Ideas, concepts, or terms may just end up seeming to be entirely subjective or totally relativistic unless put into the proper historical, relational or other needed or required context.  What is, for instance, radicalism or extremism?  

Does it ever depend upon, e. g., which century or age in which something or some practice, idea, or philosophy appears, so as to make a determination of whether or not it may or might be said to be supposedly radical or extreme?   Again, context may be needed and the consideration of what is normal versus that which is abnormal (or, at least, deemed to be so by rational and reasonable convention).   

A Google search, for instance, of “traditionalist right book” will not turn up any book (or, at least, into 5 pages of trying to find such a title, presumably as “traditionalist right”).   It may be necessary, however, to try to establish some rational grounds for thinking and (advanced) reasoning pertaining to political cognition.   Some preliminary efforts will be made, therefore, by citing examples of thought that can be backed up by definitional cogitation as to what is normal versus abnormal considerations of what can be thought in a correct manner.

Fixed Definitions Required

Thus, to keep to a simple and easily understood example, dog bites man is considered to be the normal, ordinary, occurrence that could occur; man bites dog is, by definition, abnormal, atypical, and rarely happens because it is the manifest exception to the regular rule posited as to what rationally can be so expected to occur.  Heterosexuality, meaning the joining of men and women, is usually productive of offspring, of generational results, in natural terms of social and other things that are normally involved. 

Marriage, thus, defined as the combination of a man and a woman has the fertile capacity to sustain the human race; and, thus, the normality inherent in that situation, as it has been for known for, literally, thousands of years of civilization, culture, literature, etc. has been and can be reasonably verified, without any rational questioning to the contrary, as to its being substantially false or, in fact, incorrect.

Anything, therefore, that represents the always bizarre equivalent of man bites dog ought to then be logically held as being, by definition, as manifestly abnormal, radical, extreme, deviant, etc.   What is called, e. g., same-sex marriage is, consequently, clearly an oxymoron of the highest order in that it is not productive naturally of what is so natural to humanity in terms of perpetuating the regular reality of the human race as such. 

The heuristic larger point is that, moreover, there needs to be some vital fixed basis of comparison for knowing what is the norm, as distinguished from that which is not normal; otherwise, yesterday’s radical always will seem to supposedly become today’s conservative and vice versa at that because there may not be any true point of reference that remains stable. 

Without a functional stability of definition, one lives in a perpetual Alice in Wonderland situation; this is where one means what one says only when one says what one means and not vice versa; this is, by definition, a clear case of epistemological vice that can be seen readily in such rarified, nominalist, academic pursuits as deconstructionism, structuralism, Afrocentric studies, Homocentric studies,  Feminist-centric studies, etc.

If, some 50 to 60 years ago, someone, on the political right, stated as a prediction that there would be gay pride parades in most American cities, then that person would have been denounced and dismissed  as just a weird crackpot or rightwing fanatic for suggesting such an extreme or far out possibility.   In the early 20^th century, however, G. K. Chesterton had remarked how, in that century, the normal had to keep giving way to the abnormal; and, it can be added, this historical reality of societal, cultural, and moral degeneration has not ceased.  

So, what is being explicitly asserted here is the need for having a constant means of measuring, properly determining, change that intellectually and logically avoids any unneeded, unwanted, philosophical relativism or subjectivism.  But, this is not at all that easily possible with the modernist era ideology of Conservatism, which keeps on changing its functional principles.

Problematic Nature of Conservatism Revealed

Conservatism in America, and even elsewhere for that matter, tends generally to be a quite changeable thing, generation to generation; this, clearly, proves that it is cognitively infected by varying degrees of empiricism, rationalism, and, especially, pragmatism, among other strains of different philosophies in the main realm of modernity. 

If one could, say, go to the 1950s and bring back to the present era a typical American conservative of that decade, and introduce him, e. g., to a typical conservative of the year 2009, he would call such a (present) conservative a blazing leftist.   And, this is not an exaggeration at all.   Prominent spokesmen of conservative thought, such as Rush Limbaugh, have repeatedly claimed that, e. g., John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were conservatives; if given enough passage of time, one would not or should not be at all surprised if Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and other Leftists are also called conservatives; the political definition of a “conservative” is, indeed, quite plastic.

It has not just been the acknowledged case that this nation’s social and cultural views have moved very far to the ideological Left; its basic politics has, moreover, truly moved very far Left, has been greatly radicalized, since the 1960s and, therefore, this is also notably reflected in Conservatism today; and, neoconservatism, by the way, is even much further to the Left, of course, in its firm support for the welfare-warfare State.  The massive and observed, continuing radicalization of America has helped to push conservative ideology more and more toward the ideological Left.  

