A Clarification
I had written a response to a post on Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog today, something I had not done before, before I realized that I needed to be a member of Blogger to do so. I have posted the comment here instead.
Cole: "Why should a Right that claims a genealogy in egalitarian Enlightenment thinkers have these smelly entanglements with racial, sexual, religious and other hierarchies?"I'm not sure that the Right ever claimed this genealogy, at least in purely intellectual terms. Outside of the efficacy of couching rhetoric in egalitarian terms for the purpose of winning elections, I see little evidence that the conservative coalition today is the product of some claim on egalitarian thinking. The intellectual history of the postwar Right is precisely order and hierarchy. Militant opposition to the welfare state and staunch anticommunism were the forces that allowed dispartate conservative intellectual currents to coalesce in the 1950s and 1960s. In short, they had in common opposition to egailitarianism itself. We need not look for socioeconomic explanations. It is the intellectual genealogy of the Right to oppose equality.
I would add that Cole's expertise is in Middle Eastern affairs, for which I bow to his superior knowledge. But Cole is also a commentator on American politics, which I can claim some knowledge of. I believe he is confusing the empty slogans of the economic right (i.e., the "ownership society") and their fethish for mythologizing the small business owner with an actual claim on the American tradition of equality. This gets us into the realm of intellectual roots and, as I say above, there is little evidence that the Right believes its worldview is egalitarian. When Reagan talked about this stuff he made it sound convincing and a generation of Americans came to believe that the New Right actually gave a shit about people's economic needs. But Reagan was merely providing a convincing (and perhaps needed) mythology about economic egalitarianism to bolster a supply-side ideology which has shown itself to be a failure in the past two decades.