation with express commitments, is no doubt part of the reason. But it is also to do with the distance between a discourse of justice, however olympian, and the realities of a society driven by power and profit. The quartet considered here had the political courage of their conviction. But they also went, more largely, with the grain of the social order. So although they could often appear marginal, even eccentric figures to their colleagues, their voice was heard in the chancelleries.

The idea here is that, while almost nobody teaching at a university really reads the work of conservative thinkers (Anderson is absolutely right about this), the actual substance of their ideas resonated with right-wing politicians, and hence they managed to wield disproportionate influence. What matters, in other words, in determining whether a given thinker will have impact in the ‘real world’, is the nature of the ideas that are being communicated and whether they find the right audience.

This is the root of the error. The truth is in fact almost the exact opposite. The substance of an idea matters much less than the fact that it is widely believed: in intellectual affairs, Napoleon’s old adage that ‘quantity has a quality all of its own’ holds sway. If lots of people have the same idea, then that idea will tend to have real-world effects regardless of its intrinsic quality. If only a few people share an idea, it is unlikely to go anywhere, not matter how close it gets to the truth.

We see this very clearly in Anderson’s own example of John Rawls. It may be true that Rawls was not invited to dine with Presidents and has never been lauded in the House of Commons. In that sense his ideas had next to no impact. But he is very, very widely cited and read - he must rank in the top five thinkers of the 20th century in these respects - and his influence permeates the academy; indeed, the academic humanities and social sciences are utterly steeped in the basic Rawlsian notion that: a) it is possible and desirable to think rationally about how society should be arranged; and b) this ought to be done to make it distributively just.

There is barely a university student at a university anywhere in the West who does not encounter this basic idea as the implicit foundation of the intellectual project tout court. And this influence then bleeds out into society, and hence into politics, because so many university students go on to occupy elite positions after graduation. It is diffuse - most of these people could not even name John Rawls, and spent very little time indeed actually studying much at university at all - but this doesn’t matter. They are imbued with the ideas, there are an awful lot of them, and they go on to become teachers, lawyers, civil servants, and the like - where they put those ideas, wittingly or otherwise, into effect.

It is not just Rawls, of course, of whom this is true; one could say the same thing about a dozen or so major theorists of the 20th century whose ideas have worked their way into the academic atmosphere so pervasively that university students simply breathe them in as they go about their daily life on campus - admittedly very often in half-baked and poorly understood form. Undergraduates are, in short, presented with a style of thinking which, while not monolithic, is predicated on a broadly accepted conceptual matrix in which university-educated people are supposed to shape society in accordance with their own enlightened views, employing the organs of an enlarged administrative state in order to achieve this. And since students are similarly presented with the set of views which are deemed ‘enlightened’, the result is a regimented orthodoxy which permeates the graduate class and hence finds impact through the types of job - any job, really, having social status and influence - that graduates tend to take.

What are these views which they imbibe, and which hence comprise this orthodoxy? Well, given that confessedly left-wing academics outnumber confessedly right-wing ones by a factor of between 9 and 14 to one in the social sciences and humanities, you can probably do the maths for yourself. I will in a future post explain why the terms ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ have become rather misleading in this context. But in shorthand form, the message is easily read. The vast majority of academics are not conservatives. And thus they are very unlikely to be sympathetic to conservative ideas, to read the work of conservative thinkers, and to have their undergraduate students engage with the conservative tradition, either.

We see the consequences everywhere, and these hardly need spelling out. It is not, as conservatives frequently convince themselves, that universities simply fill students’ heads with propaganda. In adopting this criticism they are equally guilty of adopting a paranoiac approach as the opposite ‘side’. The problem is much less sinister: it is simply that the modern undergraduate marinades in an intellectual sauce whose ingredients are almost entirely picked from regions of scholarship that are hostile or dismissive of conservative thought. She does not have the faintest clue about what conservative intellectualism even is, let alone reading the work of prominent conservative thinkers; and since the only ideas which she is exposed to are essentially anti-conservative, those are the ideas which - perfectly naturally - she comes to believe. And given the way the university system works (with 99+% of academics themselves having gone to university as undergraduates) this process simply self-perpetuates and self-reinforces.

The truth, in other words, is that Anderson has it exactly backwards. It matters very much that right-wing thinkers such as Oakeshott and Hayek are barely read by academics - because this means that they are barely read by students either, and the field is then almost entirely open for intellectualism of different kinds to frolic in as they wish. Conservative ideas are consequently almost entirely absent from the culture, at least in properly explicated form. And the result is an almost total lack of consequence in terms of practical politics or daily life.

The notion that a handful of right-wing intellectuals or a relatively modestly funded right-wing think tank would be capable of overturning the monolithic nature of the orthodoxy to which we are now subject is therefore an absurd delusion. This does not mean that the analysis of our predicament offered by conservative intellectuals has nothing to offer - far from it - nor that the rich tradition of conservative thought should be abandoned (indeed, in part two in this series I will explain why is is that a serious project of conservative intellectualism is so desperately needed). It simply means that we need to push past an awful lot of silliness in order to get to the nub of the matter when it comes to the role that conservative thought should play as we enter the middle period of the 21st century.