Paul Kingsnorth is a wonderful writer. Reading him is a great joy. His conservatism is not mine but variety is good within a movement.
The reason I say Kingsnorth’s conservatism is not mine is that he came to the movement from a very particular type of leftism. There used to be variety in leftism, too, but then it was all swallowed by the corporate HR style that is now the only flavor of leftism on offer. Before, though, there were all kinds, and Kingsnorth belonged to the hippy leftism that loved nature and wanted to live in a commune in the woods away from any form of capitalism and corporatism. These leftists were obsessed with feudal Europe which, for them, was the perfect model of society because it remained pre-capitalist. They hated capitalism and industrialization because those were bad for the nature and brought in mass society instead of small communities.
I hated these leftists and their hemp outfits even when I was still on the left. I was an industrialist, nation-state leftist, and all these feudal fantasies bored me.
Then, both my kind of left and Kingsnorth’s left were kicked out of the newly corporatized left. Now we are conservatives, and I feel for Kingsnorth the kind of tolerance that the left doesn’t foster. I find his enthusiasm for quoting Marx and his profound hatred of “the bourgeoisie” to be entertaining.
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