There’s a certain kind of academic who likes to cite George Steiner to the effect that knowledge of Goethe, or a delight in Rilke doesn’t make a person any less likely to be barbaric. And yet the strongest argument for that position has always been Steiner himself, not least because his visceral racism and palpable misogyny have flourished in a historical milieu when the humanities have produced some of the most far-reaching, stringent inquiries into the relationship of high culture to moral sadism. In that sense, Steiner’s skepticism is no different from the gushing encomiums to intellectual supremacy espoused by most of his academic colleagues – “philosophers are skeptical and dangerous to the status quo!” “Those who graduate with English degrees are empathetic and cosmopolitan!” – for, despite their varying affective registers, they function as roundabout ways by which the speaker transitively, insidiously congratulates himself.

Consider, for example, Steiner’s space clearing remarks as he launches into his study of the rhetoric of philosophy in his book, The Poetry of Thought:

The incandescence of intellectual and poetic creativity in mainland Greece, Asia Minor and Sicily during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. remains unique in human history. In some respects, the life of the mind thereafter is a copious footnote. So much has long been obvious. Yet the causes of this sunburst, the motives which brought it about in that time and place remain unclear. The penitential “political correctness” now prevalent, the remorse of postcolonialism make it awkward even to pose what may be the pertinent questions, to ask why the ardent wonder that is pure thought prevailed almost nowhere else (what theorem out of Africa?).

Manifold and complex factors must have been interactive, “implosive” to borrow a crucial concept from the packed collisions in atomic physics. Among these were a more or less benign climate and ease of maritime communication. Argument traveled fast; it was, in the ancient and figural sense, “Mercurial.” The availability of protein, cruelly denied to so much of the sub-Saharan world, may have been pivotal. Nutritionists speak of protein as “brain food.” Hunger, malnutrition lame the gymnastics of the spirit. There is much we do not yet grasp, though Hegel sensed its central role, concerning the daily ambience of slavery, concerning the incidence of slavery on individual and social sensibility. It is, however, evident that for the privileged, and they were relatively numerous, the ownership of slaves comported leisure and dispensation from manual and domestic tasks. It bestowed time and space for the free play of intellect. This is an immense license. Neither Parmenides nor Plato needed to earn a living. Under temperate skies, a nourished man could proceed to argue or to listen in the agora, in the groves of the Academy.

The third element is the most difficult to evaluate. With stellar exceptions, women played a housebound, often subservient part in the affairs, certainly in the philosophic-rhetorical affairs of the polis. Some may have had access to higher education. But there is little evidence prior to Plotinus. Did this (enforced, traditional?) abstention contribute to the luxury and even arrogance of the speculative? Does it reach, via the arrestingly modest contribution to mathematics and metaphysics made by women, into our own, now metamorphic day? Protein, slavery, male prepotence: what was their cumulative causation in the Greek miracle? For let us be clear: a miracle it was.
— George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought

What is notable here, I think, isn’t the vulgarity of the racism and sexism. As pointed out above, it shouldn’t by now be news to us (though it is no less appalling, of course) that the racism of intellectuals like Steiner proves to be the usual banal fare available from Fox News and the Daily Mail, a coagulation of folk science, modern myths and legends about ancient Greece, and a “Great Books + Classical Music” cultural fetish.

Rather, what I find striking here is how strenuously Steiner strives to pack in as many “politically incorrect” slurs as he can manage in two paragraphs. One would almost be forgiven for thinking this a Sokal-like, reverse hoax of what a cultural studies type imagines conservative thought to be like; so determined is he to check off every space in his bingo checklist of imagined “intersectional” foes of conservative thought. Racism: “what theorem out of Africa?” no doubt a deliberate echo of Saul Bellow’s “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” Ableism: “Hunger, malnutrition lame the gymnastics of the spirit.” Class domination and brutality: “There is much we do not yet grasp, though Hegel sensed its central role, concerning the daily ambience of slavery, concerning the incidence of slavery on individual and social sensibility.” Misogyny: “With stellar exceptions, women played a housebound, often subservient part in the affairs, certainly in the philosophic-rhetorical affairs of the polis.”

It is this breathless, flailing litany of invective that I think may tell us something useful about conservative thought. I mean here, specifically, not only the white rage that it bespeaks, the desperation and rancid resentment simmering to a boil just beneath Steiner’s rococo prose, but also how that rage is constituted by phantasms, visions, nightmares summoned precisely by their very telling. In other words, the phantasms generative of conservative rage and resentment are constitutive of – rather than only or primarily reactions to – observations made about an “objective,” “external” reality.

This carries certain implications not only for a hermeneutic adequate to understanding conservative thought, but also a praxis attentive to its energies. The political theorist Corey Robin has offered one of the most penetrating accounts of how we ought to understand conservativism’s unifying vision. And yet if what I have argued above is correct, one of the implications he has been at pains to draw out and elaborate about the Trump era increasingly appears questionable. In a review of Robin’s book in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lily Geismer offers a particularly helpful distillation of this dimension of Robin’s thesis:

“In a somewhat counterintuitive argument, Robin argues that the weaknesses and instability of the Trump administration and the Republicans on Capitol Hill are a result of conservatism’s past successes, and proof that that it is on the decline. The decline of conservatism as an intellectual tradition — its increasing instability, incoherence, and irresponsibility — has occurred, in Robin’s opinion, less because of Trump’s furious tweet storms and doctrinal sloppiness and more because the right does not have a credible left to borrow from and react against. Over the last half-century, he argues, conservatives have been so successful at thwarting emancipatory movements that now it has nothing to unify it. Although Robin does acknowledge the achievements of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders campaign, he believes that none of these movements are strong enough to truly galvanize and discipline the right.”

What Robin’s argument appears to presuppose is that the right is animated by a more or less realistic judgment of the balance of forces arrayed against it; that conservativism gains its coherence and discipline from the pressure exerted by an actually existing vibrant, credible left. This fails to account for the fantastical visions that have often galvanized and unified the right – terrors of conspiracy plotting by the enslaved, moral panics around sexuality and gender, Islamophobic fever dreams of Dhimmitude and Sharia. Even more crucially, Robin’s account does not register the extent to which the very marrow of “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” really, the very marrow of politics, economics, and culture, are significantly – though of course not completely – constituted by fantasy and myth (“witchcraft” and “racecraft”).