Dennis Hopper, Reactionary Radical
Writes Bill Kauffman, in Look Homeward, America, of Hopper’s signature film:
I don’t really have to convince you that Easy Rider is a reactionary picture, do I? The only characters depicted as unqualifiably virtuous are the homesteading family, living on their own acreage, raising their own food, teaching their young. If they’re not Treichlers then Dennis Hopper is playing Ron Ziegler. The only American Dream worth the snores is based in liberty and a community- (or family-) oriented independence, which the filmmakers associated with the country’s founders. Dennis Hopper (an admittedly unorthodox Kansas Republican) and Peter Fonda (a gun-loving libertarian) did not make a movie glorifying tripping hippies and condemning the southern gun culture; rather, as exasperated Fonda explained, “My movie is about the lack of freedom. My heroes are not right, they’re wrong. … Liberty’s become a whore, and we’re all taking the easy ride.”
“The best radicals,” Bill argues, “are reactionaries at heart. They despise the official order, be it state capitalism, militarism, communism, or what have you, but wish not merely to remove the malignancy but to replace it with an organic system, rooted in human nature and human affection. However angry, theirs — ours — is a politics of love.” There are shades of Rousseau in that, but so what? Even Irving Babbitt allowed a little room for something like romanticism, especially in an age of ideological frigidity.
The problem with both liberty and any given ism is that none can be an absolute solution to every given circumstance that rises in the life of an individual and his or her family. A lot of the survivors from the 60s came out the other side seeing the liberal orthodoxy as confining as the former conservative orthodoxies. The irrefutable truth is that one should be able to spurn either conservatism or liberalism and be self-actualized. Instead of whining about whatever the prevailing trend is, act as if your conscience and inherent rationality (COMBINED) inform your decisions and then don’t apologize for it or tip your hat to anyone about it. Self-actualized individuals pity the myopic that must run their every action through a political ideology to see if it’s legitimate enough or self perpetuating (as regards their wholly imagined identity). It’s idiots that want to find some sort of unified theory that explains life that are desperate and unhinged. They can’t be happy without that security blanket. For some problems the answer is capitalism, for others socialism, for others still libertarian ideals make sense and etc be it utilitarianism, environmentalism, communitarianism. But none have a monopoly on applicability.
But the problem that most often matters most is not the individual or the philosophy, but the government and its’ relative power over any given person.
Still, you are right. And to look for “solutions” as if you will find one that is universal is to begin that road to serfdom.
One thinks here of Dickens as read by Chesterton, to whom it was the view of the world’s flawed goodness that made Dickens a social reformer, since he recognised people’s degraded dignity. One is made by Christianity “fond of this world, even in order to change it”, in contrast to simple (one might say, Whig or Marxist) optimism or simple pessimism (such as that of much of the political Right), each of which discourages reform. We have to “hate [the world] enough to want to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing”, for it is “at once an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.”
Such was the view of Dickens and of Chesterton; and such is the Christian view, uniquely, as all of Christianity’s critics unwittingly concede by simultaneously accusing it both of excessive optimism and of excessive pessimism. Chesterton presciently predicted that an age of unbelief would be an age of conservatism (in the worst sense), whereas for the orthodox “in the hearts of men, God has been put under the feet of Satan, so that there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration.” Furthermore, “A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling”, since “a fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of revolution.”
Chesterton extends this concept of limits as necessary to freedom, to the explicitly theological. Liberal Protestants are most illiberal, wishing to diminish rather than to increase the number of miracles, and to disbelieve in things rather than to believe in them, so as to curtail “the liberty of God.” Orthodoxy is here the limit necessary for liberty: Calvinism reserved it to God; and now scientific materialism, in succession, “binds the Creator Himself”. But Catholicism holds to the spiritual freedom both of God and of Man, whence we proceed onto the familiar ground of “the democracy of the dead” and all that.
[...] views. "My heroes are not right, they're wrong," Hopper's co-writer and co-star Peter Fonda said. "Liberty's become a whore, and we're all taking the easy [...]
Practically all radicals are trying to restore a lost Golden Age, even the craziest radicals. Especially the craziest radicals. The Golden Age might have been a primitive, classless, propertyless utopia, or a glorious past age of the Volk, or the Medieval Tymes when everyone knew his place in the great chain of being, or the bourgeois liberal heaven of the 19th century, or…
So Kaufman’s right that the best radicals are reactionaries at heart. But so are the worst.
[...] views. "My heroes are not right, they're wrong," Hopper's co-writer and co-star Peter Fonda said. "Liberty's become a whore, and we're all taking the easy [...]
[...] heroes are not right, they’re wrong,” Hopper’s co-writer and co-star Peter Fonda said. “Liberty’s become a whore, and we’re all taking the easy [...]