Who are the key conservative thinkers the current age, and who is your favorite?
To me, the first who springs to mind is Theodore Dalrymple, who seems to encapsulate a the traditionalist Tory-like conservatism perfectly (even the name, which is a pseudonym, fits).
I also like some from Charles Murray and Roger Scruton, and especially Samuel Huntington. I greatly dislike Peter Hitchens.
Who are the key conservative thinkers today?
Who is the greatest?
I like the old school ultra-hardliners like de Maistre and Ludovici. I don't agree with their views at all, but their knowledge and writing is so goddamn impressive. And their writings are generally amusing.
"Great Conservative Thinker" is like saying the richest homeless in poverty
Edward Feser and Alsadair MacIntyre, easy.
Whether you like it or not, the overwhelming majority of thinkers and philosophers have been conservatives, from Aristotle to Plato, to Kant and Hegel.
In literature, from Dostoevsky to Eliot to Borges
Now crawl back to your marxist screeds where Shakespeare is patriarchy and shit in cans is art. Working class scum.
Me
I like highly practical conservative statesmen like LKY. I strongly recommend his memoirs.
Is Richard Posner any good? His blog used to be exciting.
BTW, anyone with access to New Yorker who can provide me with a copy of following article?
archives.newyorker.com
Love Dalrymple.
I think there's going to be, or already is, a renaissance of "conservative" thought, though it's probably best categorized as nationalist thought. Mostly because these sentiments have been so subverted and repressed in the postwar jewish era. People can say what they want about the alt-right, but that appears to be where the leading thinkers of today are finding their way to.
Thomas Sowell
Bill Kristol is great
What does "conservative" even mean?
Not even trolling or trying to stir shit, I really don't get it. If we assume that "liberal" means one thing and "conservative" is its opposite, that's inherently a bad thing, right?
I don't identify as either, so I have no dog in this fight. I just don't get it.
Apart from bigotry and a fear of change, what does conservatism entail? And please, don't just throw concepts to me that are just thinly veiled bigotry and fear like "traditionalism" and "values".
>Not even trolling or trying to stir shit
>And please, don't just throw concepts to me that are just thinly veiled bigotry and fear like "traditionalism" and "values".
There's literally nothing more working class than conservatism lol there's a reason why the poorest and least educated always identify as conservative.
...
This is a horribly uneducated opinion
Is that trolling? Can't we just be honest about what conservatism is with no bias? There's nothing wrong with being a bigot or not wanting things to change for the worse. Sorry, I didn't mean to upset you or anyone else, I'll use a trigger warning next time.
>>greatly dislike Peter Hitchens
Absolutely Immoral
A respect for a nation's institutions. Being skeptical of, but not necessarily against, change.
>bigotry and a fear of change
Lol, your opinions have been formed by a prevailing zeitgeist that has distorted the state of nature. What you think of as progressive "change" is an illusion created by an outgroup of liars. What people on the real right want is to merely accept the state of nature that revolves around jew-free ethnic homelands, a social hierarchy, and a culture based on heritage instead of permanent iconoclasm disguised as "progress."
>what does x mean?
>x entails y and z
>no actual explication of meaning for x, just assertions of thick concepts y and z without further justification
top tier minds of reddit
Feel free to educate me. Don't waste my time with anecdotes or personal observations, please and thank you.
>There's literally nothing more working class than conservatism
Why? Wouldn't socialism be working class?
I asked you to explain what x is to me, why can't you do that?
I'm not sure where to start. Education skews left because it wasn't available to the overwhelming majority of the population 70 years ago (plus all those shindigs in the 60s,) but to think that conservatives are poor is just.. plain retarded. The right wins with wealthier voters in every country in the West
Conservatism was born out of a reaction to progressive influences.
>to think that conservatives are poor is just.. plain retarded
Have you ever been to America?
In the states and elsewhere, there's an illusion that wealthy people are conservative, which is bolstered by the reality that they use conservative people to hold on to power and squeeze more money out of the uneducated.
Why would anyone bother giving an explanation for something, when your own post is a good example of "motivated cognition," thus meaning there is no real dialogue to be had with you.
Feel free to justify your claims a bit better. The onus here is really on you. You made a bunch of assertions with no supporting reasoning. Some of your claims contain thick concepts (both descriptive and normative content). You've predicated some concept with those thick concepts, without justification. That's something that deserves a bit more than reddit-tier, "right wingers are meanies!"
Thankyou for proving how utterly uneducated you are
press.princeton.edu
Feel free to educate yourself, friend
This is just not true anymore. Postwar liberalism was a jewish-led sociopolitical fabrication that was able to flourish in times of abundance but has run into the wall of reality and lost its ability to convince a dying wasp class that was attracted to it purely for virtue-signaling purposes, further hampered by the third world barbarian invasions occurring throughout the west.
i'm not sure there are any.
conservative thought, by its nature, isnt very dynamic. so the thinkers of yesteryear are still the best.
all the conservative thinkers of today are doing are rehashing old ideas
I'm confused you guys, why is conservatism 'for poor/uneducated people'. The alternatives don't seem much better
The concept behind that book doesn't disprove anything that I believe. The rich vote republican so that they can hold on to their money. And? That's not exactly a good thing. That doesn't mean conservatism is the philosophy of the elite, it means it's the tool of the greedy.
