Julius Evola (1898-1974) was an important Italian intellectual, though he despised this term intensely. As poet and painter, he was the major Italian representative of Dadaism (1916-1922). Later he became the leading Italian exponent of Integral Traditionalism or Perennialism, the intellectually challenging esotericism of René Guénon (1886-1951). Evola enjoyed an international reputation for books on eastern religious traditions that won the respect of scholars such as Mircea Eliade and Giuseppe Tucci. His 1943 book on early Buddhism, The Doctrine of Awakening, was translated in 1951. It was more than a generation before a second translation appeared, in 1983, when Ienner Traditions published 1958’s The Metaphysics of Sex, reprinted as Eros and the Mysteries of Love in 1992, the same year it published his 1949 book on Tantra, The Yoga of Power. The marketing appeal of books about sex is obvious, but these works are serious studies, not sex manuals. In 1995 Inner Traditions reprinted The Doctrine of Awakening and began publishing translations of his other books, including Revolt against the Modern World, his fullest account of the World of Tradition, which he opposed to the degenerate modern world.

In Europe, Evola is also known as a brilliant and incisive right-wing thinker. His books, New Age and political, were translated into French under the aegis of Alain de Benoist, leader of the French Nouvelle Droite. His books and articles have appeared in German since the 1930s. Translations into English continue to appear. Italian New Age publisher Edizioni Mediterranee keeps his books in print and has republished some with good texts and new introductions. Evola never belonged to a political party or held a political or academic post, but 25 years after his death his books are available in Italian, French, German, and English.

After the appearance of Sarah Palin’s ghost-written Going Rogue in November 2009, the former Alaska governor saw her celebrity soar. Her book sold over 600,000 copies within 36 hours of the time it went on sale. And even that paradigmatic liberal Oprah Winfrey worked hard to have Sarah on her TV programs. FOX News went agog over her 320-page work, and for about a week, her face was more visible on FOX than that of any of the channel’s other favorites.

The only influential people on the establishment right who expressed reservations about her, up until her recent overexposure on TV, were David Frum and Charles Krauthammer. But within the neoconservative camp, other opinions also surfaced. Bill Kristol and his fortnightly Weekly Standard have been high on Sarah, a fact that may be attributed to her Christian Zionism and her outspoken defense of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. And Krauthammer has moderated his critical attitude by observing on FOX that Sarah “will be a significant force in Republican politics, even if she never becomes president.”

And the impossibility of conservatism.

It’s 1964. A stranger approaches and tells you two political movements will arise in the near future, the New Left and the New Right. One of these movements will dominate American politics for a good quarter century. Indeed, political scientists will define the entire period in terms of the ascendancy of this group; historians will write books naming this age after the movement’s most successful leader. Politicians, scholars, and activists on right and left will go so far as to call it a “Revolution.”

Imagine then that you could look at the America (such as it is) of November 5, 2008, at the end of this era.