Just as an earlier post today found a progressive writer horrified to learn that liberals weren’t liberals, the conservative think tank The Witherspoon Institute is shocked to find that “radical traditionalists” aren’t conservatives:
For many years now, the litmus test of an American conservative has been whether he or she is committed to limited, constitutional government and to the proposition of the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.†Although much maligned and often misunderstood, this tradition serves a vital purpose in our republican government: it keeps conservatives united around a set of concrete political and philosophical goals that every layman can understand.
Strange to say, then, that conservatism is increasingly under assault, not from the Left, but from within. This attack is driven by false narratives that blame the Founders’ natural-law liberalism for today’s cultural and political decay. By contrast, the life and work of Frederick Douglass can serve as an alternative model for the conservative movement—a way of upholding natural-law liberalism, and yet remaining introspective about our nation’s origins and future.
I’ve been referring to these “radical traditionalists” for some time as “Right Bolsheviks”.
I think that both of these groups are romantics; their ideas are founded in highly glamorized visions of a wonderful future on the one hand and a glorious imagined past on the other.
I come back to G. K. Chesterton’s remark on the two kinds of reformers:
Let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’
Left or right there are fewer and fewer of the latter sort of reformer every day.
Off-topic: Coreyrobin.com as a left-blog which might meet the criteria you set in a previous post.
Thanks. I’ll take a look.
Right Bolshevik is a great descriptive.
If Vox Day is a radical traditionalist, then they deny that the Founding Fathers were natural law liberals establishing a proposition state and insist that they first and most WASPs who were establishing an Anglo-Saxon ethno-state.