When you're rich, you vote republican. But voting republican won't make you rich, which is something incel fedora conservatives don't seem to realize.
What are the alternatives, do you think?
Most people are poor and/or uneducated, so really you're going to find lazy retards on both sides of the aisle.
Confucius is a based conservative, more focused on the individual and society than on politics though
So, ignoring that I've utterly debunked the notion that conservatives are poor, by "elite," you mean those in academia? You could put that down to a million things
>Demographics
>The 60s
>The rise of cultural conservatism in the 80s, where universities sought to counter this, leading conservatives academics to leave for the private sector
>The 1900s (iirc) where there was a divergence between the educated and monarchy
It's really a Western concept, other parts of the world would be entirely different ()
Other politicial views that come up in the mainstream like Social Democracy, Liberalism or batshit leftism. The average laymen holding these views aren't much more educated.
True but why is conservatism the most looked down on?
I'll also point out that your argument makes no sense. Of course conservatism is the philosophy of the elite. It seeks to uphold institutions.
Because in The West the left have gained utter dominance of cultural institutions.
Conservatism is looked down on because it's not fun or sexy and because lots of bad people wield it as an ideological tool for their own gain.
But is it the "wrong" ideology? Obviously not.
>It seeks to uphold institutions.
Why do you think that's a good thing? Unless those institutions are working in your favor. Which they probably aren't, but someone is telling you that they are so they can exploit you.
Sad.
I believe some institutions are worth upholding. I think you've got the wrong mindset. The world is very rarely a zero-sum gain.
that's not conservatism
Which institutions? How do you decide which ones are worth upholding and which ones aren't?
The way you're presenting it, conservatism is a philosophy that strives to "uphold institutions" and then... what? Because you yourself have admitted that not all institutions deserve to be upheld. So, what happens to the ones that you personally don't want to uphold? They stay in place and work against you or simply fail from a lack of support?
Is that really more sensible than a philosophy that wants to actively dismantle the ineffective or disagreeable institutions, while leaving in place the ones that work?
>why is conservatism the most looked down on
years of propaganda
>I'm not a bigot
>accept the state of nature that revolves around jew-free ethnic homelands
yikes
Because "conservativism" for the past 50 years has meant liberalism on a slight delay.
What you call bigotry I understand as a biological response that we won't get rid of by shaming people as you're attempting to do.
I think you need to read Edmund Burke, friend. He explains better than I can. If you don't have the time to do so you should at least look into why he supported the American revolution but did not support The French revolution.
The idea that we should not be so quick to change something unless:
1. There is overwhelming evidence to do so
2. There is an appreciation of why we had what we had in the first place
3. That the change is not entirely out of line with the nation's past,
4. That the change should be organic and grow out of society's customs
>archives.newyorker.com
Bump. It's only one PDF page. The Posner Portrait.
It's called Bench Burner.
Is that how you defend pedophilia too? lol
I want to deal quite harshly with the people most responsible for pushing pedophilia these days: jews.
damn, you sound so stupid
go back to /pol/
>Whether you like it or not, the overwhelming majority of thinkers and philosophers have been conservatives, from Aristotle to Plato, to Kant and Hegel.
>In literature, from Dostoevsky to Eliot to Borges
I love how conservatards always forget the 20th century when spouting this retarded meme.
>It's turned into an American """"polar opposites"""" Libtards vs Conservatards thread
no because conservatism has nothing to do with ethnic nationalism
>Kant and Hegel
anglocucks can't into philosophy
Why no Confucious?
Which is why it has failed and is no longer relevant. Conservativism begins with the conservation of race.
That's false. The premise that you're supposed to surrender your nation to foreigners who will never assimilate would have never been even considered by past conservative thinkers, let alone embraced by them. It was an unquestioned assumption that communities should govern themselves and that invasions should be fended off. Just like how the Greeks understood the nature of Being so intuitively that they never needed to question what it was and how it worked. The fact that we're having this debate today and that our (((cosmopolitan))) overlords have succeeded in diluting Western civilization to such an extent is both a travesty and a tragedy.
this
Conservatives always just need a generation or two to catch up to everyone else.
We used to have Jonathan Bowden , but he's dead now, some people would cite Moldbug as an influence as to why they began to consider true conservativism as well, even if most of those people do not like jews.
There aren't really any prominent conservative intellectuals today, most of them have been shunned from academia completely and the rise of PC culture has ensured that they never find the mainstream without having thought police beat down on them.
Even the alt right today is mostly a joke, they are about as soft core of a reactionary movement you get and constantly bicker among themselves. That's not to say there is no intellectual basis behind them, in fact I'd suggest listening to Rebel Yell, Kulturekampf, and the Darwin Digest to get s good understanding of what the modern far-right is like today.
Donald Trump.
