Paul Gottfried’s fine thinking—and there is little in this article that I disagree with—continues to be burdened with the outdated Left-Right spectrum.  Such an outdated metaphor, besides not corresponding to reality, also gives the illusion that because another ideology is grafted on near another on the spectrum, it also can serve the basis of a coalition.  But in fact: We Real Conservatives (Burkean-Kirkan) know that we have nothing to do with the “Neoconservatives”. We also have nothing to do with the other Faux Conservatism: be they called Fascists, racialists, or extremist nationalists. Both faux conservatism aren’t even close to us.

The Neo-Conservatives are neither neo or conservative, but they are also neither “right” or “left”.  They’ve been around since 1688, and they are correctly called “Whigs”, or “Hamitonians”. 

The Social Democrats, what Americans mistakenly call “liberals”, shed themselves of Classic Marxism (and thus “the Left") with Bad Godesberg in Germany and similar programs in other countries.  They reject class struggle and support a modified captialism. Their chief ideologue is Rawls.  They are best called “social-welfare” democrats.  They and the Whigs are statists and superstatists.

The Cultural Marxists are really not Marxist anymore, Marxism having died a strange death indeed!  They’ve become nationalists, celebrating the race and the ethnic identity of some groups against the race and ethnicity of others.  True, some of the ethnic groups are a bit odd: sodomites, lesbians, and women.  Yet in their deep structure, they are indistinguishable from the “the far right”. They really don’t even believe in “equality”, and certainly not “liberty” or “fraternity”.  Imagine Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse whooping for a race, an ethnos, or for sexual perversions!  These men were against and economic system, captitalism. 

And what about the environmentalists?  Are they “Left” or “Right”?  Or the Austrian School libertarians?  or Classic Christian Democracy?  And in Huckabee we’re discovering that Evangelical Christians aren’t “Left” or “Right” either.

The Austrian Schoolmen have suggest a better metaphor, with statists on one end, and anti-statists on the other.  It’s an improvement, but not much.  Brian Patrick Mitchell’s Eight Way to Run the Country is a definite step in the right direction.  He’s terms need to be corrected to historical terms ("Communitarian" to the correct “Social Democrat"), and his scheme might need some adjustment, but he’s on the right track.  Why Paul Gottfried, who favorably reviewed Mitchell’s book, still clings to the outdated metaphor of “left-right” is beyond me.

To abandon the Left/Right metaphor is political wisdom.  Political ideology looks more like a Chinese Checkers board or a Jackson Pollack painting.

American Conservatism, as Paul Gottfried’s latest book demonstrates, really isn’t conservatism. It really is either libertarianism or Jeffersonianism or Fascism or racialism or nationalism or Kirkan Anglophilia. One of the jobs of Taki Top Drawer is to define Real Conservatism correctly, as a unique movement with its own deep structure, and then see to it that it have a speakers’ corner in the forum.

Could someone explain to me why Taki considers Nixon to be a great President.  He was certainly no conservative and I see little good that came from his administration.

I think a good part of the problem outlined by Professor Gottfried (not all of it) arises neither from conscious opportunism (but never discount this when dealing with politicians) nor conscious adherence to an ideological creed but simply to the fact that liberalism is the tradition of the US - at least the one which has triumphed.  Those who object to propositional nationhood are confounded by the fact that the US was created propositonally by enlightenment intellectuals - albeit of a more refined breed than the thugs of the French Revolution.  The temperamental conservative or tradionalist must therefore either defend the works of liberalism or, adopting a different tradition, be perceived as at least somewhat anti-American.  Thus we see the odd phenomenon of both liberals and conservatives (not just neo-cons) praising the statist tyrants Lincoln and FDR as our greatest presidents and the even stranger phenomenon of conservatives defending liberal war crimes such as Truman’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And in contemporary times we see the US armed forces, in self-image a conservative and authoritarian institution, killing hundreds of thousands to bring the blessings of democracy and feminism to the Middle East and central Asia - all to the applause of contemporary conservatives.

