Eugene Genovese (1930-2012) Marxist historian of the US Southern heritage and tradition.

“But most conservatives have distrusted ideological crusades, especially those which remind them of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman and profess to stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord.

“For these conservatives, the Cold War concerned a massive threat to American national-state interests, albeit a threat ideologically driven. They wanted to lift that threat, not to tell other people how to live. No one, therefore, ought to have been surprised when leading southern conservatives poured out their wrath on President Bush for his intervention in the Persian Gulf, denouncing American policy as imperialist, rapacious, and one more example of Yankee presumption, meddling, greed, and violence.

“Opposition to fascism and resistance to ideological holy wars flow from southern conservatives’ hostility to the centralization of political and economic power and from their preference for community decisionmaking [sic]. But they know that real communities, in contradistinction to those projected by utopian imaginations, must be creatures of the historical evolution of shared experience and faith.”

▪ Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition – The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Harvard, 1994) extract from pages 92 through to 93.

SydneyTrads is the internet portal and communication page of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum: an association of young professionals who form part of the Australian independent right (also known as “dissident right” or “outer right”).