Remembrance of things past

I haven’t been active on my weblog recently, and have mostly used it for notices of pieces I’ve published elsewhere, but stubborn technical issues in an aging Drupal installation on my home computer finally forced migration to the more user-friendly WordPress platform. Post-migration cleanup involved several hours manually reassigning posts here and there, reminding me of the times those posts were written.

My impressions: at bottom politics hasn’t changed much since the year 2000, when I published an essay in Modern Age, “The Tyranny of Liberalism”, describing the situation. Then as now we had a public order dominated by an increasingly insane Left, opposed by various people who dislike the tendency in one way or another but mostly lack a coherent position and are very much at the margins of official intellectual and social life.

One thing that has changed is public availability of non-mainstream right-wing thought. The alt.revolution.counter Resource List and Traditionalist Conservatism Page display the situation in the late ’90s and early oughts. They tried to be comprehensive, and list what was out there, but it really wasn’t much — a few small and almost unknown organizations and publications, some books that were mostly rather hard to get, mainstream publications that seemed somehow suggestive, and a few Internet forums that were finally beginning to spring up.

Otherwise, it was really all late-stage postwar consensus, with The New York Times, the successors of Walter Cronkite, and a fairly unified mass culture as the unifying factors, and talk about “the Constitution” and “moral imagination” as the recognized intellectual opposition. Today’s situation on the right is a mess, but there’s much more available there, and that seems a big step forward.