Today while eating a hot dog (right wing food) on multi-grain bread (left wing food) for lunch (conservative in the sense of traditionalist meal time), I was listening to a podcast interview of a scholar who studies new religious movements.
For the moment, I’m not interested in the actual interview or the study of modern Satanism which was the focus of the talk, but in some political terms he threw around in the course of the conversation.
He talked about Anton LeVey’s Church of Satan, which advocated a strict hierarchy and misogyny as being libertarian and conservative. Hmm, I thought. Libertarians are indeed in the present considered to be conservative. Yet Libertarians believe in a system with as little government as is possible for a society to function, while advocating for a high degree of individualism. How does one square this circle with a use of the term ‘conservatism’ that advocates extremes of hierarchy? He then mentioned that a rival group, the Satanic Temple (the actual focus of the interview) as being opposite politically, described with the use of the term ‘progressive’. Yet, progressives advocate a system where government controls just about everything, if not actually doing everything in a society.
I am not here attempting to disentangle these mangled terms, but got to thinking about how political philosophical terminology is in a state of flux and has been so since the 1960s. Back then for example in Canada George Grant, who is regarded as a conservative thinker was the darling of the New Left.
There is much here to unpack, perhaps a book length unpacking, but I had to jot down these thoughts before they evaporated from my porous memory.
BTW, this interview/review is part of an excellent series of audio podcasts called In Conversation produced by Oxford University Press for books published by that still excellent academic press.
I listen on Apple podcasts but the series is available on all the usual suspects: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/in-conversation-an-oup-podcast/id1557260408?i=1000517871485
An Historian looks at the West 