Spent the afternoon reading Matthew Rose's A WORLD AFTER LIBERALISM (h/t @HeerJeet) and more convinced than ever of this.https://twitter.com/DavidAstinWalsh/status/1472218933964988421 …
-
Show this thread
-
There's an entire chapter dedicated to Sam Francis and his political thought, and Rose notes that Francis was effectively purged from the conservative movement in 1995 after openly defending slavery on biblical grounds.
1 reply 1 retweet 4 likesShow this thread -
I think the term "purge" here needs to be interrogated a bit, since it crops up in American conservative writing about the far right all the time, and far rightists conversely used to complain ABOUT being purged all the time.
1 reply 1 retweet 7 likesShow this thread -
And what it effectively means is this: being denied the very powerful, influential, and lucrative fruits of conservative institutions.
1 reply 0 retweets 9 likesShow this thread -
This is the basis of, say, Paul Gottfried's whole deal. He's been mad for decades he's stuck at Elizabethtown College instead of at the James Madison Program at Princeton.
2 replies 0 retweets 7 likesShow this thread -
The basic point of my dissertation and now my book project is that the "purge" narrative has always been greatly exaggerated. Not only did, say, the Birchers still have plenty of opportunities in American conservatism even after being "purged..."
1 reply 0 retweets 12 likesShow this thread -
...but in order to be "purged" you *really* had to go out of your way to let the mask fall. Rose writes about Francis's infamous defense of slavery as the last straw, but also that his views were an open secret among conservatives in the '80s and '90s.
1 reply 0 retweets 9 likesShow this thread -
The same is true with Buckley's disciple Joseph Sobran, who -- despite having a long history with thinly-veiled anti-Semitism -- wasn't "purged" until after he insulted his patron personally in a column in an obscure Catholic newspaper in the mid-1990s.
1 reply 0 retweets 7 likesShow this thread -
There are other examples -- I mentioned Derbyshire in the earlier thread -- but the main point is that it was an open secret in American conservative circles these guys had ... heterodox views, but it wasn't until they became politically damaging that they were "purged."
3 replies 0 retweets 11 likesShow this thread
Their views weren't heterodox. Their explicitness was.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.