Comments Elsewhere

Thanks, arcane, for good comments. The stuff on education (i.e., actually on topic) will have to wait for a moment, because it is very late and I have virtual miles to go before I sleep. But I would like to remark quickly on this:

“There isn’t a doubt in anybody’s mind that Bismarck was right-wing, …”

Indeed. There’s no doubt in my mind, either. That’s why I said: “These are ideas that come from a recognizable Right-wing source—they are straight out of the educational playbook of the Kaiser’s Prussia. But that just goes to show that not all Right-wing ideas are conservative ideas.”

The fact that Bismarck was clearly a man of the Right is immaterial unless conservatism, as a historical tradition of thought and practice, is identical with the Right. Which it’s not—although the two often overlap. Conservatism and Rightism are distinct (though linked) in their historical origins, in their theoretical preoccupations, and in their

Case in point: it would be hard for anyone to seriously defend the claim that Nazism was not a movement of the Right. (You can point out that it claimed to be a form of socialism; true, but that only shows that there is Right-wing socialism.) But it would also be hard for anoyone to seriously defend the claim that Nazism was a conservative movement; it was a movement devoted to radical reconstruction of the whole society, and indeed the whole world, from the standpoint of a apocalyptic conception of racial struggle and a messianic notion of racial purity. Now, the Second Reich was very far from being that; but it was also very far from being “conservative” in any meaningful sense; it was a Right-wing regime which pioneered nearly every piece of “progressive” government policy and waged an ongoing war against traditional institutions in the name of creating a new Kultur in the image of the new Prussian State.

I’ll have something to say on actual educational issues soon. Cheers.