>Conservative
>MacIntyre
>All the faggots taking the b8
Sad!
A communitarian thomist Catholic virtue ethicist with an emphasis on tradition as epistemic basis for everything, I'd say he is easily placed with the widely conservative outlook. He's not a conservative of Edmund Burke or de Maistre type, but he's got a lot more in common with them then other ideological alternatives.
As far as alive dudes go, I like scruton -despite not being a great reader - and yuval levin -though I wouldn't recommend "fractured republic". Levin's journal, "National affairs" is often interesting. Parts of Daniel Bell hold up well. Christopher Lasch (RIP) is always worth reading. (I recognize parsing him as conservative is disputable). Henry Jaffa is good to read.
>Tory-like conservatism
Tories aren't conservative you dumb skinny milk drinker
>capitalist
>conservative
You can't have both
>Local man takes the midnight train going anywhere after learning his country has been overrun by migrants.
youtube.com
Look at any working class political action ever.
i'd rather have neither
bump
>Great thinkers today
oxymoron
I wish the libtard/contards wouldn't argue in this thread about "wat is bestest." Go to /pol/ and do that.
Thank you. Delightful read. Maybe the best recommendation in the thread so far.
>Conservative
>Thinks Nigel Farage is the devil and Clement Attlee should be canonized
I think it's time for that old fuck to get in the urn
Unironically Steve Sailer
>being this retarded
I'm just going to assume this is bait.
Not true.
>I want things to change!
>No, I want things to stay the same!
Can still be
>I want things to stay the same!
>No, I want things to change!
This guy's writings were in my parents bookshelves at home and I read them all. Despite at that time being a snob and playing the role of young fogey reactionary I found his arguments poor and unconvincing in defence of aristocracy. It's essentially those Tatler articles about why only plebs called Wayne say toilet, except dressed up with a learned style and with less nude poshos showing their tits. He seems to only care about these auras of prestige which certain institutions (for his class these tend to be Eton, ornate and liturgical churches like CoE or RCC, Oxbridge, certain clubs like the Garrick, and so on) imbue in those that belong, and conflates these with aristocracy and class, which is ironic because it's the exact same thing that uninformed working class kids do if you are at all well-educated, can speak clearly, and dress nicely. Why does he make the same mistake as non-aristocrats? Because he himself is not a true old-money red-trousered aristo, and probably better off for it as they rather in a bad way in today's world. He is a Jacob Rees-Mogg type, bog standard public schoolboy with a dollop of brains who affects a contrived toff persona and manner. Unless you are some class-insecure, twee Evelyn Waugh type his body of work is probably best left unread.
Institutions that are inherently beneficial for everybody like healthcare, police force and educational institutions are worth upholding. Obviously changes can be made within those institutions but only so as to more fully recognise the spirit and core principles under which those institutions were designed for.
Seconded.
Sowell runs circles around muddled thinkers.
Buamn
Who?
I like him a lot, although I doubt he is "a thinker" or even that "conservative".
He's just sharp, honest, with a wide real-world experience and a wide vocabulary.
Laughable, uneducated post. The "scum" in the end was a nice touch, though. Neck yourself, neckbeard trash
...
I guess if you want to conserve certain values and traditions. Thus convervatism can mean anything, depending on where you live and in what time.
M O L D B U G
There's nothign to conserve.
L A R P I N G C O M P U T E R G E E K
Moldbug.
I find the old German "radical" conservatives intriguing. Edgar J. Jung, Schmitt, Jünger, many others. The entire Fin de Siecle period is extremely interesting (any good books on the period, lit?).
I have a book of letter exchanges between Schmitt and Kojeve. Dear oh dear, absolutely brilliant men! Heidegger is interesting, but too difficult. Spengler is also too Germanic, too ponderous for me. Nietzsche is the apex of "radical conservatives" IMO.
I will be on the hunt for more letter exchanges (recommendations greatly wanted!)
Letter exchanges are an underrated book form.
>I will be on the hunt for more letter exchanges (recommendations greatly wanted!)
Flaubert and George Sand.
>It is of little matter whether many peasants know how to read and listen no longer to their cure, but it is of great matter that many men like Renan or Littre should be able to live and be listened to! Our safety is now only in a legitimate aristocracy, I mean by that, a majority that is composed of more than mere numbers.
--- Flaubert
Is this satire?
Roger Kimball is my favorite. Most of the writers you mentioned are published in Kimball's New Criterion.
I also don't care for Hitchens because he's just as deluded as his brother. If he was more talented he would be writing books or novels about the decline of Britain rather than shilling for the Church of England which is a lost cause.
Anyway, Hitchens IS however more talented than those youtube hacks /pol/ worships.
The left is universalist and egalitarian
The right is paticularist and elitist. I don't really like the term 'conservative' as it's an inherently losing strategy
He doesn't seem like a LARPer to me. His prose is a bit purple and edgy, but pretty much everything on the internet in 2007 was quite edgy desu. He comes off as a very amiable and level-headed guy in interviews and (dare I say it) his reddit AMA.