For instance, though the feminist Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was never ratified, virtually everything, however, desired by the ERA as to its basic consequences, for radicalizing society and culture, has been essentially achieved, including, e. g., women as part of the active combat forces of the United States; this is the clear victory of what has been correctly called cultural Marxism; thus, the majority of today’s American conservatives no longer see anything (fundamentally) wrong with women in combat roles.

What still remains firmly on the political Right, consequently, could only be called the traditionalist right concerning social, cultural, political, religious, and other such views, perspectives, attitudes, etc. that are then clearly intellectually rightwing in their fundamental orientation.   As a here sufficiently prominent example to use, the Christocentric view of politics, society, and culture of the traditionalist right has, essentially, remained constant for centuries and will, as such, still foundationally continue for further centuries to come.  

Such a view is not meant to coldly or absurdly exclude all non-Christians from participating in a revival of Christendom; what is meant is that it is better for people to believe in something, instead of nothing.  As G. K. Chesterton rightly put it, when people cease believing in God, it is not the rationalist case that they, thus, come to believe in nothing; they then become capable of believing in anything, in any superstition imaginable or even unimaginable; after all, the Communist, Nazi, and Fascist regimes of the 20^th century were not Christian autocracies, far from it; moreover, e. g., at least a million times more people were butchered by Communism alone than during the entire history of the Spanish Inquisition; Stalin ordered more deaths per day than all of the deaths collectively attributed to that Spanish institution that had, functionally and operationally, primarily served Spain’s nation-state structure, not Catholicism.

Readers, thus, need to know that this is a brief discussion of how of the traditionalist right is extremely different from Conservatism and other such ideological fixations falsely claiming to be on the political right.  The matters discussed here, it needs to be properly noted, will be philosophically dealt with in terms of created archetypes of thought to better help focus and sharpen, crystallize and concretize, the true and notable differences observably involved.

First, some good definitions are in order so as to, one hopes, avoid confusion.  Conservatism in America and some other places in the world, such as some countries in Europe, exists as a modernized form of classical Liberalism (or neoclassical Liberalism) in general support of capitalism, nationalism, bourgeois class society and material culture with its pandemic consumerism, the open society ideal, fundamental optimism, and basic belief in democracy; all of this is mainly or, at times, fully supportive of the doctrine of American exceptionalism, which means, in essence, that this country is then always to be considered absolutely unique regarding all of recorded human history. 

Modernity v. Traditionalist Right

The traditionalist right in America and some other places in the world, again, such as Europe, is in favor of free-market economics, patriotism, a social view condemnatory of (crude and crass) bourgeois attitudes toward society and culture, supportive of the good society ideal, and free, constitutional, republican government in America and either monarchy (for some countries) or a version of republican government in, e. g., Europe; but, this is all allied to a fundamental pessimism, especially regarding human nature; American exceptionalism, as a function of the Whig (read: liberal/progress)Theory of history, is completely rejected as such; Western civilization and culture in general are referred to as the requisite collective norm for understanding and comprehending an appreciation and support for the best features of civilization and culture. 

Of course, both aforementioned defined concepts are, thus, deliberately generalized to reasonably cover a large ground that, nonetheless, can freely allow for some variations, upon certain different themes, without essentially ever destroying the basic contentions formally asserted.   An examination of the different things being supported or rejected will, thus, better help to illuminate the positions of Conservatism, which is a definite ideology, versus the traditionalist right, which has contempt for all ideologies because all of them, either immediately or ultimately, support modernity.  

Modernity is not meant here as being the modern age; it is to be defined as the complex of ideologies (Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Feminism, Libertarianism, Syndicalism, etc.) and related philosophies (existentialism, empiricism, rationalism, pragmatism, positivism, phenomenology, materialism, nihilism, naturalism, etc.) that had, therefore, defined critically what came to be called modernity or modernism in cognition, society, and culture.   Important reading would include C. N. R. McCoy’s The Structure of Political Thought, Leo Strauss’ Natural Right and History, E. J. Roesch’s The Totalitarian Threat, and Thomas P. Neill’s The Rise and Decline of Liberalism and his Makers of the Modern Mind.

Conservatism as a modern ideology can usually be traced back to the English, Liberal Whig Edmund Burke of the 18^th century; the thinking of the traditionalist right, however, predates substantially what goes by the conservative label.

