Excerpt from note to D.H. on the sometime rightness of the Right...

My favorite Marxist writer, Frederic Jameson, who writes mostly about literature and cultural politics, observed once that the Right often has better insight into the reality on the ground than many liberal intellectuals...Jameson also said that conspiracy theories are the poor man's social critique...(for "poor man" read "unsophisticated" and/or "ill informed")

Buchanan represents the fairly sane wavelength on the Far Right spectrum exemplified by the likes of a fellow like William Cooper, author of BEHOLD A PALE RIDER...Cooper was an ex-Navy officer who came to believe in something like the Trilateral Commission-Illuminati--International Communist Conpiracy theory of history...He believed that the Protocols of Zion were true, except that the culprits weren't the Jews, it was, in contemporary terms, the international socialist conspiracy, openly yclept The New World Order & at the time of his book's publication, Cooper regarded the elder Bush as the mastermind--or figurehead, I'm not sure which--overseeing the whole conspiracy. Cooper said (approximately direct quote) we would have been better off if Dukakis with his drunken wife had been elected President... Without doing any research on the guy's life, I would be willing to bet money that Cooper was somebody who grew up in a small town, or at least a sheltered neighborhood, who tended to believe that the corner grocery store was the epitome of capitalism...vast international corporations and the various mechanisms by which they promote their interests could not but seem socialist to such a soul...in a sense he was/is right...Marx observed that corporations represent, among other things, the incredible economic power of large scale social production...Cooper was wigged out on a number of fronts, but he, like many rightwing nutsos, was on to something without really knowing what it was...When I was putzing around with the Spartacist League, we had a saying that Maoism was Trotskyism with a prefrontal lobotomy...I'm no longer a doctrinaire Marxist (if I ever was), but I would extend the comparison to those weird aspects of Right Wingery with which I sometimes sense a odd resonance...