Prior to Cheney/Bush and supporters hijacking the
Republican party and recasting it as the War Party, I
thought it was precisely the opposite.  Despite conisderable
ineptitude and a taste for pork to rival the Democrats,,
Republicans had essentially held onto power for twelve
years because conservatism still lives in the USA and
it was easy to appear conservative next to the Clintons.
Of all the current rather pathetic cast of presidential
candidates who dares say the least about his/her true
agenda?  My vote goes to Mrs. Clinton.

Donald, we have to characterize. In order to speak, to point out certain things, it is necessary to put people into groups, either race or into an ideology. For say Christians.  There are many types of Christians. Where there is distinctions, we use labels that fairly describe the essence of the group.  WASPs is a very convenient term. It is a group of people that are at the core of “Americanism”; or the founding of this country America.  What those people were, is what WASP connotates. WASP may have started out as a term of denigration, but it has moved to become a good label for the core constituency of America.

One can also see this movement from right to left in old conservatives. This can be seen in William F. Buckley. As he got older---he got more leftist.  As people age---they become softer. The will to fight, does not become them. Old people become sedated, relaxed, and more unperturbed. A fighting spirit goes out of them, and they relax their standards. 
Conservatism is a hard thing.  Conservatism is Hard and not many people are up to it.  It is easier to take the low road than it is the high road.  Conservatism is the High road.  Only a people that are conditioned to the Hard---can be conservatives.  An easy life, or a too hard of a life, breeds liberals.

Obviously, television.  The long march through the institutions became a blitzkrieg by the 1970s.  Nowhere in the Western world is there a healthy conservative party or movement that I’m aware of, despite the differences in systems.  The laws of these countries also converged long before the EU, due in large part to the homogenizing effects of the medias.  Also decadence caused by wealth.  People will tolerate anything as long as they’re comfy, it’s the age old story.

I think B Henry is right: the Left has traditionally needed to mask its agenda to gain electoral support.  Many of the social reforms initiated in the Sixties were couched in terms of fairness when in fact they represented a huge soical revolution that was critical of the family, religion and stability.  The so-called unintended consequences of their policies are usually the real motivation behind them.  The Left has been very succesful at making their radicalism seem reasonable, and this, too, has helped things move leftward.  One day I woke up and everyone in my generation was for gay marriage and considered tobacco worse than heroine.  It has become very difficult to explain why borders and sovereignty are not fascism.  Using terms like “human rights” to promote group politics and social change has proved a success, for who can be against something so seemingly obvious.

Happy New Year to all Taki contributors and readers, even the crazy and rude ones!

Could we not move away from the 2 dimensional model?  There are those things of a man that reside within the walls of his manse, his family, his private behaviour.  There are those things that he does within the public sphere, his job, his politics, his visible religious preference.  There are many who wish the state to regulate that which is private and those who believe that the state has no authority within the family.  One dimension, left or right.  There are those who profess to believe that what a man does in his public behaviour is the property of the state to regulate and determine.  Public speech, public entrepreneurship, public labour.  Another dimension ( call it up and down )
Map your beliefs.
Is it important to you that others not practice in private the worship of Trees? Is it important to you that certain organs on other people’s bodies may only meet in certain ways?  Is it important to you that no one work for less than a mandated hourly wage, Is it important to you that the consequences of actions should be paid for by the actors involved and not the uninvolved?
In small things one may discern big things.  Some years ago at a televised debate one of the candidates was asked his underware preference.  Given a binary question ( Boxers or Briefs ) he accepted the frame and answered.  Would you in the same situation choose either a or b or would you say: “Not really Your concern,” or maybe “neither.” The private man has been demonized.  To have answered “Not really your concern.” would have been to label himself an elitist a private man.  To have answered “neither” would have labelled him a Scotsman or a condescending swine.
To have had the temerity to ask the question labelled the questioner as just an ordinary American with ordinary concerns.  The private man is passing into history.  With that passing the two dimensional left right model will be all that remains.

