The Great Erasure

Download or read book The Great Erasure written by Paul E Gottfried and published by Radix. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For those who are a part of it, and for those who feel represented by it, the postwar American "conservative movement" has been a roaring success. More Americans openly identify themselves with "conservative" than any other political ideology. There are more magazines, websites, television programs, and publishing houses that advocate "conservatism" than ever before. But the question remains: What is this movement, which has, for some half century, defined what is called "the Right"? A central crucible in its formation has been "the purge"-that is, the expulsion, often in an explicit fashion, of views or individuals deemed outside the boundaries of the official Right. Through the purges-specifically, through the logic of the purges-we can glimpse what conservatism is *not*, those aspects of itself it has attempted to deny, mask, leave behind, and forget, and the ways in which memories can be reconstructed around new orthodoxies. This collection of essays attempts to understand how conservative ideology (often euphemized as "timeless principles") functioned within its historic context and how it responded to power, shifting conceptions of authority, and societal changes. It includes essays by Lee Congdon, John Derbyshire, Samuel T. Francis, Paul E. Gottfried, James Kalb, Keith Preston, William Regnery, and Richard Spencer.