![]() I’m not certain that this is how it is-or should be-in the world of ideas. You judge the work for the work and do not hold it responsible if the artist, or its fans, turn out to be bad people. In art, we divorce the work from both its creator and its legacy. So it’s nice to think so.īut at some point, you have to start asking hard questions. Would Scruton be horrified by all of this? By having his name affixed to a self-consciously revanchist coffeeshop by an aspiring authoritarian? By having fifth-rank, self-proclaimed “anti-liberal” intellectuals acting as if they are the champions of his legacy?Īs I said: Scruton was the real deal in terms of intellectual horsepower and he was, by all accounts, a good egg. Interviewed by Cassel at one such cafe, Pappin extols Hungary as “a traditional Christian society,” going on to say “as an anti-liberal, I think that’s good.” Pappin then defends altering the Constitution to tilt power toward the right and strip protections from groups he feels have undermined American traditional values. The Scruton café is a salon for the Americans who have come to Hungary to study the Orbán œuvre, the ones who imagine themselves to be partaking in a new version of turn-of-the-century Vienna. But today, with liberalism under threat, it comes across more like an indictment of liberalism-an indictment that has apparently been taken up as a foundational text by fascists. That critique was especially valuable when it could be read as a friendly corrective to liberalism’s errors, excesses, and contradictions. Scruton’s argument in many of his essays and books amounted to a deep critique of liberalism as mistaken about human beings, about society, about politics. Reading Scruton’s critique of liberalism today, with right-wing illiberalism on the march both at home and abroad, is quite another. That said, reading Scruton’s critique of liberalism from the safety of, say, 1995, with communism vanquished, liberalism ascendant, and Europe beginning to heal from an 80-year-old wound is one thing. (I met him only once, but have friends who knew him well.) I have never heard anyone say a bad word about him. I should say here that Scruton was a true intellectual, that his writing extended far beyond political commentary into various fields of philosophy and the arts, and that his reputation was that of a gentleman. They even seemed kind of beneficial: Reminding us that forced marches into the future aren’t always wise and that many established institutions have elements which ought to be conserved. Such sentiments-a wistful longing for the beautiful past-seemed harmless 30 years ago. You should be reading all of their free stuff and they’re absolutely worth supporting if you can afford the paid subscription.) That is what’s being celebrated in these coffeeshops, where great minds of the new nationalist right are meant to congregate. In Twilight of Democracy, she describes his work England: An Elegy, as “apocalyptic” and an “outpouring of cultural despair.”. But, as Anne Applebaum has noted, there was also a hard edge in Scruton’s nostalgic nationalism. ![]() He was an elegant writer and a profound thinker about the role of beauty and tradition in social life. He wrote often about English life and culture. Roger Scruton was an admirer of England in all its glory as a green and pleasant land. More recently, I watched the newest installment of Vice News’s Breaking the Vote docuseries, in which the reporter interviewed American ex-pats Gladden Pappin and Rod Dreher, who are now in Hungary to study Viktor Orbán’s brand of illiberal Magyarism. Scruton, the late conservative English philosopher, is beloved by right-wing nationalists in Europe and North America, including in the Hungarian capital. In late 2020, the first Roger Scruton-themed coffee shop opened in Budapest, Hungary. This Alan Elrod piece in Arc Digital is a tough read for anyone who admired Roger Scruton, who was a beloved conservative intellectual of the previous generation: ![]() Bush) to Trump (or Tucker, or DeSantis).īut you can draw a reasonable best-fit curve. You simply cannot draw a straight line from Reagan (or Bill Buckley, or George W. In many important ways, “conservatism” was not, 20 years ago, what it is today. That’s one of the big questions we talk about here, and there is no correct answer. ![]()
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