About
The Tory Anarchist is Daniel McCarthy, associate editor of The American Conservative. E-mail him here.
What is a Tory anarchist, other than a self-evident oxymoron?
Max Beerbohm called himself one. So, before he became a socialist, did George Orwell, who later thought the designation a good fit for Jonathan Swift. Others have applied it to H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock, who once suggested that “where one finds, as in Falkland, or Mr. Jefferson, radical principles and ideals combined with Tory manners, there, of course, one sees about the best that human nature is capable of producing.”
More recently, Auberon Waugh, Michael Wharton, and Florence King have all been labeled Tory anarchists. And if no one has yet called Dwight Macdonald one, it’s about time.
Next to them, I’m not even a shadow of a Tory anarchist. But the catalogue above ought to give some idea of where I’m coming from.