Antonio Salazar and conservative delusions

All the historical data I’ve cited above — from Salazar’s Nero-esque impaling of his enemies in the jungles of Africa to the calamitous legacy of economic indigence and stagnation he bequeathed to his successors — are easily accessible matters of public record. One of the chief reasons for attributing his veneration in certain circles of the American Right to a warped aesthetic sensibility is that the alternative would be to accuse his champions of outright, self-aware barbarity. To call them thoughtless aesthetes is about the nicest way of characterizing their position.

What, then, is the nature of the aesthetic temptation to which Salazar’s defenders have fallen prey? Reading the recent pro-Salazar apologetics, along with similar encomia of Francisco Franco, Viktor Orban, and Vladimir Putin, it becomes clear that the conduct of such strongmen wouldn’t be held in such high regard by American post-liberals were the caudillos in question not considered to be, in some sense, fides defensor. (This, of course, ignores how poor these politicians actually prove as bulwarks against secularization; in Hungary, for instance, Christianity is declining at the tenth-fastest rate of any nation on earth.) Indeed, many of America’s prominent post-liberals are Christians of a particularly sacramental and liturgical disposition. I have nothing to say in criticism of this disposition, since it is, apart from anything else, my own. But the political temptation that tends to beset people of a sacramental sensibility is certainly aesthetic at its core, often because aesthetic considerations play a big part in their conversion to faith in the first place.

A similar aesthetic weakness has afflicted the admirers of Salazar. The vision of a holy Catholic integralist Portugal helmed by a devout, nigh-on-ascetic strongman, who resists with Samsonesque strength the twin abominations of gaudy capitalism and gulag-ridden communism, too closely resembles their political fantasies for them to resist its aesthetic allure. Reason, in both its moral and its historical permutations, trails behind the aesthetic intuitions of these men and is never permitted to catch up. This might help explain why, for example, these strongmen apologists pay their political enemies the unintentional compliment of elevating them to the level of bloodthirsty 20th-century communist revolutionaries. The plain fact of the matter is that violent leftist revolutionaries of the kind that Salazar promised to extirpate in Portugal are nowhere to be seen on the American political landscape today. To suggest otherwise is nothing short of political hypochondria.