John – I agree, it’s an interesting piece and I learned a couple things from it. But that line bugged me too (I’ve mentioned Nock in print and criticized him in debates and speeches numerous times). Frank — an old friend — seems to be carving out a space for himself as the next John Judis, a liberal chronicler of conservative intellectual history. I’ve quibbled with Frank’s versions of conservative history before, but I’ve decided my real problem is that he reports on conservative intellectual history as an outsider and so maybe he simply sees things I don’t and I see things he doesn’t. And fair’s fair when it comes to interpreting such things.
But what does bug me is this entire ouevre. Conservatives, rightly, have a greater ownership of their intellectual history than liberals have of theirs. We’re proud of our heritage of ideas. Liberals are proud of their heritage of action (a gross oversimplification, of course). Nevertheless, the whole project of applying a vague guilt-by-association between today’s conservatives and figures from the past, particularly the pre-Buckley past, often strikes me as a bit unfair, if not tawdry. I’ve been wading pretty heavily into liberal intellectual history for the last two years. And, frankly, it isn’t something to be all that proud of.
The key difference, I think, is that conservative have investigated their own history enought to pick and choose which traditions we want to uphold (again, a gross oversimplification). Liberal writers, on the whole, have done no such thing (there are obvious exceptions including, I think, Foer). This has made liberals far more indebted to the intellectual undertow of their intellectal past than they realize. The undercurrents of Dewey, for example, still steer a staggering amount of liberal thinking today and I just don’t think liberals appreciate the implications and handicaps this places on them. Being part of an intellectual heritage that is uninterested in intellectual history means you will invariably accept certain ideas as givens you might rightly question and dismiss if you took an interest in doing such things.
Meanwhile, conservatives have the opposite problem. We have to contend with the weight of everything any conservative ever said (or, at least, anything a liberal critic wants to throw in our face). We constantly hear, for example, that conservatism has been poisoned by southern racism because the South moved to the Republican fold in the 1960s. But almost no allowance is made for the possibility that the conservative movement had a far more profound effect on southern racism — or souther conservatism — and that maybe not every Southern Republican is a Bull Connor.
Anyway, I gotta get back to work.