My Sunday column on reactionary thought — its sins, its strengths, its notable absence from the upper reaches of our official intelligentsia — was an attempt to tackle a subject that doesn’t really lend itself it to adequate treatment in eight hundred words. So let me try to tease out some of the issues latent in the piece.

First, more than a few readers interpreted the column as simply blaming a kind of academic-left conspiracy for the absence of serious reactionary thought in America. I can see why it read that way, and to clarify I don’t think that’s exactly the right way to think about it. Contemporary academic groupthink certainly illustrates the absence of the reactionary imagination, and it plays some causal role in keeping reactionary ideas taboo or marginal. But there’s a chicken-and-egg issue here, because you could also argue that reaction effectively discredited itself between, say 1930 and 1965 — or between the Reichstag Fire and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, if you prefer — in a way that eviscerated its position morally and made its intellectual exile inevitable. (The Second Vatican Council has a place in that generational story as well, since it was widely seen as the last bastion of Western reaction giving up the ghost.)

It’s not a coincidence, in this reading of intellectual trends, that the one philosophical school within hailing distance of reaction that’s persisted in the modern university is the school of Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish emigre whose critique of liberalism was explicitly and very personally anti-fascist, whose favored pre-modern thinkers were pre-Catholic, and whose disciples have generally cast themselves as liberalism’s wise protectors rather than its subversive foes. (Not that this saved Strauss from being linked, via Carl Schmitt, to the Nazis during the anti-Straussian frenzy of the Bush era …) The Straussian experience suggests that deep critiques of modernity can claim some territory (though not that much) in the liberal academy; they just need to be sufficiently distanced from racism and anti-Semitism and unfortunately most reactionary ideas and traditions simply aren’t.

Now of course you can turn this around and ask, well, if reaction was discredited by Hitler and Bull Connor, by race hatred and Jew hatred, why wasn’t left-wing radicalism discredited by Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot? If this is all about moral credibility and the company you keep, why did so many prominent historians and literary critics get to keep on calling themselves Marxists after every Marxist-Leninist regime committed mass murder on an epic scale? Why are Kipling’s politics or Eliot’s or Pound’s or even Heidegger’s considered so much more “problematic” and all-discrediting than the Stalinist strain in so much left-wing historiography and philosophy and criticism and art?

Conservatives have been asking these questions for a long time; they’re still good ones. But without defending the left-wing blindness that long disfigured Western debates about Marxism, you can still see other reasons why a distinctive set of taboos might have grown up around reactionary ideas in the post-World War II West.

The most important one is that political reaction’s worst crimes were committed close to home, in the heart of Europe in fact, while the darkest crimes of Communism were perpetrated in (relatively) distant lands. If the history of the 1930s and 1940s had been somewhat altered, and (let’s say) a Stalin-esque German Communist leader had allied with a Marxist-Leninist Japan to plunge the globe into a genocidal war (a war in which a reactionary White Russian Empire, led by a ruthless Admiral Kolchak, fought on the same side as Britain and France and the United States), then I suspect that left-wing radicalism would have seemed less idealistic and admirable subsequently than it did after the united anti-fascist front, and right-wing reaction would have seemed less absolutely evil than it did in the shadow of Hitler and Holocaust. But familiarity with evils breeds taboos against them, and since it was reaction — or certain styles thereof, at least — that helped prepare the way for the West’s “only culturally available icon of absolute evil,” its subsequent intellectual marginalization makes sense on a human level even before questions of academic bias enter in.

And then in the specifically American context, too, reactionary ideas begin with a kind of double handicap. First, America has no real ancien regime, no medieval Catholic past: Not only our liberals but our conservatives take certain liberal premises for granted, and the American reactionary always risks projecting an air of make-believe — a “look at me, Ma, I’m a pirate” sensibility — in a way that even now (or maybe especially now?) a European reactionary does not.

Second, to the extent that we have any inheritance that’s even somewhat reactionary and aristocratic and old-regime-ish, it’s the inheritance of the Old South, which for all its gifts and graces is morally corrupted at its roots and freighted with all the weight of America’s original sin.

So as with the crimes of the Nazis in Western Europe, the familiarity problem comes in here: If reaction in the American context means a Confederate flag and radicalism a Che Guevara tee-shirt, well, Che was a wicked man with a wicked ideology and Marxist regimes have committed worse atrocities than the C.S.A., but the Confederacy’s evils are still ours, still American, in a way that the killing fields and gulags are not.

The radical left has many crimes on its conscience, but in America it has been relatively powerless compared to elsewhere in the world. (Even if you make the implausible-but-interesting neo-reactionary move of arguing that we’ve actually become a Communist country given what Communism was once understood to be, that process has still been accomplished with relatively little in the way of bloodshed. To the extent that there’s a legacy of bloodshed on the American left, running from the progressive imperialists and eugenicists down through Roe. v. Wade, it’s more a broadly-liberal legacy than a specifically radical one.) Whereas America’s lone political and cultural outpost of something like reaction was actually powerful for a time (that’s why they called it the slave power), and it depended for its distinctiveness on the brutal subjugation of an entire race, a stain that neither nostalgia nor “Lincoln was a tyrant” revisionism can wash away.

So again, no intellectual conspiracies are necessary, per se, to explain why 1) it’s harder to think reactionary thoughts than radical ones in a country founded on a liberal revolution, and 2) why it gets harder still, from a moral and political perspective, when those reactionary thoughts keep bumping up against the brute fact of chattel slavery. It’s not impossible to think them; people do, myself sometimes included. But without a “Lost Cause” mythology to give them shelter, reactionary ideas in America tend to flit about like a bird without a nest, now alighting on Wendell Berry, now on Henry Adams, now on the anti-Federalists, now on European/Catholic/Orthodox alternatives, now on the idea that the entire American founding was a Lockean mistake … and lately, of course, on neoreaction.

Does all that flitting matter as something other than an obscure intellectual sideshow, raised to strange prominence by the Trump campaign? I think it might, for reasons specific to where the left and right (especially the younger left and right) have ended up right now. But it will take another post to explain why.