Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between
American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial
politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions
of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the
rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as
cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term
rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige
reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This
shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational
antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social
order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market
capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent
double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that
sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital
while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around
racial and ethnic diversity.