I know you’ve all read John Ray’s monograph on leftism. C’mon, you know you must have. I asked you to do so some time ago.
He just posted THEORIES OF RIGHTISM. It is also lengthy, and I haven’t been through the whole thing…yet. Like all his work, it is amply documented and referenced. Just a quick taste of his thesis:
My submission is that what modern-day Rightists of the English-speaking world are can be traced right back to the invaders (Angles and Saxons) from coastal Germany who overran Romano-Celtic Britannia around 1500 years ago and made it into England. They brought with them a very decentralized, consultative, largely tribal system of government that was very different from the Oriental despotisms that had ruled the civilized world for most of human history up to that time. And they liked their decentralized, consultative system very much. So much so that the system just kept on keeping on in England, century after century, despite many vicissitudes. Only the 20th century really shook it. So conservatism in English-origin countries is simply Anglo-Saxon traditional values.