Jeet Heer: The historian John Lukacs (1924-2019), whose death at age 95 has just been announced.... In 1975... predicting that a post-Soviet Russia would be dominated by a criminal underworld.... Lukacs was born in Hungary in 1924.... Lukacs was a conservative... of a type that is virtually extinct.... a traditionalist wary of mass politics based on nationalism and scapegoating of minorities. He was for that reason properly scornful of American conservative movement. Lukacs' scorn for right-wing populism surfaced in the early 1950s. As a refugee from Hungary he was anti-communist, but still quick to detect and denounce the dangers of demagogues like Joseph McCarthy, who he feared would destablize society and incite war.... Lukacs's anti-populist conservatism... proved prophetic.... He long feared that populist-nationalist-authoritarian demagoguery was the wave of the future.... He once dismissed movement conservatives' worldview as... 'narrow enough to be ignorant, broad enough to be flat'.... Aside from his valuable critiques of nationalist populism, Lukacs was an eloquent defender of historical consciousness as a distinct & valuable form of thinking, with his own work exemplifying how being steeped in history can help illuminate the present and future...
#noted
