A New Conservative Theory of Why America Is So Polarized

New York Magazine ^ | January 21, 2020 | Park MacDougald

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of people who care deeply about political writing, he is a towering figure. His prose — full of wit and irony, enlivened by an eye for paradox and the telling detail, informed by a polyglot and polymathic erudition — is second to none in the world of conservative journalism and exceeds nine-tenths of what is published in the press at large. In a review of Caldwell’s previous book, 2008’s immigration-skeptic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, himself one of the most learned individuals on the planet, praised Caldwell’s “cultural range” as “perhaps without equal” among American journalists and noted, respectfully, that his “columns in the Financial Times make much liberal opinion look the dreary mainstream pabulum it too often is.”

Although long affiliated with the neoconservative Weekly Standard, Caldwell has always been more of an old-school, even Old World type of conservative. The cast of his mind is literary and historical, not ideological, and his principal concern is with cultural preservation and continuity. Perhaps for this reason, Caldwell has, over the past several years, emerged as America’s premier highbrow defender of transatlantic populism. In his recent essays for the Claremont Review of Books, City Journal, and even the New Republic, he has relentlessly attacked the “globalist” consensus around free trade and immigration while writing sympathetically — some would say too sympathetically — about some of globalism’s most disreputable opponents: Viktor Orbán, Eric Zemmour, Rodrigo Duterte, et al. In Caldwell’s writing, the conflict between globalism and populism is staged as a clash of civilizations: on one side is a high-handed elite, set on transforming the West into a sort of multicultural shopping mall . . .

[GOPsterinMA]

Agreed. Them or us, simple as that.

[DarthVader]

E = MC2

[GOPsterinMA]

Not just an idea. It’s the law.