Many, if not most, great writers were temperamentally conservative: Swift, Austen, Tolstoy, Kipling, Claudel, T.S. Eliot, (later) Auden, Larkin, Powell, Elizabeth Bowen, Waugh, Mishima, (later) Bellow, Sybille Bedford, Gene Wolfe. Even Orwell called himself a Tory Anarchist. https://twitter.com/jneeley78/status/1328698947179786242

Indeed, with the exception of Dickens, I’m struggling to think of a really first-rank writer (in English, at least) who was truly a woman or man of the Left—or who ended as such. All of them, doubtful of progressive impulses and certainties. In Italian, perhaps Italo Calvino.

I’m too bed.

In any case, my point was: mild to pronounced conservatism of a humanist and skeptical tone is not rare amongst dead writers we still read—indeed, it’s almost commonplace.

But activism and faddish progressivism seems to be the enemy of lasting interest.