A most interesting phenomenon can be rendered here, for apt illustration, of a yet continuing problem in trying to defend rightwing cognition opposing modernity and its plentiful evils.  Wonderment exists, nonetheless, in that even people who really ought to know better, due to their heightened intellectual ability, still absurdly give out with the usual tiresome, clichéd, ritualistic denunciations of those past European thinkers who were validly on the political right such as Joseph de Maistre, Vicomte de Bonald, Francois Chateaubriand, etc .  Why is this, pointedly, being said and then raised as an important issue?

If the 20^th century had never tragically occurred, then there would be some fair justification for and, thus, reasonable rejection of most of what they had to say in the 19^th century; but, the 20^th century did, in fact, shockingly happen with its well known and horrendous two world wars, genocides, Soviet gulag, other communist gulags, and much else that had, therefore, tremendously confirmed, many times over, what those (often scorned) 19^th century French men of the Right had to truthfully say.   In an otherwise splendid book, Fr. George Rutler, in his A Crisis of Saints, found the highly tendentious need to there dismissively characterize (as a kind of quaint nonsense?) such writers as mere “pseudo-traditionalists” and pathetic romantic reactionaries.

He greatly needs, therefore, to read such forceful and instructive works as Bela Menczer’s Catholic Political Thought 1789-1848 to, needfully, correct his stilted vision of what they were actually talking about back then.   And yet, why Abbe de Lammenais, a man of the ideological Left, is placed on the Right as a romantic reactionary, by Rutler, must now remain, one guesses, just a simple theological mystery.   These, by now, standard, overused denunciations of de Maistre et al are routinely expected, as with the often analogous, e. g., practice of anti-anti-Communism, which is similar to ever violently noticing and objecting to an oh-so-tiny flea (Joe McCarthy) on the back of a Jumbo-sized elephant (Communism).  

As author of The Theme is Freedom, M. Stanton Evans’ Blacklisted by History: the Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies is yet another corrective volume.  No one, in his right mind at least, would call Evans a romantic reactionary, (after all, he’s not even a Roman Catholic).   

Rutler’s criticism (which doesn’t make sense anymore), given historical occurrences of an aggressively evil magnitude regarding the ideologically murderous intent of the Left, is then completely disproportionate, to just put the matter quite mildly. 

If there are, however, any true remaining doubts, one can profitably read Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Leftism Revisited, From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot.  And, this book explains why the traditionalist right, which most liberals or progressives would idiotically denounced as being on the far Right, is completely opposed to all the ideologies of the Left, including Nazism, Fascism, and Communism.

Closed, Open, and Good Society Concepts

Attitudes can be illustrated best, in some ways, by speaking about such concepts as the closed society, the open society, and the good society.  The first conception of society is absolutely dominated by an ideological construct that seeks to totally control any society, any political order, that it can dominate; the closed society is seen, of course, by Communism, Nazism, Fascism, and any other such ideology that seeks to perfect what is called totalitarianism or, at the least, authoritarianism. 

The open society is compatible with Conservatism, Liberalism, Libertarianism, and other ideologies that do not, at least in a formal sense, seek to control the realities of all or most matters concerning society, culture, politics, morality, ethics, aesthetics, etc.; a socio-political and socio-cultural fluidity, noted in mental, emotional, and psychological terms, is supposed to be generally maintained to keep some rational limits upon what may get advocated and implemented directly within the open society.

But, ultimately, all values, due to a blatant nominalism in modernist thought, become perceived, rightly or wrongly, as being, finally, subjective because an asserted or purported objectivity gets equated, more or less, with bias, prejudice, discrimination, and bigotry; modernity is manifestly anthropocentric in its orientation, which can be even more so perceived in the ultimate details of the closed society.  

The good society is, of course, fully supported by the traditionalist right because it adamantly rejects, axiomatically, nominalism as being an integrally and inherently false view of what properly constitutes the realities and limits of the human condition.   Good reading would include Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue, and his Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry; Frederick D. Wilhelmsen’s Citizen of Rome and his Christianity and Political Philosophy.   

The good society is always, unabashedly, theocentric and, for Christian societies and cultures, it is, thus, explicitly Christocentric and, also, without any apology whatsoever.  

On could guess that the socio-cultural and econo-political direction to be strongly recommended by the traditionalist right is, thus, completely against modernity and all its nominalist ideologies, which involves the logical rejections, ethically, morally, and spiritually speaking, of both the closed and open society.  As a direct consequences of such reasoning, the good society will, therefore, be held as then being forever logically superior to either the open or closed society.

