We Must All Be Left Conservatives Now
Lee Siegel's December 2024 New Statesman essay taking Mailer's self-description as a 'Left conservative' in The Armies of the Night as a lens on present-day American politics, read through Christopher Lasch, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump. An about-Mailer clipping.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
Lee Siegel. “We Must All Be Left Conservatives Now.” New Statesman, 21 December 2024. https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/12/we-must-all-be-left-conservatives-now
An essay building on the phrase Mailer coins two-thirds of the way through The Armies of the Night, where he calls himself a “Left conservative.” Siegel reads the term — an emphasis on material and historical conditions held together with values that transcend history — as “the holy grail of American politics,” capturing voters who want both a government that regulates the market and the ballast of tradition. He traces a left-conservative lineage through Christopher Lasch and Philip Rieff (and, in passing, Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt, and Ralph Ellison) and sets it against Steve Bannon and Donald Trump as competing claimants to the same historical current. The full text is held in the working archive (rights not yet cleared); see We Must All Be Left Conservatives Now under texts.