The American Right, that most singular bird.

Way before beginning this blog I was wondering if I should spend some time discussing the recent writings of the American right. I have mixed feelings about the thing. On the one hand, it can become addictive but with little benefit. I can't remember who said that Ann Coulter's pieces were fascinating in the same way a gruesome car accident is: you can't avert your eyes although you know how ugly is what you're looking at. Same for some other people. On the other hand, the American right is an interesting and important ideological phenomenon and, as such, a social scientist should pay attention to it. 

American conservatism often combines free-market ideology, religious faith and patriotism in ways that you can hardly find anywhere else. Conservatism in other latitudes often has to compromise in one of these. Just for that, it's interesting to think about it. 

Anyway, the point of all this throat-clearing is that today I succumbed to temptation. This piece by Charles Krauthammer is just the kind of train-wreck that one cannot stop noticing. So, what the heck, I'm gonna start every now and then yielding to the guilty pleasure.

Even by Krauthammerian standards, this is pretty deranged. I don't have time for a point-by-point take-down. I think the piece is pretty much self-combustible. What I want to single out is how Krauthammer reaches back into the old topic of the "hardworking citizens of democracies" taxed by the Third World. You know, those cunning, brown peoples that always find a sneaky way to make hard-working, civilized Westerners to feel guilty and part from their hard-earned money! And to think that those people in the Third World have it easy! They don't suffer from low-back pain, or carpal tunnel syndrome as those of us in the industrious West do because all they do is to lay in their hammocks all day long. While we produce the world's wealth, they enjoy toiling in the outdoors, watching beautiful landscapes and rare animals (often vultures, but never mind), spending quality time with their kids that help them rummage through heaps of the products of civilization that they, ingrates that they are, call "garbage" and so on.

I could pile more sarcasm, but what matters is something else: seemingly there is no such thing as a defeated ideology. There was a time when I thought that plain ol' imperialism, justified with unapologetic racism was gone for good. A while back I wrote of Leopold II as the mass-murder version of a defunct ideology. I was wrong. That ideology is not dead. You can find it brought to you by the Washington Post.