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Joseph de Maistre, though less well-known than Edmund Burke, embodies the essential points of the 21st-century American conservative mind at a deeper level than taxes, spending or size of government.

Curiously, the agrarians, ur-Americans of Southern Protestant extraction, were influenced by the leading figure of the French Counter-Enlightenment, the arch-reactionary ultramontane Catholic Joseph de Maistre.

Even in the present day, a Southern apologist for slavery has written a screed for something called the Abbeville Foundation extolling Maistre’s hatred of republics.

Maistre, on the other hand, fits the dogmatic spirit of their creed.

Maistre, though less well-known than Burke, embodies the essential points of the American conservative mind at a deeper level than taxes, spending or size of government.