The traditionalist right (TR) properly sees itself as the main intelligent mean between the two terrible extremes, individualism versus collectivism, observed in modernity, though, paradoxically, both individualism and collectivism are yet actually the two sides of the very same coin of modernity.   The basic needed mean between pacifism and militarism is the appropriate ideal of chivalry, not either a modified, qualified pacifism or a partial, subdued militarism.   

The TR supports what could be fairly called “aristocratic” internationalism versus idiotic “parochial” cosmopolitanism; the latter being, in effect, a merely endless reduplication of a Greenwich Village mentality seemingly omnipresent everywhere a leftist finds himself, meaning yielding, thus, a bizarre, pseudo-cosmopolitan parochialism as a decadent mentality.   

Thus, both capitalism and collectivism are also the two sides of the very same token of modernity; they are not really antagonistic but reciprocal ideologies that both basically support, to varying degrees at times, hedonism, materialism, secularism, rationalism, pragmatism, positivism, utilitarianism, and, ultimately, nihilism.  The societal-oriented conclusion, from all of the above reasoning, is that the good society ideal is the requisite middle ground or via media; it stands between the two vile extremes of the open society, leading to libertine ethics and moral-spiritual degradation, and the closed society, guiding people toward totalitarianism and an equally terrible form of moral-spiritual destruction and decline.

Capitalism Opposed to Free-Market Economics

It can be importantly noted that the TR opposes capitalism but genuinely favors free-market economics, meaning, also, free enterprise, of course;  the former type of economics  defends what can also be called corporate or neo-mercantile capitalism that necessarily requires tariffs, quotas, corporate welfare supplied by government and other needed (anti-free market) protections against there ever being too much risk, innovation, competition, and, especially, entrepreneurship; it largely favors maintaining and, when thought necessary, the further strengthening of the welfare-warfare state.  The fairly predictable and logical result is a bureaucratic and technocratic-dominated society and culture that mainly worships the many various aspects or different realizations of power, money, and corruption. 

In sharp contrast, authentic free-market economics, as is rightly upheld by, e. g., the Austrian School of Economics,  truly supports needed risk, innovation, competition, invention, and, above all, dynamic entrepreneurship, free-enterprise activities.  It is, however, not by any mere accident, therefore, that the genuine origins of both free-market economics and the first stirrings of the TR, as a truly conscious political mode of thought and reflection, began totally without Edmund Burke, a Liberal English Whig of the 18^th century, but, rather actually with Fray Juan de Mariana, a Spaniard, of the 16^th century.

Mariana had commented negatively upon the unfortunate rise of the centralizing nation-state, mainly dedicated to despotism and autocracy, as it sought to crush the decentralized aspects of the medieval society and culture (however imperfect) as needed checks upon the ever grasping and authoritarian tendencies of the European monarchs of the early modern age.   

This was, he felt, because it was much easier to keep smaller pockets of local free towns and villages in opposition to the, thus, clearly advancing consolidation of the State that then meant the enlarging augmentation of its war-making capacities, fairly exorbitant levels of taxation, and the truly loathsome stranglehold of the many bureaucratic servants of the monarchies upon the nations, as moving into the modern age; the peoples involved, in terms of a progressive modernity, were to be, thence, subjugated by these modernist, centralizing nation-states— and their aforementioned political, economic, and military consequences. 

As historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr., author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, and other writers have noted, the sources of the Austrian School of Economics can, moreover, be traced back successfully to the thinking of such writers as Mariana.   Social civil liberties and economic freedom, within the context of the traditionalist right, are not at all incompatible features of an opposition to the modernity in thought, as founded by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Lenin, and other such rabid nominalists and advocates of tyranny under, of course, various euphemisms. 

The thinking involved needs to be put into a proper context as when, in the 19^th century, Sir James Fitzjames Stephens, e. g., did his forever devastating refutation of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty with its very significantly warped and deracinated  understanding of liberty; Stephens’ brilliant volume is entitled: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; Pope Benedict XVI’s Mirari Vos had soundly denounced Liberalism, in no uncertain terms; Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors condemned forever various philosophies, religious attitudes, and opinions, particularly on the noted and important relation between Church and State; in the 20^th century, the correct understanding of liberty was, for instance, defended ably, once again, in Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Liberty or Equality.

All of this is fully consistent with the Roman Catholic Church’s logical condemnation of both socialism and capitalism as both being aimed at secularism, materialism, pragmatism, positivism, and, ultimately, final nihilism in a world seeking to be bereft of any needed belief in God.  

On the other hand, there is nothing truly incompatible between religion and free-market economics, as long as each properly and substantially respects the domain of the other, while never making an idol out of 19^th century Economic Man, as definitely did, e. g., the Manchesterian Liberals.  

