From an interview with the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton:

You say somewhere, I think it’s in The Gatekeeper (2002), your autobiography and memoir, that it’s of great consolation to you that you’ve avoided the typical trajectory of going from being a youthful radical to being an old Tory. But there has been a kind of a movement towards dealing with big metaphysical themes in your recent work, I think: tragedy, evil, religion, love, death. Have you been conscious of that shift?

As far as avoiding the cliché of angry young man to the dyspeptic old reactionary, I guess a reason I haven’t done that is because, as I argue in the Marx book, the reason why people stopped being leftists [in recent decades] was not necessarily that they changed their views about the system, but that they found it too hard to break. There was disenchantment with the alternative, in the rampant years of boom, of Thatcher, of Reagan, of cowboy capitalism, of neoliberalism. There just seemed no way that you could feasibly change it. That’s depressing in one sense but encouraging in another. It wasn’t that people threw in their hats with the system because of how marvelous it was (apart from one of my most radical Marxist students ever who became a stockbroker, because he became convinced that capitalism was the best thing since Michelangelo). So that was the reason that I hung in there, and many other people did.

I suppose one of the advantages of a left downturn, ironically, is that it gives you time to think around politics, not to fetishise it. Politics isn’t the be-all and end-all. I never really believed that it was, but when the left is on the ascendancy, it’s hard not to believe. So there are ironically gains from the situation at the moment that you can then begin to lay in ideas or think around the topic, and I suppose that’s partly what I’ve been doing. Not deserting politics but trying to add a depth to it, and also, in doing so, breaking with the holy trinity of class, race, and gender. Vital topics though they are, they’ve become such tram-lines on which the cultural left has been moving.

I like that metaphor: tram lines. They determine the path of discussion, and don’t allow for deviation from the predetermined route.

What do you suppose are the tram lines of the right? The ones that our side is stuck on? Surely they have to include taxes, size of government (including regulations), and defense. When is the last time you’ve heard a conservative say anything fresh, interesting, or new about any of these topics? They’ve become such fetish on the right, and the stances among conservatives are so rigid. I would say another rightist tram line is abortion and gay marriage as the sum total of social conservatism. 

I also like Eagleton’s idea that when one’s side is on the political ascendancy, it’s hard to gainsay, at least in one’s own mind, the idea that politics is everything, or at least the only thing worth worrying much about. To what extent do you think the intellectual dullness and ideological rigidity of today’s conservatism is the legacy of the enormous success the right has had in setting the terms of political debate since postwar liberalism sputtered out in the late 1970s? More to the point that interests me, to what extent did cultural conservatives become so blinded by the right’s political successes that they believed politics was the only game in town?

Claes Ryn has written penetratingly about this. Excerpts:

Those who enter our minds and imaginations are in a position to make particular ideas, attitudes, behaviors, and experiences seem inviting or repulsive. They can affect our notions of what to admire, what to fear, what to scorn, and what to laugh at, and they can incline us to action that corresponds to these responses.
Especially over time, the power of all the politicians in the nation’s capital is dwarfed by the power of those who influence us through teaching, writing, preaching, art, and entertainment. Even if the latter group represents a variety of viewpoints, a particular cultural and intellectual ethos tends to predominate that can be traced back to ground-breaking works of art and thought. In our own time, egalitarian pressures and mass communication have produced a perhaps more thoroughgoing like mindedness than seen before. Behind what counts as moral sensibility today, for example, who but the ignorant and dull-witted could fail to discern the deep and brilliant, if deleterious, influence of the thought and imagination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

Whatever the dominant fundamental mind-set that artists and intellectuals have cultivated, it has planted in us certain expectations and desires. It has prepared the ground for or built obstacles to political action of a certain type.

More:

A disparagement of thought and imagination is discernible also among intellectuals on the right who are critical of the now dominant strains of conservatism. Although sometimes perceptive in other respects, they tend to view ideas and culture “sociologically,” as the expressions of group interest. The fundamental reality of politics is for them the conflict between “us” and “them.” Ideas and art may be influential but do not rise above conflict; they are essentially instruments whereby people who seek power advance their cause (a perspective not unlike that of Karl Marx).

… In the decades just after World War II several leading American conservative intellectuals understood well the historical origins of civilization and the great influence of thought and imagination. Russell Kirk and Peter Viereck are good examples. The two differed politically, Viereck being less opposed than Kirk to the budding federal welfare state inherited from Franklin Roosevelt and now managed by the Eisenhower administration. Although sharply critical of the Eastern intellectual-cultural political elites in important respects, Viereck also felt a stronger bond with them than Kirk. But the two men agreed on the primacy of the “pre-political” sphere of ethics, ideas, and culture. There could be no real recovery of Western civilization without a renewal of mind and imagination.

… Babbitt strongly influenced the perhaps most fertile strain of conservative thought after the war. But, on the whole, American intellectual conservatism has not carried through on its most promising potentialities. It has had difficulty accepting or understanding that real and lasting social change must begin deep within the mind and the imagination and work itself out over generations. Although paying lip-service to the need for ideas and imagination, many of the leaders of the movement wanted immediate results, by which they meant, first of all, political victories. Intellectual conservatism did not fully assimilate or go very far developing and supplementing the work of its leading minds, dead or living. It did not develop the wide-ranging and philosophically mature intellectual culture that might have held and expanded its ground in academia and thence more deeply penetrated society. The element of intellectual and imaginative vitality was diluted or made to seem secondary by the ever-present concern with practical politics and, of course, economics.

Read the whole thing.  My TAC colleague Noah Millman asked on his blog the other day what TAC was trying to do — that is, what is the vision for the magazine? One way to answer that question might be: to get our culture and civilization moving in the right direction by derailing mainstream conservatism’s trams.