Jumping off from Mark Lilla’s negative review of my book in the New York Review of Books—about which more later, though if you’re looking for a hard-hitting response, check out Alex Gourevitch’s demolition at Jacobin—Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a helpful corrective to Lilla’s claim that “political apocalypticism” is a recent development on the right. It’s interesting that Lilla raises Buckley here. People often bring him up as foil to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, as an example of a time when conservatism was sane. But that Buckley joke has always struck me (a college dropout) as batshit crazy. I constantly hear about the sober-minded Buckley, but it’s tough for me to square that with the man who posited that the bombing […]
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Categories
The Right
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Tags Charles Mill, Dominic Losurdo, Drew Gilpin Faust, Edmund Burke, H.R. Haldeman, Haitian Revolution, John Adams, John C. Calhoun, Kevin Mattson, Manisha Sinha, Michael Gerson, Patrick Allitt, Paul Finkelman, Richard Nixon, Rick Perlstein, Robert Brassilach, slavery, Southern Strategy, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thomas Dew, Thomas Jefferson, William F. Buckley, William Harper
It’s been a while since my last round-up of news about The Reactionary Mind. Here’s what you missed: Reviews Two reviews of the book have recently appeared. In The American Conservative, John Derbyshire—the British-born conservative who also happens to be a contributing editor at National Review—didn’t agree with or like the book. But he did have this to say (alas, the review’s behind the firewall): On the positive side, The Reactionary Mind at least does not snarl or sputter. It is a thoughtful, even-tempered sort of book. The old maid tendency that dominates liberal polemic in the U.S.—the shrieking, clutching at skirts, and jumping up on kitchen chairs that one gets from a Joe Nocera, a Maureen Dowd, or a […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Right
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Tags Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hayes, Dominic Losurdo, Howie Klein, John Derbyshire, Marcy Wheeler, Michael Medved, n+1, Richard Seymour, Ross Douthat, Scott Lemieux, The Reactionary Mind, Thomas Meaney