Conservatism is a preference for “the familiar to the unknown …

https://t.co/fpsnSYiPXm

— mozu (@mozumozumozu) December 2, 2021

 Whichever denomination they prefer, New Rightists tend to agree that classical liberalism—of the sort embraced by previous generations of conservatives—has a big hole in the middle of it where a substantive concept of the Good should be. “My core belief is just that you can’t be a libertarian,” 

Nonetheless, Trump’s presidency was a suitable vehicle for the group’s blistering grievances against the liberal left and the conservative establishment

“The smartest conservatives I knew in college had nothing but venom for the Republican Party,” 

Importantly, most of them are Catholic. The church has always had an allure for conservatives—with its strict rules, hierarchies, and status as an institution bestriding antiquity and modernity.

Hochman said his religious and political journeys are entangled; each made him more open to the idea that a tradition “preexisting modernity” has something to teach us.

 “By polling … most young Republicans are more liberal than their older counterparts on everything from diversity to LGBT rights to immigration to climate change,” Hochman acknowledged. Meanwhile, his milieu of young, conservative, intellectual elites is moving in the opposite direction. “They want a more culture war–oriented Republican Party.”

For them, libertarianism is synonymous with the laissez-faire approach to economics and morality that dominates Washington, D.C., and has permitted the twin cancers of hyper-individualism and secularism to metastasize through the culture. 

“If you had interviewed young people at a Jacobin reading club in 2014 and printed that in TNR, they would’ve sounded pretty crazy to most people.” But now, he said, their sentiments are repeated by elected members of Congress. (As someone who attended many pre-Bernie gatherings of socialist nerds, I can tell you, the experience of the past five years has been disorienting.) “I think it’s really easy to be like, ‘Ah, these people are nuts,’” Shor said. “But it turns out, it’s a lot easier to take over a political party than you would think.”


The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott memorably defined conservatism as a preference for “the familiar to the unknown … the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

And herein lies a contradiction. Only the young have the energy, the optimism and will, to engage in that “brawly business.” And yet they have no real memory of the world they seek to restore. They can only grasp in the dark, among their own shapeless longings, for a handhold on the paradise lost. And thus the world they imagine and the means they enlist to enact it are inevitably novel. In this way, conservative activists are always retro-futurists of a sort, imagining into being—from within the heady stew of modernity—a grisly simulacrum of the “old world.” 

　左派とも旧来の右派とも対立するカソリック系新右派の若者たち 　

　台頭するリベラル傾向に反対し、伝統に回帰しようとするが、回帰する伝統の記憶がないから”過去””伝統”を自分たちが創造していくしかない、と。数的には少数であるが、今後どうなっていくかわからない・・・・なんちゃらまで、読んで飽きてきた・・・

　途中「保守とは未知のものより馴染みのあるもの、試したことのないもより試したことのあるもの、神秘よりも事実、可能性よりも現実、遠いものより近いもの、完璧な世界よりも便利なもの、理想郷の至福よりも現実の笑いを好む人達」みたいな定義があるんだけど・・・保守の定義としても面白いんだけど、共産党や社民的な左派がこの手の保守は好むものと反対のものを好んでいるよね・・・その意味で裏を返せば、左派の定義としても面白い。

　それと、キリスト教も原罪以前の理想郷という”過去を創造”したわけだけど・・・・保守は伝統への回帰といいつつ過去になかった自分たちの理想を想像、創造して”過去””伝統”に投影しているんだろうね・・・それは日本の保守にも言える。