This more philosophical edge of the religious rejection of liberalism leads us finally to a less visible but in its way more profound right-wing creed, not necessarily theistic or even religious, which we can call tragic authoritarianism. It is the authoritarianism of one of my intellectual heroes, a man we’ve already encountered and who I love: the eighteenth-century journalist and philosopher, Samuel Johnson. He thought that life was too sad to be cured by politics. Even good government ended in death. It is also a form of the attack on liberalism one finds as well in the so-called
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