Heritage Month Day Six: Mel Bradford

Happy Mel Bradford Day!

Today is day six of Heritage History month and we are once again in the American context of those who issued a last stand against Conservative Inc but who were eventually conquered and pushed out once and for all.

Like Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried, Mel Bradford was a heavy hitter in paleoconservative circles in the 80s and early 90s. Realizing that Conservatism in America had been completely taken over by Straussian universalists and Neoconservatives more specifically, Bradford sought to reorient conservatism along more traditionalist-realist lines.

First and foremost, Bradford was a defender of the South. Not just the South in the Civil War, but the South as an outpost—perhaps the last remaining outpost—of true Western Civilization, adjusted and developed along the experiences and memories of the American context. For Bradford and the defenders of the South as a civilization, it was misleading to talk only about a generic Americanism, and not the regionalism that was more fundamental to her character and legacy.

Bradford’s specialty was in Southern literature— where be believed the true spirit of the South was contained and could be rediscovered, though we live in a world of hyper-innovation, technology, and industry. These phenomena, for Bradford, were part of a greater metaphysical struggle centered on cultural erasure. Far from being an advocate of American-led capitalistic “progress,” Bradford always understood that culture and progress—in the American setting—would be in conflict. The latter was bound to conquer the former, and the present “woke” trends had nothing to do with it.

Bradford also, like most traditionalist Southerners, had a strict constructionist view of the constitutional order and would have thought it outrageous that today’s Conservative Movement, Republican Party activists, and anti-woke liberals would call themselves constitutionalists. The view of the Constitution in the world of Officialdom was essentially the Progressivist, centralizing, managerial interpretation of the Constitution that not only destroyed the South, but also Heritage America at large.

Bradford’s most important participation in the conservative wars of the 90’s came when he was involved in sort of an existential struggle with the students and proponents of Leo Strauss— who laid the ideological groundwork for the Neoconservatives. His debates with Harry Jaffa were over whether “equality” was a conservative principle and, moreover, whether equality played a key role in the making of the American system. Bradford, of course, thought it ridiculous that someone could call themselves a conservative, in light of the true Anglo-American past, and uphold equality as a fundamental value.

My own biases should be expressed here in saying that Bradford was absolutely correct, and the damage that has ensued by Bradford’s older views losing out cannot be overstated. Bradford placed his emphasis on what I call “particularism.” Conservatism should be about preserving actual, integrated, and organic ways of doing things, not about pursuing ideals. Conservatism is about maintaining customs over time and from generation to generation, not about holding the right values or principles in a universal sense. Conservatism is about tradition, doing things as your forebears did them, and walking in old paths.

The moment of truth in the Neoconservative ascendancy against the traditionalist conservatives took place in 1980. The Conservative movement, though already weakened by Buckley’s own purges earlier on, was at another fork in the road. Reagan had been convinced to appoint Bradford—then at the top of his academic game— to the chairman post for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Such an agency (unconstitutionally Bradford would admit) plays a key role in the shaping of our own understanding of American culture.

The Neoconservative, doing what they do best in their strategic brilliance (though moral and cultural Jacobinism), put extreme pressure on Reagan to change his mind. They cited Bradford’s (Southern) criticism of Lincoln, his support of the southern Civil Rights Movement dissenter George Wallace, and other aspects of his denial of the postwar liberal consensus. Reagan folded, appointed Bill Bennett, and the Neocons scored a massive victory.

Neoconservative hegemony in the Conservative world was nearly complete.

Bradford should be celebrated on the Right today. If this is Heritage month, it’s hard to find someone who wrote with almost melancholy love for his beloved Southern culture and the body of literature it produced. It was the antidote to the hysteria of material progress.

“I oppose any regulation of private property, but when I see some developer clear-cutting one-hundred-year-old trees, I want to pass a law to pound the hell out of him.”