This week's Chroncile Review has an essay by Mark Lilla, "Taking the Right Seriously," that you may be interested in. I think Lilla under-serves the conservative movement (and those of us who take conservative ideas seriously as scholars) with statements like, "It is a convenient left-wing dodge to reduce 20th-century American conservatism to cold-war politics, since it implies that conservattive ideas are embedded in a world that no longer exists and never should have." For I fear that gives less credence to the ways that conservative ideas have been (and are) being engaged on campuses, by faculty and in classes. Moreover, while Lilla refers to college catalogs for evidence of the preponderance of post-colonialism and identity politics, he doesn't mention that there are a whole bunch of courses — perhaps flying below the radar because they're offered in law schools — in which conservative ideas are the stock in trade. (I know what he's interested in is conservative political theory, but I think if we're assessing the relative power and presence of the right and left, we need to be looking at the curriculum more broadly.)
Taking the Right Seriously
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1Be that as it may, I'm always happy to see a resurgence of interest in conservative ideas on campus and in classrooms, not the least because I have spent many years studying conservative thought in the nineteenth century.
Oh, yeah, one more thing: Happy Constitution Day!
That article was a little bit annoying. First, the tired "look at the course catalog" bit is dumb. He doesn't tell us what universities he looked at, or why this should matter. At Penn quite a few classes that either are on conservative thought, or that deal with it to a substantial degree, are offered. You can't always tell this by the course catalog. (If "recent political philosophy" devotes a significant amount of time to Nozick and Hayek, as it often does, you can't tell from the name of the course. So, if you're drawing inferences from the title you're either being dumb, lazy, or dishonest. I wish people would stop with this.) This is a serious strike against the piece. Secondly, it gives way to much credence to David Horowitz. The man is not only anti-intellectual and hysterical, as is implied, but a habitual and pathological liar. As such, he deserves zero respect and shouldn't be treated with even as much authority as offered in the article. Finally, Lilla responds to the claim of the Berkeley center (about which I have no opinion) that anti-communism was the "transcendent" issue for the right in the 20th century by noting that many right-wing parties have much older histories. But by itself that's a complete non-sequitur, and he says very little that would establish whether the claim is wrong. I agree that serious ideas on the right should be considered and taken seriously. This article gives us little reason to think this, though.