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The Revolt Against the Masses
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11106 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1986 |
3,469 Words |
| Author
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Samuel T. Francis
Samuel T. Francis is deputy editorial page editor of the
Washington Times. |
THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION IN AMERICA
Guy Sorman
Chicago: Regnery Books, 1985
Guy Sorman's sympathetic account of the basis and the recent successes of the American conservative and "New Right" movements is based on the author's observations of the United States during an extended visit to this country from 1982 to 1983. There are similarities, then, between the origins of The Conservative Revolution in America and Democracy in America, but Sorman is not a de Tocqueville, despite his frequent comparisons of himself to his countryman of the nineteenth century, and his book is neither as searching nor as balanced as de Tocqueville's classic.
Unlike his earlier compatriot, Sorman appears to accept without question a number of illusions about America that have been floating around in the heads of some European intellectuals since the end of the War for Independence. These illusions, which often resurface among Americans of the Right or the Left who want to be what they think is European, add up to the view that America is literally a "New World," in which the realities of human nature and society as they are known in European and Old World history do not apply.
Americans, unlike people anywhere else, are said to be always in a hurry, materialistic, egalitarian to the point of boorishness, too loud, and disrespectful of the past, of high culture, and of the standards of taste and morality. This is essentially the portrayal of America that obtains in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, and it bobs up in such aspercus of Sorman as his claim that "The
... (1991 of 21679 Characters)
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