Edward Abbey

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

Who was the most right-wing member of the Beat Generation?

Who was the most right-wing member of the Beat Generation? The gentle Catholic-Buddhist Jack Kerouac, spontaneous-bop prosody prince of the Old Right, has the strongest claim. In 1952, shortly after finishing the novel that would be published five years later as On the Road, he argued for Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” for president, while his pal Allen Ginsberg was puffing up Cold Warrior and son of a robber baron Averell Harriman. (As usual in American politics, left was right and up was down, and those who see only blue and red were utterly befuddled.) But William S. Burroughs, gun fancier and cadaverous grandson of the adding-machine inventor, gave Saint Jack a run for it.

beat
culture
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Conservatives and culture

"The liberal conception of society,” the political philosopher Kenneth L. Minogue wrote in The Liberal Mind, “is... determined by the moral and political policies of modern liberalism. It has only a tenuous connection with sociological description.” As well as, we must add, the political realities of the nation state in the twenty-first century. (Minogue’s book was first published in 1963.) Today, liberal policies are the emotional expression, translated into political terms, of liberals’ utopian aspirations toward the complete “inclusion” of every one of society’s “communities” on precisely equal terms. Liberals will not recognize that this goal can never be achieved, and that a multicultural nation is a plain contradiction in terms.