Benjy Compson, the mentally disabled narrator in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, is a model of clarity compared to a recent and muddled account of what has befallen the American right in the Washington Examiner.

From this Washington publication’s British contributor  Dan Hannan, we learn that the Alt Right is assailing mainstream conservatives. Unsavory individuals are trying to impose on our fine, outstanding conservative movement the rule of raging anti-Semites and even the lunacies of German Nazi political thinker Carl Schmitt. Apparently, Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, both “antiliberal” Catholic thinkers, various unnamed Nietzscheans, and Chronicles’ editors and contributors may also be trying to bring down American constitutional government and replace it with (shall we use the F word?) fascism.

Among the many problems with this peevish outburst is that our editorial board has no contact with any of these other presumed baddies. None of them writes for us nor have they engaged with us in conversation. I recall writing a long critical review of Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, which may seem astonishing to Hannan, since our magazine and this Catholic “antiliberal” are allegedly linked in a web of evil. Further, my own study After Liberalism, was produced as a nostalgic defense of “bourgeois liberalism.”

If we, along with all these supposed Alt Right writers and thinkers, are conspiring to overthrow what Hannan considers to be an acceptable America, it seems surprising that we don’t have any personal relations or even necessarily hold the same views.

I have written copiously on the political theories of Carl Schmitt, but don’t remember endorsing his opportunistic embrace of the Third Reich. This famous jurist’s involvement with Hitler’s dictatorship was a mistake for which he paid dearly. By 1934, he ran afoul of the Waffen SS, who noticed that Schmitt gave no indication of being a racial anti-Semite and even had Jewish students and close Jewish friends before the Nazis came to power. In any case, my research on Schmitt has never endorsed his political choices, but focuses on his concept of friend/enemy relationships as the “essence of the political,” his study of political religion, which influenced among others Eric Voegelin and Hans Jonas, and his view that the “state” is a modern European creation. I’ve no idea how my book and articles on Schmitt betray an affinity for the Third Reich, although in the frenetic, paranoid second reality that Hannan and much of what we call Conservative Inc. inhabit, this connection may appear more obvious.

Let’s get to the meat and potatoes of Hannan’s tirade on how those of outside of Con Inc. are supposedly turning the young to fascism:

This hostility is now overt on the post-liberal Right. Here, to pluck an example at random, is an editorial in the current issue of the paleo-conservative magazine Chronicles, taking issue with those who complain that the Heritage Foundation is no longer focused on America’s, you know, heritage: “The Declaration [of Independence] is an ordinance of secession from the British Empire, and the Constitution is an old list of laws and political compromises. This is akin to running into a fire to grab a drawer full of old legal documents.”

Skepticism about the Constitution is the original sin. Abandon the vision of the Founders and all manner of unpleasant things follow: strongman government, protectionism, tribalism, and, yes, the oldest hatred. Look at the various European autocrats, of Left and Right, who railed down the ages against “Anglo-Saxon liberalism” and “debased American capitalism”. Almost to a man, they were antisemites. It comes as a package.

Hannan seems particularly exercised that we at Chronicles don’t pay high enough honor to America’s founding documents. For example, while we view the Declaration as being primarily about the secession of a new American nation from the British crown, we don’t sing the praises of Hannan’s preferred part of that document, namely the passage about “All men are created equal.” On the other hand, unlike the conservative establishment that Hannan represents, we are quite willing to publish those who disagree with us on this question.

Hannan also fails to explain how, if a writer for Chronicles viewed the Constitution as embodying “old legal documents,” we were insulting the American founders. On the contrary, as representatives of a real American right, we adore “old legal documents.” To claim that the American Constitution built on older European traditions of constitutional government is, for us, a resounding expression of approval. This stance is not some bizarre aberration from conservative thought; it’s the core of thesis of, among other works, Russel Kirk’s Roots of American Order.

There is, moreover, nothing in Dannan’s diatribe that indicates we don’t respect America’s foundational documents or that we despise our British legal antecedents. We just emphasize different aspects of that venerable tradition, for example, the original constitutional design of America’s founders, as opposed to the living Constitution into which our founding national document has “evolved” during the last 100 years. We also admire the early American republic, but not the managerial state into which the American polity has plunged from the progressive era on.

Hannan’s attempt to associate us with a rejection of America’s founding documents is, in fact, laughable. In just about every issue of Chronicles, we have legal scholars, most often the eminent legal scholar Stephen Presser, examining constitutional questions. What Hannan does not like about us may be something else: that we do not fit into the cookie-cutter conception of what a “conservative” publication should be. Unlike his publication, which did not respond to my request to respond to his attack on Chronicles, we do not mechanically repeat establishment party lines. Unlike the Washington Examiner, which seems to have taken its idea of open discussion from the woke left, we welcome dissenting views.