It was a conservative approach, but it could never have become a fascist one, since the idea of a civilized tradition was exactly what fascism set out to dismantle.

He defined true democracy as the sum total of civilized traditions. Anti-Semitism reared its head…There are a thousand brilliant sentences to prove that he was the natural opponent of state power in any form, so there can be no real doubt about the stance he would have taken had he lived longer. The virtue itself had a drawback: as a Catholic convert, he valued theological tradition to the point of embracing some of its blemishes, one of which was an abiding suspicion of the cosmopolitan. vice was wilful paradox, but his virtue was for asking the awkward questions about current liberal fashions. Yet in his magisterial monument to liberalism, Cultural Amnesia, he finally exonerates his precursor in journalistic provocation: A man of letters who rivaled Chesterton for cheerful volubility, Clive James, was a bellicose and even imperialistic liberal, one who died recently enough not to leave us wondering about where he would stand on Europe’s right turn. Different critics have come to different conclusions about this, not least because “fascism” lacks any stable definition-a tendency to which Marinetti and Heidegger both belonged is too syncretic to be a doctrine-and is moreover popularly used not to describe but only to delegitimize a bewilderingly wide range of views from left, right, and center. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.Īs Sam Leith observes, this sounds like the common sense of Orwell and English empiricism when wrenched from its context but within its context-both the whole paragraph from which the lines are drawn and the author’s entire immense corpus-it represents a much stranger and more paradoxical assertion: that to believe in the most sensuously immediate reality is already to believe in God, a view explained at length in Chesterton’s brilliant little biography of Thomas Aquinas, with its earthy subtitle: The Dumb Ox.Īs for Chesterton’s own politics, Leith concedes that “fascism”-a label Meloni has attracted-is one plausible context in which we might place his brand of populist religious conservatism, especially given the writer’s anti-Semitism and sexual traditionalism. A clip of Italy’s new Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, showed her concluding a fiery anathema against contemporary left-liberalism with a quote from the in-all-ways prolific English Catholic writer of a century ago:įires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. ChestertonĬhesterton was trending the other day. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K.

The man who was chesterton