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Entry: Hugo, Danny, and Saddam Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/hugo_danny_and_saddam#2771 Post contents: Thank you, Mr. Richert, for you thoughtful reply to my posting. 1. In that posting I was a bit hasty, so let me clarify: I do not wish to suggest by no means that anyone at Chronicles is racialist, nationalist, or Judeophobic. And I particularly abhor Cultural Marxists (or anyone else)using these terms in a McCarthyite manner. I am suggesting instead that some paleos have been slow about purging these diseases from the movement, and have thus given ammo to the paleo's enemies. 2. You are right that there is no Christian Democratic tradition in the US. So ... join me, and there will be two of us! And there is indeed no foundation for it, so let's lay one! 3. What is more, I have a liberal democratic friend (and I mean Liberal Democracy in the European sense, not the American) who says we really don't have a CONSERVATIVE tradition in the US, nor do we have the foundation for it. The Federal US was founded before the Counter-Revolutionary movement really got off the ground (Möser excepted, and probably unknown in the Anglophone world), the High Tory Cavalier Royalists in Virginia of 1641 were Whig by 1775, The Anglican Church on both sides of the sea isolated the High Church and became Latitudinarian in 1688, the remaining American High Tories left by 1783, and Conservatism just died in Gringoland. Jefferson thought Tommy Paine really cool -- and Paine sure ain't conservative! In England itself it took a century for real Conservatism to recover after 1688, except for Johnson, and Jacobitism was considered shear treason. Jefferson's tradition remains was un-conservative save for its localism and agrarianism. The only remaining US of A conservative intellectuals are Henry Adams (an agnostic) and T.S. Eliot (who got out of Dodge), and maybe Kirk. Maybe the case can be made for a minor figure, Irving. My friend wonders if Roger Scruton is the only conservative in England. I think my friend is correct in these opinions. Perhaps Paul Gottfried's upcoming book will change my judgement. I have been accused of playing games with words. So, I am using "conservatism" the way Karl Mannheim used it. Chateaubriand coined the term, and I think we should let his movement own it. This movement produced, late in its history, only two major card-carrying Judeophobes and nationalists, Drumont and Maurras (they weren't racialists, and so they weren't Anti-Semites,unlike Schönerer), and for Maurras Judeophobia wasn't a foundational principle but cheap trick to rally support to his nationalism (he knew Dreyfus was innocent), and his "integral nationalism" was tempered by his very strong regionalism. He was also more Orleanist than Legitimist, and one could ask (I don't know) if his royalism was just another prop for this nationalism. And until on his deathbed, he was the self-described "Catholic atheist". Otherwise by the late 19th C, many real conservatives were becoming proto-Christian democrats: Le Play, Keller La Tour du Pin in France; in Germany Ketteler, Pesch, and the founders of the Zentrum; and in England Manning. I welcome correction. Sent at: 2008 11 20