1984 as Critique of Intellectuals

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In this week’s episode of 1Dime Radio, I’m joined by Professor Michael C. Behrent to discuss Towards a Conservative Left: Selected Writings of Jean-Claude Michéa, a newly translated collection of essays by one of France’s most fascinating dissident socialists, sometimes described as “the French Christopher Lasch.”

Michéa is a rare kind of left thinker: fiercely anti-capitalist and pro-democracy, but deeply skeptical of the Left’s cultural project, especially when it becomes a substitute for class politics, or when it turns working class “common sense” into something to be morally corrected. We talk about his Orwellian framework (including “Tory anarchism” and “common decency”), his critique of liberalism as both an economic and social ideology, and why these arguments suddenly feel uncomfortably relevant.

In The Backroom (Patreon), we go further into what “conservative leftism” could actually mean today: socially conservative and economically leftist, what that synthesis would look like in practice, and what parts of the modern Left Michéa thinks have become complicit with liberalism.

Timestamps:

00:00:00  The Backroom Preview Culture vs Race, and The Cosmopolitan Delusion

00:04:19  Jean Claude Michéa: The French Christopher Lasch 

00:10:38  Towards a Conservative Left: Michéa’s Conservative Socialism

00:14:05  Orwell: The Tory Anarchist

00:17:50  Michéa’s background, communist parents, the Resistance, and patriotism

00:28:01 Why Orwell is the key to Michéa’s synthesis

00:35:57  Orwell’s “common decency.”

00:50:15  Common sense vs left suspicion, and the populist question

00:59:22  The “bourgeois left” & The drift away from the working-class 

01:02:45  What “conservative” really means here

01:31:02  A New Political Synthesis (The Backroom Transition)

GUEST:

Michael C. Behrent

• Towards a Conservative Left (Bookshop): https://bookshop.org/p/books/towards-a-conservative-left-selected-writings-of-jean-claude-michea-jean-claude-michea/22912345

• Towards a Conservative Left (Barnes & Noble): https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/towards-a-conservative-left-jean-claude-michi-a/1147813503

• Vauban Books (Publisher): https://www.vaubanbooks.com/

• Behrent faculty page (Appalachian State): https://history.appstate.edu/faculty-staff/profiles

• Behrent’s site: https://sisterrepublic.wordpress.com/about/

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