"Avoid the movement."

Austin Bramwell, the conservative who seems to despise all other living conservatives, has yet another excoriation of the conservative movement up at The American Conservative. Among the many quotable segments:

"Movement conservatives have in fact produced few of the conservative ideas in general circulation. Even the movement’s intellectual founders—men like James Burnham, Richard Weaver, and Whitaker Chambers—did their best work before they decided to pool their energies into a movement. Take any movement conservative position: the original insights usually came from someone with little initial interest in building a conservative movement."

And right at the end:

"My advice to young conservatives: avoid the movement, eschew its enticements. Above all, ignore debates as to the true meaning of conservatism. Heed instead the words of Ezra Pound: Make it new!"

Sounds good to me, and fully in keeping with my innovate-on-the-genre idea, which is nothing special, but is nevertheless helping me get through election season.

I'm starting to see the twentieth century as a tragedy of split rationality. The liberal mainstream pushed back too hard against criticisms of its programs, many of them valid, from market thinkers and conservative skeptics, thereby creating the context for an institutional conservatism. How different would the political scene be if Friedrich Hayek's critique had been initially absorbed into the national conversation, rather than pushed into opposition? And now there's this strange split where young movement conservatives read a whole roster of reactive writers without engaging the very serious thinkers against whom their heroes were reacting.

I've not done much better myself, but at least I know something of what I need to learn.

(Via The Confabulum.)