Capitalism, by its inherently corrupted and corrupting nature, cannot ever avoid practicing a hellish form of idolatry in the process of modernity, for modern, enlightened men are capable of knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing; what has been disgustingly called economism ends up being an ersatz religion as fully morally and spiritually bankrupt as is all of communism/collectivism forever.

Standard of Law and Justice; and Sovereignty Issue

Conservatism and the TR are also divided greatly in the matters of sovereignty as a political concept in the realm of modernity and the question of what the standard of law and justice ought to be.  The true concept of sovereignty was, basically, developed knowingly in strong favor of enforcing the autocratic, authoritarian, and despotic predispositions of the nation-state monarchies of the 15^th through 18^th centuries; in particular, one can, thus, easily cite the political works, e. g., of Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth and Thomas Hobbes, as with his Leviathan.  Related to such explicit cognition were the very logically compatible notions of the Divine Right of Kings and Erastianism/Caesaropapism. 

Conservatives can usually be found backing up the nation-state in terms of nationalism and cognate foreign policies that seek out enemies around the world to constantly or otherwise confront; those on the TR prefer patriotism that honors their own country but seeks not to be aggressive toward the rest of the world, as with trying to be the world’s policeman.  The current American imperium is, for instance, firmly supported by the main bulk of this nation’s conservatives, not by those on the TR. 

The TR is opposed to the concept of sovereignty because, among other important reasons, it is a reification and secularization of the almighty nature of the truly Sovereign Lord God Almighty.  

For Christians, there ought to be only one true or legitimate Sovereign, meaning the Supreme Being; for Hobbes and other supporters of despotism, tyranny, etc., it is, of course, only the modern State.

Conservatives accept the Lockean notion (attributed directly to the thinking of John Locke and classical Liberalism) of there being the supposed equal justice under law, while those who support the TR favor the classical or Aristotlean of concept of justice and law that means that unequals ought to be judged differently, meaning unequally; thus, by the Lockean standard, to give here a much simplified example for the sake of clarity, whether a poor man or a rich man steals, say, $100 or a $1,000, both are just to be prosecuted equally in terms of the exactly same penalty to be applied to such a theft.   

In the more just and proper Aristotlean order of things, however, the rich man, having then greater social status due to his higher wealth, would be, naturally and appropriately, then given a harsher sentence and more severe criminal penalty under the law; so this is yet another significant and extremely major dividing line between conservatives and the men of the traditionalist right.

Man’s law, according to the TR, must ultimately be based upon classical Natural Law teachings and Divine Law, not just be the mere product known as positive law, as based upon the modernist Law of Nature thinking as was thought up by such people as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others.  Many conservatives and, perhaps, most do, more or less, unfortunately align their fundamental reasoning with the latter understanding. 

 Important reading, for properly coming to know the really important differences between classical (or traditional) Natural Law versus the Law of Nature would be such books as Heinrich A. Rommen’s The State in Catholic Thought [though recommended with some serious reservations]and, moreover, his The Natural Law; and, E.B.F. Midgley’s The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations.

These above noted beliefs and principles of thoughts have definite consequences and help to distinguish conservatives from those who would be on the side of the traditionalist right; for instance, most conservatives, and probably the vast majority on average, did not fully or mainly mind that Pres. George W. Bush and his Administration had failed to aggressively conduct, through the Justice Department and other agencies, criminal  prosecutions of Bill Clinton and members of his Administration for having committed various felonies. 

Those politically knowledgeable citizens, on the other hand, who were on the TR were, however, quite intensely infuriated at this enormously unjust neglect of needed justice to be dealt out to Clinton and his nefarious minions.  And, because of thinking in terms of the Aristotlean concept of justice, Bush was, therefore, politically, legally, and morally worse than Clinton and his people, according to the cognition and principles of the TR.

Conclusion

Because of the proven mutating and mutable nature of Conservatism, it needs to be rationally rejected in favor of the traditional right if there is any profound desire to oppose modernity and its ideologies; moreover, the TR position is, moreover, much better suited to critically and courageously fight against the even more absurd ratiocination known as the postmodernism of deconstructionism, structuralism, and other such ideological fanaticisms.  

The TR can, therefore, more intelligently defend and promote true patriotism, classical Natural Law teachings, Aristotlean justice, free-market economics, constitutional republicanism, liberty under law, the good society ideal, “aristocratic” internationalism, the ideal of chivalry, and, ultimately, a mainly Christocentric view of society, culture, and civilization.

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