The Lessons of the Old Left

Although I have always been a man of the Right, some of the major influences on my thought have come from the classical Left. Many years ago, when I was being considered for the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Senator Jesse Helms, who ended up supporting my candidacy, asked his friend Sam Francis why I had written so often for Marxist publications. Sam answered: “He may be too conservative for conservative ones.” I made the same observation to a Marxist acquaintance to whom I loaned Sam's posthumously published notes on managerialism, when they came out in the volume Leviathan and its Enemies in 2016. This acquaintance had asked whether the author, who examined the relationship of managerial government to the growth of global corporate capitalism, was a Marxist like himself. “No, he's not. He's on the far Right,” I responded. “But why don't conservatives publish him? He's really very smart,” my interlocutor continued. “Because he was too conservative” was my answer.