ARRGH
2 directions = one dimensional.
Some nights are better some are worse.
Happy Yew Nears

And you fars too

CK - I really liked your comments.

Come on, Gottfried. There is not and never has really been a legitimate American right. America is and always has been a liberal country, right to its core. The American “right” would have been considered radically left in, say, 1910.

It’s not shifting so much as showing one’s true colors.

Whether or not “Left” and “Right” are meaningful today, it seems anachronistic of Dr. Gottfried to conflate Democrats/Republicans in the 1960s with Left/Right.  The fact that “[a]lready by the 1960s the Republicans were taking positions that were farther on the left than those held by many Democrats” says something about how the parties have become more ideologically based since then, not about how self-identified conservatives have moved leftward.

Dr. Gottfried’s argument that the leftward slide didn’t follow public opinion seems questionable.  What if the media, academics, etc. had not been on the Left?  Then public opinion would have been less to the Left, manufactured outrages would not have been the problem that they are for right-wing politicians, and there would have been less “fear of giving offense”. 

There’s also an apparent assumption that these “faux Right” American politicians somehow float above the culture, that they didn’t grow up watching the same TV shows and reading the same newspapers as everyone else.  I’m always puzzled that Dr. Gottfried, who I think counts Gramsci as an influence, puts so much emphasis on the state (and politicians) and so little emphasis on the culture.

Paleoconservatives frequently devote much time and effort to the creation of substantial cases that certain historical dates or events profoundly affected the nature of conservatism.
The year 1865 or the New Deal’s advent usually suffices for those historians who have this purpose in mind.
But what of the American System and its proponents, Calhoun and Clay?
Lincoln thoroughly suppressed the notion of states rights and FDR’s consolidation of an egalitarian centralist state on the political lines of National Socialism, were merely battles, lost in a general conflict.
With all due respect to Professor Gottfried, his personal views on the democratic process are unsound and they obscure his perspective of traditionalism in the 21st century.
He views the vote, as an activist method and has discussed using it as such, in the past.
In fact, voting will not serve as even alleviation for one’s social conscience. It serves no purpose and is a gradually decaying as the people whom it was intended to enable are either entirely indifferent and apolitical or feel that their token ballot is worth as much as their voice.
The end of conservatism began with social-democracy’s advent. Monarchists may blame Republicanism for this, but it was Republicanism, diluted with liberalism which provoked the crises of thought that resulted in the exaltation of the individual, those men and women devoid of distinctiveness in any way, shape or form and part and parcel of the faceless masses.
Mankind was not made for democracy. Its indelible effect upon mankind has been negative, so determined were its advocates to implement social-democracy upon humanity that they resorted to social-engineering to destroy the final vestiges of traditionalism which could not be eradicated from the human psyche.
The left-liberal drift began in the 17th century and by the 19th, it had undergone profound alterations before emerging as social-democracy. Liberals became reactionaries with a depressing regularity. Their ideology has undergone no alteration whatsoever. The times changed and they did not.
To begin with Karl Marx on what we might call the “left” for convenience sake, or to begin with Burke, Kirk or the Southern Agrarians on the supposed “right” is impossible,
for these are no more than reflections of a greater, eternal traditionalism or anti-traditionalism, respectively.
Today, we have two parties, one in power, devoted to keeping things as they are the other in opposition, whose purpose is to speak of the future, where things will be as they should. 
Neither of these parties is politically motivated.

What is represented by both political parties in the U.S is the phenomena known as messianic politics.  The belief that heaven can be created on earth by taking up the sword.

@WLindsay Wheeler,

The will to fight, does not become them. Old people become sedated, relaxed, and more unperturbed. A fighting spirit goes out of them, and they relax their standards. 

You are dead on.  I have noticed this with my parents.  My father allows me to put my Ron Paul sign on his lawn but he has lost his will to fight himself.  He believes in the president because he has been taught to believe that the Republican Party represents family values, etc. Many people in his generation, forced to accept the normalcy of radical behavior, are quite the same.  Uninterested, indiferent and accepting.  They leave the fight to the younger generation.