Taki Magazine

Lukacs the Tory

by Grant Havers on May 31, 2008

As a longtime admiring reader of John Lukacs’ histories, I agree with the comments of many bloggers on this site that his thought can be accurately described as “elitist” or “reactionary.”  I also agree that Lukacs’ tendencies towards a Burkean conservatism at least in part explain his animus towards the more populist expressions of right-wing politics in the United States; these biases might even explain why he targeted Buchanan’s book in mainly unappreciative terms.  Lukacs is no different from the late Peter Viereck in fearing the threat which mass democracy poses to traditional authority and conventions while celebrating a Rousseauian trust in the General Will.  Like another Tory, George Grant, Lukacs has always given me the impression that American conservatism, in his view, is an oxymoron.  A populist nation just cannot be conservative.

This position has its merits, although it is hardly immune to criticism.  Much as I respect the Tory writers of our time, I have always found it perplexing that they often fault the tail for wagging the dog.  Like Grant and Viereck, Lukacs is inclined to blame the American people rather than the ruling establishment for the most extreme passions circulating through the American psyche.  One favorite target of Lukacs is American Christianity, a toxic blend of Puritan fanaticism and technological will to power that is incompatible with the restrained Christian faith which Lukacs finds characteristic of European culture.  Lukacs gives the impression that this distortion of Christianity is the true culprit behind populist extremism in America.  As he wrote in A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (2004):

There was a kind of unrestrained spiritualism at the base of the American mind from the beginning.  This did not mean that America remained medieval from its beginnings.  It meant that this peculiar coexistence of medieval with supermodern habits of mind has been typically American.  For Americans have been often unable as well as unwilling to recognize the peaceful coexistence of their, often evidently contradictory, mental categories—and this kind of inability was in itself a medieval habit of mind.

Notice that Lukacs makes no distinction between ruler and ruled in his critique.  Few Americans, whatever their caste, escape from a fanaticism which courses through the American bloodstream.  Even that venerable Tory, Russell Kirk, did not escape the nefarious influence of this postmodern Puritanism, in Lukacs’ view.  Kirk’s writings ‘reflect both the Royalist and the Puritan aspects of his persona, of the Cavalier and of the Covenanter at the same time.” (186)

As an outside observer of the United States, I must confess to sharing Lukacs’ anxieties about the fanaticism of the evangelical Right and its support of Jacobin policies like global democracy-building.  If one watches the mainstream media in North America, it is to easy to get the impression that Reverend Hagee and Pat Robertson wield enormous power over Americans.  Yet, in my more reflective moments, I must disagree with Lukacs’ conclusion that somehow the great mass of Americans and their religious beliefs are the primary source of these policies.  Despite the “unrestrained spiritualism” of the Religious Right, their representatives did not make the decision to go into Iraq.  Their supporters are just that, supporters.  They have provided the foot soldiers for Bush and Cheney, but they do not call the shots.  What every Tory writer known to me desperately needs is a good dose of “elite theory,” or the hermeneutical teaching (developed by Peter Brimelow, Sam Francis, and Paul Gottfried) that ideas, spiritual or otherwise, are usually subject to the manipulation of a savvy ruling class.  This would be preferable to the alternative:  embracing the hyperbole of Richard Hofstadter and other leftists on the imaginary power of the “radical right.” 

Does this last claim relieve the American people of all blame?  Not at all.  The Religious Right and other unrestrained spiritualists in the American political scene deserve to be forever excoriated for going along with the neoconservatives, who do not take their social views on gay rights and abortion seriously until election time.  Nothing stops the “unrestrained” spiritualists of America from restraining themselves with a good book on the history of the Middle East.  Still, they don’t make the decisions in the upper echelons of the GOP. 

As for the ruling class:  we can accuse the neoconservatives and democratic leftists of many things, but they probably don’t fit what Lukacs (unhappily) calls a “medieval” frame of mind (considering the medieval respect for Aristotelian prudence, it’s hard to call the neocons medieval!).  Rice and Cheney could probably care less about the spiritual passions of Americans in the heartland.  While they certainly count on the populist stirrings within the American body politic for support of their agenda, there’s no question about who’s in charge.     

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